Maria Riva, the mistreated daughter of Marlene Dietrich, whose memoir revealed a childhood spent as her mother’s ‘handmaiden’ and personal assistant, has died aged 100.
“At age three I knew quite definitely that I didn’t have a mother; I belonged to a queen,” she wrote in a searing biography published one year after Dietrich’s death in 1992 that portrayed her mother as “a heartless, manipulative, domineering narcissist who had demanded to be worshipped by her fans, her many lovers (male and female) and her daughter — but treated them abysmally.” Maria was denied formal schooling, was not told her true age by a mother determined to appear younger than she was. In her teens Riva was repeatedly raped by her lesbian governess, turned to alcohol and contemplated suicide before she turned her life around and had a family of her own.
Her father, an assistant film director, to whom Dietrich remained legally married, for appearances’ sake, was only an intermittent presence in her life. Dietrich’s lovers came and went: patriarch Joseph Kennedy, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Adlai Stevenson, Edward Murrow, Édith Piaf.
Maria Riva, born 13 December 1924, Berlin, had one supportive companion in her childhood. Tami Matul, her father’s Russian mistress, described in public as Riva’s nanny and routinely abused by both Dietrich and her father. Riva wrote that Matul was forced to undergo 15 abortions “to ensure no scandal sullied the purity of my mother’s marriage” and ended up in a mental asylum. “During my entire youth Tami was my friend, the one person I loved the most,” Riva wrote.
Maria, once she settled with her second husband, acted in TV shows and commercials through the 1950s and had four sons.
She had a Sagittarius Sun conjunct Jupiter which was probably her saving grace giving her an innately optimistic outlook despite the horrors of her upbringing. Her Sun Jupiter was trine a filmic Neptune and square an explosive Mars Uranus conjunction in Pisces for a life of constant turbulence and excitement. Her Cancer Moon was probably close to controlling Pluto for an enmeshed association with her mother that threatened to stifle her. Her Moon was also likely in a Water Grand Trine to a chilly Saturn in Scorpio conjunct Venus trine Uranus – giving her a life that existed in its own bubble of her mother’s demands and also possibly gave Maria a rich inner world of imagination into which to escape.
Marlene, born 27 December 1901 9.15pm Berlin, had a powerful stellium in Capricorn with her Sun conjunct Mercury on the cusp of her performing 5th house. And Jupiter Saturn Mars all conjunct in Capricorn in her attention-seeking 5th in varying combinations inconjunct a 10th house Pluto and Neptune in Gemini. A whole load of super-ambitious, over-indulgent Capricorn with a cruel streak from Saturn Mars, heavily controlling from Pluto in the 10th though also able to cast a dreamy spell with Neptune. Her Leo Moon on the cusp of her hidden 12th house is not well integrated into her chart making her disconnected and emotionally unstable.
Her Scorpio North Node hinted that her spiritual journey and life’s development lay in relinquishing all that she had once coveted. Evidently. ‘By the end of her life Dietrich was living alone in a squalid Paris flat — reclusive, bedbound, hooked on assorted drugs and using kitchen dishes as bedpans.’ Whether this brought any redemptive insight is not known.
The relationship chart between Maria and her mother had a superficially glossy composite Jupiter Venus opposition Pluto though with undertones of a power struggle which only emerged after Marlene’s death and the tell-all biography emerged. Plus a composite yod of Mars sextile Sun inconjunct Neptune hinting at the emotional disorganization of their bond.
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