The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  1

  THE WISHING SEASON

  HAUS ELIANA, DOGGILOCHSTRASSE, KLOSTERS, SWITZERLAND

  JANUARY 1963

  IT IS A HOLIDAY TOWN. After the first snows of the year, the hotels and chalets begin to swell with the ski crowds, with Christmastime bringing revelers up from Zurich by the train-load. Among them are so many movie stars that the little Alpine village has come to be called Hollywood on the Rocks. At the train station they arrive in a merry commotion, snugly wrapped up in their youth and glamour and money, none of which have belonged to Salka Viertel for a long time. In her second-floor apartment above the butcher’s shop, she worries now over every franc and depends on her son Peter, who lives nearby, for monthly handouts. Her furniture is falling apart. Her clothes have gone threadbare. The last time she was in Davos she ordered the cheapest new dresses she could find and still gasped at the expense.

  Poverty in youth is something to be vigorously outrun; at life’s end, it is a prison. She can’t make plans, can’t travel to see her other two sons who live in Los Angeles and Massachusetts. They are nearly as financially strapped as she is, and her worries about them seep into the corners of her day and keep her thrashing in her bed at night. There are grandchildren in the States who barely know her; even a tiny step-great-grandson now.

  And the granddaughter she helped to raise has been claimed by Peter, who is her father after all, and was shuttled away at age ten to a British boarding school, closed off from Salka now except for a few holidays. Christine, her darling, her Puck and her Ariel: the last great love of her life. For some years Salka fed and bathed her, and sang her lullabies, and kissed away her sorrows, too many sorrows for any little girl. She has to be careful to spare Christine most of what she knows, and to keep the good memories alive. Their mutual mourning is a large part of what links her with Christine and she can hardly stand the distance from her now. Her longing for the child is a genuine physical ache.

  Yet for all of Salka’s troubles she is an optimist out of long habit, and at seventy-three she doesn’t always feel so hopeless. If it’s true that her body, that reliable engine, is not as indomitable as it was—her back bothers her, she worries about her heart—her spirit still feels strong. She enjoys the young admirers who come to pay her visits and bask in her counsel. And for herself, there is still so much she wants to do. Work, as always, sustains her. She keeps a daily diary and is trying, with difficulty, to finish her memoirs, although sometimes she thinks she has lived too long and seen too much to get out on top of her life, to see it whole. With luck she will convince a decent American publisher to buy the memoirs and grant her a bit of financial freedom, but she shudders to think she might be forced to sell her life too cheaply. Already the few who have read her drafts—all men—have blanched at every hint of womanly mess, of love affairs and menstruation and childbirth. They insisted that she take it all out.

  When she’s not struggling with her memoirs she dreams up scenarios for pictures. Every day, sparks of ideas come to her as they always did: a vignette from Chekhov or Turgenev, or a story about refugee servants in America. She tries not to care that too few people these days are interested in hearing them. It seems another life, all those years ago in Metro’s heyday, when she was one of Thalberg’s favored Scheherazades.

  Salka Viertel in Klosters, Switzerland, early 1960s.

  Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone, the end of “the wishing times,” once her favorite time of year. As a child in Galicia, on the eastern fringe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she couldn’t wait for Christmas, which her family celebrated twice, on December 24 and then two weeks later for the Ukrainian servants. She has loved it even more as an adult, with the candid delight of all the Hollywood Jews. In her living room in Santa Monica, to the distress of her American-born neighbors, her angel-topped tree was always alight with real candles. Today, in her sitting room darkened by the unadorned spruces of the Selfranga hills outside the window, on the outskirts of the movable Yuletide feast that sets up for the winters in Klosters, cast aside among the endless snows and the freezing black rush of the Landquart River and the clanking cowbells and the pretty young skiers and the vacationing film stars, she misses California and she is not in a holiday mood.

