The last couple of days I've been re-reading Donald Spotos Blue Angel: The Life Of Marlene Dietrich and my latent crush on Marlene is in full swing. Blue Angel does a good job of putting Dietrich's life (as well as German history from the Unification to the Weimar Republic and afterwards) in full context ; In 1919, one dollar equalled 8 marks, but "...four years later , it bought one trillion" and the resulting economic instability was exploited by many differing political factions, all of which had an effect on Marlene's life and outlook.
(not to mention her ensembles)
Dietrich became one of the most celebrated stage and film actresses in Berlin, and then one film (The Blue Angel) made her an international star, which she remained for the rest of her long, increasingly sad, life. Blue Angel is a pretty compelling, occasionally sad, overview of her life.
But honestly, for me the final word about Marlene will always belong to her daughter, Maria Riva. Riva's engrossing (800 pages!) biography of her iconic mother isn't at all a hatchet job by a dissatisfied failure of a daughter a la Mommie Dearest-- it's simply a blunt, honest memoir, but also an attempt to understand her mother.
Although Maria Riva clearly didn't love her mother (she states so explicitly in the text), still she writes perceptively of her. This is a very well researched book--there's so much detail and background information about the making of Marlene's films (as well as her wild, casually bisexual romantic life) and every single word is fascinating (one of the most startling things about Riva's book is how damned intelligent both women are, and how funny).
Marlene could be a loving--although often inattentive--tyrant of a mother, but Maria eventually figured out how to deal with her: alternately humor and/or ignore her!
(Although Dietrich seems unaware, her daughter is unsmiling in most photographs taken of her as a girl...
...as well as when she was an adult).
A little forgotten background about Maria Riva:
She was one of the most famous actresses of the "Golden Age of Television" (one of the three "Most Seen" actors in the early days of live TV). And she was gorgeous.
(Frankly, I think Maria was much more beautiful than her mother)
Happily, Maria Riva has ended up a completely happy woman, professional, wife and mother.
And even now, well into old age, she's still beautiful, commanding, stately.
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And just to keep it all in the Crawford vein, here's a quote from an enraged Marlene Dietrich regarding the forthcoming film version of Mommie Dearest:
"I'm shocked that Paramount bought that filthy book, and made the frightful bitch who wrote it rich!" My note: the "frighful bitch" (to quote Dietrich) lost all of her ill-gotten riches very quickly, not at all what she expected when she first published MD!
(Joan Crawford rolling on the floor, laughing her ass off just thinking about it!)
6 comments:
The mother/daughter portrait where the young Maria has one arm up and is scowling is almost Arbus-like. I'll be seeing that little face in my head all day!
Oh my GOSH, Toon-- Good call! (And oddly, Diane Arbus showed up in a totally unrelated search online today--weird, huh?).
Maria was a solemn, loveable, oft-neglected child--I'm glad hers has been a happy life!
Sorry to be so late with this comment Rob. I have the Spoto book on Marlene. I will get it out again. I remember enjoying it at the time and feeling I got some understanding of the star from it. I was looking forward to his Joan Crawford book but found it sort of flat and lacking anything new. Maria Riva's book was great - well I thought so anyway!
Hi Janie! I agree about Spoto's Joan Crawford book. Not bad, but tell me something NEW! Still, he has good intentions, and if it gets anyone interested in finding out more about her, it's all to the good.
And yes, most definately, I LOVED Maria's book! It stands the true test of a biography: if it were about a mother and daughter who weren't celebrities, it would still completely work; it feels completely real to me. SO GREAT to hear your thoughts! Rob
Maria Riva is a bitter old lady. She was jealous of her mother all her life.
Hey there Anon, you might be right, who knows? I do think it took guts for her to admit very clearly in the biography that she didn't love her mother. Heck, at least she didn't pull a christina Crawford, acting as if she loved her mother and was simply trying to "understand" the mother/daughter relationship-in print-for money!
If you're interested, just last night I saw this comment over at Self Styled Siren that really perked my ears up:
"...Riva was ten different kinds of bitter although she does seem to have had her reasons. The thing that made me like the book, aside from the fact that she can write (which B.D. Hyman and Christina Crawford cannot) was that she did have a bead on the work it took for Dietrich to be Dietrich, and respect for a lot of that work. Hyman and Crawford had zero feel for their mother's talent, zero."
Here's the link:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=12295435&postID=3332321868611035343
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