THEY amount to the last gasp of a gone but not forgotten Hollywood legend.
Marlene Dietrich once offered to seduce Edward VIII [ALAMY]
The prize lot among the mementos of the star is a 1955 letter from writer Ernest Hemingway, expected to fetch £30,000.
He addresses her as Dearest Kraut (his nickname for the German-born actress) and it is signed with his nickname Papa.
It is the very fond, rather racy letter of two very old friends who had no secrets from each other.
Hemingway was always special in her life perhaps because she never slept with him. He was her confidant.
She would sit on the edge of his bath in the Paris Ritz during the war and tell him everything while he shaved.
What a lot there was to tell! The actress only ever had one husband.
He was Rudolph Sieber, a good-natured young film director. They married in 1923 and she gave birth to their daughter the following year.
It was a completely open marriage – he was more of a brother than a spouse – and it worked. Sieber and his girlfriend, a Russian actress Tamara Matul, raised the baby Maria, who is now 89 and has several grandchildren.
Dietrich pursued men and women mostly for kicks. On one occasion she did it for king and country
In California she lived with Mercedes de Acosta, a wellknown lesbian socialite and friend of Picasso, who gave up her affair with Greta Garbo for Dietrich.
The sultry star cleaned and cooked for de Acosta like a good German housewife. It was the nearest thing she came to a proper marriage until she got bored.
Their life was an open secret in Hollywood, rather like the affair between Cary Grant and Randolph Scott who shared a beach house every weekend for many years.
Dietrich pursued men and women mostly for kicks. On one occasion she did it for king and country.
When Dietrich arrived in England to make Knight Without Armour (1939), she let it be known she was deeply pro-British.
She kept quiet the fact that her uncle had flown the first Zeppelin raid over London.
While having an affair with Douglas Fairbanks Junior she learned of Edward VIII’s plans in 1936 to abdicate for American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Dietrich had a veries love life, including John Wayne in 1942 [UNIVERSAL]
She thought perfume, sultry make-up and a quiet assignation would do the trick.
Fairbanks wasn’t so sure. She stifl ed his objections. “We are doing it for England, which we both love. Some sacrifi ces must be made,” Dietrich said.
Unfortunately she spent so long getting ready that by the time she reached Fort Belvedere in her limousine the king had gone out and duly lost his throne.
No less far-fetched was her plan to bump off Hitler. She detested the Nazification of Germany – she was born in Berlin in 1901 – by the jumped-up corporal.
Her father had been a dashing police lieutenant in the Kaiser’s day and her mother was of respectable stock.
To Dietrich’s mind Hitler was common and frightful and had to go. According to one biography she told the astonished Fairbanks.
“I would gush over how I feel about him, intimating that I am desperately in love with him. I’ve heard Hitler likes me and I’m certain he would agree.”
Certainly propaganda minister Goebbels would have been delighted to have the singer of Lili Marlene change sides and support the Nazi cause. But how to get a murder weapon into the room?
Dietrich knew she would be searched so she proposed to enter his quarters stark naked except for a poisoned hairpin.
The plan was not finalised though Fairbanks never once doubted she was mad and brave enough to try.
The following year she dumped Fairbanks and took up with James Stewart, her co-star in the 1939 western Destry Rides Again.
Dietrich played the part of a hellcat, munching on a chicken leg and shoving dollars down her bosom with the line “there’s gold in them thar hills” which only she could have got away with.
Eventually she would turn to another even more famous cowboy, John Wayne, though “the Duke” was, she said, too needy to last long in her clutches.
Her next major amorous strike was launched at the most powerful dynasty in the world.
Dietrich met the American ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy, father of John (who was then 21), Robert and Edward, while the family was on holiday in the south of France.
Years later when the sexually inexhaustible JFK was President he offered the then 60-year-old star one of his famous “quickies”. She accepted.
Her memory later was hazy. “I think he was even faster than his father.
He had an even busier schedule . They both kept their watches on.”
The war years were arguably her finest hour as a performer and lover. Never a great actress, she was undoubtedly a great star.
Her work entertaining the troops was one way she could hit back at the Third Reich. She arrived in France just after D-Day.
Hemingway was then a famous war correspondent as was his wife (Martha Gellhorn, the third and soon to be ex-Mrs Hemingway) who hated her guts.
To Gellhorn she was “that actress” and to Marlene she was “that writer”. Dietrich never let any of his marriages affect her friendship with “Papa.”
During the Battle of the Bulge she started a well-corroborated affair with the fearsome American General Patton, known as “Old Blood and Guts”.
When Patton swooped into the besieged Belgian city of Bastogne Dietrich was by his side as if in a film.
By the end of the war she had replaced him with handsome James Gavin, who at 37 was the youngest general in the history of the American army.
When Dietrich entered Berlin she used her high-level contacts to track down her poor 93-year-old mother, living in squalor in the smoking ruins.
It was a fate that would befall Marlene herself who ended her days in her Paris flat reclusive and broke, reduced to singing Falling In Love Again as a form of phone sex for a rich doctor.
The real tragedy was that she had hoped to spend her old age, all passion spent, with Rudi her husband but he died in 1976. She lingered on, a hermit with a sticky tape DIY facelift.
She died alone in 1992, aged 90, with memories of a fevered life as the 20th century’s greatest lover and its most lethal femme fatale.
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