Marlene Dietrich, Chimera

My initial interest in Marlene Dietrich stems from a lifelong study of World War II. The documentaries describe her heroism and her exploits as she entertained the Allied troops in the European campaign. That she was a German invariably depicted ‘leading her troops’ intrigued even more. I put her bio on my Christmas wish list causing her to appear under the tree. What a great Christmas present!

examining the book, Marlene Dietrich by her daughter Maria RivaI tried to judge how much time I would have to devote to this 800-page juggernaut and then plunged in resolutely, leery of reading biographies written by boosters; you rarely get the unvarnished truth. After only a few pages, I knew I was stuck for a page turner written by a master communicator. I congratulate Maria Riva on an excellent effort as she removes layers of shellac makeup from behind one of Hollywood’s enduring illusions. Maria’s talent lies in taking us backstage to show us the magician’s tricks without diminishing our love for the show. She does it skillfully at great personal cost.

Despite the author’s lifelong struggle to break free of her mother’s meddling and self-centered self-adoration, she survived to become a gifted writer and luminary in her own right. It must have been a painful cathartic process, and what a cathos she endured! Maria documents without exaggeration the many idiosyncrasies of her mother, untangling a jumble of neurotic thread that would have given Freud nightmares, and ably backs it up with letters from and to her famous mother. Maria gives us a front row seat in the grand theater of life, meticulously revealing and documenting what went into the making of a world-renowned sex symbol, and fasten your seatbelts, it’s not pretty.

There are moments where the book is more about Maria than ‘The Dietrich’, as she likes to call her mother, but it cleverly reveals the impact Dietrich’s twisted personality had on those closest to her. The narrative is painful to witness, much like a bloody car accident, as we voyeuristically see and feel the utter emotional destruction of anyone who comes in close contact with The Dietrich. But because she endured, we now have a full firsthand account of what it’s like to live with a ‘star’.

For people who only expect hero worship, this book will disappoint. It will dissect the intimate details of one woman’s very curious sexuality, and show through Marlene’s own missives and statements that she had an ulterior motive for everything she did every hour of the day: self-promotion. It’s sad to hear it from her own daughter, and when you experience it through Maria’s eyes and ears, you’ll cringe in sympathy. It’s a great tribute to her to have emerged from this balanced experience: just being able to get rid of a wobbly parent is tribute enough, but living her entire life in the gravitational field of an eccentric celestial body while maintaining her own orbit and perspective is something of a miracle.

Marlene’s numerous sexual encounters are recounted factually, because oddly enough, for posterity, she sent all of the love letters (some quite explicit) to her ex-husband to be indexed and filed away as Little League baseball trophies. Oh yeah! Marlene appears to have been bisexual, having had relationships with as many as five women and perhaps a hundred men. She admits near the end of her life, to her daughter, that she never felt anything for any of them, yet her letters are filled with undying devotion and outpourings of love. One can only conclude then that her love is opportunistic in nature, that she may not really have been bisexual, lesbian, or straight, that she had sex with humanoids to achieve or get what she needed. The fact that she openly communicates the details of her exploits with her estranged husband and her very young daughter is evidence of her pretzel mind, that she seeks to reinforce her rationalizations by bouncing them off unwitting confidants. It’s a sure sign that she knows what she’s doing is wrong, like an alcoholic begging the company of strangers to beat him up.

Another indicator of her self-adoring motivation is the fact that she never, not once in all her affairs, gives a former lover a push. She never tells them “it’s over, we’re done.” She keeps them all hopeful, and even sexually services them if they come back into her life, prolonging their misery. Marlene Dietrich is a manipulative sociopath. She has lovers who send her gifts and love letters, expressing their undying devotion to her, but they must be reminded who she is. We find out that at one point she has four or five unsuspecting lovers boiling over simultaneously and she juggles them like plates in a carnival act. Occasionally one falls and breaks into pieces, but this doesn’t affect Dietrich at all, as the world is an endless Chinese cabinet.

Every private glimpse into this woman’s life believes in her self-created heroic image. For example, a lover, Jean Gabin, went to fight with the Free French. Marlene joins the USO to entertain the troops of her newly adopted country (which she privately accuses of having no culture) and she is soon in command of the troops. Her gallantry is selfish: she wants to be on the front lines so she can reconnect with her long-lost lover, she wants to be the first in Germany to reconnect with her mother and her sister. It was easier to manipulate the press in the 1940s, and Dietrich does it with ease. Nowhere in it do they mention her motives hidden from her, and if they had known about her, it is likely that she would not have received laudable decorations from her for her service during the war.