  Of course, when she was in California she longed as fiercely for Europe. Forever uprooted. She thinks of this time as her exile in the Alps, the last stop in a series of exhausting rebeginnings. If there is a defining truth in all she has lived over this long century, it’s the speed with which she has seen houses and homelands snatched away, their inhabitants forced out into different kinds of wilderness, obliged to rebuild what they could with whatever opportunities they managed to seize. What an effort she has made to keep creating the spirit of all her homes, over and over again, for herself and for others. Her childhood house—her dear rambling Wychylowka—gone. The rye and wheat fields; the orchards and the little forest. Galicia itself—many times destroyed. The apartments of her vagabond theater days in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Berlin—vanished. Her house in California by the shore: how she misses it but there was no choice, she could not make the payments. A house filled with the dispossessed, all of them drawn to her compassion and her European cooking. The current of energy that flowed through her Sunday afternoon gatherings as she strode to the kitchen to check on the food: Arpège and cigar smoke, a tumult of piano chords, the confidential lilt of German, and, through the open terrace doors, the ionized breath of the sea.

  Now, in her solitude, even on her good days she thinks the attempt to invent yet another haven from these Swiss rooms will defeat her. Anyway, so many of those she cared for are gone. Too many to count. Too hard to think about.

  How extraordinary to think that so many of her loved ones, hounded out of Europe in the 1930s, returned there almost immediately after the war, harried this time by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She had taken them all in, the wild-eyed and desperate, when they had found themselves so improbably in Los Angeles, and then, as soon as they could, they had gone back. Brecht and Helli Weigel, disappearing with no regrets behind the curtain of East Berlin. Thomas and Katia Mann, leaving the house they’d built in Pacific Palisades for a staunch manor in the hills above Zurich. Katia is still there, eight years after Thomas’s death, as sharp and imposing as ever. And Salka’s own husband Berthold, dead now a decade, who had settled with a sigh of cosmopolitan relief back into Vienna and the Burgtheater when the war was over. She’s acutely aware that, were it not for the quirk of timing that brought her and Berthold to Hollywood in 1928 before the deluge, they would have been among Hitler’s victims. Aware also that after the war was over she would no longer be in demand at Metro or Warners. She wasn’t exactly on the blacklist, but by then it didn’t matter. The Committee had already succeeded in wrecking her livelihood.

  Now she too has abandoned America, with infinite regret. How strange to find herself in this sanitized version of Europe, going about its gay daily business as though the war had never happened. Impossible today for a galitzianer Jewess to look up at these mountains, just a few miles from the Austrian border, and fail to feel amazed at being alive in this time and place, and more or less intact. Impossible not to wonder about the former peasants turned waiters in the luxury hotels of this recently chic town as they serve platters of tête de moine and Bündnerfleisch to the rosy-cheeked tourists. The young woman who does some typing for her, hired part time as a gift from Peter, likes to regale her with tales of her dead father’s Nazi past.

  So much is dreamlike about her life these days. At midnight at Irwin Shaw’s New Year’s Eve party, he had been the first to kiss her. Then she had found herself approached to be kissed by every man in the room, most of them perspiring unpleasantly. The scene had a troubling dream’s truthfulness: it’s not vanity but only fact to say that all her life and even now, with her nimbus of white hair, she has been accustomed to fielding the frank expectations of men. Plen
ty of young men always, though it was the old men she tended to remember, for the urgency and pathos in their plans of conquest.

  At last in the New Year’s parade of sweaty kissers she had arrived to face her long-ago love, Gottfried. With Silvia—his official Mrs. Reinhardt—off somewhere out of earshot, he had held her against him and kissed her deeply as he had in the old days, and whispered, “Weisst du noch?” Of course she remembers, but his kiss itself was like a dream of their dead passion. She remembers many of the New Year’s Eves they spent together when he made her so unhappy with his drinking, and then the next day he would play his little seducing games to win her back. She feels not the slightest sentiment for him now. For some reason she thinks of the time a handful of years ago when he arrived at her Westwood apartment to take her to a party and noticed a torn seam in his pants. He had taken them off so she could make the repair for him, and while he sat there in his shorts she had been surprised to find how distasteful she found the sight of his bare legs. She’d tried not to look at him as he waited silently in the airlessness of the late afternoon, and she had marveled to herself at the idea of her once-crazy obsession with that same body.

