The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

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  FOR THE MOMENT, Berthold and Salka’s chief concerns were more immediate and more pecuniary. When the summer of 1929 ended, they extended the lease on the Mabery Road house for another year and renewed their government-issued visitors’ permits, too ambivalent at that moment to take the next step to apply for immigration visas. Their family and friends were pressuring them to come back, and in those early Hollywood days, Salka confessed, she “was counting the days till [her] return to Europe.” But Berthold was still doing well at Fox and the Viertel sons were thriving, spending much of their free time at the beach and becoming strong swimmers. In no time they had changed from pasty little Jungen in short pants and overcoats to bronzed California boys who answered their parents’ German questions in vernacular English and raced off through the little highway tunnel to go bodysurfing in the ocean.

  Salka did what she could to add some style to the house, covering its hideous black-velvet furniture with slipcovers, renting a piano, and finding shelves for all their books that had been sent from Berlin.

  When the stock market crashed at the end of October 1929, Hollywood was slow to feel the shock. But the Viertels themselves were immediately affected. Berthold had invested their savings in Fox Theater Corporation shares, whose value had been climbing vertiginously until the crash. Now they were wiped out. Although he and Salka had managed to pay off the debts from their theater company and they still had a bit of savings for a return trip to Germany, they delayed any plans for leaving. The Viertels were accustomed to setbacks. They renegotiated their rent for the house to a lower figure of $150 per month and resolutely began again.

  Berthold’s next directing job for Fox was an “all-talker” called Seven Faces, a showcase for the Yiddish theater actor Paul Muni, whose real name was Muni Weisenfreund and who had been born in Lemberg, not far from Salka’s hometown. In Seven Faces, Muni played the caretaker in a wax museum whose figures come to life during a dream sequence. The film carries cinematic echoes back to 1924, to the silent German Expressionist horror picture Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, and looks forward toward our era, to the Night at the Museum franchise of 2006 and onward. In addition to playing the caretaker, Muni also played most of the waxwork figures, which included Franz Schubert, Don Juan, and Napoleon. For the small part of the waxwork Catherine the Great, the production supervisor recommended Salka, who’d been continuingly unhappy about the interruption of her acting career. Jumping at the chance, Salka worked hard to learn her lines in English, while her accent managed to sound Slavic enough to seem authentic.

  For an actress who until quite recently had been accustomed to striding across stage after stage in leading roles, the experience was a shock. “My face, my neck, my whole upper body had to be modeled in wax,” Salka recalled. “A company specializing in death masks did the work, during which I was allowed to breathe only through a thin straw, plastered over with plaster. I felt as if I were a model for my own tomb.”

  Salka’s participation in the shoot lasted for only four days. The rest of her scenes were filmed using only her wax figure. It made for a funny story—she relished that, and didn’t mind laughing at herself—but only in the way that extreme humiliation is funny. To be encased in her own stiff shroud, unable to move and barely to breathe, and then to be erased from the proceedings with only the waxen shell of her outline in use: this was what a forty-year-old actress at the time could expect from a casting opportunity. Salka’s name was obscured as well: in reviews for the film she was listed in the credits variously as “Salka Stenermann” and “Salka Stensrmann.” Of the experience, she wrote with characteristic wryness that “acting in fragments is like drinking from an eyedropper when you are parched.”

  Salka would appear as an actress in three more pictures between 1929 and 1931, all of them German-language versions of American films, shot quickly on the same sets as the American versions, sometimes at night while the English-language productions were shooting during the day. (Before the innovations of dubbing and subtitles in the mid-1930s, this was how Hollywood studios exported talking films to their still very lucrative foreign markets.) Two of the pictures were Warner Bros. productions: Die heilige Flamme, or The Sacred Flame, based on a Somerset Maugham play, for which Salka was paid the handsome sum of five hundred dollars per week; and Die Maske fällt, or The Way of All Men, directed by William Dieterle, a good friend of the Viertels’ from Germany.

