HOLLYWOOD headlines are full of the sexploits of today’s young stars – but none of them could hold a candle to Tinseltown’s all-time sexual superstar MARLENE DIETRICH!
“Lili Marlene” had hundreds of lovers, both men and women. In her confidential coded diary the insatiable actress confessed she sometimes had three lovers in the same day!
Even all-American hero Jimmy Stewart came under her spell. Decadent Dietrich seduced the squeaky-clean star and became pregnant with his baby. She wanted to keep it, but shockingly, Stewart ordered her to have an abortion – not the only one she had.
And when she saw a young John Wayne, then a fresh-faced new actor, in a Hollywood canteen, director Tay Garnett recalled, “Dietrich, with that wonderful floating walk, passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn, and cased him up and down from his cowlick to his boots.
“As she moved on, she said in her characteristic deep-voiced whisper, ‘Daddy, buy me THAT!’”
Wayne became just the latest addition in a list of male lovers that reads like a Hollywood Who’s Who of He-Men.
John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Burt Bacharach – they all fell for her open sexual aggression.
Even legendary TV newsman Ed Murrow, war hero Gen. George Patton and President John F. Kennedy’s father Joe became notches on a bedpost that must have been whittled to a toothpick!
And her long list of female lovers included Hollywood’s other foreign vamp, Greta Garbo, French singer Edith Piaf, and many members of Hollywood’s closeted lesbian world. Dietrich would make her female conquests in secret gay clubs in Los Angeles, when she’d visit wearing men’s clothes.
And in private she did nothing to hide her bisexual preferences.
“In Europe, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive,” she once declared.
She called her group of Hollywood women lovers her “Sewing Circle,” one of many that thrived in the 1930s and 1940s.
Garbo was just a naive 19-year-old when she was seduced by Dietrich.
“The older Dietrich was already a worldly, voracious lover with a notorious and compulsive appetite for the sexual seduction of other beautiful women,” says Diane McLellan, the author of “The Girls”, which tells all about Hollywood’s lesbian scene in the ’30s.
Fearful studio bosses did their best to keep her affair with Garbo under wraps, in case it destroyed the careers of both women, huge stars because of their sex appeal to men.
“But I certainly think Dietrich would have been fairly open about it had she lived in these times,” added McLellan.
“She was completely outspoken among her friends. It was just in public that she had to be restrained. But Garbo was terribly, terribly, self-conscious – and ashamed. “I don’t feel that she would have wanted people to know, even now.”
Hollywood producer Michael Riva – her favorite grandchild – said Marlene’s sex life opened his eyes!
Incredibly, the aging diva used to confide the secrets of her love life to the young Riva.
“I didn’t know about all the lovers at first, although I was always aware she was somehow different from anyone else. She’d turn up – always with a different man – draped in fur. There was a sense of a good Cruella De Vil about her!
“As I got older and started to visit her in Paris, where she lived for the last 14 years, I started to understand what her private life was REALLY like!”