  All her life, it occurs to her, she has loved extravagantly, heedlessly. It may have been her greatest achievement, but it has cost her, maybe too much. One day last summer in Klosters she was walking along the road when her son Peter happened to drive up behind her and gave her a ride. Of late he had been behaving coldly toward her and she impulsively asked him why he does not like her. “I like you,” he replied, “but I am not as demonstrative as you.” Demonstrative? It’s only that she loves him. She has always loved him. She has demonstrated it all her life.

  She knows Peter loves her too, even if he is always running away. Of her three sons, he most resembles her. Their faces are similar and they have the same walk, headlong but with a slight hesitation in the step of the right leg. Peter has her social ease, her gift for friendship, her avid way of engaging with the world. But too much has happened between them over the years and their bond has gotten very complicated and often tense. Sometimes he is proud to be her son, proud of her connections to international celebrities and the old-guard movie folk. At other times he is ashamed: of her refusal to be a normal American mother, her insistence on clinging to her European ways.

  Between Berthold and Peter it was different. Difficult also, but perhaps in some ways less complicated. Peter never mentions his father these days. Yet one need not pay the sky-high fees of a Hollywood psychoanalyst to tease out the relationship between this Viennese father and his Dresden-born middle son, a boy who always and only wanted to be an American. At a young age, during Berthold’s long absences from Santa Monica, Peter had hung on to their neighbor Oliver Garrett, whose sporty New England urbanity Peter loved and admired. And later, Peter had thought to be amusing when he dedicated his first novel, The Canyon—published, to her surprise, when he was just nineteen—to “the foreign family up the street.” She and Berthold had not been amused. They had felt the sting of accusation at that time and ever since.

  Some years later Peter sent a copy of The Canyon to Ernest Hemingway after they had become friends. Peter made no secret of caring more for Ernest’s flattery than for the praise he’d received from Berthold. And so developed Peter’s dogged and largely successful pursuit of substitute fathers. There was Hemingway, certainly, and also her own old ally John Huston: big, brawling, globe-trotting men who possessed Berthold’s brilliance and his fiery temper and his love of excess but who were also solidly, and, most crucially for Peter, American. Hemingway the hero of literature and war, and Peter his worshipper; it’s hardly even a stretch that the world calls him Papa. Peter who still talks like the Marine lieutenant he was, a character Hemingway might have invented, ordering Greta into the car when she comes to visit during the summers as if she were the lowliest of GIs and not the Divine Garbo, and Greta rather loving every minute of it.

  In the meantime, now that Hemingway has been erased from their lives with his final violent act of self-dispatch, Peter has found himself another Ersatzpapa, Orson Welles, who recently departed from Klosters after spending the winter holidays. Orson is only a few years older than Peter but he fills the bill in every other way. Just as it was with Hemingway, the friendship was sealed by their devotion to the infernal sport of bullfighting and by the writing advice Orson has offered Peter over the years. More recently they worked together on a doomed film, and last August Peter wrote an admiring profile of Orson for Life magazine that to Peter’s chagrin was scrapped as well. Early this winter Orson announced he was coming to Klosters to give his little daughter a white Christmas. His wife arrived as well, a very beautiful Italian, quite a few years younger than he. There are whispers of an estrangement. No doubt there are people who find this information compelling, but many years ago Salka learned the value of inoculating herself against Hollywood rumors. It could be true or not. Either way it’s of little use to her.

  Orson when he arrived was catastrophically fat, his bulk draped in acres of soft dark clothing, a cape, a slouchy hat on his giant head, a cigar cradled in his hand. As he picked his way across the snow-banked path toward Peter’s house, pausing for a moment near the two frozen ponds by the barn, he looked like a miniature black mountain among mountains, dwarfed only by the tall pines and the white-frosted peaks rising up behind him. Later, seated next to Salka for Christmas dinner, he was loud and to her mind not terribly interesting.

