INTRODUCTION

HER STORY

QUOTES

Rita Hayworth once confessed that she got the best head ever-- not from a man-- but from Marlene Dietrich. When Marlene wanted Rita to return the favor, Rita told her, "Mañana." Tomorrow never came...

Her grandsons were called John Michael, John Peter, John Paul and John David, Marlene's quartet of "Jonnys." They called her "Missy" or "Maus," and she called them by their second names.

When Marlene showed up at Mae West's dressing room one day and offered to wash her hair Mae politely turned her down. She said she had been afraid Marlene did not mean the hair on her head.

A large part of her audience and acquaintance were gay men. She called them "kinder, nicer than 'normal' men.

Her singing voice had a narrow but serviceable one-and-a-half octave range, centered almost precisely as a viola.  Her friend Ernest Hemingway wrote famously of her voice, "If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it."

She liked to watch the news on television, and tennis tournaments; she liked watching the legs of young tennis stars she fancied.

She and Clark Gable inaugurated the Lux Radio Theater of the Air from Hollywood in 1936 (hosted by Cecil B. DeMille) with a version of Morocco called "The Legionnaire and the Lady."

At the Brussels World's Fair in 1958, visitors to the U.S. Pavilion were invited to name "the greatest immigrant to the United States": Einstein came in first; Dietrich came in fourth.

She made a famous bet with Noël Coward that she could quit smoking and he could not, and in a demonstration of the Dietrich discipline, she won. She stopped smoking overnight and never touched another cigarette. However, she loved being around smokers for the second-hand smoke and encouraged everybody else to puff themselves to death.

She was never invited to leave her footprints in the forecourt of Hollywood's Chinese Theater.

Once when Marlene refused accommodations near Brussels because there was no lift in the hotel (she feared for her legs), she panicked proprietors who had lovingly converted a seventeenth-century convent into a luxury inn. "This place may be seventeenth century," she bellowed. "I am not!" When she found her room was on the ground floor in what had once been the chapel, she agreed to stay but insisted the steps to the bed, on what had been the altar, might cause her to trip in the middle of the night. Carpenters installed an entirely new floor in the chapel suite while Marlene told them how to do it.

In 1962 she checked herself into the Niehans Clinic in Switzerland for injections of fresh cells of unborn lamb and recuperated by spending Christmas, her sixty-first birthday, and New Year's with Noël Coward at his Swiss chalet.

In Sydney she appeared as the last great star at the now razed Theater Royal where Sarah Bernhardt had been the first. Her final ovation lasted for fifty minutes, until finally she begged them, "Please go home, I'm tired!"

Costume designer Edith Head said of Marlene: "You don't design clothes for Dietrich. You design them with her."

Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, gave Marlene a sample of what he claimed to be the original culture from which he had made his then ignored discovery in 1928. She had it framed and later hung it on Park Avenue walls.

Marlene always told her daughter: "Most children inherit medals from their father; you will inherit them from your mother."

Marlon Brando had called to complain that Marlene shouldn't perform in South Africa. She didn't agree, preferring to teach tolerance while she was there: she gave preferential interviews to black journalists and offered work, where possible, to black musicians.

In German Dietrich means "skeleton key" or "passkey."

Collecting dressing-room door plates inscribed with her name was a habit spanning her entire professional life.

Her first real job was playing violin in an orchestra accompanying silent films of which she was the only female member, a measure of her self-confidence and the enlightened attitiude of the Berlin music world.

In 1954 Marlene caused a sensation as the ringmaster for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden, New York.

When Marlene and George Raft broke up, she left him with a photograph of herself bearing the injunction "Love Me!", which he kept over his bed for the rest of his life.

Her career was often plagued by fractures and bone breaks, an inheritance from milk shortages in childhood.

She had a perfect memory for poetry that would not desert her for the rest of her life..

Marlene would never own her own home, she preferred rentals.

Diana Vreeland described one of Marlene's thirty-pound beaded gowns as "a million grains of golden caviar," and liked it so much she put it on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art almost fifty years later.

A star in his own right, Marlene's good-luck doll appeared in all of her films until the 1940s. When setting up a studio dressing room, her good-luck doll was the first to be unpacked-- and always the last to be repacked. Only during the war years did he not accompany her to the front.

She made a brief return to filmmaking in 1979-- receiving a $250,000 salary for two days work-- in Just A Gigolo.

When filmmaker Josef von Sternberg was asked if he intended to wed Dietrich, his protégée and lover, he admitted, "I'd as soon share a telephone booth with a frightened cobra."

