Rating: 
Summary: Rare biography written with intelligence
Review: This is one of the best biography ever written. Much better than most of the biographies written by those famous bio writers, as it is written with intelligence (or as Dietrich will say "superior intelligence"). This is written without the usual self-pity you would expect from hype and with great insight and information. I enjoy this book very much.
Rating:
Summary: Rare biography written with intelligence
Review: This is one of the best biography ever written. Much better than most of the biographies written by those famous bio writers, as it is written with intelligence (or as Dietrich will say "superior intelligence"). This is written without the usual self-pity you would expect from hype and with great insight and information. I enjoy this book very much.
Rating:
Summary: Maria Riva's
Review: This is the juiciest and the best Hollywood biography I've ever read. It's an awesome accomplishment. Dietrich's daughter obviously has a prodigious memory because she brings not just her mother, but an entire vanished age of moviemaking to life.
I was expecting to read about Dietrich the great heroine, instead I learned about a woman whose narcissism was truly monstrous but who remained fascinating despite that. Riva writes brilliantly about the early days of moviemaking, the personalities with whom she came into contact and who were part of her mother's world, from the legendary directer Von Sternberg to Noel Coward, the pre-war days of Hollywood, the fascinating days of train travel and the gorgeous oceanliners of yesteryear in the days before airline travel, her own extremely bizarre upbringing by a mother who thought she existed only to be her handmaiden and a father who had his own major issues, her own attempts (and ultimate success) in breaking free, self-indulgence and addiction on a grand scale, politics, heroism, cowardice, human cruelty and selfishness, glamour, beauty, the arts of design, stagecraft, lighting and the endless, almost dizzying parade of Dietrich's lovers and victims.
A tremendous achievement not just as psychological portraits of a disfunctional family with a queen egotist at its head but of an entire lost world. Riva clearly admires her mother's enormous gifts, her warrior-like discipline, her tenaciousness, her ferocious appetite for learning about her craft, her attention to the image, her great aesthetic eye, her heroism and physical bravery ---while deploring the way she used and discarded other people and was such a monster of selfishness and dishonesty, ultimately destroying herself in the process. Literally, this is one of the best books I've ever read. I could NOT put it down. I've recommended it many times -- no one has EVER been disappointed--and everyone has always LOVED this book!!!!
Rating:
Summary: My favorite book!
Review: When I first saw the cover for this book, in 1993, I thought I was looking at a picture of Madonna! Then I opened it and found that it was about Marlene Dietrich. Still, I checked it out from my local library, and I couldn't put it down! I spent my entire summer vacation reading this book. I hardly knew anything about Dietrich--or Hollywood's Golden Age--before this. Like many young people (I was fifteen at the time), I wasn't interested in watching those "boring", old black-and-white films, but this book changed all that. Marlene is such a fascinating person, flaws and all. She is also an extremely talented one, helping with the design of her famous costumes, and even to arranging her own lighting. Riva's anecdotes about her mother and old Hollywood made me wish I could have grown up during the twenties/thirties, instead of the eighties/nineties. I highly recommend this biography, especially for young people who have yet to discover actors and films from a time long gone by.
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