Daughter's `Marlene Dietrich' Paints A Pathetic Portrait Of Icon

When Marlene Dietrich died in Paris last May at the age of 90, she had spent most of the previous decade in a squalid state of self-exile, an alcoholic who never rose from the stained sheets of her cluttered bed. With a hot plate at her side and unquestioning caretakers to see to her needs, she had succeeded in preserving her legend by closing off the world from her pathetic decline.

Dietrich's only child, Maria Riva, was a witness to her mother's final days. She had also been an intimate observer during the creation of the legendary film star's rise to become "The Dietrich," a timeless icon of the silver screen whose beauty and "genderless" sex appeal have not faded over a half-century of public fascination.

This perpetual curiosity has yielded more than 80 books about her phenomenon. Five new volumes have appeared since her death, including Steven Bach's exhaustively researched "Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend," but in writing her own book, simply titled "Marlene Dietrich" (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50), Riva claims an advantage over all other biographers: She was there.

"I was her `product,' and she never wanted me from her side," Riva said while in Seattle this week on a book-promotion tour. "And because my brain was never cluttered by normal things like school, friends and birthday parties, I was like a blank sheet of paper upon which was printed only what Dietrich said, what Dietrich thought. I was her creation, she owned me, and so she spoke to me as if she were speaking out loud to herself."

Always "Dietrich." Riva's third-person references echo her mother's own treatment of herself as something other than real - a manufactured creature, imported from Germany into the Hollywood studio system, whose realities, on screen and "in life," were tragically one and the same.

Now 68, Riva sees her mother's life and stellar ascent in the 1930s through the windows of crystal-clear memory, and concludes that it was a rigid sense of duty that ultimately obscured the genuine individual her mother might have been.

"Dietrich was intelligent, highly disciplined and extraordinarily beautiful," Riva said, "and she was consumed by this Germanic or Teutonic duty to make and maintain her legend, until that duty obliterated everything else. That, I think, is her tragedy. It was also tragic that I don't think my mother knew how to love, although she thought she had invented love."

Or love invented her. With access to Dietrich's lifetime of diaries, telegrams and letters written and received, Riva writes at length about her mother's relationship with director Josef von Sternberg. It was he who fashioned Dietrich's legendary image through seven sumptuously produced films at Paramount, including "The Blue Angel," "The Scarlet Empress" and "The Devil is a Woman." It was a collaboration of mutual dependence but not, Riva says, the cause of her mother's obsessively cultivated persona.

"Jo was a man in love and a genius with a camera," Riva said, "but there was no conscious thought of creating a legend. It was the studio system that forced the image. They didn't give a damn about Dietrich. All they wanted was a rival to Greta Garbo at MGM, and from a business point of view they were right."

It was Paramount that had discovered and nurtured their new European phenomenon, but it was Dietrich who embellished her image with consummate skill, aided by costumer Travis Banton and an entourage that included her daughter, who served as hand-maiden, assistant, jewelry supervisor, and all-too-innocent confidante.

If those roles allowed Riva unmatched authority about her mother's life, it also subjected her to Dietrich's domination - a submission that also involved her father, Rudi Sieber. Riva characterizes him as "a weak man who made himself important" by being Dietrich's husband of nearly 50 years, living with a mistress while Dietrich pursued "romance with a capital R" throughout hundreds of affairs.

Riva writes with entertaining frankness about her mother's legendary bisexual liaisons with a long list of suitors, including Yul Brynner and Jean Gabin (the great loves of her life), Maurice Chevalier, Edward R. Murrow, Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf and even a gleeful one-night stand with President John F. Kennedy.

Riva supplies an abundance of these juicy revelations, but "Marlene Dietrich" is neither a tell-all scandal sheet nor the bitter attack of a wronged child seeking revenge. Although richly detailed and laced with lively insight, the book is frequently sad in tone, sometimes awkwardly filtered through Riva's particular perceptions and memories, but it also maintains the objectivity that Riva strived to uphold. The result is a fascinating portrait of power and fame that critic Molly Haskell accurately describes as "the ultimate act of demystification."

While allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about Dietrich, Riva does claim the right to judge her mother on two "unforgivable" matters: her rape at age 13 by a lesbian governess (she blames her mother for allowing an obviously dangerous employment), and the torment of Sieber's mistress and Riva's beloved friend Tami, a devoted friend and lover who became Dietrich's ultimate victim.

Living in Switzerland with her husband of 45 years, Riva (who finished her book in November 1990) now views her mother's life and legend with sympathy.

"You can't write a book like this as self-therapy," she said. "If at 68 I still needed to write hate or vengeance out of my system, then I'd be in big trouble. You can't build anything from that perspective. To my way of thinking, if you have compassion for someone before they're dead, it's quite different than having compassion for them after they're dead.

"I'm grateful to Dietrich. She taught me what not to be."