A landmark biography. The full-scale, riveting, hitherto untold story of Marlene Dietrich as only her daughter, Maria Riva - from girlhood through most of her life her mother's confidant and companion - knows it and can tell it.
With her total recall of the detail and texture of her mother's life, she powerfully evokes a woman, a career, a world.
Here is Dietrich the child - the adored Maria Magdalena - raised meticulously by a mother who knew her place as a successful tradesman's daughter in Berlin society and her duty as a good wife...the adolescent Lena, revealed in Dietrich's voluminous and emotional life-long diaries (at age seventeen: "Somebody told me I looked like a doll one wants to keep on kissing"..."I had a very big fight with Mutti.
She said that as I 'hang' around with all those schoolboys, that I must be boy crazy"... "Countess Gersdorf, your feet are pink my heart is set on fire for you...").
We see the young Marlene, the energetic, disciplined, quickly successful actress whose mother equated actors with shiftless tambourine-playing thieves...Marlene about to marry Rudolf Sieber ("He was dressed like an English lord on his country estate. A little assistant director in real tweeds. Right away I knew I loved him!")...
Marlene totally trusting her husband's impeccable instinct for an approach that would work for his actress-wife: to play vulgarity but not become it, to startle the world but maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat.
Here is Dietrich in the Berlin of the 1920s, becoming recognized for her sharp wit, her bisexual sensuality; in top hat, white tie, and tails (made by her husband's tailor), visiting cabarets where transvestites congregated and performed, embodying for them all they yearned to be...Marlene seen through the eyes of her young daughter ("At age three, I knew quite definitely that I did not have a mother, I belonged to a queen").
Dietrich is here in all of her incarnations: Sternberg's muse and collaborator in The Blue Ang
