Marlene Dietrich love letters

Marlene Dietrich love letters
Reuters

BERLIN, MAR 2: Shortly before Marlene Dietrich become a legendary femme fatale of the silver Screen, she wrote to her then boyfriend worried that he had found a prettier girl, according to a love letter made public in Germany on Friday.

"Have you already found beautiful women? And someone prettier than me?" Dietrich, then 19, wrote in 1921 to Willy Michel, a baker. "I feel so empty....Now I am crying."

Dietrich had met Michel in Weimar when she was an unknown music student there from 1919 to 1921. In a life that apparently included some of the world's best-known men and women as lovers, Michel is little remembered in her biographies. An account published last year said Dietrich had a one-time fling with US President John Kennedy in the White House in 1962 and other recently published accounts have linked her romantically with Greta Garbo, Frank Sinatra and others.

An auction house in Hanover, where Michel lived, has made eight letters to Dietrich's former boyfriend public ahead of their planned sale at auction later this month.

A 1993 auction of Dietrich's personal collection of clothes, jewellery and show business memorabilia sold to a film museum in her native Berlin for $5 million.

"I'm Very unhappy, can you believe it," Dietrich wrote in the last letter in the series in January 1922. "I am crying so much, my little Michel, much too much. And it is not helping."

Despite the outpouring of sentiment, she used the formal "Sie" in addressing Michel rather than the more intimate "Du".

Soon after the 1922 letter, Dietrich's life took a dramatic turn. She appeared in her first film that year, and two years later she married director Rudolph Sieber.

Dietrich made her name by starring in the first German talking film, "The Blue Angel", made in 1929. She then moved to Hollywood to continue her career, where she established herself as the sex siren of her day. Her song "Lili Marlene" became an anthem for troops on opposing sides in World War Two.

Dietrich, spurned by many of her countrymen for taking the Allied side against Germany during the war, died in exile in Paris in 1992. Michel became a regional Nazi party official in the 1930s and early 1940s and died in 1988.