Remembering the wildly lurching economy of the Weimar Republic, Salka later wrote: “I was amazed that there were still people who would buy tickets, but they did; and tottering but determined, Die Truppe continued its frail existence.” The company’s production of Side by Side, Georg Kaiser’s New Objectivity play about the hyperinflation, with sets designed by George Grosz, played to sold-out houses every night in November of 1923. Yet each morning the Viertels awoke to learn from the newspapers that they were as broke as ever. “It was a cold and wet winter and the dollar now stood at between two and three billion marks,” Salka wrote.
We got paid every day; at noon we would appear at the cashiers, our billions and trillions stuffed into large paper bags or suitcases, and those of us who lived in boarding houses would rush home to deliver cash to our distraught landladies, who hastened to the stores and bought food before the Stock Exchange closed and another deluge of marks swept away the value of the old ones.
Die Truppe struggled to stay afloat. But its death knell came in March 1924 with Berthold’s staging of a pair of one-act plays by his friend Karl Kraus, to honor the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch). The premiere was packed with the very same theater critics upon whom Kraus had lavished his harshest invective, and while many in the audience cheered at the company’s courage, the occasion was more of a wake than a celebration. In the days that followed, the critics retaliated. One of the troupe’s key sponsors, a currency speculator seeking cultural cachet, suspended his financial support. The Viertels declared bankruptcy, sending them into considerable personal debt.
Salka and Berthold went back to chasing piecemeal theater work in whichever city they could find it, dwelling fleetingly in boardinghouses or dreadfully furnished apartments in Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Düsseldorf. They were nomads of a rarefied intellectual sort, hauling their children and their belongings from city to city, throwing themselves into play after play. Salka was Strindberg’s Laura at the Volksbühne in Leipzig. She was Medea in Hamburg, catching the night train to Dresden after her Sunday performances to spend twenty-four hours with her sons and with Berthold, who was directing at the Dresden Schauspielhaus. Then she rushed back to Hamburg on Tuesdays in time to take up Medea again and to murder her make-believe children offstage. The train, the curtain, the train, the children and Berthold, the train, the stage. She was Schiller’s Mary Stuart in Düsseldorf. She was Friedrich Hebbel’s Judith in Berlin.
They were citified bohemians with many addresses but no home. When Salka and Berthold were together, there were late nights at their table at the Romanisches Café in Berlin, where on any evening they might sit with Bertolt Brecht, say, and the actor Alexander Granach, and the young Communist Otto Katz, and with scores of other friends who would pop up again at different times in their lives in different cities. They knew just about everyone worth knowing. Through Salka’s brother Edward Steuermann, a notable pianist, they had met all the important composers: Schoenberg, Webern, Hanns Eisler. They befriended Berlin’s wild young things, many of them from culturally patrician families and all brimming with plans to épater le bourgeois: Pamela Wedekind, Anna Mahler, Klaus and Erika Mann, Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn. While Salka and Berthold were in Vienna, there were long nights in coffeehouses with Karl Kraus and his circle when Salka was nine months pregnant with Tommy and dying to go to bed. She did not go to bed. She stayed at the table to answer the lacerating wits, glazed and half-delirious, hoping the waiters would turn out the lights.
Steeped as they were in the theater, she and Berthold were interested in the possibilities of cinema, and willing to gamble on its future as a serious art form. Berthold had written a scenario for Nora, based on Ibsen’s Doll’s House, for Universum-Film AG in 1923, and soon thereafter he wrote and directed The Wig, which became an Expressionist classic, for Westi Film. He directed a picture called Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note for Fox Company Europe in 1926, in which the musically prodigious Francesco von Mendelssohn played the role of “Ein Klavierspieler.”
Around the time of the success of the landmark film Sunrise in 1927, its director F. W. Murnau asked Berthold to be the writer for his pictures. At that time the Westphalia-born Murnau was already working in Hollywood, where he’d been coveted by the studios as yet another must-have European genius like Lubitsch and Stiller, and signed to an enormous salary by William Fox.