  The best-known of Salka’s three pictures, released in December of 1930, was a German-language remake of MGM’s Anna Christie, marketed as the first film in which “Garbo Talks!” It was Greta Garbo’s personal favorite of all her pictures. Salka played Marthy Owens, the waterfront prostitute who’d been portrayed to great effect in the film’s English-speaking version by the great American actress Marie Dressler. Salka was nowhere near as enamored of the film as Garbo was. She hated her makeup and her costumes and felt uncomfortable when her scenes began shooting. But she used some of her time on set to help the director, her friend Jacques Feyder, with the German dialogue. “I got excellent reviews and fan mail from Germany,” Salka wrote about her role in Anna Christie in the German edition of her memoirs, “but nothing could change my conviction that [as an actress] I belonged to the stage and not the movies.”

  Salka never acted again after these small roles, in films or on the stage. It was an acute sort of exile for her, a death of self that she mourned for the rest of her life. “It made me miserable that I, who had started to act at the age of seventeen, had to be idle in my best years,” she wrote. Yet her flair for drama lived on, unofficially, during her crowded Sunday parties on Mabery Road. The novelist Christopher Isherwood later offered a description of Salka during those afternoons:

  She greeted newcomers warmly and got them involved in conversation with earlier arrivals, then she disappeared into the kitchen to see how things were going. I remember her most vividly at this moment of greeting: she was strikingly aristocratic and unaffected. Her posture, the line of her spine and neck, was still beautiful; you could believe that she had been a great actress.

  When she first arrived in Hollywood, Salka had written to Berthold during one of their worst quarrels that “the only kind of home that I had was the stage.” Because she recognized, as feminist scholars have noted, “that home and estrangement were not geographically determined,” she was especially well suited to create an alternative home for others. Now and for the rest of her life, although Salka never stopped wishing it were otherwise, the most effective stage she would have would be her home.

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  ONE CHILLY EVENING, Ernst Lubitsch and his wife gave a party at their six-columned Southern Colonial Revival estate on Beverly Drive. (Some film scholars believe it took place in the spring or around Christmas of 1929, while others claim it was in 1930 or 1931.) It was a formal gathering of about forty people. The servants balanced trays of bootleg booze as they sidestepped around the incoming guests. In the well-appointed living room the men huddled to talk about work, dressed in black tie, their voices booming. Their host was at the center, stocky and dapper, his dark hair meticulously parted, an eternal cigar between his teeth, his demeanor both amused and discerning.

  In the opposite corner the ladies were clustered, laughing delicately, showing off their evening gowns. A lone man had joined their circle: Jacques Feyder, the Belgian director. He gestured a welcome to a woman friend of his, smartly dressed in a tailored cocktail dress, who’d arrived to join the group. It was Salka Viertel, Lubitsch’s colleague from their years as actors in Reinhardt’s theaters, whom Feyder had met at the Mendelssohn villa in Berlin.

  Salka and her husband Berthold had decided to attend the party out of nostalgia. The occasion, Salka noted later in her memoir, was to honor a visiting German movie star whose husband, a producer, was someone Berthold had known in Berlin. Feyder ushered Salka over to a sofa on which the movie star was
holding court. She was engulfed in a dress with voluminously flouncy skirts. The dress took up most of the sofa except for another woman, who sat squashed into the only remaining space. The squashed woman wore a severe black suit instead of an evening gown. Salka had never met her before, but recognized immediately that she was Greta Garbo.

  As there was no room for her on the couch, Salka suggested that Garbo join her outside on the veranda. When they got there they saw that the night was cold enough for the few outside guests to see their own breath. Feyder rejoined the two women with a bottle of champagne and the talk grew animated. Salka spoke about The Saga of Gösta Berling, the only one of Garbo’s films that she had seen, and about her own work in the theater. Salka found Garbo intelligent, totally unaffected, and droll, joking about her poor German and her English, both of which were actually quite good. Eventually Berthold joined them and the four of them kept talking until late in the evening.

