Marlene Dietrich's 'Night Thoughts' Accessioned at The New Yorker

When the actress Marlene Dietrich passed away, Peter and Maria Riva (her children) donated a fraction of her library to the Film Museum in Berlin and the American Library in Paris. But what did she read and do in her final days, spent mostly in isolation? In addition to racking up a three-thousand-dollar-a-month phone bill, Dietrich's library revealed well-worn collections by Goethe and other classics adorned with marginalia. We'll pick up with Page-Turner, Megan Mayhew Bergman, who investigates:

Perhaps the most moving books in the collection are Dietrich’s volumes of Goethe. In her autobiography, she speaks of “deifying” Goethe in boarding school; after her father’s early death, she looked to Goethe as a father figure. “My passion for Goethe, along with the rest of my education, enclosed me in a complete circle full of solid moral values that I have preserved throughout my life,” she wrote. In her copies of his books, Dietrich noted passages of interest with small “X”s and with sheets torn from a notepad with a stamped red directive: Don’t Forget.

Dietrich’s books are full of marginalia. She usually scrawled it in English, and with red ink. Inside a copy of “Love Scene,” a paperback recounting the story of Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, she writes, “this is without a doubt the worst writing I ever laid eyes on.” In the P. D. James novel “Innocent Blood,” she has stuffed another Don’t Forget note, this time writing beneath that phrase, “a bore.” She took her pen to the pages of a book on the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann: “Who cares anyway?” On the first page of Anthony Burgess’s 1980 novel, “Earthly Powers,” above its notorious first sentence (“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”), she wrote, “That’s when I stopped reading.”

Continue reading at The New Yorker.