Salka had known Murnau—colossally tall, ginger-haired, fiercely reserved—since her earliest days in Max Reinhardt’s theaters. They had acted together in Penthesilea, when he was a Greek soldier and she a saucy Amazon. She had once thought Murnau unbearably stuffy, but in time, with warmth and humor, she found she was able to soften his Prussian inflexibility. Hollywood loosened up Murnau as well, although his relationship with the equally headstrong Berthold remained fraught from the beginning. In November of 1927, just after staging Peer Gynt for Reinhardt’s theaters in Berlin, Berthold completed the scenario for 4 Devils, the second of Murnau’s three Hollywood films. (This circus picture, starring a young Janet Gaynor, became one of the great “ghost films” of the silent era, all copies of which were lost.) Now, in 1928, Murnau was impatient to get Berthold to the Fox studios in California to begin writing his next film, to be called Our Daily Bread.
Salka thought most of the early movies she saw to be vulgar. She considered one a masterpiece—Eisenstein’s Potemkin—and a few others remarkable: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Paul Wegener’s Golem, Ernst Lubitsch’s Anne Boleyn, the first pictures of Fritz Lang and the great Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. Salka would always remember the collective gasp in the movie house during Stiller’s The Saga of Gösta Berling when the luminous eyes of a very young Greta Garbo took over the screen. But she, like nearly everyone she knew, reserved her highest admiration for the faraway legend of Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
In Berlin in the early summer of 1925, Salka had written a film treatment of her own, an adaptation of a novel by the nineteenth-century French writer Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. It would be some years before she would begin to imagine herself as a writer. Yet she was inspired by the hectic artistic activity flourishing around her, and she conceived a scenario with the encouragement of Hjalmar Lerski, the brilliant cameraman for Berthold’s picture The Wig. Pluckily she forged ahead, scrawling her work longhand on big sheets of paper in a single exhilarating session. She sold the treatment to the Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, whose film company then promptly went bankrupt. While Salka’s picture was never produced, she managed to collect her payment of five thousand rentenmark, the currency issued by the Weimar government in a vain attempt to control hyperinflation.
* * *
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BERTHOLD WAS A SERIOUS POET, essayist, and novelist as well as a director and screenwriter. Deeply intellectual and prone to philosophizing, he recognized the radical power of the medium of film—the first new form of storytelling to come along in five hundred years—and noted its vulnerability to manipulation. It was, as he saw it, “an immense political tool of the future.” With the ubiquity of screens in our era, it’s difficult to imagine how grand and strange those first films seemed to audiences, how shocking the notion of pictures that moved. Pictures that offered the grandest exotic vistas, and pictures so intimate that a kiss filled an auditorium, its viewers rapt and furtive in the secrecy of the dark. Pictures that could reach into every corner of the planet in a way the theater never could—not even Max Reinhardt’s 360-degree extravaganzas and his tireless world tours could approach cinema’s range. Just as the Great War had been the first industrialized war, the movies were an industrialized art form, deployed to seize vast audiences and to change the way they would see the world. Berthold was more correct about film being a political instrument than even he could imagine. It happened sooner than he expected: in America mostly for profit, in Germany for control and subjugation.
Convinced by the achievements of Stiller and Chaplin, the Viertels were gambling on novelty. They would leave the stage, their ancient beloved, into which they had infused modern ideas and techniques. They would take up the screen, investing the new technology with all the classic old stories. As they prepared to cross the Atlantic for the first time, Berthold was intent on using this moment to remake himself as well. A lover of excess—too many cigarettes; too many rich desserts; an extravagant temper; a chronic sexual thrall to actresses who momentarily caught his eye—he now fervently hoped, for his and Salka’s sakes, to rein himself in. The previous year, on their tenth anniversary, he had written to Salka: “I often wish you had a worthier man, a stronger, better-looking, smarter, richer, and better husband. But I beg you from the bottom of my soul to keep me the way I am with all of my failings.” He now swore to smoke only twenty cigarettes a day (he would count them) and to curb his frequent raging. “Ever since I have known you there is no greater fear for me than that I might lose you,” he had written. “I’ve never said that to another human heart and probably never will be able to again.”
