Marlene Dietrich
 Greta Garbo’s greatest rival in Hollywood was Marlene Dietrich, another European screen goddess, whose ambivalent sexuality held the rapt attention of the world.
Dietrich was born in Germany. Like all German schoolgirls, she was in love with Henry Porten, Germany’s first great movie star. When she discovered that Porten was staying in nearby Garmisch, she climbed out of the window of her boarding house where the school party was staying, and, carrying her violin, took a tram to Garmisch, where she serenaded Porten early one morning. The star was not pleased.
 By the time she was 16, her looks were so provocative, she managed to get a young faculty advisor dismissed. At school pageants, Marlene would seize the opportunity to dress up like a boy. She had a “special friend,” Hilde Sperling, who worshipped her.
After the war, Marlene was sent to a boarding school in Weimar, where she entertained her roommates with a risque routine that involved her wearing only a bedsheet and doing an impression of a Chinese pagoda.
 When Marlene went to Berlin to stay with her uncle, she supported herself by playing the violin in the theater. However, her legs soon got her out of the orchestra pit and into the chorus line at the Girl-Kabarett.
Marlene failed the audition to Max Reinhardt’s acting school, but continued to work in theaters, anyway. At the age of 21, she married Rudi Sieber, in the Berlin suburb of Friedenau. They remained married for the next 53 years, until his death in 1976. (Rudi’s former fiancee, Eva May, promptly slashed her wrists. She recovered, but shot herself in the heart the following year).
 Marlene made her first movie appearance in 1926 in “Duel on the Lido.” She continued to get roles as Parisian playgirls and jazz-age vamps, sometimes wearing a monocle, which was to become something of a trademark. Meanwhile, Dietrich was developing a relationship with lesbian comedienne Claire Waldoff, who helped Marlene hone her distinctly masculine performing style.
Cary Grant once played opposite Dietrich in “Blonde Venus.” Brian Aherne co-starred in her next movie, “Song of Songs.” He played an artist who sculpted her in the nude. The use of a statue throughout the movie was a skillful way around the morality codes of the Hays Office. Paramount even went so far as to put replicas of the famous nude in the foyers of all their theaters.
 The rapid turnover of men in Dietrich’s life was often an embarrassment to her daughter, Maria. She explained that it was romance she craved, not sex. In fact, she preferred impotent or gay men.
Rumors of Marlene’s flamboyant lesbian affairs caused her studio much concern. When questioned, she told them, “In Europe, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, we make love to anyone we find attractive.”
Despite her preference for feminine companionship, Dietrich had many male lovers, including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and James Stewart. Dietrich was filming “Seven Sinners” when she spotted an up-and-coming John Wayne in the Universal commissary. She walked past him as if he was invisible, then stopped, half turned, rolled her eyes and whispered: “Daddy, buy me that.” (Wayne got a part in “Seven Sinners,” which was the movie in which Marlene wore her first “nude” dress). Wayne was, reportedly, mesmerized by her. She enjoyed herself by going hunting, fishing and drinking with him. They made two more pictures together.
Adolf Hitler was a great fan of Marlene. The Fuhrer begged Marlene to return to Germany. She refused. (When I interviewed Marlene during her nightclub engagement at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, and asked about her “relationship” with Hitler, Dietrich looked blissfully out into space and then said: “You know, I will always wonder what would have happened if I had been nicer to that man. The whole world might have, somehow, been different”).
 Shortly after Marlene became a U.S. citizen, she enthusiastically sold U.S. War Bonds. Her favorite ploy was to sit on the laps of drunks in nightclubs while treasury agents called their banks to make sure their checks would clear. When President Roosevelt heard about her methods, he summoned Marlene to the White House. “You will no longer appear in nightclubs,” he told her. Marlene did as she was told.
Of all her infamous lesbian affairs, perhaps the most interesting one was with Edith Piaf. When it was over, Marlene acted as Piaf’s bridesmaid. Marlene had a brief affair with Kirk Douglas and Edward R. Murrow, whose wartime broadcasts from London during the blitz had inspired her.
Ernest Hemingway met Marlene in the 1930s. he wrote a fitting epitaph for her screen career in Life magazine. He said that Dietrich was a great actress because she “knew more about love than anyone.” That was later interpreted to mean that she knew more about sex than anyone. (Hemingway never took Dietrich to bed. He wrote her off as a lesbian).
 Convinced that she could still have a theatrical career on stage, Marlene went on a publicity tour in 1953. At the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, she stood on stage and let her cape slip from her shoulders. Underneath was one of her famous “nude” dresses. (When Tallulah Bankhead saw her, she quipped, “She told me she didn’t have a thing to wear, and I didn’t believe her”). The show was an instant succes s and those “nude” dresses soon made Marlene the highest paid cabaret artist in the world.
Marlene died in 1992 in Paris in her flat on Avenue Montaigne. Her coffin was draped with a French flag at a service held for her at the Eglise de la Madeleine. Then her coffin, draped in an American flag, was flown to Berlin, where it was covered with the flag of the newly reunified German Republic and laid to rest.
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