  Salka wrote later that there was always something startling about the loveliness of Garbo’s face, as if, on every viewing, one was seeing it for the first time. Garbo was then in her middle twenties and approaching the height of her fame. She was fixated on her need for privacy and rightly so: fans and reporters hounded her relentlessly.

  On Mabery Road the next day, the Viertel family was just finishing lunch when the doorbell rang. When Salka went to the front door she saw the famous face again, peering through the open window of the entrance. She noted that Garbo looked even more beautiful in the sunny light of noontime. She was makeup-free except for mascara on her naturally long eyelashes. She looked a bit sunburned and was wearing a well-cut shirtwaist and slacks.

  The actress was in a merry mood. She was living nearby at the moment, she said, and was hoping to continue their conversation from the previous night. In fact Garbo stayed all afternoon. She chatted with the three Viertel boys and patted their waggy-tailed dog, Buddy. She and Salka strolled on the beach in the golden air, up past the Santa Monica pier with its merry-go-round. Later they sat talking in Salka’s bedroom as the light grew deeper and more shadowy. In the evening Berthold and Salka walked with Garbo back to her rooms at the Hotel Miramar, where they said warm goodbyes and made their way back home. Berthold said to Salka that he found Garbo absolutely charming, polite, and attentive. He noted her oversensitivity but also her resilience. Salka answered that Garbo’s fame must prevent her from living an authentic life. Berthold agreed, saying it was a high price to pay.

  In her memoir, Salka devoted less than a page and a half to her first encounters with Garbo, reporting them without fanfare and concluding rather vaguely: “She came very often early in the morning when the beach was deserted, and we took long walks together.” But that first meeting in Ernst Lubitsch’s living room was an electrifying moment for both women. It sparked the longest and most important relationship either of them would ever have in Hollywood. Instinctively they must have known that each had what the other needed. As a major film star at the peak of her earning potential, Garbo had power, while Salka had stability, patience, ironclad loyalty, and a gift for advocacy. Along with advice and total discretion, Salka offered Garbo a refuge on Mabery Road, where the actress could be herself, relaxed and without airs. Garbo moved into eleven different houses during her years in California, but each of these was a fortress, not a place of comfort. They could never be home, as Mabery Road came to represent for her. And Garbo offered Salka as much if not more in return. Salka wrote to a friend in the mid-1960s that Garbo “is a kind of deus ex machina responsible for the strange turn my life took, and kept me in America.”

  Salka’s loyalty to Garbo was possibly the reason for her declining to mention in her memoir the name of the German film star whom Lubitsch was honoring at his party the night she and Garbo met. Cinema devotees have guessed for years that this was Marlene Dietrich, who was being welcomed by Hollywood’s film community from the time of her arrival there on March 31, 1930. (The American premiere of Dietrich’s The Blue Angel took place in December of that year.) If it’s true that Lubitsch gave the party in honor of Dietrich, Salka would have had good reasons for neglecting to mention Dietrich in this portion of her memoir. (She does mention a “Mary Dietrich” once in an earlier section, when she tells of acting with her in Max Reinhardt’s 1911 Berlin production of Heinrich Kleist’s Penthesilea, in which the two young women played Amazons and showed off their legs. But this actress was not Marlene Dietrich, who would have been too young to perform with Salka at that time.) Salka was first and always loyal to Garbo, who was locked into a decades-long, studio-fostered rivalry with Dietrich. Thus Salka would have felt compelled to erase Dietrich’s name from the scene in her memoir when she first meets Garbo by simply calling her, as she does, “a visiting German film star.” In any case, Salka and Dietrich knew each other well, and Dietrich frequently showed up at Salka’s Sunday afternoons in Santa Monica. The two women shared a passionate dedication to antifascism and a mutual if wary respect. Salka’s son Peter later observed that “my mother thought [Dietrich] something of a poseuse, playing Mother Earth off the screen.”

