Photo: dpa
Two Of A Kind
By CHRISTIANE HEIL
Photo: dpa
October 3, 2022 · Maria Riva, the only daughter of Marlene Dietrich, grew up in the shadow of the diva.
Today, at the age of 97, she understands many things in her mother's life.
But not for everything.
In Hollywood, they say, there are at least as many broken relationships between parents and children as there are between spouses.
Maybe even more.
Elizabeth Taylor, the first American film celebrity, recalled being beaten by her father while filming Lassie Come Home as a 10-year-old.
Long before the word dysfunctionality hit Hollywood, Tatum O'Neal's relationship with her father, Ryan O'Neal, was also rocking fans.
The actress accused her aging mother-in-law of not only driving her into drug addiction through neglect and outbursts of anger.
When Tatum O'Neal was awarded an Oscar at the age of ten for her role as precocious Addie Loggins in Paper Moon,
her father also boycotted the award ceremony – out of resentment.
Ryan O'Neal, who played con artist Moses Pray alongside his daughter in Peter Bogdanovich's road movie, was not nominated for a gold knight at the time.
The relationship between Alec Baldwin and his daughter Ireland, now 26 years old, was also considered troubled for years.
The phone tirade in which Baldwin called her a "thoughtless little pig" during her divorce battles with Kim Basinger in 2007 cost the Golden Globe winner visitation rights at the time.
After spending time in rehab to process her "emotional trauma," Ireland Baldwin forgave her father.
Elizabeth Taylor later explained her father's violent excesses with his alcohol addiction.
And even Hollywood's troubled father-daughter duo O'Neal occasionally managed to reconcile, at least until the next argument.
Marlene Dietrich with daughter Maria, called Heidede.
Photo: akg-images
Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich's only child, still struggles to this day.
Thirty years ago, the ninety-seven-year-old scratched the image of the film diva, who had died a few months earlier, with her biography “My Mother Marlene”.
Dietrich, the actress Riva let it be known at the time, was cold, unapproachable and inconsiderate.
"At the age of three, I knew very well that I had no mother," Riva summarized her allegations.
"I was a queen's property."
Today she is more magnanimous.
“We all have our weaknesses, shortcomings and mistakes.
That's only human," writes the ninety-seven-year-old FAZ from Palm Springs, where she retired after leaving Hollywood.
Decades later, Riva does not want to erase three "events" that were only hinted at in her emails and that she recorded in her memoirs of Dietrich in 1992.
"My mother was just the way she was," she says vaguely and sends the interviewer to look for clues.
"I was her product, she always wanted me by her side."
MARIA RIVA
When "Dietrich", as the German-American calls her mother, came to Hollywood in the spring of 1930, the director Josef von Sternberg received her with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle-green Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Two weeks earlier, the tragic comedy “Der Blaue Engel”, one of the first talkies with the actress in the role of the singer Lola Lola, premiered in Berlin.
Since Sternberg, who was born in Austria and emigrated to New York with his parents as a small child, shot the film in German and English at the same time, Dietrich's titles "I'm set on love from head to toe" and "I'm the smart one Lola", translated as "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)" and "They Call Me Naughty Lola", soon also known in their new homeland.
While Dietrich moved into a villa in Los Angeles,
Riva stayed with her father Rudolf Sieber in Berlin.
Dietrich met the assistant director in 1922 while shooting Joe May's silent film Tragedy of Love.
A year later the couple married, and in December 1924, shortly before her 23rd birthday, the actress gave birth to her daughter Maria Elisabeth.
Peter Riva, Maria Riva's son, attributes the fact that there was hardly any time for "the child", as Dietrich and Sieber called their offspring, to Marlene's ambition.
"She worked very, very hard, especially in her twenties," says the seventy-two-year-old of the FAZ. "She wanted to be a successful actress at all costs."
in December 1924, shortly before her 23rd birthday, the actress gave birth to her daughter Maria Elisabeth.
Peter Riva, Maria Riva's son, attributes the fact that there was hardly any time for "the child", as Dietrich and Sieber called their offspring, to Marlene's ambition.
