Marlene Dietrich, Chimera

My initial interest in Marlene Dietrich comes from a life-long study of WWII. The documentaries describe his heroism and exploits while entertaining Allied troops in the European campaign. The fact that she was an invariably depicted German “leading her troops” intrigued even more. I put her bio on my Christmas wish list by teasing her under the tree. What a great Christmas gift!

Examining the book, Marlene Dietrich for her daughter Maria RivaI tried to judge how much time I would have to spend on this 800-page monster and then decided to dive in, wary of reading biographies written by promoters; the plain truth is rarely obtained. After only a few pages I knew that I was trapped by a page flipper written by a master communicator. I congratulate Maria Riva for an excellent effort removing layers of shellac makeup 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. He does it skillfully at great personal cost.

Despite the author’s lifelong struggle to break free from her mother’s meddlesome and egocentric self-adoration, she survived to become a talented writer and luminary in her own right. It must have been a painful cathartic process, and what a catastrophe it endured! Maria documents her mother’s multiple idiosyncrasies without exaggeration, unraveling a messy ball of neurotic thread that would have given Freud nightmares, and skillfully backs her up with letters from and to her famous mother. Maria gives us a front row seat in the great theater of life, meticulously revealing and documenting what happened in the creation of a world-renowned sex symbol, and fasten your seat belts, it’s not pretty.

There are times when the book is more about Maria than “La Dietrich,” as she likes to call her mother, but it cleverly reveals the impact Dietrich’s twisted personality had on those closest to her. like a bloody car accident, as we voyeuristically see and feel the total emotional destruction of anyone who comes into close contact with The Dietrich. Near the end, Maria says she ran out of her mother’s apartment while crying, obviously a race to freedom. Maria didn’t protect herself at an earlier age; suffered for 70 years of devotion to the least deserving person simply because he was a blood relative. But since he held on, we now have a full first-hand account of what it’s like to live with a ‘star’.

For people who just hope to worship heroes, this book will disappoint. It will analyze intimate details of a woman’s very curious sexuality and will show through Marlene’s own letters and statements that she had an ulterior motive for everything she did every waking hour: self-promotion. It is sad to hear it from her own daughter, and when you experience it through Maria’s eyes and ears, you will shudder with sympathy. It is a great tribute to her that she has come out of this balanced experience: just being able to get rid of a wobbly father 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 many sexual encounters are recounted objectively, because, interestingly, for posterity, she sent all of the love letters (some quite explicit) to her ex-husband to be indexed and archived as minor league baseball trophies. . Ohhh kay! Marlene appears to have been bisexual, having had ties to about five women and perhaps a hundred men. She admits near the end of her life, to her daughter, that she never felt anything for either of them, yet her letters are filled with eternal devotion and effusions of love. One can only conclude then that her love is opportunistic in nature, that it is possible that she was not truly bisexual, lesbian, or heterosexual, that she had sex with humanoids to achieve or obtain what she needed. The fact that she openly communicates the details of her exploits with her estranged husband and very young daughter is evidence of her pretzel mind, which seeks to reinforce its rationalizations by bouncing them off unwitting confidants. It’s a sure sign that she knows what she’s doing is wrong, just like an alcoholic asking the company of strangers to beat her up.

Another indicator of her self-worshiping motivation is the fact that she never, not once in all of her affairs, does she give an old lover a shove. She never tells them “it’s over, we’re done.” She keeps them all waiting, and even cares for them sexually if they come back into her life, prolonging their misery. Marlene Dietrich is a manipulative sociopath. You have lovers who send gifts and love letters, expressing their undying devotion, but you have to remind them who they are. We discover that at one point he has four or five unsuspecting lovers boiling simultaneously and juggling them like plates in a carnival act. Every now and then one falls and shatters, but this does not affect the Dietrich at all, as the world is an endless Chinese cabinet.

Every private look at this woman’s life contradicts her heroic self-created 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 will soon be in command of the troops. Her gallantry is selfish: she wanted to be on the front line so she could reconnect with her lost lover, she wants to be the first in Germany to reconnect with her mother and sister. The press was easier to manipulate in the 1940s and Dietrich does it with ease. His ulterior motives are nowhere mentioned, and if they had been known, it is likely that he would not have received his commendable decorations for his service during the war.

