“We became important to each other, we became friends.
We told each other secret truths,” she writes. Here she met the birthday girl, Judy Garland-another chubby, friendless outsider whom Riva (who always paints herself as an empathic fixer) surreptitiously gave a forbidden hot-dog. They laughed and chatted, making up comfortable groups,” Riva writes.
“The place was full of non-grown-ups who seemed to know each other. She was in awe of the Kennedy brood, who seemed to her so fun-loving and happy, and recalls asking studio personnel what she should expect when she was invited to a child’s birthday party. Riva, a girl who considered her mother’s famed set of emeralds “her siblings,” heartbreakingly details the psychic toll of her bizarre childhood, which included being molested by a monstrous governess. According to Riva, she spent her childhood attending her mother in the bathroom after Dietrich dosed herself with Epsom salts, guarding the door while she vomited, taping her mother’s breasts, and sitting on set alerting Dietrich to any imperfection. She does begrudgingly give her mother credit for the discipline and tireless creative obsession which made her a star, though the details of what it took to maintain that stardom are highly disturbing. Kept away from school and surrounded by bodyguards who snuck her treats, a pint-sized Riva wore a special white wraparound coat, an “attendant to Miss Marlene Dietrich” uniform made by costume designer Travis Banton. Riva is at her most poetic and heartfelt when she vividly describes her “real home”-the Paramount lot where she would slip away from her duties like a less mischievous Eloise to visit with the commissary workers and makeup women while her mother entertained her latest lover.
Born in 1924, Riva, known to her parents as “The Child,” was whisked off to Hollywood in the early 1930s and became her mother’s perfect little soldier, a mini-adult that Dietrich viewed as a “brilliant” collaborator.