"She worked very, very hard, especially in her twenties," says the seventy-two-year-old of the FAZ. "She wanted to be a successful actress at all costs."
in December 1924, shortly before her 23rd birthday, the actress gave birth to her daughter Maria Elisabeth.
Peter Riva, Maria Riva's son, attributes the fact that there was hardly any time for "the child", as Dietrich and Sieber called their offspring, to Marlene's ambition.
"She worked very, very hard, especially in her twenties," says the seventy-two-year-old of the FAZ. "She wanted to be a successful actress at all costs."
Maria Riva consciously wanted to shape her family life differently than she had experienced with her mother and father Rudolf Sieber (around 1931).
After moving to Hollywood, with a contract with the film production company Paramount Pictures, acting was no longer enough for her.
"Marlene wanted more, she wanted to create a persona." In the years that followed, she succeeded like no other.
On the way from supposedly German housewife to world star, Dietrich lost weight, plucked his eyebrows even more narrowly and surprised the American audience with an androgynous look consisting of pants, shirt and tie.
Von Sternberg, who also shared the bed of his discovery, put them in the right light.
Her rather broad nose, which she repeatedly compared to the hindquarters of a duck, was narrowed by his artfully orchestrated lighting.
The shadows that the director placed on Dietrich's cheeks made her face seem fragile.
The first joint Hollywood production, the romantic drama "Morocco", made her a star in the United States.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) nominated her for an Oscar in 1931 for the role of nightclub singer Amy Jolly, who falls in love with Tom Brown, played by Gary Cooper.
In order to present her best side to visitors at home, the self-made diva had spotlights suitable for film installed in the entrance hall of her villa on Birchwood Drive in Westwood.
"With her perfectionism, she drove the studio crazy," says grandson Peter Riva.
"Each dress rehearsal became a battle with the costume designer."
All eyes were mostly on Marlene Dietrich.
Photo: Laif
It wasn't about vanity at all.
"She didn't care about celebrity.
She was never interested in that.” Wasn't she then in the wrong place in Hollywood?
Today, says Peter Riva in the study of his ranch in New Mexico, Dietrich would not have fitted in well with the American film industry.
"But in the past, the studios relied on exactly the perfection and discipline that they also demanded."
While "The Dietrich" bathed in the limelight and shot the films "Dishonored", "Shanghai Express", "Blonde Venus", "The Scarlet Empress" and "The Devil is a Woman" with von Sternberg, her daughter Maria eked out a lonely one To be there.
Riva remembers working as her mother's assistant at Paramount Studios after moving to America from Berlin.
While other children went to school and spent the afternoons with friends, she helped Dietrich with the wardrobe, accompanied them to the set and ran errands.
"I was her product, she always wanted me by her side," Maria Riva recalled after her mother's death.
"Since my brain was never distracted by normal things like school, friends and birthday parties, I was like a blank piece of paper with only what Dietrich said, what Dietrich thought.
I was hers and she spoke to me as if she were speaking aloud to herself.”
Growing up on film sets shaped Riva.
After a small role alongside her mother in the historical film "The Scarlet Empress", in which the then nine-year-old played the young Catherine the Great in 1934, she took acting lessons.
She kept her distance from “Papi”, as Riva calls her father Rudolf Sieber.
"I was hers and she spoke to me as if she were speaking aloud to herself."
MARIA RIVA
The assistant director and screenwriter had been living with Tamara Matul for a long time.
The young Russian met Dietrich and her family in Berlin before leaving Europe.
Officially the nanny, unofficially Sieber's partner, "Tami" offered everything that Riva didn't find in Dietrich: affection, attention, warmth.
“Marlene, Papi, Maria and Tami pretended to be family.
But nobody took that away from them.
Daddy used her as a lover,” Peter Riva confirms the rumors about the difficult years for Matul.
Again and again "Tami" became pregnant by Sieber, again and again he demanded that she have an abortion.
Peter Riva reports three abortions, Dietrich biographers counted 15 abortions or more.