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  BERTHOLD HAD TOLD SALKA admiringly that she was the “driver” of their family life. As she searched for ways to channel the energy she had reserved for acting into other kinds of work, she discovered that she was just as good at helping to drive the professional affairs of her friends. As Salka’s footing in America grew surer, she improvised a volunteer job for herself as a social ambassador between the newcomers who were flocking to Hollywood and the Americans and Europeans who were already established there. Much of this took place at her increasingly popular parties on Mabery Road. There Salka welcomed the playwrights, novelists, and journalists who’d been summoned from New York to the West Coast, having found themselves suddenly in demand as dialogue writers when the silents gave way to talking pictures. She made introductions on their behalf to director friends like William Dieterle and to actors like Charles Boyer. She also made a place at the table for Berthold’s new assistant, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring filmmaker from Vienna named Fred Zinnemann, who had arrived in the States on the day of the stock-market crash in October 1929.

  Salka performed her role as a connector of people with genuine warmth and panache. In making introductions she was witty when she spoke and careful when she listened. On Sunday afternoons at her house, alliances formed and circles expanded around her as she commanded the room—something she had not had an opportunity to do since her last days on theater stages.

  Her pro bono human resources work extended well beyond the Sunday parties. In 1930 and 1931, she became a de facto manager for two of early cinema’s most notable figures: F. W. Murnau, the Expressionist master who had been responsible for bringing Berthold to Hollywood; and the visiting Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Both were men of enormous artistic sensitivity who found themselves at odds with a studio system that had gone to great expense to lure them to Hollywood and then did not know how to work with them.

  By mid-1930, Murnau’s directing contract with Fox was reaching an unhappy end, while Eisenstein—whose landmark Potemkin was the only silent picture that Salka considered a masterpiece—had accepted a six-month contract with Paramount. Each man, for different reasons, confided his immense frustrations to the Viertels. Murnau’s last Fox picture, the Oregon wheat-field epic which Berthold wrote, had been retitled City Girl and butchered by the studio, which had added extra footage and a clumsy dialogue track to stay current with the transition into talkies. Eisenstein’s scenarios for Paramount—one about the 1849 California gold rush and another about a house made entirely of glass—were both moldering away in Paramount’s files, never to be made. Nor did anything come of Eisenstein’s final attempt at a film for Paramount, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy.

  In separate ventures, Murnau and Eisenstein each decided to make an independent picture far away from the confines of the
Hollywood studios. Salka and Berthold offered their support as Murnau scraped financing together and headed to the South Seas to film a feature called Tabu with the well-known documentarian Robert Flaherty. The Viertels were equally sympathetic when Eisenstein set off to make a historical travelogue—“a colorful film symphony,” as Eisenstein described it—in Mexico. Eisenstein financed his long-hoped-for venture with the help of the muckraking socialist writer Upton Sinclair, whose novel Boston Salka had admired, along with some well-heeled Pasadena women who were sympathetic to Sinclair’s politics.

  By acting as an adviser and advocate for both Murnau and Eisenstein throughout their voyages, Salka served a kind of apprenticeship that would prove critical for the work she would do for hundreds of artists in the years that followed. She saw Murnau off from the harbor at San Pedro with a gift of two pounds of Malossol caviar, an act that moved the stoic Prussian to tears. And then, via letters and telegrams, she proceeded to offer advice during every phase of the South Seas film shoot.

  Hans, Peter, Berthold, Thomas, and Salka Viertel on F. W. Murnau’s yacht, 1928.

  Things went badly for Murnau in Tahiti. His collaboration with Flaherty fell apart and the production ran out of money. Yet Murnau still managed to return with completed footage for Tabu. The symphonic music for the score would cost another $50,000. Never able to refrain from helping a project they believed in, Salka and Berthold loaned the director all their newly restored savings to help pay an advance to the film’s composer.

  At last Murnau managed to complete Tabu, which he successfully sold to Paramount. But fate intervened again, this time shockingly. Only a week before the film’s New York premiere, on March 11, 1931, Murnau died from injuries he sustained in an automobile crash near Santa Barbara. Hours before the crash, he had stopped at Salka’s house to pick up sandwiches for his motoring trip up the coast. He was forty-two years old.