When I was a kid my parents had a book published by Playboy Magazine Press called THE MOVIE BOOK. It had a couple nude movie stills from, like, Last Tango in Paris and such, but otherwise it was a G-rated coffee table book. There was a chapter called Legends, and the caption for the photo of Marlene Dietrich read: “By far the most exotic of Hollywood’s creations, a screen goddess of the 1930s whose image remains eternally haunting.” That was all I needed to read. Over and over.

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In one of my Barbra Streisand books it quotes someone as saying Streisand had “the best legs since Dietrich.” I started to think I had nice legs too after reading this.

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I tried to collect every book written about her. I got about 28? by the time I was 28. In some cases I used interlibrary loan, and when the book came in I photocopied the whole thing and kept that.

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Before the real Marlene, I was first exposed to Madeline Kahn’s impersonation of/tribute to Marlene in the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles (I saw it when I was about 10). She does a song called “I’m Tired,” in the character of Lili von Shtupp, playing off of Marlene’s character Frenchy in Destry Rides Again. All-around funny movie, one of our favorite pizza-and-rented-(from-the-pizza-parlor)-VCR-Friday-night choices, my younger brother and me, when we were kids.

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There was an episode of M*A*S*H where Radar O’Reilly is part of some plot on the base there, and he’s to stand outside a tent smoking a cigarette as a signal to someone. Someone asks someone, “Is that Radar?” to which the other person replies, “Either that, or Marlene Dietrich is back in town.”

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Grandma Shrake told me once, when I was a teenager, with visible and audible disdain, regarding Marlene Dietrich, “I never believed she was a woman.”

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When I was about 15 I started plucking my eyebrows to look like Marlene’s drawn-on ones, which I didn’t realize were drawn on. My dad approached me one day in the basement and asked, head cocked and eyes slitted, with a tired-out, suspicious tone, “Scott, have you been… um, doing something to your eyebrows there?” First I denied it. Then I admitted it but gave the reason as being that my eyebrows “hurt” if I didn’t pluck them. “Don’t do that anymore,” he said flatly. And I didn’t.

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Marlene was 30 years old when she became famous for The Blue Angel. She was famous for another 61 years after that.

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She helped a lot of gay and Jewish friends emigrate out of Nazi Germany to Hollywood. Legend has it Hitler himself wanted to bring her back to Germany to be THE aryan star. Instead he had to make do with a Swede who could speak German, Zarah Leander.

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Her sister was married to a concentration camp guard in Germany during World War II. Marlene denied in public that she had a sister.

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My favorite Dietrich film is the extravagant swansong of her years-long svengali collaboration with Josef von Sternberg:  The Devil Is a Woman. I like how emotionally sadistic she is to the male characters in that movie, her lovers. I hate men.

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She hated Madonna and Meryl Streep.

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Dietrich met the Beatles at a variety show and liked them and their music. They liked her too. Hence her appearance on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

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She quit smoking in her 70s. Won a bet with Noël Coward on who could quit, he died of lung cancer not long after she won.

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She never received an Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, or anything like that.

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When they discovered Dietrich had run out of money in her old age but wanted to continue living in France, the city government of Paris passed a special law: “Marlene Dietrich is not allowed to pay any rent in the City of Paris.” The city covered her rent quietly.

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When I was living in Germany my Junior year of college, someone tipped me off that the then-90-year-old Dietrich was going to call in to a show, a tribute to the Babelsberg UFA studios where “The Blue Angel” was filmed. We watched the show, me and a couple Ami buddies. Dietrich calls in and says a few things in German, then before hanging up she says, in English, “Love, Marlene.” Like she was reading a letter? But she wasn’t. Then this big military band kicks in and plays “Falling in Love Again” — it was very tacky, schmaltzy, this show, and I said “Fucking nazis!” Later my German friend Sabine heard me say it on an audio tape I had made of the TV show airing, and her face dropped.

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I walked down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris in 1991, a year before she died, looking up at the windows, wondering if she were looking down at me.

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My friend Andy called me at the movie theatre where I worked in college to tell me Marlene had died.

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Like most 20th-century female stars, she moved her birth year up by a few years (it was 1901, not 1904), and largely got away with it because there was no Internet back then. And her birth certificate would have been in a city hall in Berlin someplace, probably destroyed during the war.

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My mom told me she thought of me when she saw the news Marlene had died. “I know how much you liked her,” she said.

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I went to her gravesite in Berlin. She’s not buried right next to her mother. Her mother is catty-corner from her. I left a rose on her gravestone.