"She was a real person," he says, "she suffered."
For his mother, "Tami" became a confidant, the "only person" she had feelings for in childhood and adolescence.
As Maria Riva writes, Dietrich calmed down the increasingly mentally ailing Matul with medication.
The fact that "Tami" died alone in a mental hospital in 1956 after almost 37 years at Sieber's side is probably one of the three "events" that Riva, despite her mild age, has still not forgiven her mother to this day.
The sexual conquests with which Dietrich caused gossip in Hollywood in the first few months did not affect Riva.
During the filming of Morocco, her mother became close to her co-star Gary Cooper.
He was followed by the who's who of the California entertainment industry.
Actor John Gilbert, also known as "The Great Lover" because of his affairs, shared her bed, as did James Stewart, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Gabin and Kirk Douglas.
Private film footage shows Dietrich on a boat trip in the thirties - with daughter Maria, husband Sieber and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., her lover at the time.
She wrote down her adventures, up to three in a day, in a notebook.
Dietrich is also said to have gotten to know at least one Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, more intimately.
the sex with men,
In 1937: Marlene Dietrich (left) with a friend in Paris Photo: Collection Dupondt / akg-images
It was different for women.
The diva, who had made no secret of her bisexuality during her early days as a revue dancer and theater actress in Berlin, joined the "sewing circle" in Hollywood.
In the golden era of the film enclave, when studios like Paramount, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox curbed their stars' public debauchery with morality clauses in their contracts, lesbian and bisexual actresses would gather regularly for lunch, chat, and what author Diana McLellan called "possibilities".
Also in the notorious "Sewing Circle" were Mexican film actress Dolores del Río, then wife of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer artistic director Cedric Gibbons, New York writer Mercedes de Acosta,
actress Joan Crawford ("People at the Hotel") and Greta Garbo.
Her parents' sham marriage was just as little a problem for Maria Riva as the fact that Dietrich slept with both men and women.
"It was normal for me," remembers the native of Berlin.
“As a child, you learn from what you see.
And since it always stayed the same for me, it didn't cause me any problems."
The encounter with a lesbian nanny, whom Dietrich hired for her daughter according to Riva's biography, turned into a trauma.
It remains to be seen whether the sexual abuse of the then thirteen-year-old affected her more than her mother's reaction when the girl confided in her.
"It's behind you now.
You're not dead, so come to terms with it," Dietrich is said to have thrown at her daughter - a shock and the second "event" that Riva bears after her to this day.
She began drinking when she was seventeen to escape from herself.
Shortly after turning 19, Riva married actor Dean Goodman.
Although the marriage broke up in 1946, she describes the connection as the beginning of a better life.
Goodman helped her get rid of ballast.
Perhaps she also means the relationship with her mother.
On July 4, 1947, Maria Riva married musical designer William Riva in New York.
Photo: Picture Alliance
Like Marlene Dietrich, who became a US citizen in 1939, Riva enlisted during World War II to look after troops for the United Service Organizations (USO).
Meanwhile, Dietrich used the popularity in her adopted country to sell war bonds.
Her grandson Peter Riva describes how she went from village to village in California to promote the famous War Bonds.
She sang, shook hands and raised millions.
Clark Gable, the unsung king of Hollywood, is said to have repeatedly complained that she was selling more bonds than he was.
Between 1943 and 1946, Dietrich made more than 500 appearances for Allied soldiers - in Italy, France, Great Britain and other theaters of war, almost always with the melancholic title "Lili Marleen", often with comedian Danny Thomas.
"Danny provided the jokes, she the sex," says Maria Riva.
After the war, Thomas fondly recalled how Dietrich tirelessly sought out soldiers in need of a distraction.
"Marlene didn't leave anything out to put us in danger," the sidekick of the intrepid USO frontwoman joked again and again.
At home, Dietrich helped out in the "Hollywood Canteen".
Like fellow actors Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall and a few dozen other stars, she cleaned, sang and cooked at the restaurant on Cahuenga Boulevard for soldiers on home leave.
