Maria Riva--1993 TV Interview, Marlene Dietrich's Daughter

[Music] she was the world's most glamorous and intriguing woman tonight the mystery of marlena dietrich revealed for the first time her personal home movies and an array of famous lovers what do you call this god's gift to men and women that's what you called it and the startling story of the husband who protected her secret life and the daughter who paid the price when i judge i judge from abc news with anchors diane sawyer in new york sam donaldson in washington chief correspondent chris wallace judd rose jay shadely sylvia chase john quinones and renee passant this is prime time it's been 63 years since the plump and sassy star of josefan sternberg the blue angel traveled from berlin to hollywood and began molding herself into dietrich the legend who could make love to half the men and women in hollywood and still be there for her little daughter too or so we thought that daughter maria riva has now written a book about her mother's allure self-absorption and careless cruelties but also about the way her whole family was forced to serve the legend right to the empty and heartbreaking end [Laughter] lots of men stand six foot seven and lots of men have arms like heaven and lots of men have hair all golden and gravy dietrich in the 1930s and 40s no one had ever seen anything like her before a woman so tough what are you waiting for so direct i kissed you because i loved you for a minute so androgynous all sex one writer said and no gender a glamour girl who lived like one of the boys who's buying me a drink and nothing on screen was accidental dietrich was deliberately creating a legend supervising every sequin every feather every shadow on her face and off screen too these are dietrich's home movies shown here for the first time a chronicle of life with her at the absolute center basilrath bone drops over for a little badminton david niven in for a chat jack kennedy on the beach every frame a tribute to dietrich's perfection as pinup as house frau as adoring mother and by her side a young girl who would spend a lifetime as witness to her mother's power you cannot judge dietrich on any normal scale in the world if you try to understand dietrich on a normal basis you'll never get there at age 68 less than a year after her mother's death maria riva has written an astounding tale of her mother's life including her rapacious appetite for admiration and her endless lovers what were you thinking of well if you keep looking at me like that i'm liable to tell you what john wayne was one of the few who turned dietrich down saying he didn't want to be part of the stable which numbered in the hundreds michael wilding michael rennie harry cone edward r murrow piaf adlai stevens and sam spiegel frank sinatra harold arlen kirk douglas and an impressive array of ladies and gentlemen who must remain nameless and everybody was happy after a night of love her mother would give maria the review sinatra we never heard anything about sinatra except one word he is tender and then sweet sweet and tender was frankie eddie fisher she said now i understand why elizabeth taylor had to go with burton what do you call this i mean she was god's gift to men and women that's what you called it [Music] was she a lesbian i don't think my mother would think of herself as a lesbian no but she loved women a lot of them hollywood actresses this a millionaire she called my pirate she told maria women were better lovers you just couldn't live with them if my mother's appetites had been generated by sexual desire i would have been disgusted by it and i would have pulled away in a different way but basically my mother did not like sex you see and so you did it as fast as possible to get it over with but when i kiss they want some more and wanting more [Music] and this was dietrich's idea of romance a canoe ride with her lover blindingly handsome douglas fairbanks jr and an audience maria and her father dietrich's husband for 53 years rudolph sieber and you and your father are witness to all of this oh sure it was a happy family how can you explain to the outside world i know isn't that difficult in which the woman sends her husband love letters that she's writing other men to get his approvals writing him how disappointed she is that she didn't turn out to be pregnant when she thought she was by another man if you adored her you took whatever she had to give you the crumbs you're talking about worshipers yeah uh-huh that's what i'm talking about sweetheart and one of the worshipers maria who even as a little girl was her mother's collaborator confidante and maid waiting for her to undress her and put away the shoes they have to be cooled first you know you can't put shoes away when they're warm but it wasn't the cinderella this was my world and i loved it i thought it was fascinating i was never bored but for all the showy public hugging riva says her mother initiated it that was the rule you didn't touch my mother you didn't sit on her bed with her oh no no no nobody was allowed to sit on her bed except a special gentleman my mother was royalty we have some of the home movies you were playing with other kids no these were children that were brought in to have autographs from my mother i never went to school i never had friends she never wanted me to be away from her side did it feel like love this need to have you there with her all the time when you see your parents have the same euphoric love and tenderness for a loaf of bread or a song or a man or a woman as they have for you you step back and start not to trust it and in fact in truth i don't think my mother knew what love was and that was her tragedy maria says there was one loving adult in her childhood her father's mistress tommy i loved her she was a vulnerable creature and between them they destroyed her tommy served dietrich's purposes cooking cleaning the extra