Marlene Dietrich Reads Rilke on the Lido, 1937 The beach is vulgar, the resort salted like dead fish. The book is not a prop. Strange to be called box office poison in such a poisonous time; she imagines the glass of a ticket booth fogged with a sinister green mist. The latest La Stampa is crumpled at her feet like a cheap towel, a crab dozing on Stalin’s mustache. Since the studios stopped calling, she’s noticed how the headlines crawl with new dread daily: Il Duce preening, Earhart missing, Guernica’s ruins smoking. How elegantly rubble photographs, she half-thinks.Read More