The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Salka herself had had little idea what to expect. She had not even known where Hollywood was. On a visit home to Wychylowka the previous summer, her father had been obliged to find a map so he could show her. She now realized that Hollywood was actually a neighborhood within a larger city which was coming into focus. She and Berthold would need a car, and driving lessons. They would need a house. Their days in Europe had been lived in apartments and on trains, in orderly vertical metropolises where people went about their business on foot or public transport. Their new life would be lived in this elliptical, self-driven place. It might as well be a new planet for the complex vocabulary they would have to learn in order to maneuver within it.

  For the moment, though, their lives as urban nomads played on at the Roosevelt Hotel, a Spanish Colonial Revival fantasy which had opened the previous year, financed by the likes of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Louis B. Mayer as a fancy way station for visiting film folk. In their too-warm suite they found ingratiating gifts from the studio. A big bouquet of red roses for Salka. A case of Prohibition whiskey for Berthold, stashed, with cheeky cliché, in the bathtub.

  After all of Murnau’s fretful telephoning, it turned out that he was busy shooting tests and would not need Berthold that day. This was an inauspicious beginning. Berthold interpreted the hurry-up-and-wait as a sign of Murnau’s insufferable arrogance, and was furious.

  Instead the Viertels had lunch with a German journalist of their acquaintance, and then, before they even got a glimpse of the studios, Salka begged to see the ocean. They headed toward the beach town of Santa Monica, named by eighteenth-century Spanish missionaries after the patron saint of difficult marriages and disappointing children because some local freshwater springs had reminded the good Franciscans of Saint Monica’s tears. At the end of Pico Boulevard, a long highway heading west, Salka got her first glimpse of the Pacific. She described it on that gray day as iridescent, as if it were a vast sheet of mother-of-pearl.

  They stopped the car in front of a large hotel shaded by sycamores and cypresses, then crossed the street to find themselves on the rim of a cliff. To their right were the bay and the canyon, dotted with trees and only a few houses. To the left was the pier. They drove up to its entrance and Salka was instantly smitten: with the yellow hippodrome and the merry-go-round inside it, with its hand-carved painted horses and old-fashioned music; with the ice cream stands and the fish markets and the bait stalls; with the day fishermen casting from atop the pier, and the swaying boats below; and with the Filipina bedecked in sequins who was telling fortunes out of a shack.

  Salka had been raised near a river that flowed out of the Carpathian Mountains and emptied, after a long haphazard course, into the Black Sea. The river was called the Dniester and the section of it that flowed near her childhood home was unpredictable, with sudden deep and roiling chasms. Her memory of its wildness answered a secret call that she sometimes heard. It rose up in protest against Berthold’s unassailable Viennese urbanity and her own self-discipline on the stage and at home. Looking out beyond the pier at the expanse of this foreign sea, she recognized that same wildness and it called to her again.

  Amid the gaudy melodies of the carousel’s orchestrion and the fresh brine of the air, here along the pier was a sense of openness and possibility. Here, for the moment, was a counterpoint to all those days and nights in the crowded cafés of Vienna and Berlin, with their hours upon hours of talk. Talk of art and politics and the path toward the future, talk that was weighty and nervous and much of it brilliant, all those ideas, all those convictions, and all of this talk on top of the daily difficulties of theater rehearsals and scrounging for food and soothing sick children and endless cooking and arranging and tidying. On the Pacific shoreline Salka recognized how much of her old existence had been exhausting her, while here the world seemed to be taking a silvery breath. She pleaded with Berthold to let them find a house in Santa Monica.

  But the implacable world was not standing still, even among the eternal holiday-makers on this peaceful American shore. In fact, dramatic change and conflict had been routine here long before the Spanish missionaries had forcibly relieved the indigenous people of their beachfront land. Those people, the Tongva, had thrived on it for more than seven thousand years, and clashed regularly and violently with other hunter-gatherers, including the Chumash, their neighbors to the north. More recently, in 1828, rights to the land had been vigorously disputed among several Mexican families who had been granted grazing rights. After the city of Santa Monica was officially incorporated in 1886, development had marched insistently forward with the building of hotels, private clubs, bathhouses, and pleasure arenas, its progress punctuated now and then by large fires with dubious origins, destruction followed by eager and bigger reconstruction.

