“My daughter is the only one who knows the real history. She’s my official biographer. Read her book.”

So said Marlene Dietrich, the legendary, boundary-pushing star of classics like Morocco, Destry Rides Again, and Witness for The Prosecution. But Dietrich was evidently wrong to believe her only child, Maria Riva—“the only love of my life”—would portray her in a flattering light.

Published in 1992, Marlene Dietrich: A Life is an exhaustive, 787-page portrait of a domineering mother through her jaded daughter’s wide, all-seeing eyes. Its length is warranted: it’s chock full of personal letters, telegrams, and reams of suspect “remembered” dialogue. Riva is a gifted, brilliant writer with a lyrical touch. Still, one wonders why Riva—now a 97-years-old, who seems to have had a happy, healthy adulthood—would want to dwell another second on a mother she portrays as a manipulative, egomaniacal liar.

Perhaps she hoped to answer the questions her mother never asked. As a child, “I never heard her say, ‘How are you?’ to a living soul,” Riva writes. “Fifty-five years later, this would still be true.” By becoming her mother’s definitive chronicler, Riva got the last word.

“There are some faces that can do no wrong. Special faces that look marvelous recorded by anything that print an image,” she writes. “Some say it’s bone structure but pictures of skeletons aren’t particularly gorgeous… Inner beauty? The beauty of the soul? Now that should be close. But I know from personal experience that this is really the least necessary ingredient.”

The Flirt 

Maria Magdalene Dietrich was born December 27, 1901, in Berlin. Her mother, Josephine, was a stoic, “hard woman” who raised Dietrich and her older sister to be proper Prussian aristocrats after their playboy soldier father, Louis, died in 1907.

From an early age, the luminous, free-spirited Dietrich rebelled. Riva slyly juxtaposes her mother’s callous, self-involved childhood diary with historical stats from World War I, which raged concurrently with Dietrich’s growing libido. “Why must I experience these terrible times?” a teenage Dietrich mused. “I did so want a golden youth and now it turned out like this!”

Dietrich blossomed as a performer in wild post-WWI Weimar Germany. She was a bisexual, eccentric flirt known for her sharp wit and daring costumes. In 1923, she married the handsome, fastidious assistant director Rudolf Sieber, to whom she would remain legally married until his death in 1976. “Throughout his life, it is what he did best: served this incandescent creature it was his tragedy to love,” his daughter writes.

The director Josef von Sternberg would soon fall under Dietrich’s spell, becoming her Svengali and lover as he molded her image in the 1930 mega-hit The Blue Angel. In return, Riva believes Dietrich fell forever in love with the movie star the two created, an assertion backed up by her mother’s own words. “I am fascinated by that face up there on the screen,” the actor once wrote, “and look forward to the rushes each day to see what I, his creature, will look like.”

Mutti’s Little Helper 

“At the age of three, I knew quite definitely that I did not have a mother, that I belonged to a queen,” Riva writes.

Born in 1924, Riva, known to her parents as “The Child,” was whisked off to Hollywood in the early 1930s and became her mother’s perfect little soldier, a mini-adult that Dietrich viewed as a “brilliant” collaborator. Riva is at her most poetic and heartfelt when she vividly describes her “real home”—the Paramount lot where she would slip away from her duties like a less mischievous Eloise to visit with the commissary workers and makeup women while her mother entertained her latest lover.

Kept away from school and surrounded by bodyguards who snuck her treats, a pint-sized Riva wore a special white wraparound coat, an “attendant to Miss Marlene Dietrich” uniform made by costume designer Travis Banton. She does begrudgingly give her mother credit for the discipline and tireless creative obsession which made her a star, though the details of what it took to maintain that stardom are highly disturbing. According to Riva, she spent her childhood attending her mother in the bathroom after Dietrich dosed herself with Epsom salts, guarding the door while she vomited, taping her mother’s breasts, and sitting on set alerting Dietrich to any imperfection.

Riva, a girl who considered her mother’s famed set of emeralds “her siblings,” heartbreakingly details the psychic toll of her bizarre childhood, which included being molested by a monstrous governess. She was in awe of the Kennedy brood, who seemed to her so fun-loving and happy, and recalls asking studio personnel what she should expect when she was invited to a child’s birthday party.

“The place was full of non-grown-ups who seemed to know each other. They laughed and chatted, making up comfortable groups,” Riva writes. Here she met the birthday girl, Judy Garland—another chubby, friendless outsider whom Riva (who always paints herself as an empathic fixer) surreptitiously gave a forbidden hot-dog. “We feasted. We giggled. We told each other secret truths,” she writes. “We became important to each other, we became friends. We rarely met. Sometimes it was years, but when we did, instantly, without hesitation, we again became two little fat girls sitting on a back-porch swing.”

The Dietrich Freeze

According to Riva, her mother was a bigot, a racist, and a classist who considered herself an “aristocrat” in a sea of peasants. She became legendary for her mean-spirited put-downs, christening her favorite sleep suppository “Fernando Lamas” because she considered him “the most boring man in Hollywood.”

But Mr. Lamas was only one of Dietrich’s many victims. Her archrival Greta Garbo was a “cruel Swede” who had gonorrhea. Charlie Chaplin was one of the “low-class circus performers,” Cary Grant was a pansy “shirt salesman,” and Princess Margaret was a “little gnome.” Joan Crawford was “that terrible, vulgar woman with the pop eyes who beats her children,” and the phony Duchess of Windsor was the “ever so elegant skeleton.” According to Riva, her mother particularly hated the devout Loretta Young: “Every time she ‘sins,’ she builds a church.”

