BERLIN (dpa) – She was born Maria Magdalene Dietrich in Berlin on December 27, 1901, but by the time she was a 20-year-old fledgling actress she knew she wasn’t going to be a star with those Christian names.
So, she joined the first and last syllables of her names together to become – you guessed it – Marlene Dietrich, one of cinema’s most legendary stars.
After the Hollywood star died in seclusion in Paris in 1992 her body was brought back to Berlin for burial alongside the grave of her mother. Now Berlin busies itself organising a series of celebrations linked to her 100th anniversary.
During World War II she became enormously popular, touring American and British army camps in Europe, giving concerts, clambering aboard tanks to flash those glamorous legs and sing her own distinctly husky version of “Falling in Love Again.”
Tagged “The Goddess of Love” in Hollywood, Marlene certainly lived up to that reputation, finding time for a series of passionate liaisons with people of both sexes.
Currently, a Marlene Dietrich exhibition entitled “Forever Young” is to be seen at the Film Museum on the Potsdamer Platz.
It is there that a vast array of the star’s personal effects – costumes, hats, jewellery and sequined gowns – purchased from the star’s estate for five million dollars – have been on display since the mid-1990s.
Curiously, the star was always wary when the question of her age was raised at Hollywood studies and at parties. Throughout the 1930s, she repeatedly gave her age as being four or five years younger than it really was, possibly for fear of being ignored for leading movie roles.
Angered by her refusal to return to Germany to make movies, the Nazi authorities gained their revenge by printing a copy of her birth certificate, showing she’d been born in the German capital on December 27, 1901.
But, by then her fame was so great few people took much notice of what Hitler’s Germany had to say about her.
A flood of new books about the star are being turned out for what would have been Marlene’s 100th birthday.
One of them, entitled simply “Marlene Dietrich has been co- authored by Peter Riva, the star’s 5l-year-old New York-based grandson, and writer Jean-Jacques Naudet.
It includes hitherto unpublished correspondence exchanged between Marlene and her numerous lovers down the years, as well as snap shots and letters of endearment written by Ernest Hemingway, long a fervent, albeit platonic, admirer of the star’s for many years.
Interviewed at the exhibition, Peter Riva says his Dietrich book is really a series of images of the star, “which she wouldn’t release during her lifetime.”
Riva claims the star’s relationship with the media required her to be somewhat cool at times, “more the Queen.” For this reason, he says she’d hesitated releasing some of the material in her possession during her life-time.
She felt the material was “a little bit more vulnerable than she wanted it to be.” As a result, Riva says he thinks people will come to look at the book and understand her better, “and perhaps even like her more than before.”
A pocket book about Dietrich has also been published by local film historian and archivist Peter Sudendorf who was given the job of sifting through the movie star’s effects, which included 680 suitcases and crates, after her death.
He says: “Marlene was very intelligent. She was also a sphynx for the Press. That’s why she became a myth … because she always refused to commit her personality totally to the media. “What she was in to was showmanship. She knew her audience and how to treat it.”
Sudendorf says the star’s fame endures, and she continues to fascinate young people today. “When we began making tours to the Dietrich show we feared only elderly people would come. But that’s not the case at all,” he says.
“At the exhibition you hear Madonna quoting from a Marlene song and the Beatles singing one of her numbers, so l think the ‘Forever Young’ really means her image is still transported in modern terms.
“She remains an eternal icon even when young people haven’t even seen ‘The Blue Angel,'” he insisted.
Marlene pin-ups, jewellery, and costumes stud the show on the Potsdamer Platz. “Five minutes with her was like a day spent with a normal person,” explains Riva, whose mother, Maria Riva, now 75, lives in Palm Springs. She was the star’s sole child.
A rare “sour” note scribbled by Marlene lists the names of Eddie Fischer and Michael Wilding (both ex-lovers) and Richard Burton, as being men allegedly “ruined” by actress Elizbeth Taylor.
Also displayed are photos of the star’s various lovers. They apparently included actors Yul Brynner, Jean Gabon and David Fairbanks, jr, writer Erich Maria Remarque and film director Josef von Sternberg, the director of Marlene’s first major movie, “The Blue Angel,” in 1930.
From mid-December until mid-January retrospective screenings of 16 of the star’s Hollywood movies – among them “Shanghai Express,” “Destry Rides Again” and “Witness for the Prosecution” are to be shown in Berlin.
A technically improved version of “The Blue Angel” is also to be screened for the first time in the German capital.
As the seductive “Lola” the actress was pitted against the German academy award actor Emil Jannings in the role of the hapless Professor Unrat.” Her performance catapulted her overnight to world stardom.
The “Forever Young” exhibition is to be seen at the Film Museum in Berlin until February 17, 2002, while on December 27, a gala – “Marlene – 100” starring Ute Lemper, Joy Fleming, Katja Riemann and Erkkan Aki, will be held at the city’s Friedrichstadtpalast.