Today, Marlene Dietrich’s image is one that can be represented by a campy transvestite in a slit skirt, sequins and boas. It is a sad testament to human sexuality that he learned his seduction craft from the transvestites in Berlin. Lured by a flashy fishing lure, her many lovers would have done well to learn the lyrics to a song that became famous during her Vegas days: “When Will They Learn?” Somewhere in her learning process, and it’s unclear where, given that there are few forgivable details from her formative years, that cheesy sexual manipulation of the audience passed into every other aspect of her life and became her target. final. It became his philosophy and his reason for being, the means and the end in one, locked in a feedback loop. As a manipulator, her talent stood out, captivating everyone of all sexual tendencies. If there was praise for pan-genre seduction on the big screen, she takes the Oscar. But was that transition simply a sign that Dietrich was emotionally unprepared to handle her own success? Deep down she must have known she was neither a talented actress nor a good singer, so she grabbed the bronze ring from a leg show vampire. Unable to compartmentalize, he clung to that image with the tenacity of a Titanic survivor in the frozen ocean. To contemplate letting go, to be normal, to consider any self-doubt, would be to tolerate an anonymous death in oblivion, so his grip on the illusion held firm to the bitter end out of perceived necessity. What created this abnormal perception we never learn because of the narrator’s later appearance on the scene, and Marlene has locked the vault of psychoanalysis, throwing away the key.

There are few books of this length where I get out of bed in the morning thirsty in anticipation to read more. Maria never loses sight of her perspective – witness the many examples of humor she sees in her mother’s strange personality. For example, in his later years, Dietrich is in the hospital with a broken woman and his daughter comes into the room for a visit. They told him, “The food here is not suitable for human consumption, so I kept it for you and your family.” I am paraphrasing for brevity, but it is one example of many in this excellent book where the author has managed to keep an unbiased observer’s eye while explaining what it was like growing up with a pathological egomaniac for a mother. Perhaps my own lack of exposure to rarefied The air of elegant society stopped me when I heard of taffeta, filigree, scalloped, or dirndl suits, but like a well-mannered imposter at a white-tie evening, I kept quiet to hide my weakness, getting by with the help of online references. .

The book also reveals a lot about Dietrich’s shocking personality from what it doesn’t say. For example, most of this exhibition is painted in the context of the 1930s, during which the world’s worst economic downturn took place. More than 25 percent of Americans were out of work, and entire tent cities populated by homeless people sprang up around the railroad tracks. About them we hear nothing, not an iota, only how Dietrich traveled in first-class luxury to Europe aboard the Normandy with twenty trunks and thirty suitcases full of dresses and jewels. At a time when a quarter of men struggled to eat, we only hear of expeditions to buy thirty pairs of goatskin gloves. If there is any mention of the soup kitchen lines it is only in relation to how it impeded his progress down the boulevard to buy jewelry from Cartier or Philippe Patek.

The press is partly to blame for this myth-making. I can clearly remember seeing news clips of Dietrich singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ in German before a grateful Israeli audience, but it takes the daughter’s honesty to reveal that Dietrich almost always referred to Jews or blacks in a way. denigrating. The press is its maiden and we are the dupes. We have 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 is “why didn’t she throw in the towel in such a destructive relationship many years before?”

Was Maria driven by a feeling of family guilt? Perhaps he hoped the change would eventually come as the ages destroyed the ancient stone columns that supported the myths, eroding over time like bent legs under the oppressive strain of a dress made of glaring falsehoods. Would reality blow a hole in that over-inflated balloon and topple the entire building? In the end, Maria realized that it would never happen. Marlene Dietrich lived her last days bedridden, buried in a Paris apartment for a decade, with withered legs, sheets covered in feces, untidy buckets of urine next to the bed, alcohol and drugs accessible by mechanical tweezers. The true sign of a psychotic, she built castles in the sky and just moved away.

Marlene Dietrich did not allow Maria to bathe her or clean up the stool-stained squalor in the apartment. Why? Perhaps he didn’t want the world to take a look at the wizard’s wardrobe, to see beyond the layers of yellowish varnish. Perhaps she was creating another lie for posterity that she was abandoned by all to starve, all alone. Perhaps he believed in his own myth so strongly that he couldn’t smell reality in his drug-induced alcoholic stupor. Be my guest and read this fascinating psychological thriller to draw your own conclusions about the mystery of Marlene Dietrich.

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 again watch a classic movie with the same wonder for the time. Thank you very much, Maria Riva.