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But some escaped her wrath. Dietrich adored Ernest Hemingway, Edith Piaf, Orson Welles, and Dolores del Rio. “Her species was Living Legends,” Riva writes. Dietrich’s bawdy Paramount neighbor Mae West was included in this category, and Dietrich delighted in how West constantly pilfered flowers from outside her bungalow.
“It became a game they played. My mother got rid of the hated gladiolas,
delphiniums, and roses, and Mae had fun decorating her dressing room with her floral loot,” Riva, always the moral compass, writes. “I never told my mother that long-stemmed red roses were our neighbor’s favorite flower. That became a private joke between Mae West and me.”
Tami
“During my entire youth, Tami was my friend, the one person I loved the most,” Riva writes.
Tami, her father’s longtime mistress, floats throughout Riva’s story like a ghost. Loving, compassionate and ethereal, Tami was hidden in the shadows—labeled Riva’s “nanny”—lest her existence destroy her parents’ façade of a marriage.
Though it seems almost impossible, Riva paints her father in an even worse light than she does her mother. Although they often lived in different countries, Rudi served as Dietrich’s meticulous henchman, making sure she was perfectly housed, dressed, and perceived. “Like many ineffectual men, he was a tyrant in those categories in which he could get away with it,” she writes.
Dressed in Dietrich hand-me-downs, Tami was the main victim of his cruelty. Constantly belittled by Rudi and Dietrich, the kindhearted Tami became increasingly unhinged. Riva alleges that Dietrich got Tami hooked on drugs, and that she was placed in numerous sanitariums. Riva recounts a devastating conversation she overheard between her parents, which may have accounted for Tami’s instability:
“It isn’t just the money for the abortions—you know I don’t mind paying for them all the time, that is not the problem,” Dietrich said, per Riva. “Someday, someone is going to find out—no matter where we hide her.”
Tami eventually died in a mental health facility. The mistreatment of Tami, along with her own sexual abuse, makes Riva’s attitude towards her parents—at times as cruel as she claims they were—seem utterly justified. “It took nearly thirty years to break her spirit, then destroy her mind,” Riva writes. “My mother and father were very thorough people.”
Falling in Love Again
“I once asked Orson what had given him the idea of Dietrich for the madam of his brothel,” Riva writes of her mother’s role in the Welles film Touch of Evil. “He smiled that naughty ‘little boy’ smile of his: ‘Never heard of typecasting?’”
Indeed, Dietrich boasted an entire stable of toy boys and girls. Frank Sinatra, Jean Gabin, Joe Kennedy, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fritz Lang, Jimmy Stewart, Edward R. Murrow, Adlai Stevenson, Michael Wilding, Erich Maria Remarque, Kirk Douglas, Edith Piaf, Ronald Coleman, Maurice Chevalier, and Garbo’s castoffs Mercedes de Acosta and John Gilbert were some of the reported lovers she obsessively fawned over, cooking them her famous eggs and meticulously douching with ice water and vinegar after every assignation.
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