Salka Viertel and the Hollywood exiles

Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was an actress, screenwriter, influential hostess and effective humanitarian. She was born on the estate of her wealthy Jewish family in Sambor, western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a prominent lawyer, was mayor of the town, one brother was a concert pianist, another was a professional soccer player. She was neither a beauty nor a star, but acted in everything from Greek drama to Schiller and Strindberg in the major cities of central Europe. Her stage career ended when she and her husband Berthold Viertel moved to America in 1928. 

Salka arrived the year after The Jazz Singer introduced sound movies. The new sound ruined the careers of actors with strong European accents (or squeaky voices) but also increased the demand for talented screenwriters. Before the Production Code of 1934 there was no censorship, which allowed Hedy Lamarr’s sensational nude swimming scene in Ecstasy (1933). Salka thought acting in movies that were shot out of sequence was more difficult than appearing on stage and said, “acting in fragments is like drinking from an eyedropper when you are parched”. Christopher Isherwood noted Salka’s energy, humour, charisma, intense emotions, gift for friendship and reckless generosity. Aldous Huxley’s wife remarked, “she loves perfume and takes lovers,” which made her seem like a weak imitation of the femme fatale, Alma Mahler. In her new biography, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkind doesn’t note that Alma made anti-Semitic remarks despite (or because of) her two Jewish husbands, Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel. 

Rifkind describes Salka’s husband Berthold, a stage and film director, as “a lover of excess—too many cigarettes; too many rich desserts; an extravagant temper; a chronic sexual thrall to actresses”. Emphasising Berthold’s leonine head and grim mouth, Isherwood portrayed him as Friedrich Bergmann in his novel Prater Violet (1945). Unlike Garbo and Heinrich Mann, who briefly flirted with the bogus Swami Prabhavananda, Berthold said Isherwood was wasting his time with that “old Indian stuff”. Berthold sardonically wrote that “marriage is sex without desire,” and his protestations of eternal love when Salka was supporting him in New York sound hollow and unconvincing. He had many lovers, including the English actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann and the Austrian actress Elisabeth Neumann, whom he married in 1947. Salka never remarried.

During her marriage Salka gave in to her impulses and need to retaliate. She loved extravagantly and heedlessly, defiantly asserting her right to have sex with both women and men and to ignore the emotional damage she caused. She explained her love life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a woman enough, he can have her. Absolutely. It’s only a question of time and place.” Her first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, by their spouses, who ignored the brutti momenti and social constraints. Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger than the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout the next decade they were emotionally, physically and even professionally involved when he became her producer at MGM. Rifkind calls this a “civilised arrangement,” yet buried grievances, boiling tensions and deepening wounds caused bitter quarrels. Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ complex relationship” and soon “adjusted to the domestic changes, as children do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve experienced their mother’s adultery are often torn between loyalty to the older father and younger lover, and can be deeply wounded by the moral transgressions and emotional scars.

Nevertheless, Salka’s three sons managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics scholar at MIT. Thomas worked at the Los Angeles Department for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced me to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth in 1941. He served as a marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, as a spymaster with the OSS, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Germany. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an alcoholic and drug addict and, in a ghastly accident, burned herself to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend of John Huston and Hemingway, and published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. He finally had a long and happy marriage to the elegant Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Adam and Eve were the first mythical exiles in our culture. In the 1930s and early 1940s real Jewish exiles were desperately trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. The foreign intellects and original ideas of the refugees who reached America had a powerful effect on Hollywood movies. Landing in that glamorous, semi-tropical paradise, they were both grateful and resentful. The novelist Alfred Döblin, for example, hated his screenwriting job at MGM but felt that losing it was even worse. The Hungarian S Z Sakall, who played the waiter Carl in Casablanca (1942), summed up the ambivalent experience in his memoirs: The Story of Cuddles: My Life Under Emperor Francis Joseph, Adolf Hitler and the Warner Brothers (1954). Casablanca superbly portrays exiles on the edge of the African continent waiting, sometimes hopelessly, for exit visas. The cast and crew were mainly European, and Bogart, who represents America, helps them escape and survive. When Jigee praised innovative American films and the exiles claimed, “oh, that was done in Berlin in the twenties,” she wittily replied, “if fascism ever comes to America, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we had that in Germany long ago'”.

Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel prospered in exile while most other writers failed; Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig committed suicide. The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who lost his houses and possessions in both Germany and France, regretfully wrote, “I never learned my lesson. I would always begin building over again, then cling spiritually and literally to what I had built, confident that this time I must surely be able to keep it.” By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, who lost millions when he fled Russia during the Revolution, never bought homes in America and Switzerland. He knew he could never replace the grandeur he had lost and was fearful of losing everything again.

Salka was a warm, witty and gemütlich hostess. On Sunday afternoons at her house many famous figures — from Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, to Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote discordant twelve-tone music — gathered for animated talk and inside information about Hollywood stars and studios. (When I taught at UCLA in the 1960s and lived on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, I was less than a mile from Salka’s house at 165 Mabery Road but didn’t know about her.) She continued to act dramatically in her own salon and remained the centre of attention. Rifkind claims that Thomas Mann loved “the sense of being looked after and cared for” at her house, though he lived in luxury with his devoted wife and daughter. Isherwood, who spoke fluent German and lived for a time in Salka’s house, got fed up with these celebrity parties and condemned them as “huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores”.

Salka used her formidable energy to save the lives of many Jewish exiles. She besieged influential friends to help get visas and provide guarantees of financial support in America, then found them jobs when the refugees arrived. She sometimes supported her whole family and all the impoverished people she took into her house. She eventually brought her aged mother to America, but could not rescue her younger brother, murdered by the Nazis. 

Rifkind gives a distorted account of Salka’s futile attempt to help Schoenberg write music for MGM’s pictures. She didn’t warn him about the strict rules, including the need for humble deference, nor instruct him on how to deal with all-powerful studio executives. Schoenberg thought all movie music was garbage, had no respect for Irving Thalberg who wanted only “lovely music,” and realised that his own work and temperament were hopelessly inappropriate. By refusing to accommodate Thalberg, one of the most enlightened producers, Schoenberg lost his one great chance to earn a high salary. In this episode Salka was not, as Rifkind says, “the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexity of both milieus” and did not “soften the boundaries between high culture and commerce in Hollywood”. The meeting, in fact, was a humiliating disaster.

Salka played opposite Greta Garbo in the German movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930) and Garbo, 16 years younger than Salka, was her closest friend in Los Angeles. The rise and fall of Salka’s screenwriting career, as a Garbo specialist from 1933 to 1943, was closely connected to MGM’s greatest star. Garbo came from a poor Swedish background, was poorly educated and — created by the studio — had no authentic life and was emotionally crippled by fame. Rifkind states that “Salka found Garbo intelligent, totally unaffected and droll,” but does not describe any conversation that took place during several decades, apart from general ideas and scripts for Garbo’s films. Salka had at least one lesbian affair and Garbo had many, including one with Mercedes de Acosta, whom Rifkind mentions without stating her sexual tastes. She does not discuss how Garbo’s lesbianism affected her friendship with Salka.

Rifkind wildly inflates the artistic merit of Queen Christina (1933), Salka’s most successful movie for Garbo (pictured). She exclaims that “the ‘memorising this room’ scene is one of the most poignant in film history” and calls the final shot “one of the immortals in film history”. The line of dialogue she quotes, “we need new wine in the old bottles,” is an obvious cliché. In fact, this costume drama (which can be seen on YouTube) now seems stilted, wooden, dated and dull. When the queen abdicates, Garbo declares in a strong Swedish accent, “I haf no joyce,” which played well when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936. Garbo herself wrote, “I am so ashamed of Christina. Just imagine our queen abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard.”

Strangely enough, Rifkind does not discuss Salka and Garbo’s far greater collaboration Anna Karenina (1935) or Garbo’s best picture, Ninotschka (1939), written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. After Anna Karenina, Salka kept searching for, but never found, a suitable vehicle for Garbo. She had as many as 17 other writers on her scripts, but refused to work with a French wartime collaborator who later came to Hollywood. Her movie The Girl from Leningrad, about a wounded soldier and nurse, imitated Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and was never made. Garbo thought The Painted Veil (1934) was rubbish and Salka repressed all memories of it. Two-Faced Woman (1941) was a humiliating failure that made Garbo abandon her acting career. Salka blamed the producer’s unrealistic demands for an oxymoronic script that was “original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but a highbrow masterpiece”.

