Maria Riva, Dietrich Daughter Who Demystified the Legend, Dies at 100

Maria Riva, an actress and author who was the only child of Marlene Dietrich, the audacious, androgynous and libidinous Teutonic screen siren and cabaret star — and whose bombshell biography of her mother, published a year after her death in 1992, explored the terrible cost of her fame — died on Wednesday in Gila, N.M. She was 100.

Her son Peter confirmed the death, at his home, where she had been living for the last year and a half.

Ms. Riva was born in Berlin; her father, Rudolph Sieber, was a dashing assistant director who had cast Dietrich as an extra in one of her first film roles. They married in 1923. As her mother’s career took off, Ms. Riva grew up mostly in Hollywood, on the Paramount Pictures backlots.

School was out of the question; Dietrich considered the English language vulgar and Americans even more so, and in any case she wanted her daughter — “The Child,” as she referred to her — by her side, as handmaiden and personal assistant.

It was Josef von Sternberg, the Vienna-born director who was Dietrich’s Svengali and lover — he had made her an international star, and won her a Hollywood contract, with “The Blue Angel” (1930), the first of their seven films together — who taught Ms. Riva some useful American words and phrases, among them “soundstage,” “makeup” and “wardrobe department.”

She grew skilled at caring for her mother’s costumes and props, at stamping her autograph on publicity photos, and at staying quiet on set. Dietrich’s costume designer made her a special uniform and gave her a title: “attendant to Miss Marlene.” For years, she thought “Maria Daughter of Marlene Dietrich” was her proper name; she was also never quite sure of her age, which changed as often as that of her mother, who regularly shaved off the years.

Family life, to say the least, was unusual. Mr. Sieber, who was based in Paris, would arrive now and then with his cowed Russian mistress, Tami, in tow, to oversee Dietrich’s finances and Ms. Riva’s deportment and to archive his wife’s letters — all of her letters, most of which were from her lovers, which arrived in droves and Dietrich often read aloud. Ms. Riva loved those visits, because it meant affection from Tami, the nurturer in the ménage, who played nanny to Ms. Riva and housekeeper to her parents.

“Dietrich was the queen,” Ms. Riva told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “My father was her major-domo, her lovers were her suitors, and I was the lady in waiting. I didn’t think it was strange; I had nothing to compare it to.”

No school meant no companions her own age. Those she counted as friends were the least obsequious of Dietrich’s lovers — the English actor Brian Aherne, who sneaked her copies of Shakespeare plays, was a particular favorite — and her bodyguards, who were in constant attendance after a kidnapping threat following the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. One of them gave her a frog as a pet.

When she was about 12, she had her first encounter with actual children, an invitation to Judy Garland’s birthday party. She was terrified: What did real children do together? She and Judy huddled on the porch and bonded over their strange, caged existence, while the guests, none of whom were known to the birthday girl, proved adept at the current youth vernacular and a mysterious game called spin the bottle.

Until Ms. Riva was a teenager, her mother’s many male and female suitors left the house before dawn, keeping up the ruse, for The Child, that they were just good pals. (In those early years, to name just a few, the cast included Mr. von Sternberg, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, who was also a lover of Greta Garbo’s.)

They often reappeared in the morning, freshly dressed in their street clothes, for breakfast. Dietrich was as enthusiastic about her cooking as her nighttime adventures. But the pantomime must have grown exhausting to all the players, Ms. Riva assumed, as her mother began billeting her with governesses in hotels and rented houses.

Dietrich’s sexual adventures were the stuff of legend — from Gen. George S. Patton to Colette to Adlai Stevenson — with a cast that expanded through the decades. During a stint in London, Ms. Riva wrote, there might be Michael Arlen for breakfast, Christopher Fry for lunch, Kenneth Tynan for tea and “a sexy new Swedish blonde to supper.”

John Wayne, with whom Dietrich starred in three films in the early 1940s, was an outlier, seemingly impervious to her charms. Years later, he told Ms. Riva, who asked him why he didn’t succumb: “Never liked being part of a stable.”

