Marlene Dietrich

by Maria E. Riva

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the landmark biography that tells the full-scale, riveting, and untold story of Marlene Dietrich.Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich’s childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves. Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality—wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity.  She would play vulgarity but not become in; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat. As Riva herself remembers, “At age three, I knew quite definitely that I didn’t have a mother, I belonged to a queen.” Marlene Dietrich comes alive in these pages in all of her as muse, artistic collaborator, bonafide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother. Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom.  There were her rich artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward and Cole Porter, and her heady romances.   In her final years, she would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend. Maria Riva’s biography of her mother has the depth, range, and resonance of a novel and captures the conviction and passion of its remarkable subject.

1171 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Tam May · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't finish this book. The title really should have been "Marlene Dietrich And Me" because it was as much about Maria Riva as it was about Dietrich. I was expecting to read a straight-forward Dietrich biography. Instead, this reads like a horror story of emotional abuse, cruelty, narcissism, and viciousness. It's not only Dietrich herself. I was more disgusted with Sieber, a weak-willed bully who used his daughter and his mistress as pawns to compete with his movie star wife. I really feel for Riva. Her voice is sometimes very humorous but it's obvious that the constant dialogues in this book are out of her own imagination and not possibly real (which I am not necessarily against, as I believe in some poetic license). But at some point, the made-up dialogue sounded like something out of one of her mother's Pre-Code melodramas - over the top with its cruelty and intended more for shock value. I'm not saying none of the horrendous things Riva describes of her childhood happened - I am very sure they did. But at some point I felt the line between fiction and reality had been crossed. Had this been a work of fiction I would have probably understood it (although it probably wouldn't have made me continue to read it as I don't read horror stories of abuse if I can help it). But this book is intended (at least, that's what I assume, since it's under the Biography category) as a work of non-fiction so crossing that line was too much for me.