Even Dietrich’s loyal friends Billy and Audrey Wilder were fair game. “All they do, those two, is sit in front of the television set! Billy even eats in front of it. They both sit there like Mister and Missus Glutz from the Bronx,” Dietrich said, per Riva. “That’s what happens to brilliant men when they marry low-class women! Sad!”

But some escaped her wrath. Dietrich adored Ernest Hemingway, Edith Piaf, Orson Welles, and Dolores del Rio. “Her species was Living Legends,” Riva writes. Dietrich’s bawdy Paramount neighbor Mae West was included in this category, and Dietrich delighted in how West constantly pilfered flowers from outside her bungalow.

“It became a game they played. My mother got rid of the hated gladiolas,

delphiniums, and roses, and Mae had fun decorating her dressing room with her floral loot,” Riva, always the moral compass, writes. “I never told my mother that long-stemmed red roses were our neighbor’s favorite flower. That became a private joke between Mae West and me.”

Tami

“During my entire youth, Tami was my friend, the one person I loved the most,” Riva writes.

Tami, her father’s longtime mistress, floats throughout Riva’s story like a ghost. Loving, compassionate and ethereal, Tami was hidden in the shadows—labeled Riva’s “nanny”—lest her existence destroy her parents’ façade of a marriage.

Though it seems almost impossible, Riva paints her father in an even worse light than she does her mother. Although they often lived in different countries, Rudi served as Dietrich’s meticulous henchman, making sure she was perfectly housed, dressed, and perceived. “Like many ineffectual men, he was a tyrant in those categories in which he could get away with it,” she writes.

Dressed in Dietrich hand-me-downs, Tami was the main victim of his cruelty. Constantly belittled by Rudi and Dietrich, the kindhearted Tami became increasingly unhinged. Riva alleges that Dietrich got Tami hooked on drugs, and that she was placed in numerous sanitariums. Riva recounts a devastating conversation she overheard between her parents, which may have accounted for Tami’s instability:

“It isn’t just the money for the abortions—you know I don’t mind paying for them all the time, that is not the problem,” Dietrich said, per Riva. “Someday, someone is going to find out—no matter where we hide her.”

Tami eventually died in a mental health facility. The mistreatment of Tami, along with her own sexual abuse, makes Riva’s attitude towards her parents—at times as cruel as she claims they were—seem utterly justified. “It took nearly thirty years to break her spirit, then destroy her mind,” Riva writes. “My mother and father were very thorough people.”

Falling in Love Again 

“I once asked Orson what had given him the idea of Dietrich for the madam of his brothel,” Riva writes of her mother’s role in the Welles film Touch of Evil. “He smiled that naughty ‘little boy’ smile of his: ‘Never heard of typecasting?’”

Indeed, Dietrich boasted an entire stable of toy boys and girls. Frank Sinatra, Jean Gabin, Joe Kennedy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fritz Lang, Jimmy Stewart, Edward R. Murrow, Adlai Stevenson, Michael Wilding, Erich Maria Remarque, Kirk Douglas, Edith Piaf, Ronald Coleman, Maurice Chevalier, and Garbo’s castoffs Mercedes de Acosta and John Gilbert were some of the reported lovers she obsessively fawned over, cooking them her famous eggs and meticulously douching with ice water and vinegar after every assignation.

But according to Riva, her mother did not enjoy sex, preferring romance with a capital R. “Remarque and I talked until dawn,” she once exclaimed. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘I must tell you—I am impotent!’ and I looked up at him and said: ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ …I was so happy! It meant we could just talk and sleep, love each other, all nice and cozy!”

Riva admits that she was embarrassed by her mother’s overlapping entanglements and felt enormous empathy for the lovers her mother manipulated and hurt, many of whom became Riva’s friends. One of the most fascinating aspects of Marlene Dietrich: A Life are the countless printed letters from Dietrich’s conquests, which exemplify the hold she had over her lovers and the cruel way she appears to have toyed with their hearts.

After the actor Brian Aherne complained about being relegated to the role of “ the other man,” Dietrich scoffed at him. “Sweetheart—you must be joking! All this soul searching about poor Rudi,” she wrote, per Riva. “He is my husband! What has that to do with it? You can’t be that bourgeois.…”

The Recluse

After years under her mother’s yoke, Riva took charge of her own life, though she was never able to escape Dietrich’s incessant phone calls—and wound up letting her mother play smothering grandmother to her four sons. Even while protesting a tad too much, she continued to work with Dietrich on her famous stage shows and projects.

The image she paints of Dietrich in her last two decades is harrowing. Having descended into alcoholism and drug addiction, Dietrich—unable to live up to her unattainable image any longer—lived in bed in Paris, peeing in a Limoges pitcher and defecating in a casserole dish. According to Riva she took morbid delight in the deaths of other celebrities, pasting their photos on her bedroom wall.

Riva, who is often witheringly funny, is at her best describing the antics of a bedridden Dietrich: pretending to be a Spanish maid on the phone, sleeping with a pillow of Robert Redford that Riva bought her, and devising ways Riva could smuggle her dead body out of her apartment. “I visited her often, while her diaries stated, ‘I never see Maria,’” Riva writes. “Each time I would note ‘Maria here’; each time I returned, found it crossed out with her Magic Marker. We played our little games.”

Marlene Dietrich died in 1992. That same year, her daughter’s revenge—tinged with respect and regret—was published. “This powerful preoccupation the world has for the famous is a difficult yoke to live under. Those of us who carry it, due to birth, pay a price,” she writes. “For those of us … who know that what is so revered is undeserving of canonization—until we learn that where fame and the power it engenders is concerned, fairness has no place—we scream into the void of non-acceptance and are driven mute by its very repetitive uselessness.”