Following the collapse of his marriage to Virginia Bruce, John Gilbert had a prolonged affair with Dietrich. At his funeral, Marlene made a hysterical scene, walking in tears up the aisle to the flower-bedecked open coffin an then, rather spectacularly, fainting in front of everyone.

Briggs, the driver of Marlene's Cadillac, wore a mink-trimmed uniform and a pair of revolvers.

Marlene is said always to have been ready to take the time to commiserate with and reassure her co-workers, and was almost as famous for her soothing chicken soup as was the M-G-M commissary. Make-up man Bob Schiffer reports that when he worked with her, she would often present him with strudel and pies she had just taken out of the oven.

Marlene and Tallulah Bankhead had adjoining dressing rooms at Paramount in 1932. Marlene wore gold dust in her hair. Tallulah got some, put in on her pubic hair, showed herself to people and asked, "Guess what I've been doing?"

Mercedes de Acosta would write her very passionate love letters. Marlene would read these letters aloud to her husband and add the usual "Oh, please, she really is too much!"

Her Hollywood arrival gift from von Sternberg was a forest green and gold-speckled Rolls-Royce.

Up to 1939 Hitler sent messages to her that she should come back and when she refused they said that they had means to make her very unhappy.

The only cigarette lighter she carried from the 1940s until she stopped smoking in the 1960s was made for her by jeweler Flato to her own specifications in the shape of a Jerry can.

In 1937, when she was in England to film Knight Without Armour, she tried to talk King Edward VIII out of giving up the throne for nothing more important than that conniving woman, Wallis Simpson.

During their long love affair in the 1950s, Yul Brunner and Marlene had a secret code and pet names.  Their love notes were exchanged via dressers (his) or maids (hers).

Claimed the only really important thing she had ever done was entertaining the Allied Troops during World War II.

Although married only once (to Rudolf Sieber) she boasted such lovers as: Maurice Chevalier, Douglas Fairband Jr, George Raft, Jean Gabin, Yul Brynner, Erich Maria Remarque, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Edith Piaf, Edward R. Murrow, John F. Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, John Gilbert and Mercedes de Acosta.

In 1948 she became a grandmother and she now referred to her new persona as The World's Most Glamorous Grandmother.

By 1967 Marlene had already had three face-lifts and many youth rejuvenation treatments which she tried in vain to keep secret.

In her final years Dietrich became obsessed with her own death and told her only child Maria that when she died to remove her body in a garbage bag so "no press could see it."

At her funeral service the reverend commented "Marlene was highly discreet and secretive:  Her secrets now belong to her alone and to God."

Rumor has it that she regularly douched with ice water and vinegar to avoid getting pregnant.

Alternately supportive and disparaging of Dietrich's affinity for men's clothing, Paramount eventually decided not to encourage publicity for her sartorial affectations after she confided that she also wore men's underwear.

Is the only star who became famous in America before American audiences ever saw her in a film. A massive publicity campaign had been waged to introduce her.

Regarded The Devil Is a Woman as her favorite film "because I was my most beautiful in it."

Was so expert at hair and makeup that she bears the distinction of being the only actress ever to be admitted to the film makeup and hairdressers' union.

Never worked without a mirror on the set so she could constantly check her appearance.

Dietrich and Sternberg were rumored to be lovers. Sternberg's wife slapped her with a lawsuit, demanding $500,000 for alienation of affections.

Marlene was a Kennedy grabber... she prided herself in having slept with Joseph P. Kennedy (JFK's father), Joe Kennedy Jr. and JFK as well.

Since 1978, she occupied a two room apartment overlooking a courtyard garden, at 12 Avenue Montaigne  in Paris. Being bedridden for her final five years, she would spend hours chatting with her friends across the world on two telephones spending up to $7,500 a month.

She once proclaimed that the diaphragm was "the greatest invention since Pan-Cake makeup".

Josef von Sternberg shot Marlene Dietrich singing, Falling In Love Again 236 times because she couldn't pronounce the word 'moths' to his satisfaction. The way she said it, it sounded like 'moss'.

Dietrich demanded that Max Factor sprinkle real gold dust into her wigs to add glitter to her tresses during filming. The glamour trick was expensive. In powdered form, gold cost about $60 an ounce, and approximately half an ounce was required to add shimmer to a wig.

Her last stage appearance was in Sydney, Australia - where she fell and broke her left leg - in September 1975.

In a posthumous gesture of forgiveness, she bequeathed her vast collection of memorabilia to the city of Berlin.

Although the last 13 years of her life were spent in seclusion in her apartment in Paris, with the last 12 years in bed, she had withdrawn only from public life and maintained active telephone and correspondence contact with friends and associates.