In 1943, Garbo backed out of her last project and Salka’s MGM contract was terminated. After supporting so many people and donating generously to refugees’ charities, she was suddenly out of work. Garbo cruelly insisted, “I have done enough for you. I cannot do more.” Peter Viertel stated that she was “not all that great a friend. Actually, she used my mother more than my mother used her”. Lubitsch fiercely reproached Garbo by declaring, “You threw an old friend to the wolves. You have been in Hollywood long enough to know how much damage you have done to Salka.”

Rifkind’s book, though lively and interesting, has serious flaws. To justify her work —though Salka is certainly worth writing about — Rifkind laments the absence of real women in books about Hollywood and complains that women have been “virtually erased” (i.e., ignored). But on the very next page she lists six books that emphasise the role of women. As if to answer her, Aldous Huxley imagined a futuristic fantasy of a women’s Hollywood without men: “Warner Sisters, Louisa B Mayer, United Artistes and Twentieth Century Vixen.”

Rifkind dedicates her book to as many as seven people (there ought to be a limit) as if she feared this would be her only one. Her index is poor and omits many important names. She makes a few errors: Paul Kohner was an agent (not a director); Dinard is on the Normandy coast (not Brittany); Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine wore yellow stars (not blue); Scott Fitzgerald was not anti-Semitic. Her style is sometimes banal: “the wheels of time and change were turning”; “Germany and America were gazing at each other across an ocean”; Salka and Berthold “had not yet become their full selves”.

Rifkind tediously repeats that Salka did charitable work at least forty times, as if saying the same thing over and over again makes it more significant. (She also mentions that Salka earned $650 a week three times in twelve pages.) In four different places she impossibly claims that as Heinrich and Nelly Mann escaped from France she carried him over the Pyrenees. In fact, Evelyn Juers’ biography of Heinrich states, with significant qualifications, that Nelly “sometimes almost carried him”. Rifkind says Nelly was a “bar hostess,” though she had actually been a prostitute; she later became an alcoholic and killed herself in 1944. 

Rifkind constantly drops the names of the Viertels’ famous friends but never describes these supposed friendships. Albert Einstein, for example, is thrice mentioned in passing as a friend, and Katharine Hepburn makes a sudden appearance as a putative friend two pages from the end. Instead of describing in detail Salka’s real friendship with Peter’s great pal Irwin Shaw, she offers an unintentionally absurd sentence that describes Shaw’s son having “hockey practice in Salka’s tiny kitchen”. We also need to know more about which six languages Salka spoke; the themes and value of Berthold’s oft-mentioned poetry; why Hitler hated Vienna (the city of his youthful poverty and rejection by the Academy of Arts); how all the family and many guests fitted into her crowded house; how Thalberg could “overthrow” Louis Mayer who owned the studio; and the love affair of Simone de Beauvoir and Ivan Moffat. Rifkind quotes Fred Zinnemann’s belief that André Malraux’s Man’s Fate “was the Bible of his generation,” but doesn’t note that in 1969 he was filming this novel in Singapore when the studio suddenly cancelled the project.

Rifkind gives an inaccurate account of the novels and reputations of Thomas and Heinrich Mann. She contradicts herself by stating that Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was “the most influential of all the Weimar era novels” and also that Thomas Mann was “the most exalted writer of the Weimar era”. She then confuses matters even more by asking whether Thomas or Heinrich was the greater writer, claiming that Heinrich was “equally illustrious,” though Thomas had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and quoting Heinrich acknowledging Thomas’ superior reputation. She absurdly calls Thomas’ turgid Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy, rather than The Magic Mountain, “the finest work of his career”. She also misjudges Thomas’ political views by stating that his democratic socialism conflicted with Salka’s pro-Roosevelt liberalism, though Thomas was a great admirer and personal acquaintance of Roosevelt. Rifkind’s structure is also weak. She covers Salka’s last 25 years in 20 pages, the last nine in only two pages. Since Rifkind’s editor was sleeping at the switch, some of the people she effusively thanks in the five pages of acknowledgments should have warned her about all her weaknesses. 

In her last years, Salka gave drama lessons and hustled for scripts. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in Klosters, Switzerland, where Peter lived with Deborah Kerr. The Kindness of Strangers (1969), Salka’s vivid memoir and main source for this book, takes its title from Blanche DuBois’ famous farewell in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Rifkind’s biography makes clear that Salka was famous for dispensing kindness to strangers, rather than receiving it.

Donna Rifkind. The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. NY: Other Press, 550p. $30.