  By 1928, Hollywood’s elite had entrenched itself on the beach, with actors Pickford and Fairbanks and the Talmadge sisters venturing from their inland neighborhoods in Hollywood and Beverly Hills to stake out second and third homes on choice stretches of sand below the California Incline that extended north toward the canyon. Then, as now, the houses were built backward. The balconies and fenestrations of their revival-style architecture faced the water, while blankly forbidding gates and garages fronted the street. In 1926, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer commanded his art director at Metro to conjure up a house for him at 625 Pacific Coast Highway as quickly as possible. In six weeks, with three construction shifts working around the clock, a sturdy twenty-room Spanish Colonial with a red-tile roof and an onyx-and-marble bathroom materialized like a film set, at a cost to Mayer of $28,000 (about $412,500 in 2019 dollars). Many more Hollywood folk followed into this neighborhood. It came to be known as the Gold Coast and the American Riviera.

  Hollywood was coming to the shore for prestige, not for its health. For the leisure-seeking crowds, the sea air of Santa Monica in 1928 was thought to be anything but wholesome. When Berthold casually mentioned at Fox that Salka was keen to live there, he met with scandalized protests. No, no, the studio people said, the Viertels would become rheumatic, the dampness would bring on recurring bronchitis and gout. Gold Coast mansions—most famously the house built for the film star Norma Shearer and her husband, the chronically unwell MGM executive Irving Thalberg—were climate-controlled, double-windowed, and soundproofed to block the toxic air and the perilous surf.

  About all this Salka was skeptical. But she gave in when Herman Bing noted that living in Santa Monica would add an extra half hour to Berthold’s daily commute. Defeated by visions of the mad rush her husband would have to endure, she rented the least expensive house she could find in Hollywood, a pleasant mock-Tudor on North Fairfax Avenue, near the foothills of Laurel Canyon.

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  THERE WAS A WELCOME PARTY for the Viertels that echoed the farewell parties in Berlin. A cabaret singer presided over this gathering, as Yvette Guilbert had appeared in Francesco’s salon, though this one had not sung professionally for years. She was a chic Frankfurt-born blonde named Gussy Holl, a former film star and diseuse, and she was married to the German actor Emil Jannings. The Janningses hosted the party at the house they were renting from Joseph Schenck, the American film pioneer who was at that time the chairman of the board of United Artists.

  Schenck’s place was luxurious, if not as august as the Mendelssohn villa. Sitting on a fashionable stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, its three-acre grounds included a tennis court and a swimming pool that was routinely emptied in order to water the citrus orchard. The interiors shone with onyx and tile, oak and mahogany. Salka noted that the enormous living room boasted a wondrous variety of lamps, a common feature, as she would discover, among the swanky parlors of film folk.

  Ernst Lubitsch and the actor Conrad Veidt were among the guests—both, Salka noted, with “uninteresting pretty wives.” Despite Lubitsch’s renown in America, she found him unchanged since the early 1920s in Berlin, when she had
watched him pull off practical jokes during rehearsals on Max Reinhardt’s stages. Further blending her new life with the old, on this Hollywood evening Max Reinhardt himself made an appearance, declaring himself besotted with California, while their host Emil Jannings, who had taken no time to familiarize himself with his surroundings, professed to hate it. At the party too was a director named Ludwig Berger, a big success in Germany but a troubling loss for the Paramount executives who had brought him over and now could not find a use for him. Salka vowed to remember Berger’s predicament as “a warning to European directors”—no doubt thinking of her own husband, to whose fortunes she was yoked.

