Still Champion

Things were really popping that night at Cafe Istanbul (Sun. 9:15 p.m., ABC). Someone had fired a shot at the nervous little man just in from Iran. Was it oily-voiced Achille Zazsrewska ? Or was it Christopher Card, the hard-boiled American whose dialogue had an oldtime Hemingway flavor ("You remember the Place de la Concorde. You remember it fine")? Or it might even have been suave Raoul Felki, the Turkish commissioner of police.

Some radio listeners last week tried to puzzle their way through Cafe Istanbul's chaotic plot. But others were content just to listen to the clinging, faintly accented voice of Marlene Dietrich, who opened her new radio series as the Cafe's owner. As she has countless times since the classic Blue Angel, Marlene played the same romantic, Weltschmerz role and whispered snatches of French and German songs. Some listeners may have felt cheated because Marlene was limited to a few choruses of La Vie en Rose and four bars of a song in German. "It's a hell of a job to do a dramatic show in half an hour," she explains with a shrug. "There isn't time for singing because you have to worry about character and plot."

Marlene worries about plot so much that she stayed up with her typewriter until three o'clock one morning, pecking out 17 pages of script revisions for the first show. "She's a worker, a hard worker," says Producer Leonard Blair admiringly. "She really rolls up her sleeves. Her suggestions are very good."

But once she's away from the studio, Marlene is apt to turn languid. "Acting just happens to be my profession," she says. "I could live very well without it. I have no ambition. I've never had the message. I'm afraid that all my life I've needed a push and never done things for myself." She recalls that Noel Coward recently described her as a realist and a clown: "He's right. Of course, I never show my clown side to the public. It doesn't go with the other thing I advertise."

The "other thing" gets a thorough workout in Cafe Istanbul, as it has in most of her movies. Broadway may get its first chance to see it this fall, if Marlene decides to do Jacques Deval's new play, Samarkand. As for television: "I don't want to get into it yet. I'm waiting for it to get better. After all, I'll have to defend my title."

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