BOOK REVIEW / Scratching at the gold surface: 'Marlene Dietrich' - Maria Riva: Bloomsbury, 25 pounds

IT MAY not have represented the height of tact on Dietrich's part, when her only daughter announced her first pregnancy, to respond: 'A child brings you nothing but trouble.' But reading Maria Riva's spitefully graphic account of her legendary mother donning a secret foundation garment ('She scooped up her drooping breasts and placed each one into the bralike structure'), you can see Dietrich's point, so to speak. As more and more of these parent-slogging biographies appear it can only be a matter of time till superstar offspring have to sign legal documents at birth renouncing their right to tell all.

Not that this insanely long (at 800 pages) but sustainedly entertaining biography is bitchy throughout. Its comic scenario is of a goody-two-shoes daughter burdened with an outrageous, overblown, drug-taking mother. And you have to sympathise with Riva, as she describes a meeting between her sensible, dependable husband and 62-year-old 'Mutti': 'She came through the door, saw him, opened her large black crocodile handbag, extracted a pair of pink panties, and held them under his nose, saying: 'Smell] It is him] The President of the United States] He - was wonderful]'.'

Dietrich behaved badly, there are no two ways about it. It can have been no fun at all to live with this capricious, domineering, truth-bending mother; with a father sexually rejected after your conception, but kept on as a stooge husband; with the fallout of Mutti's strings of romances - Josef von Sternberg, Frank Sinatra, Jean Gabin, Mercedes de Acosta, Edith Piaf, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Yul Brynner, and assorted generals - and with her tendency to get into people's homes, scrub everything down and boil up sauerkraut. But for the rest of us, no amount of vengeful detail about promiscuity, geriatric incontinence beneath shimmering cabaret gowns, elastic stockings, alcoholism and giant sleep-inducing suppositories can destroy Dietrich's glamour, spirit, panache and comic touch. (She called the suppositories Fernando Lamas after the actor she considered the most boring man in Hollywood.)

As Riva's voice progresses from a sometimes cloying navety, heavily larded with exclamation marks ('Paramount's coconut ice-cream was the best in the world]', 'It took that nice friendly American, Hemingway, to do it]'), to condemnation of the 'basic nastiness' of Dietrich, sympathy swings in the opposite way to that intended. If the daughter is the picture of martyred integrity and caring she wishes to suggest, how is she able to write about the bedpan arrangements of her 90-year-old mother?

Riva's attempts to fascinate us with her own career only make us long for the 'surface gold' of Dietrich. Take the story of the hotel middle manager Riva befriended: 'Today this likeable man holds an exalted position within the great Ciga hotel chain and often has the charm to claim that what I taught him about handling Dietrich was a valuable lesson for a young man making his way up the management ladder.' Er, gosh Maria. Bring back Noel Coward, Berlin, the costumes. . .

According to Riva, Dietrich wanted a biography published by her daughter after her death, and kept her supplied with copies of all her correspondence partly to this end. Ever the imagemanipulator, she probably knew what she was doing. Even with the dirty washing lovelessly pulled from her crocodile handbag, the Dietrich image remains fabulous.

(Photograph omitted)