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Was she always a ghost? Isn’t it incidental that some actual woman had to be Marlene Dietrich, for surely the idea of her and its mystery were only waiting to be freed.

David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition

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All of her lines in the movie Touch of Evil were improvised, including, “You’d better lay off the candy bars,” said to Orson Welles. And “What does it matter what you say about people?”

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Her memoir was largely fictionalized.

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Stinky gave me the Biographical Dictionary of Film me as a gift. On one of our first dates, we had an argument in which I pointed out that Marlene used her married name, “Sieber,” when checking in to hotels and such, to throw reporters off the trail; Stinky responded by saying Stevie Nicks did the same thing. He liked her a lot. Our argument was about how those two people and those two facts are not comparable. I was offended he could mention Nicks and Dietrich in the same breath.

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As a performer she was a diseuse, which is a French word for “talk singer.” She seems only to have one octave, and really just delivers songs in a melodic speaking voice.

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I modeled the way I speak German after Marlene’s way. I’m a diseur.

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She spoke better French, apparently, than English or German. Her German toward the end is actually so bad, so slow and riddled with weird errors, that it makes me doubt she really was born and raised in Germany.

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I wanted to write my dissertation (in the German Department) about Marlene Dietrich’s accent. I quit grad school instead, which I imagine she would have wanted me to do.

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Her daughter wrote a “Marlene Dearest”-type book in the early 1990s, right after Marlene died. Nice. Nice, grateful daughter. Always good to wait till someone is in the ground and cannot defend themselves. A lot of what I know about MD comes from that book. Actually, I believe every unflattering and flattering thing her daughter wrote, but that is not the point.

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In the mid-’90s, several years after she died, her estate sold her image to be used in print ads for Breathe Right. One of the tan snore-prevention strips was superimposed on her nose. “Commentary superfluous,” as we say in German (“Kommentar überflüssig”).

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Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the boys anyway, have the last name Riva. So look for them as you go out around in the world. Ask them: Is Marlene Dietrich your ancestor?

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Thank the Lord, they have still never gotten a biopic done. Some stage plays, yes. Drag performances? Sometimes. But they have not desecrated her silver-screen legacy with some travesty like Gwyneth Paltrow or Uma Thurman trying to be like her in a movie.

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Like all famous people, she was very petite, I’m guessing about 5´2˝, based on her dress from The Devil Is a Woman that I saw displayed at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, back in the ’90s when I used to hang out there a lot.

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I don’t do drag much, but in grad school a friend had a variety-show party where everyone had to perform, so I put on half-drag and did a lip-synch (using a boombox) to the epic “Hot Voodoo” number from Blonde Venus. It was not as successful as the belly dancer at the party.

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My friend named her daughter “Marlena” after being exposed to my Dietrichmania for so many years. She used an “a” on the end to discourage people from saying “Marleen” and she pronounces it “Marlayna,” the proper way.

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Just the other day I was at the fabric store getting a replacement silk-covered button for my tuxedo, and while I was looking at the buttons a 50s-ish woman told a very old woman — they were both customers — that she was looking for fabric to sew a dress for her daughter, who was playing (phonetic spellings) “Marleen [sic] Dietrick [sic] in a play.” I asked what play, assuming for some reason it was a school play. It turned out to be an adult play, but the 50+ lady was flattered I thought her daughter was a child and not a grown woman, which she was, the latter.

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In the 1983 documentary Marlene, wherein the then-apartment-bound 80-something Miss Dietrich famously never allows herself to be shown, only heard, director Maximilian Schell asks the great film legend’s trusted gay valet, Bernard, a question:

SCHELL: Is she lonely?

BERNARD: I think so, I think we all get lonely somet-…

SCHELL (interrupting): But I mean is she a lonely person?

BERNARD (after pausing to think): Mm… Yes.

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According to her daughter’s book, Marlene did not like her documentarian or his pretentious attitude, and no matter what he said to her after a certain point during the filming, she would respond, “You’re much too clever for me.” That is a great shutter-upper. He edited it all out to make them both sound better, as people.

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According to her daughter she was drunk during most of the taping of her voice for the documentary. The best scene in the movie is when Schell asks Dietrich what her favorite Dietrich album is. She becomes emotional as she describes Marlene Singt Berlin, and sings snippets from the songs from memory as the visual we see is aerial footage of miles and miles of bombed-out Berlin in the last days of WWII.

She doesn’t know ahead of time, of course, what will be shown along with her voice, but she ends up in tears as she sings the songs.