“My mother loved to cook, she was a good cook.
Their beef broth was considered a panacea.
She prepared them for anyone who wasn't feeling well,” recalls Maria Riva.
Occasionally Dietrich held hands with her “boys”, as she called the GIs, or kissed them on the cheek.
She ignored the fact that some Americans were bothered by the use of a German for the soldiers.
"Marlene was the daughter of a soldier with the appropriate values," says Peter Riva.
"She didn't care about the rest."
After her marriage, Marlene Dietrich's daughter began what she calls "her life" - among other things as an actress for television stations.
Photo: Getty
After the Allied victory over Hitler's Germany, Dietrich, who, according to Oscar winner Billy Wilder, had visited the European war zone more often than General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was nominated for the Medal of Freedom.
Before the White House ceremony, however, their sexual antics caught up with them.
“President Truman and his wife were embarrassed.
They rejected Dietrich's lifestyle," says her grandson.
The Medal of Freedom ceremony, one of the highest civilian honors in the United States, was canceled on Pennsylvania Avenue at the time.
Truman left the honor to Lt. Gen. James Maurice Gavin in 1947.
Dietrich already knew the officer, who was notorious as a womanizer, from her visits to Europe when she had a short, stormy affair with him.
After years as Hollywood's style icon, sex symbol and high earner, "The Dietrich" became quieter.
Even after the private and professional separation from her former mentor von Sternberg in the mid-1930s, films such as David O. Selznick's "The Garden of Allah" or the British historical drama "Knight Without Armour" with her in the lead role drew fewer cinemagoers.
In Stanley Kramer's court film "Judgment of Nuremberg", the German version of which premiered in Berlin in December 1961, she took on her last major role alongside Maximilian Schell, Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster war, she met both enthusiasm and rejection.
"At least one hundred police had to protect Marlene Dietrich's arrival and departure," wrote the "Tagesspiegel" at the time about the atmosphere in front of the Titania Palace in Steglitz.
“Almost an hour after the end of the performance, propre girls and very upright young men were undeterred waving their cardboard boxes with 'Marlene, go home' painted on them.
A team of the bravest snorted that she 'should just dare to go outside - the traitor will be shown'.”
To the disappointment of many former compatriots, Joseph Goebbels' attempt to get Dietrich back from Hollywood in 1936 in order to make her the face of National Socialist propaganda failed.
Despite all the criticism of her mother, Maria Riva learned to appreciate her straightforwardness.
"If there's one thing I've learned from her, it's to believe in yourself and do whatever it takes to help others," she writes.
"And: to be dutiful."
May 1951: Maria Riva in the studio filming a CBS TV series.
Photo: Getty
After volunteering for the USO, Dietrich's daughter met her second husband, the musical designer William Riva, in the late 1940s.
With him, she recalls, began what she calls "my life".
From 1951 she was a regular actress in front of the camera for the television network CBS and was seen in productions such as "The Milton Berle Show", "Studio One" and "Hallmark Hall of Fame".
Bill Paley, who turned CBS from a small radio station into one of the most important media companies, praised Maria Riva as his favorite actress at the time: "She is always perfect and masters every role." Her mother's drive for full commitment and discipline, which Riva felt as a child observed at the Paramount Pictures studios seemed to have rubbed off on her.
After starting out in the theater, she didn't go to film like Dietrich,
instead choosing television gave her the feeling of having achieved something of her own.
She also emancipated herself in her family life.
Maria Riva gave birth to four sons in New York: John Michael, Peter, Paul and David.
She resolved to do everything differently from Dietrich.
“My mother copied her mother's parenting style, a Prussian-Victorian lady.
I decided to use my mother as an example of what I didn't want to do," Riva recalls.
Marlene Dietrich was nevertheless celebrated as "Hollywood's most glamorous grandmother".
Marlene Dietrich soon became "Hollywood's most glamorous grandmother" (c. 1954 with grandchildren Peter and John Michael).