If Salka was feeling similar urges toward transformation, she did not mention it. She, too, was prone to rages and fits of serious melancholy. She, too, had had love affairs, some retaliatory and fleeting, one or two more meaningful. She’d begun and ended a serious romance with a friend of Berthold’s, a Viennese art historian named Ludwig Münz. She’d had an intense emotional relationship with Luise Dumont, her adviser at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus.
There is a story about Salka from her theater days. Its details are lost now, but here’s the fragment that remains. During some night on an unremembered stage, Salka was performing alongside a well-known actor with whom she was having an affair. The scene demanded that her head be positioned very close to that of the actor, who took the opportunity to whisper to her so that only she could hear. “When?” he said. She responded with a suggestion, sotto voce. Then the actor whispered, “Where?” and she replied again, meeting the challenge headlong. Throughout her life Salka was defiant about “asserting my rights to love and to live,” as she wrote decades later, regardless of collateral damage.
Despite their mutual betrayals and disappointments, Salka and Berthold were not ready to give up on their marriage. They had spent a holiday week in Venice in the summer of 1927, a second honeymoon in which they pledged to attempt repairs. Unlike Berthold, Salka now made no declarations toward self-improvement. Most likely, putting an ocean between herself and her children, her parents, and her siblings was change enough for her. Their landlady and Francesco von Mendelssohn took them to the train station in Berlin. As she always did at moments of farewell, Salka broke down and cried.
The Viertels got off the train in Hamburg and sailed from Cuxhaven on the Albert Ballin on February 22, 1928. Berthold mentioned that in the “mountainous heights” of first class the passage seemed like a stay at a spa, with rich meals and games and casual flirtation. Salka remembered that among the fifteen hundred or so passengers there was a stowaway, discovered in the hold once they had started westward. There was also a dead American soldier from the Great War who had been disinterred from his grave in France and sent off to be buried on home soil. She noted the addition of six thousand canaries, all being ferried to America to be sold as pets. The birds were as cosseted as the first-class passengers. When one of them fell ill, the purser brought it to his cabin to oversee its convalescence.
A dense fog cheated Salka of the melodrama of the approaching New York skyline. Even so, her arrival was momentous, as she had crossed an irreversible border. Though she did not know it yet, she had been translated. From the death of her old self she was emerging into an American life, whatever that might mean. The feeling of this moment of unmooring would return throughout her life. It would feed her compassion for the thousands of her Landsleute who would make this same voyage, in far greater states of panic and disorientation, in the decades to follow.
They were emigrants first of all and only after that were they the people they really were.
—LION FEUCHTWANGER
* * *
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WHEN THE ALBERT BALLIN DOCKED, three reporters and a German-speaking publicity man from Fox met the Viertels in the ship’s salon. As the reporters began to interview Berthold, out of nowhere a bleached-haired young German woman showed up, braying about how seasick she’d been during the crossing. In split seconds the reporters’ cameras veered away from Berthold and clicked away at the girl as she dangled her legs off the arm of a sofa. She had a contract with Universal, but Salka had never heard of her, and she never would again.