Today, the image of Marlene Dietrich is one that can be portrayed by a cheesy transvestite in an open skirt, sequins, and boas. It is a sad testimonial to human sexuality that he learned his trade of seducing Berlin transvestites from her. Lured by a flashy fishing lure, her many lovers would have done well to learn the words to a song she became famous during her Las Vegas days: “When will they learn?” At some point in his apprenticeship—and it’s unclear where, since there are forgivably few details of his formative years—that campy, sexual manipulation of the audience intersected with every other aspect of his life and became his ultimate goal. It became her philosophy and her raison d’etre, the means and the end rolled into one, locked in a feedback loop. As her manipulator, her talents excelled, seducing everyone of all sexual persuasions. If there were any brakes on widescreen pan-genre seduction, she gets the Oscar. But was that transition simply a sign that Dietrich wasn’t emotionally ready to handle her own success? Deep down, she must have known that she was neither a talented actress nor a good singer, so she grabbed a leg-show vampire’s brass ring. Unable to compartmentalize, she clung to that image with the tenacity of a Titanic survivor on the frozen ocean. To contemplate letting go, to be normal, to consider any self-doubt, would be to approve an anonymous death into oblivion, so her hold on the illusion of hers was held tight to the bitter end out of perceived necessity. What created this abnormal perception we never know due to the narrator’s later appearance on the scene, and Marlene has locked the psychoanalysis vault, throwing away the key from it.

There are few books of this length where I actually got out of bed in the morning with the anticipatory thirst to read more. Maria never loses sight of her perspective: she witnesses the many examples of humor that she sees in the strange personality of her mother. For example, in his later years, Dietrich is in the hospital with a broken femur, and his daughter comes into the visiting room. They tell him, “The food here is not fit for human consumption, so I saved it for you and your family.” I’m paraphrasing for brevity, but it’s one example of many in this excellent book where the author has managed to keep an unbiased observer’s eye as she explains how she was raised with a pathological egomaniac for a mother. Perhaps my own lack of exposure to rarefied The chic society air stopped me when I heard of taffeta, filigree, scalloped or dirndl suits, but like a well-behaved imposter at a black-tie soiree, I kept quiet to hide my weakness, making do with the help of online references.

The book also reveals a lot about Dietrich’s striking personality by what it doesn’t say. For example, most of this exhibition is set against the backdrop of the 1930s, during which the world’s worst economic downturn took place. More than twenty-five percent of Americans were out of work, and entire tent cities occupied by homeless people sprang up around the railroad tracks. Of them we know nothing, not one iota, only how Dietrich traveled in luxury first class to Europe aboard the Normandy with twenty trunks and thirty suitcases full of dresses and jewels. In an era when a quarter of men struggled to eat, we only hear of buying expeditions for thirty pairs of kid leather gloves. If there is any mention of soup kitchen lines, it is only in connection with how he impeded their progress down the boulevard to buy Cartier or Philippe Patek jewelry.

The press is partly to blame for this creation of myths. I can distinctly remember seeing news clips of Dietrich singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ in German to an appreciative Israeli audience, but it takes the daughter’s honesty to reveal that Dietrich almost always referred to Jews or blacks in a demeaning way. The press is her servant and we are the unsuspecting fools. We count on the veracity, decency and clarity of thought of María Riva to straighten us out. Ironically, Maria deserves those medals for her bravery infinitely more than her mother, but the question that arises is “why didn’t she throw in the towel on such a destructive relationship many years before?”

Was Maria driven by a sense of family guilt? She perhaps she hoped that change would come eventually as the ages destroyed the ancient stone columns that held the myths, eroding with time like twisted legs under the oppressive strain of a dress made of glittering falsehoods. Would reality eventually blow a hole in that inflated balloon and bring down the entire building? In the end, Maria realized that it would never happen. Marlene Dietrich lived the last days of her bedridden, entombed in a Paris apartment for a decade, withered legs, feces-covered sheets, bedside buckets of unwashed urine, alcohol and drugs accessible via mechanical tongs. The true sign of a psychotic, she built castles in the sky and just moved on.

Marlene Dietrich wouldn’t allow Maria to bathe her or clean up the feces-stained misery in the apartment. Because? She maybe she didn’t want the world to peek into the wizard’s wardrobe, for her to see beyond the layers of yellowish varnish. She maybe she was creating another lie for posterity that she was abandoned by everyone to starve, all alone. She perhaps believed her own myth so proudly that she couldn’t smell the reality in her drug-induced alcoholic stupor. Be my guest and read this riveting psychological thriller to come to your own conclusions about the Marlene Dietrich mystery.

The dictionary describes a chimera as an illusory, fire-breathing mythological monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. I will never watch a classic movie with the same amazement at the time again. Thank you very much, Maria Riva.