Marlene Dietrich’s heartfelt letters to the love of her life – her grandson

Marlene Dietrich with her grandson, John Michael Riva - Courtesy of Wendy Riva
Marlene Dietrich with her grandson, John Michael Riva - Courtesy of Wendy Riva
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When J. Michael Riva was born in 1948, Life magazine called Marlene Dietrich “the world’s most glamorous grandmother”.  But in Central Park, close to the family apartment, one of Hollywood’s first sex symbols – and certainly one of the world’s most famous faces – could still pass by unrecognised.

Instead of her Balenciaga suits, she would go out for their walks disguised as an old-fashioned nurse (or nanny) blending in with all the other anonymous women pushing prams.

Riva’s arrival seemed to give Dietrich a second chance to be a maternal figure – in marked contrast to when her daughter Maria, Michael’s mother, was born in 1924.  She wrote in her memoir: “The studio executives were of the opinion that motherhood didn’t suit the ‘femme fatale’ role I was supposed to play.” Years of Maria’s childhood passed by before Paramount allowed her to leave Berlin and join her mother in California. Nobody wanted Lola Lola (the siren of The Blue Angel) to be thought of as a mother.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Dietrich stepped back from Hollywood and toured the world as a cabaret performer. It was badly paid and physically gruelling – she broke every bone in her toes wearing her heels – but it gave her her freedom back. “I didn’t have to do what anyone told me,” she said of that time.

But her glamorous grandmother years seem to have brought Dietrich the most joy, a hitherto unknown part of her story revealed in a recently unearthed collection of letters between her and her grandson.

Marlene Dietrich, circa 1950 - Bettmann
Marlene Dietrich, circa 1950 - Bettmann

Riva, who died in 2012, followed her into the film industry with a career as one of Hollywood’s most admired production designers. But as their letters show, he was also a soulmate to whom she felt connected irrespective of where they were in the world.

This month, an exhibition by British artist Nina Mae Fowler goes on show in Paris at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, inspired by their extraordinary relationship.  Fowler, who explores the darkest aspects of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, started the series in 2019, responding to a collection of family photographs shared with her by Riva’s wife Wendy.

In 2020, while clearing out her husband’s office, Wendy discovered another cache of materials: telegrams, letters and poems from Dietrich that Riva had always kept, as well as his own writing to his grandmother, and prose about ‘Mass’ or ‘Massy’ – as she was known to her family. This treasure trove of new material – currently being gathered into a book, alongside drawings by Fowler – shows an unexpectedly nurturing and domestic side of the passionate screen goddess.

In February 1982, Dietrich wrote to Riva about looking back on those days of helping with him as a baby: “You must know by now that I don’t love you because I am supposed to love my grandsons. I love you as if I had picked you up on one of those awful streets of New York without a name-tag.”

“You know you can call me anytime collect – Paris 7239749,” she went on. “Don’t shut yourself in like I did all my life!”

Dietrich 'blending in' with Michael in Central Park - Courtesy of Wendy Riva
Dietrich 'blending in' with Michael in Central Park - Courtesy of Wendy Riva

In her final decade, spent as an almost total recluse in her apartment in Paris, at the 12 avenue Montaigne, news of Riva’s life seemed to sustain her. “Michael, you know what your letter did! I’m still up there – higher than the seventh!” she wrote to him.

In October 1991, just months before she died, she wrote to her cherished correspondent: "Your soul has been cuffed to my Brain, and heart more than even described by poets and writers.”

While the world may know Marlene, the archive is an introduction to Mass. She was a brilliant cook, and Riva references memories of his grandmother’s artichoke recipe and beautiful breakfasts on her balcony over the years. At Christmas, the only time the whole family would gather, she brought so many presents the unwrapping would take days.

Her later years, in which she confined herself to her Paris apartment, communicating with the world over the phone and by writing, may seem ghoulish. But as Fowler puts it: “At a certain point, she decided the world had had enough photographs of her and there’d be no more.”  Even today, when you consider the vicious public judgement of either aging or surgery to look young, Dietrich’s answer –  to simply not be seen at all – gave her the autonomy she’d craved her entire career.

'Don’t shut yourself in like I did all my life!': Marlene with Michael - Courtesy of Wendy Riva
'Don’t shut yourself in like I did all my life!': Marlene with Michael - Courtesy of Wendy Riva

As Dietrich moved out of view, Riva’s own career was taking flight. By his thirties he was working very successfully, and Dietrich, who had given him his first video camera as a child, took huge pride in his achievements. In 1980, he was hired as art director for the film Ordinary People and, bringing his beautifully moody aesthetic, helped Robert Redford win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Dietrich usually had no time for American directors as she didn’t believe they had any technical mastery, but she made an exception for Redford. She fired off a missive in her distinctive handwriting: “Tell Mr Redford from me to treat you well, because I adore him! Isn’t that a good reason?”

