![]() Then, she hated most cowboy actors anyway. “My mother made Pittsburgh, The Spoilers and Seven Sinners with Wayne. But The Duke refused to bow down to the sultry movie monarch. The 1930s “image” movies included Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman.īeyond von Sternberg’s prevailing influence, other disciples came to Dietrich on bended knee.Īmong them were German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (“a brilliant man,” says Riva), author of All Quiet on the Western Front actor Brian Aherne (“beautiful and her romantic”) charming French showman Maurice Chevalier and sometimes co-star Jimmy Stewart.ĭietrich made three movies with John Wayne and pursued him, too. He went on to manufacture the Marlene Dietrich mystique and direct her first six Hollywood pictures at Paramount. The movies’ master lyricist of light and shadow, he had cast Dietrich as Lola Lola in the German-film sensation, The Blue Angel (1930). The provocateur of Dietrich’s evolving Valhalla was Austrian director Josef von Sternberg. Only then would she lift you up to her level.” ‘Handsome’ did not figure within her vocabulary. And she used term ‘beautiful’ for men as well as for women. “But you had to be beautiful – or brilliant. If she deigned to bend down from her altar to raise you up – for she was the eternal romantic and this was a visual thing – that was fine. That was how she treated the people who loved her. She was on the altar and you were a parishioner. If she sensed that you wanted her to be a certain way, she would be that. Dietrich had the quality of being anything she wanted to be at any given moment, instantaneously and without premeditated thought. Riva says that many people came away believing they had met the real Dietrich. She thought actors were scum and gypsies. Movie stars were looked down upon as people who had worked their way up. Everyone was there to make that product that much better by aiding and abetting her laws, rules and orders. My father [Rudolf Seiber) was her major-domo. “Ha! Movie stars were never regarded as worthy of respect in our household,” Riva says. What was it like growing up the daughter of a world-renowned movie star and sex symbol? You can’t buy that kind of luxury – or the attitude toward that luxury.” The luxury of those days before World War II was the kind of life nobody leads anymore, no matter how rich they are. “And there were the golden years of Hollywood, which everyone is fascinated by. It was a century that had the First World War and the Sodom and Gomorrah of the ’20s in Berlin, a cesspool Americans knew nothing about. ![]() “Dietrich was a fascinating person, at a fascinating time,” she says. From the dreamy days of Hollywood, with Dietrich’s parade of leading-men lovers, to the years of decline and a final decade of pill-popping, alcoholism and seclusion, Riva illuminates and then puts into harsher glare the venerable international icon. Looking back – now through prescription glasses – Riva seldom glosses over a recollection. “Nobody really knew her,” the author admits. Necessarily, she also drew heavily from Dietrich’s personal papers and diaries. In the book, Riva taps a vein of extraordinary and sometimes unsavory memories. If I still needed a catharsis to write and if the wounds were still bleeding, I’d be in a hell of a problem, wouldn’t I?” “You have to have objectivity if you are going to write a correct biography, otherwise it becomes merely a carping statement,” she says.
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