  On this evening there was anxious speculation about the looming adoption of sound technology in film, with its potential to ruin the Hollywood careers of foreign actors with heavy accents. The Viertels had seen The Jazz Singer in New York and Berthold had been wondering what the advent of talking pictures might mean for his contract at Fox. Salka thought The Jazz Singer was hopelessly banal. Comparing it with silents like King Vidor’s The Crowd or Murnau’s Sunrise was for her “sheer blasphemy.” Yet it was hard to ignore the long lines of patrons outside the Warner Bros. theaters who were waiting to hear Al Jolson warbling “Blue Skies” and speaking sentimentally to his mother. And it was easy to imagine that the talkies might offer greater opportunities for a writer and director such as Berthold—even if Murnau, the wizard of silent cinema, looked upon all notions about sound in films with loathing.

  Reassurances for the actors’ concerns were scarce on this California evening with the hint of a chill in its early spring air. Salka was glad to see the evening’s mood lighten with the entrance of two ebullient young friends from her Berlin days, Klaus and Erika Mann, newly arrived in Hollywood as part of a pleasure trip they were taking around the world. Into the Janningses’ sedate living room the Mann siblings injected the irreverence of Berlin’s night life, a welcome jolt of enthusiasm among the roomful of glum expatriates.

  Years after that night, the gossip columnist Louella Parsons would name the Janningses’ house “the Jinx Mansion,” because of the calamities that befell so many of its residents over the decades. There had been the freak death by runaway boulder of grocery magnate George Albert Ralphs back in 1914; the dramatic suicide of Jack Cudahy, heir to a meatpacking fortune, in 1921; and the recently crumbling marriage of the house’s current owners, Joseph Schenck and Norma Talmadge.

  The arrival of talking pictures played its own role in the shifting fortunes of the Jinx Mansion’s current resident, Emil Jannings. Within the year, his thick German accent deemed incomprehensible to American audiences, Jannings would be dismissed from his contract with Paramount. It was a terrible blow for the actor, whose egotism was as outsized as his screen presence. His career in Hollywood was finished. He returned to Germany, where he costarred with Marlene Dietrich in UFA’s The Blue Angel in 1930 and tyrannized that production with rococo displays of his vanity.

  Marlene Dietrich left Berlin for America on the night of The Blue Angel’s premiere, in April 1930, as the Weimar Republic was collapsing. She did not return to her hometown until after the war was over. During those fifteen years she became first a proud American citizen and then a tireless participant in the U.S. armed forces, traveling from one dangerous war zone to another to entertain the troops. Jannings in the meantime remained in Germany and starred in films promoting the glory of Nazism from 1934 onward. In 1936, two years before the Mendelssohn villa was expropriated by the National Socialists, Jannings was made a Staatsschauspieler, or “artist of the state,” by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

  “Fate calls, and we must follow,” Berthold had written to Salka about their decision to come to America. But as they and their compatriots flowed forward and back across the Atlantic, they were not quite as passive as he suggested. Fate called, but they also made their choices, while they could. The boundary between the new world and the old was porous only for a few years longer. After the gates closed, there would be no more choice.

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  —

  AS SOON AS THE VIERTELS MOVED into the Fairfax Avenue house, they threw themselves into learning to navigate their strange surroundings. Berthold’s secretary Herman Bing gave them English lessons and taught Salka to drive their new Buick. She took to motoring with panache if not exactly with finesse, set off in high spirits, and never looked back. Bing next tried to teach Berthold, who stalled the car on his first attempt behind the wheel, then smashed a bumper and tore off two fenders. Berthold instantly abandoned all hope of driving and they hired a chauffeur to take him to and from the studio.

  Tenuously, the roots of their new life unfurled and began to cling. They felt no less foreign, but as the days and weeks went by their English improved and their familiarity with the landscape grew. The spring weather, at first so aloof, now turned munificent, the evening air thick with the smell of jasmine and eucalyptus and ringing with the trills of mockingbirds, the noontimes benignly sunny and warm. Salka sat in the garden in a summer dress and read Boston by Upton Sinclair. Berthold made a good first impression at Fox, offering advice everywhere, doctoring other people’s films, jumping whenever Murnau called. Berthold was thought to be eccentric, but they were paying him for that, for his foreign intellect and originality.