  In his grossness he reminded her a little of Heinrich George, the Weimar actor turned Nazi collaborator who had spent his last days in a Soviet concentration camp. Then again, nearly everyone these days reminds her a little of someone she knew long ago. She supposes Orson is more intelligent than George, with a better education. He has recently finished making a film of Kafka’s The Trial, produced by a blithe Russian whose contributions had gone uncredited on one of Greta’s earliest pictures in Germany. Orson said he would have preferred to make The Castle instead, but the Russian had no money and was keen on The Trial because he thought that it was in the public domain. Not true, as it turned out, but by then they were stuck with The Trial and somehow the Russian scraped the money together and Orson was grateful to him for taking a chance when no one else was interested. In that way Orson is very much like Salka’s husband Berthold had been, drawn to seat-of-the-pants producers because he had already alienated the powerful ones, the Zanucks and the Selznicks who avoided his calls even as they praised him to the skies as a great genius of the cinema.

  Orson told Salka that he had shot much of The Trial in the deserted old Gare d’Orsay in Paris, because it was enormous and cheap and available. Fortuitously it was also a place that came to speak to him of Kafka, of unstamped visas and the haunted hopelessness of refugees. She’s not sure what refugees have to do with Kafka and she was only half listening as Orson rambled on, distracted by Peter who seemed bored and impatient with his guests. At last she acquiesced to Welles and found herself telling him about her long-ago days in Prague, about her friendships with Kafka and Max Brod. He was interested and in the end quite nice and she was carried away by her memories, though she is perturbed to think she might have gone on too long…

  * * *

  —

  MOST OF WHAT SALKA REMEMBERS ABOUT PRAGUE is hunger. It was the spring of 1918. She was twenty-nine years old and a newlywed, and the last good meal she had eaten recently was the wedding dinner her mother had brought to Vienna from her childhood house: home-cured ham, roast turkey, bread, butter, and a small cake. She and Berthold had each recently and triumphantly managed to secure theatrical contracts. He would direct for three years at the Royal Saxonian Theater in Dresden while she joined the actors of the Kammerspiele in Munich. But for the moment Berthold had taken a position as a theater critic for the Prager Tagblatt, an appointment he had eagerly accepted upon his release from the army after three miserable years of active duty on the Eastern Front.

&nbs
p; Berthold Viertel in uniform, c. 1915–16.

  The war was taking its fateful turn and the unimaginable was beginning to seem possible for the Hapsburg monarchy. The Czechs were adamant in their refusal to sell the bounty of their farms to the German-speaking locals, and so the abiding topic for her and Berthold and everyone they knew in Prague was where to find enough to eat. On a few lucky occasions, Salka found that by speaking Polish she could briefly catch a shopkeeper’s attention.

  It was not the first time she would know hunger in her life and it would not be the last. In Prague, a city to which she has never returned, her deprivation had visual as well as visceral dimensions, as if it were a giddy Technicolor hallucination. The month of June had brought a profusion of cherries to the markets. Though they could never appease her cravings for a solid dinner, those baskets of cherries in the street stands delighted her anyway, their extravagant bursts of scarlet splashed against the sober stone palaces and the greenery of the Castle District.

  They had rented a furnished room in the house where Berthold’s pregnant sister Helene and her husband, a tenor with the Staatsoper, were living. What breakfast there was Salka cooked on an alcohol burner, while they took their other meager meals with Willi and Helene. Sometimes Max Brod and Franz Kafka came for supper, bringing with them a Viennese journalist named Anton Kuh, a satirist with a monocle and a stinging wit. Kuh reminded Salka of Berthold’s great friend Karl Kraus, but without Kraus’s clarity. Once when she cooked a dinner for the three men that consisted chiefly of spinach, Kuh made antic political jokes about it that she was at a loss to understand. Kafka, on the other hand, was very quiet. Salka was too shy to talk much to him though she saw him quite often, mostly at Brod’s house. Kafka was tall and handsome and so brown and robust-looking that Salka had trouble believing he suffered from tuberculosis.