woman when dietrich and rudy entertained dietrich's lovers but tommy's affair with rudy was not going to get in dietrich's way what did they do to her she allowed them to force her into more than 15 abortions and they made her feel that it was her fault to have become pregnant in the first place when tommy got depressed dietrich got her hooked on drugs when tommy became suicidal maria was forced to take and watch as she got electric shock treatments tommy died in an asylum i feel i have the right to blame them for that there i judge and when i judge i judge riva also judges for something that happened when she was 15 and started becoming interested in boys her mother moved her into a separate apartment to live with the secretary of one of dietrich's friends someone whose sexual aggressiveness was well known i was raped when i was a young girl who raped you the woman who was the secretary of one of my mother's lovers riva is convinced that her mother wanted to initiate her with women in part to keep her from leaving with a man you think she should have known if you lock an alcoholic in a liquor store and he helps himself to the bottles of liquor who do you blame the person that takes the alcohol that's offered or the person who locked him in the liquor store how long did it go on about uh a year and a half did you ever tell her no i wouldn't give you that satisfaction power must not be allowed to triumph all the time it mustn't be forgiven no matter what it does because it's beautiful because it's famous because it's powerful how did you get away i ran into alcohol and i was an alcoholic a teenage alcoholic she was also at times suicidal the thing that really saved me as a human being my husband maria defied her mother and married set designer william riva in 1947 while dietrich was off in europe continuing her tireless morale building for the wartime troops with personal attention of course to general patton and general gavin to name but a few even in her 50s she continued to collect men and women her reports ever more lurid and graphic she saw my husband and she pulled out of her handbag one pair of pink panties and waved it under his nose and said ah smell it's the president of the united states let's say this was the 1960s oh please don't hesitate to spare i'm quite accustomed to it by this time riva a beauty in her own right had been a popular star on television but gradually become pulled back into her mother's drama dietrich enlisted riva to help her create a one-woman show sellout crowds came to see dietrich in sequin dresses that weighed 14 pounds with a special harness to recreate the famous figure wigs that concealed how she pulled back the skin on her face and pinned it oblivious to the pain i get no kick from champagne the alcohol doesn't thrill me at all she kept it up until 1975 when her legs were so badly swollen from blocked arteries that she could barely walk she did not know anything else could work duty to the legend you describe off stage a table that had the nebutal second all scotch i hid her alcoholism for 10 years and we did it very well desperate for the money dietrich made one more movie just a gigolo she was 77 and drunk after that dietrich never showed her face again she stayed in this paris apartment for 13 years not sick drinking taking pills still flirting on the telephone inventing wicked little fantasies even for her funeral all the men who walked into the church and women who had slept with her would get a red carnation and all the people who said they had slept with her but hadn't slept with her would get the white carnation you see and i once said to her well how about having the whole 82nd airborne division you know make a jump over the mud lane wearing their carnations you see with general gavin leading the way with his carnation and she said oh that's wonderful but riva says her mother also had a real and cruel plan in the final years dietrich still sharp mentally refused to wash her hair or her body using anything nearby as a bedpan smelling riva rites of booze and decay and writing lies in her diary that her daughter never came to see her knowing that legends need drama right to the end you theorize that maybe she wanted to die this squalid way she was setting up this magnificent scene of dejection desertion this old woman this beautiful woman who had given her life to her daughter who had always done only everything for her daughter uh who had been left to starve in her own dirt bedridden all alone what do you think people will say about this book well i think some people are going to draw and quarter me why do you have to tell us these things i think those of us who live with great fame have to say that it is a trip of survival and that a lot of us don't make it do you worry about the mommy dearest of it all this is the most intimate detail i knew i was going to write to this book did this kind of detail oh yeah let me ask you a question you've read my book do you still like dietrich i read that her last word was your name well she probably didn't say it as you would like to imagine that she said it she probably said it maria marlena dietrich died last may her public lined up to mourn her including a daughter who wept and as she wrote in her book buried her mother in berlin back where the life and the legend began i only whisper be good to her she needs you to be good to her and i cry for all the lost love so unretrievable dietrich in the end did create a final monument to her legend and in the coming weeks we are going to take you into the vault and look at what sotheby's thinks may be one of the most dazzling collections ever because throughout her life she kept and had catalogued everything from photographs to lingerie to all those fabulous costumes

Channel: Alan Eichler

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Id: oX4sIOxz8iE

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021