  After a month or so the Viertels determined that they would stay for a while in Hollywood. Salka made arrangements for her sons—aged eight, seven, and two—to make the journey across the Atlantic with Nena, their Kindermädchen. During a blistering heat wave at the end of May, Salka traveled across the country on the Chief, by herself this time, to meet the Albert Ballin in New York. Then she accompanied Hans, Peter, Tommy, and Nena back to Los Angeles on the four-day ride that had so entranced her the previous March. While she was gone, Berthold wrote her a sweet, grateful letter in which he told her that he loved the “Hollywood Salka” even more than every other Salka he had known. She was the one who drove his life, he said wryly, alluding to his hopelessness behind the wheel. She was the globetrotter of his world (Weltenbummler is the charming word he used: “world window-shopper”), and she was, he believed without a doubt, the American driver of their luck.

  Peter and Hans Viertel, Berlin, 1926.

  After their long voyage across the ocean and then the continent, the three Viertel boys were very glad to reach California. They fell in love immediately with De Witt Fuller, the new chauffeur, and the housekeeper, Emma. Their German nanny was distinctly less enchanted with the servants, harboring an ingrown distrust of “die Schwarzen,” whose like she had probably never encountered in Europe. Emil Jannings, too, had warned he would never have a meal in Salka’s house while her Negro servants were there. But Salka appealed to Nena’s Christian morals and coaxed her into a grudging politeness.

  Salka and the boys spent the next several months taking English lessons with a tutor and making trips to the Santa Monica pier to ride the merry-go-round. She was glad to be able to send fifty dollars here or five dollars there to her parents, as money back home at Wychylowka was tight. Her seventy-eight-year-old father was no longer practicing law, and when the weather was cold her parents could not always rely on the vacationers they took in as boarders to supplement their income, nor on the fruit from their orchards that they sold to pay their bank loans. Letters to Salka from her mother showed much curiosity about life in California. “Are there snakes on the beach?” she asked. “What about mosquitoes? How is it that such splendid fruit grows in the desert? Are the film stars interesting upon closer acquaintance?”

  Berthold and Salka began to be invited to Fox studio parties. There Salka paid special attention to the wives, whom she tended to respect more than the husbands. She found Berthold’s producer, Sol Wurtzel, intolerably coarse. But she had warm feelings for Wurtzel’s wife Marion, who invited her to lunch and on shopping excursions. One afternoon, Salka watched as Mrs. Wurtzel spent three hundred dollars on fripperi
es in an expensive boutique. She explained to Salka that, as a poverty-stricken Jewish girl in her small Polish hometown, she had had to share a single pair of shoes with her sister. So it was of no small consequence to her now to be able to buy things she didn’t need.

  Some of the other wives passed their days playing golf. The director Jacques Feyder and his actress wife Françoise Rosay, whom Salka had seen at the Mendelssohn gala in Berlin, were also recent arrivals in Hollywood, and Françoise gamely suggested to Salka that they give golf a try. They abandoned the idea almost at once. Casting about for a role in this environment, Salka was firm about at least one thing: “We were professional women,” she decided, “and to survive in Hollywood we had to work.”

  For the moment, though, work was Berthold’s province alone. Murnau had been struggling from the beginning with his third Fox picture, and things were not getting better. There were problems with casting. There were disagreements about the story. Our Daily Bread was to be, as Murnau had explained to the studio chief William Fox in a letter at the end of 1927, “a tale about wheat, about the sacredness of bread, about the estrangement of the modern city dwellers and their ignorance about Nature’s sources of sustenance.” Under pressure, Berthold’s versions of the script became more and more spare, cutting out the expensive visual effects that had reflected Murnau’s original vision. Berthold wrote three drafts in all, with further contributions by a screenwriter named Marion Orth, who had also worked on Murnau’s last picture, 4 Devils. Filming was delayed for months while various crises mounted, including Murnau’s hospitalization for appendicitis in early July.