They left the boat, and Salka tried hard to grasp the immensity of New York. The city seemed alien and disturbingly beautiful. Its jagged geometries reminded her of the visions of the painter Lyonel Feininger, while its symphonic stink recalled the teeming ghetto in Przemyśl, a Galician city not far from her hometown. Immediately upon arriving at their Central Park South hotel, she and Berthold ran into an exhausted-looking Max Reinhardt, surrounded by his Berlin entourage. The theater impresario—whose portrait had been on the cover of Time magazine the previous year, and who was named “the Barnum of world theater” by the New York Herald Tribune—told them he was departing that day for the Coast after completing another successful program of Schiller and Shakespeare on Broadway. Salka had not spoken to Reinhardt personally since the day of her first audition for him when she was twenty-two, though she’d had major roles on his stages for over a decade. With great cordiality Reinhardt said he hoped to see the Viertels in Hollywood. And then, just as affably, one of his associates predicted Salka’s unavoidable failure as an actress there and her swift return to Berlin.
The performances the Viertels saw during their three weeks in New York left them cold, except for several wonderful Negro musicals and a dazzling all-black production of Porgy, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Otherwise they found Broadway thoroughly unexciting, while the Theater Guild people they met through an introduction from the journalist Dorothy Thompson were baffling. These Americans considered Max Reinhardt a mere entrepreneur, admired the most conventional aspects of German theater, and had never heard of Brecht or Wedekind.
Salka had been studying a primer called A Thousand Words of English. Her command of the language was improving but still limited; the strange vowels and the th sound would continue to bewilder her. New York seemed just as alienating as the harsh sounds of its speech. She would revisit the city many times and in her later years would briefly live on the Upper West Side, but she always found Manhattan loud, dirty, and dispiriting.
Murnau’s anxious telephone calls from Hollywood propelled them at last onto the westward train, a marvel of modern luxury and speed. Over the four-day journey, the shifting landscapes kept Salka staring out the window, transfixed by the strange beauty of the purple rock formations in New Mexico and Arizona, the spiky Joshua trees and the impressionistic mounds of sagebrush. In Berlin, cactuses were popular house-plants and familiar subjects in the still-life paintings of the New Objectivity. There they’d been symbols of otherness, of captivity and claustrophobia. But here, set among the panoramas flickering outside the train window, they were for Salka a revelation of breadth, of prodigality, of endless star-bright desert nights. She was as astonished as a schoolgirl by everything she saw.
On the fifth day she woke up to the overpowering smell of orange blossoms. Outside the window were groves and groves of citrus trees. They had reached California.
* * *
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THE SKIES WERE GRAY and the air was chilly when the sleek, efficient Chief pulled into the Pasadena train station on a late-winter day in 1928. The Viertels rode to the Roosevelt Hotel in a chauffeur-driven car with yet another publicity man from the Fox studio and Berthold’s new secretary, a tall, heavy-set actor named Herman Bing. Their route to Hollywood took them along Sunset Boulevard in order to skip the crus
h of cars downtown. Along the way Salka noted the fantastic eclecticism of the houses and shops they passed on the way: roofs shaped like mushrooms, a restaurant shaped like a hat. She must have missed—because surely she would have remarked on them—the many rooms-for-rent signs on boardinghouses that warned NO ACTORS, NO JEWS, NO KIDS OR PETS, a list that perfectly described Salka and her household.
“I expected California to be all sunshine and flowers,” Salka wrote. But the sun she had been warned repeatedly to avoid was nowhere in evidence in a sullen March sky. Outside the limousine window, Los Angeles was a fast-paced Autopia. Its main industries were oil, agriculture, and motion pictures, but for the people who lived there, it was a city built largely to support houses and cars. The sight of so many automobiles had surprised other recent emigrants, many of whom had perhaps read too many Karl May novels and were expecting some sort of Wild West settlement. The director Ernst Lubitsch had this to say about his arrival from Berlin in 1922:
I went to Hollywood with the feeling of making a voyage of discovery in a dark continent. I imagined Hollywood as a semi-wild nest surrounded by a big fence of wilderness. And when I got off the train in Los Angeles, I saw the traffic of a modern metropolis: skyscrapers towered in the air, thousands and thousands of cars whizzed around on the paved roads, a gigantic traffic jam made the city alive…
The Sun and Her Stars Page 4