To stay on top of his latest achievements, she kept a list of Michael’s credits by the phone. There was more acclaim when he worked as Steven Spielberg’s production designer for The Color Purple. This time it was Spielberg who wrote a fan letter to Marlene, praising her grandson as “the best production designer I have ever worked with.”

A drawing of Marlene and Michael by the artist Nina Mae Fowler - Nina Mae Fowler
A drawing of Marlene and Michael by the artist Nina Mae Fowler - Nina Mae Fowler

As a young man making his way in the film industry, Riva acknowledged that he and his grandmother had an ability to make themselves at home on film sets – “always these strange places”, as he termed them.  But when he became a father himself, he rejected the peripatetic aspect of his own childhood. “He grew up not knowing where he was going to be the next year. Having the family in one spot was really important to him, and being close to them,” remembers Wendy. Tragically when Riva died of a stroke in 2012 – on the New Orleans set of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained – it was one of the rare times he had taken a job away from home.

When he worked on location in the 1980s, letters from Mass anchored him powerfully to home. “Writing to you is wonderful for me,’” he told her. “As if I have talked to you on the edge of your bed… Are you still staying up all night reading and writing endless notes?”

But the letters are funny, too. Dietrich loved a bizarre French Sunday afternoon quiz show where pushy parents brought their children onto the show and watched them compete. Michael remembered how the “screams of pleasure” for each correct answer would crack his grandmother up. Dietrich had another light-hearted lifeline to the outside world with the TV shopping channels. Riva’s assistants would find his office inundated with “must-have” household items for him: from Kleenex holders to endless kitchen utensils – definitely the shopping of the practical nurturing Mass rather than the impossibly glamorous Marlene.

Unconsummated love: Ernest Hemingway with Marlene Dietrich in 1938 - Bettmann
Unconsummated love: Ernest Hemingway with Marlene Dietrich in 1938 - Bettmann

In terms of her own writing, she often included poems with her letters. Wendy Riva remembers how Michael would often buy tuberoses to have around at home, because they were his grandmother’s favourite. A poem she sent him in 1985 movingly shows that it was a habit of a lifetime: “He brought me/Tuberoses/Like a lover would… He did not know then/He would bring me/Tuberoses/When my end/Was nearly in sight.”

In other poems there’s an unnamed “you” that, given her romantic history, is tantalising to wonder about. Ernest Hemingway and Dietrich fell in love and corresponded until his death in 1961 – although the relationship was never consummated. For years, in these letters he would also enclose his used cigar papers which she saved, and then sent on to her bookish grandson.

Erich Maria Remarque, Dietrich’s former lover and author of All Quiet On the Western Front, is a possible inspiration for another beautiful lyric set in the tormented afterlife of a love affair. “You left your/Wristwatch/On my bedside table… Will you return/To claim both it and me?” she asks. But her grandson was clearly her greatest love, something powerfully reflected in Fowler’s sculptures.

A sculpture of Marlene and Michael, by Nina Mae Fowler - Nina Mae Fowler
A sculpture of Marlene and Michael, by Nina Mae Fowler - Nina Mae Fowler

Fowler titled her works inspired by their relationship “an end to a kind of loneliness”, quoting from Riva’s line to Dietrich about how their love for each other made him feel, and his belief that they “would always be inseparable.’” But the title also speaks to just what her role as a grandmother gave her too. As she wrote to him in her final years: “You light up my lonely life.”

In a 1975 interview, still working, but not long before she started to sequester herself away, Dietrich told an interviewer: “I think that as long as one can use one’s hands and one can hear... it’s wonderful. If you cannot see, if that’s your fate, then there are other things that you have in life. You have a touch that nobody has. You can hear. You can have music and you can have a family and you can have love.” That family life, and that love, even in a self-imposed exile from the world, seems richer now than anyone could have imagined.

With an extraordinary face to draw, Dietrich was one of Fowler’s earliest obsessions, but her appreciation has deepened over the years and even more so after spending time with this archive. “The older I get the more I admire her for her strength and bravery in the face of Hollywood and all its constraints,” she says. “Her fastidious control over her public image. Her eventual ducking out of the public eye.  There are so many reasons to admire her and the more time passes the more I realise how ahead of her own time she was.”


‘An end to a kind of loneliness’ is on show as part of Nina Mae Fowler’s solo show running at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris until May 6: suzanne-tarasieve.com