Despite all the action, Dietrich was not a fan of the act itself. At least not with men. She preferred fellatio, or, better, impotent men. “They are nice,” she told her daughter. “You can sleep and it’s cozy.”

Ms. Riva’s nights were not so cozy. One governess-companion raped her repeatedly, most nights, for over a year. Ms. Riva became a teenage alcoholic, and suicidal. She married, briefly, in her late teens.

By age 20, Ms. Riva was divorced, still drinking heavily and drifting, as she put it, in San Francisco, where she worked for a kindly drag performer. (Her mother was in Europe with General Patton’s First Army.) She was good at her job: As she put it, “A trained-by-Dietrich dresser can function very nicely as handmaiden to a female impersonator of Sophie Tucker.” He cared for her, fed her and housed her for a time — she had been living on ketchup and bourbon — but she began hoarding sleeping pills and still had suicidal thoughts.

But then a friend handed her a copy of “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,” the groundbreaking book by Karen Horney, the German psychoanalyst and anti-Freudian, that examined the societal underpinnings of emotional suffering. She said it saved her life.

“I found myself in it,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1993, and it made her feel less alone.

Ms. Riva got sober, moved to New York City and began to work, hard, as an actor. She joined a U.S.O. company and toured Europe until the war ended, whereupon she returned to New York. She met William Riva, a set designer, while she was directing a play with the producer Albert McCleery at Fordham University. They fell in love, and they married in 1947.

Though she disapproved of the marriage, Dietrich was a relentless presence in the Riva household, dictatorial in the nursery after the birth of their first child, Michael, in 1948. Yet when Life magazine put Dietrich on the cover that August, proclaiming her “The Most Glamorous Grandmother,” she was annoyed. “It automatically makes my age a subject for great discussion,” she told The New York Times in 1952. “That is ridiculous. It is quite common to have grandchildren at 35.” She was 51 at the time.

“What is it like, to have a mother no one knows?” Ms. Riva later wrote. “Must be nice.”

Maria Elizabeth Sieber was born in Berlin on Dec. 13, 1924. But it wasn’t until her father’s death in 1976, when she found her birth certificate among his papers, that she learned how old she really was. (He and Dietrich never divorced.)

Ms. Riva did get a bit of schooling for a few years at a Swiss finishing school; Dietrich, as was her habit, phoned her daughter incessantly, pulling her out of exams and hockey games, clearly suffering from the absence of her handmaiden. Ms. Riva also studied acting at the director Max Reinhardt’s workshop in Hollywood.

After her marriage, Ms. Riva became a prolific television actor, under contract to CBS, appearing in more than 500 teleplays and a number of commercials. She also toured in theatrical productions. But when her fourth son, David, was born in 1961, she gave up acting to focus on her family, though she continued to participate in telethons for cerebral palsy, volunteer work she had embarked on at the urging of Yul Brynner (another Dietrich swain). She also produced her mother’s cabaret act as long as Dietrich was able to perform.

Dietrich’s final years were spent alone in a squalid Paris apartment, though not because of penury or neglect: She didn’t like visitors, and, crippled by various ailments, she was lax about hygiene and often used random housewares as bedpans. She passed her days on the phone with her fans and old lovers, sedated by a cocktail of pills, alcohol and quack medicines, spinning fantasies and upending truths, tending to the legend as best she could.

In 1993, a year after Dietrich’s death at 90, Ms. Riva published “Marlene Dietrich,” a book years in the making, mostly to critical acclaim and enormous publicity.

Molly Haskell, writing in The Times, called it “the ultimate act of demystification, a startling and riveting work.”

“I think those of us who live with great fame have to say that it is a trick of survival and that a lot of us don’t like it,” Ms. Riva told Diane Sawyer in a 1993 television interview. Writing the book, she said, was a necessity.

“Power must not be allowed to triumph all the time,” Ms. Riva said, recalling her virtual servitude as a child. “It mustn’t be forgiven no matter what it does, because it’s beautiful, because it’s famous, because it’s powerful.”