Marlene Dietrich, Chimera

My initial interest in Marlene Dietrich stems from a lifelong study of WWII. The documentaries describe his heroism and exploits while entertaining Allied troops in the European campaign. 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 present!

Examining the book, Marlene Dietrich for her daughter Maria RivaI tried to judge how much time I would have to devote to this 800-page monster and then resolutely stepped inside, wary of reading biographies written by boosters; you rarely get the unvarnished truth. After just a few pages, I knew I was stuck with a page turn 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 self-centered adoration of herself, she survived to become a talented writer and luminary in her own right. It must have been a painful cathartic process, and what a cathos he endured! Maria documents her mother’s multiple idiosyncrasies without exaggeration, unraveling a jumble of neurotic thread that would have given Freud nightmares, and skillfully backs it 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 cleverly reveals the impact Dietrich’s twisted personality had on those closest to her. The narration is painful to witness, much more so. 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 did not protect herself at an earlier age; suffered for 70 years of devotion to the person who least deserved it simply because he was a blood relative. live with a ‘star’.

For people who just expect hero worship, this book will disappoint. It will dissect 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 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 shrink in sympathy. It is a huge tribute to her that she has come out of 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 objectively recounted, because interestingly, for posterity, she sent all the love letters (some quite explicit) to her ex-husband to be indexed and archived as Little League Baseball trophies. Oh, it’s fine! 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 undying 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 really 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 very young daughter is evidence of her pretzel mind, which seeks to reinforce her rationalizations by bouncing them off unwitting confidants. It’s a sure sign that you know what you’re doing is wrong, like an alcoholic begging the company of strangers to beat you up.

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

Every private glimpse into this woman’s life belies her heroic self-made 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 soon takes command of the troops. Her gallantry is selfish: she wanted to be on the front lines 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. Nowhere do they mention his ulterior motives, and if they had been known, it is likely that he would not have received his laudable decorations for his service during the war.

Today, Marlene Dietrich’s image 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 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 their Las Vegas days: “When Will They Learn?” At some point in his learning process, and it is unclear where, as there are forgivably few details from 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 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, seducing everyone of all sexual tendencies. If there was praise for the widescreen pan-genre seduction, 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 a vampire’s bronze leg show ring. Unable to compartmentalize, he clung to that image with the tenacity of a Titanic survivor in the frozen ocean. Contemplating letting go, being normal, considering any self-doubt, would be to approve of an anonymous death in oblivion, so her grip on the illusion held firm to the bitter end out of perceived necessity. What created this abnormal perception we never know due to the narrator’s subsequent appearance on the scene, and Marlene has closed the vault of psychoanalysis, throwing away the key.

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 – 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 say, “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 the eye of an unbiased observer 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 about taffeta, filigree, scalloped, or dirndl suits, but like a well-behaved imposter at a black-tie evening, I kept quiet to hide my weakness, coping 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 against the backdrop 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 occupied by homeless people sprang up around the railroad tracks. We do not know anything about them, not an iota, only how Dietrich traveled in first luxury class to Europe on board 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 shopping expeditions for thirty pairs of kid leather gloves. If there is any mention of the queues at soup kitchens, it is only in relation to how you impeded your 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 recall seeing news snippets of Dietrich singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ in German to 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 your servant and we are the unsuspecting fools. 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 that arises 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 come eventually as the ages destroyed the ancient stone columns that supported the myths, eroding over time like twisted legs under the oppressive strain of a dress made of gleaming falsehoods. Would reality eventually blow a hole in that 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, unwashed urine buckets by the bed, alcohol and drugs accessible by mechanical tweezers. The true sign of a psychotic, he built castles in the sky and just moved away.

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

The dictionary describes a chimera as an illusory mythological fire-breathing 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, María Riva.