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 her further. I put her biography on my Christmas wish list causing her to appear under the tree. What a great Christmas present!

Examining the book Marlene Dietrich for her daughter Maria RivaI tried to judge how much time I’d have to devote to this 800-page monster and then dug in resolutely, wary of reading booster-written biographies; You rarely get the truth without embellishments. After only a few pages, I knew I was hooked on a page turn written by a master communicator. I commend Maria Riva for an excellent effort as she removes 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. She does it skillfully at great personal cost.

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

There are moments 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. , much like a bloody car accident, as we voyeuristically see and feel the utter 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. Unfortunately, Maria did not protect herself at a younger age; she suffered through 70 years of devotion to the least helpful person simply because she was a blood relative. what it is to live with a ‘star’.

For people expecting only hero worship, this book will disappoint. It will dissect intimate details of one woman’s highly 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 from her own daughter, and when you experience it through Maria’s eyes and ears, you’ll cringe. It’s quite a tribute to her that she came out of this balanced experience: just being able to get rid of a wobbly father is tribute enough, but living your whole life in the gravitational field of an eccentric celestial body while maintaining your own orbit and perspective is something of a miracle

Marlene’s numerous sexual encounters are reported objectively, because interestingly, for posterity, she sent all her love letters (some quite explicit) to her ex-husband to be indexed and filed as Little League trophies. Oh yeah! Marlene appears to have been bisexual, having had relationships with around 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 full of undying devotion and outpourings of love. One can only conclude then that her love is opportunistic in nature, that it is possible that she was not really bisexual, lesbian or heterosexual, that she had sex with humanoids to 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. bouncing them off unwitting confidants. It’s a sure sign that she knows what she’s doing is wrong, like an alcoholic who begs the company of strangers to beat him up.

Another indicator of her self-worshipping 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 caters to them sexually 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 her undying devotion, but you have to remind them who she is. We discover that at one point she has four or five unsuspecting lovers on the boil simultaneously and she juggles them like plates in a carnival act. Occasionally one falls and breaks into pieces, but this does not affect Dietrich at all, as the world is a Chinese cabinet without end.

Every private glimpse into the life of this woman 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 soon commands the troops. Her gallantry is selfish: she wished to be on the front line so she could reconnect with her lost lover, she wishes to be the first in Germany to reconnect with her mother and her sister. It was easier to handle the press in the 1940s, and Dietrich does it with ease. Nowhere in it do they mention her ulterior motives, and had they met, it is likely that she would not have received her laudable decorations 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 testament to human sexuality that he learned his trade of seducing the transvestites of Berlin from her. Lured by a flashy fishing lure, her many lovers would have done well to learn the words to a song she made famous during her Vegas days: “When will they learn?” At some point in his learning process, and it’s not clear where, as there are forgivably few details of his formative years, that cheesy, sexual manipulation of the audience intersected with every other aspect of his life and became his end goal. It became her philosophy and her reason for being, the means and the end in one, locked in a feedback loop. As her manipulator, her talent excelled, seducing everyone of all sexual persuasions. If there were any brakes on widescreen pan-genre seduction, she takes 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 the brass ring of a leg-showing vampire. 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 condone an anonymous death into oblivion, so her control over her illusion held firm to the bitter end out of perceived need. What created this abnormal perception we never know due to the narrator’s subsequent appearance on the scene, and Marlene has locked the vault of psychoanalysis, throwing the key away from it.

There are few books of this length where I actually got out of bed in the morning with an anticipatory thirst to read more. Maria never loses sight of her perspective: she witnesses the many examples of humor that she sees in her mother’s strange personality. 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 am paraphrasing for brevity, but it is one example of many in this excellent book where the author has managed to keep the eye of an unbiased observer while explaining what it was like to grow 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 about taffeta, filigree, scalloped or dirndl suits, but like a well-behaved impostor at a black tie soiree, 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 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 cities of homeless-occupied tents sprang up around the railroad tracks. We know nothing about them, not an iota, only how Dietrich traveled to Europe in first class luxury aboard the Normandy with twenty trunks and thirty suitcases full of dresses and jewelry. In an era when a quarter of men were struggling to eat, we only hear of buying expeditions for thirty pairs of kid leather gloves. If there is any mention of the queues at the soup kitchens, it is only in relation to how it impeded her 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 recall 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 certain way. demeaning The press is her servant and we are the unsuspecting suckers. We count on the truthfulness, 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 persists, “why didn’t she throw in the towel on such a destructive relationship many years earlier?”

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

Marlene Dietrich would not allow Maria to bathe her or clean up the feces-stained misery in the apartment. Why? She might not have wanted the world to peek into the wizard’s wardrobe, to see past 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 in her own myth so proudly that she couldn’t smell 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 a mythological illusory fire-breathing 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 again with the same amazement at the time. Thank you very much, Maria Riva.