Photo: Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin
Meanwhile, Riva's father, now a multiple grandfather, lived a secluded life on a chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley that Dietrich had bought for him.
When a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper tracked Sieber down in the early 1960s, the diva's husband reported that he and his daughter and grandchildren were spending their holidays together on the farm.
"This is Marlene's home," the author quoted the 62-year-old as saying.
“She owns apartments in New York and Paris.
But when she's in California, she lives here." Does he still love Dietrich after 35 years of marriage?
"More than ever," assured Sieber.
And the flirtation with writer Erich Maria Remarque, her “Stage Fright” colleague Michael Wilding and Russian-American publisher Iva SV Patcevitch?
"She is a glamorous woman, and a glamorous woman is expected to
that she is constantly surrounded by romance.” How much unity there really was between Dietrich and her “Rudi” remains a secret.
When Sieber died in Sylmar near Los Angeles in 1976, he was considered Dietrich's long-forgotten husband.
"I decided to use my mother as an example of what I didn't want to do."
MARIA RIVA
A fall from the stage in Sydney had ended the diva's career abruptly a year earlier.
After leaving the screen, she had traveled the world as a singer and entertainer since the mid-1950s.
Her almost monotonous voice on titles like "La Vie en Rose" or "Das Lied ist aus" fascinated the audience at the time, as did the crystal-studded "Nude Dresses" that the French costume designer Jean Louis tailored for her.
After cancer, Dietrich found it increasingly difficult to get along without alcohol and medication.
With a small part in the German production "Schöner Gigolo, poor Gigolo" she ended her second career in 1979 and withdrew from the public.
For her daughter and her children, the time of endless phone calls from Dietrich's apartment on Avenue Montaigne in Paris began.
Riva, who at the time was commuting between Switzerland and America with her husband and sons, remembers the calls at all times of the day and night: “We talked on the phone every day.
We spent our time together on the phone.” After a life on two continents, Dietrich no longer seemed to understand the phenomenon of the time difference: “My children were called by their grandmother in Paris at the strangest times.”
In 1954: Maria Riva was in front of the camera from 1951 as a regular actress for the television station CBS.
Her mother Marlene Dietrich appeared almost exclusively as a singer and entertainer from 1953 and fascinated the audience with her almost monotonous voice.
Photo: Action Press
In her book "My Mother Marlene" Riva also describes hurtful conversations with Dietrich, who was bedridden at the time.
As in the years at Paramount Pictures, the former star demoted her to an assistant again.
According to Riva, Dietrich did not care about the question of how her daughter was doing.
The inability to respect her daughter as a personality in her own right does not represent an event in the true sense. It is always a – perhaps unforgivable – insult.
Marlene Dietrich died on May 6, 1992 at the age of 90 in her apartment in Paris.
The official cause of death was heart and kidney failure.
Her private secretary, Norma Bosquet, suspected an overdose of pills in an attempt to stay in control until the end.
"My mother created the Dietrich brand," says Maria Riva.
"She was her own work."
A myth is calling
In the last years of her life, Marlene Dietrich holed up in her apartment in Paris and only spoke to a few friends on the phone.
One of them was our freelancer Peter Bermbach, now 90 years old, who has lived in Paris for more than six decades.
As a journalist, he traveled a lot and was often not at home when his old girlfriend called.
But he had an answering machine that picked up the diva's messages from her apartment on Avenue Montaigne to Bermbach, who lived a few miles away.
In 1984 she left him a request: "Be so good as to call Ms. Dietrich.
It's now quarter to five on Monday.
Here's my number again: 47 23 97 42." Or: "You don't know: did you just go out or are you not in the country?
You should call me, please!" he called back,
they talked about love and hate, Germany and politics, God and the world.
Bermbach never saw her during this time.
But he got her food and left it in front of her door or put the magazine "Bunte" in front of her.
And because he was so nice, she sent him hydrangeas or far too many geraniums for which he had no space on his balcony.
You can read Bermbach's story and the news from Marlene Dietrich, first published by us ten years ago: here
Color blindness I see red
Nature experiences We're out