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Personal life

Dietrich's professional image was carefully crafted and maintained while her personal life was mostly hidden from the public. She was fluent in German, English, and French. Dietrich, who was bisexual, enjoyed the thriving gay bars and drag balls of 1920s Berlin. Bars included the Mali und Igel, run by Elsa Conrad. She also defied conventional gender roles with her boxing at Turkish trainer and prizefighter Sabri Mahir's boxing studio in Berlin, which opened to women in the late 1920s.In May 1923 Dietrich married assistant director Rudolf Sieber, who later became an assistant director at Paramount Pictures in France, responsible for foreign language dubbing. Their only child, Maria Riva, was born in Berlin on 13 December 1924. Riva later became an actress, primarily working in television. When Maria gave birth to a son (John, later a famous production designer) in 1948, Dietrich was dubbed "the world's most glamorous grandmother". After Dietrich's death, Riva published a candid biography of her mother, titled Marlene Dietrich (1992). In it Dietrich is shown as a cold, manipulative narcissist who treated Riva more like an assistant or extension of herself than a daughter.

Throughout her career, Dietrich had numerous affairs, some short-lived, some lasting decades, often overlapping and almost all known to her husband, to whom she was in the habit of passing the intimate letters from her lovers, sometimes with biting comments. When Dietrich arrived in Hollywood and filmed Morocco (1930), she had an affair with Gary Cooper, even though he was having another affair with Mexican actress Lupe Vélez. Vélez once said, "If I had the opportunity to do so, I would tear out Marlene Dietrich's eyes." Another of her affairs was with actor John Gilbert, known for his professional and personal connection to Greta Garbo. Gilbert's untimely death was one of the most painful events of her life. Dietrich also had a brief affair with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., even though he was married to Joan Crawford at the time. During the production of Destry Rides Again, Dietrich started a love affair with co-star James Stewart, which ended after filming stopped. According to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich, Marlene Dietrich told him during an aircraft flight that she became pregnant as a result of the affair, but had a surreptitious abortion without telling Stewart. In 1938, Dietrich met and began a relationship with writer Erich Maria Remarque, and in 1941, the French actor Jean Gabin. He was probably the love of her life, but the relationship ended in 1948, for she desired that they live in New York and Gabin did not want to leave France.

In Paris, Dietrich had an affair with Suzanne Baulé, known as Frede, a coach and cabaret hostess whom she met in 1936 at the Monocle, a women's nightclub on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet in Paris. The two women remained friends until the 1970s, as can be seen in the correspondence kept in the Marlene Dietrich archives in Berlin. In the early 1930s, Dietrich also had an affair with Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta, who claimed to also be Greta Garbo's lover. Sewing circle was a phrase used by Dietrich to describe the underground, closeted lesbian and bisexual film actresses and their relationships in Hollywood. In the supposed "Marlene's Sewing Circle" several other names of other close friends are mentioned, such as Ann Warner (the wife of Jack L. Warner, one of the owners of the Warner studios), Lili Damita (an old friend of Marlene's from Berlin and the wife of Errol Flynn), Claudette Colbert, and Dolores del Río (whom Dietrich considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood). The French singer Édith Piaf was also one of Dietrich's closest friends during her stay in Paris in the 1950s, with Dietrich serving as Piaf's matron of honor at her wedding to Jacques Pills in 1952; there were rumors of something more than just friendship between them.

When Dietrich was in her 50s she had a relationship with actor Yul Brynner, which lasted more than a decade. Dietrich's love life continued into her 70s. Her lovers included Errol Flynn, George Bernard Shaw, John F. Kennedy, Joe Kennedy, Michael Todd, Michael Wilding, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Frank Sinatra. Dietrich maintained her husband and his mistress first in Europe and later on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, near Hollywood. Dietrich was raised in the German Lutheran tradition of Christianity, but she abandoned it as a result of her experiences as a teenager during World War I, after hearing preachers from both sides invoking God as their support. "I lost my faith during the war and can't believe they are all up there, flying around or sitting at tables, all those I've lost." Quoting Goethe in her autobiography, she wrote, "If God created this world, he should review his plan."