The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Christina’s ambiguity invites viewers to project their own fantasies on Garbo’s blank mask, to see what they want to see. This is what makes the picture a serious work of art and an eternally debatable one. According to Ben Urwand’s 2013 book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, Queen Christina played for a robust forty-four days after its 1934 premiere in Nazi-dominated Berlin, earning National Socialist approval as “artistically valuable.” The picture’s value for the Third Reich lay in its perceived celebration of the Führerprinzip, or the “leader principle,” a concept applied to Hitler maintaining that the Führer had a direct mystical line of communication with his people, who in turn invested him with absolute authority.

  Somehow, the idea that the Swedish queen embodied the Führerprinzip was the official National Socialist takeaway from Queen Christina. Hitler’s propagandists saw what they wanted to see, and ignored the rest. Clearly those officials were not bothering much about the picture’s pacifist theme. And if they saw their fascist ideal of blind fealty in the film, their ideological enemies found their own reasons to laud the picture. In 1967, Salka wrote to Sam Behrman that Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin’s daughter, had mentioned in her own memoir how she had loved Queen Christina when her approving father arranged to have it screened for her when she was a child. “Did I ever tell you,” Salka wrote to Behrman, “how many people wrote me in the Thirties how deeply affected they were by Christina’s renunciation of power and her pacifism.” To which Behrman replied: “to think of you and me slaving away in the Thalberg building to provide a thrill for the Stalin girl.”

  While Christina did its best to affirm antifascist values, no case can be made that it is an anti-Nazi movie. Those pictures would come later, under different circumstances. Metro’s The Mortal Storm is set in Germany in 1933 during the same initial wave of persecution that Berthold had fled. While it was one of the first Hollywood pictures to condemn Nazi anti-Semitism, it did not appear until 1940. Christina does not offer any such blistering indictments. But if Christina is not an anti-Nazi movie, its pacifist sentiments suggest that it’s a pro-Weimar movie, representing everything that Salka mourned and missed, and censuring the regime that suppressed its convictions. Salka deserves more credit for the picture’s sensibility than she has received. She was already a passionate ambassador for fleeing European intellectuals and would grow more and more authoritatively into that role.

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  WHILE QUEEN CHRISTINA HOLDS UP A MIRROR to Salka’s Europe of 1933, Salka was not the picture’s only European influence. There was Garbo herself, who returned from her trip to Sweden with a suitcase full of notes on period architecture and clothing which she had taken in Uppsala and Stockholm. According to Metro’s publicity chief Howard Strickling, Garbo was “a daily consultant in matters of historical importance…In every department, Greta Garbo was technical advisor as well as the star of Queen Christina.” Garbo’s ideas came vividly to life at the hands of the scene designer Alexander Toluboff, who had studied architecture in St. Petersburg in the early 1900s and was responsible for the splendidly aged sets for Christina’s castle, the village, and the country inn. There was also the brilliant cinematographer William H. Daniels, who was American but who had learned innovations in lighting from the Austrian director Erich von Stroheim, with whom he’d worked regularly early in his career.

  Also influential was Christina’s director, hired in May 1933 after Garbo’s two first choices proved unavailable. The final candidate, proposed by Salka, was Rouben Mamoulian, whose landmark Broadway all-black production of Porgy Salka and Berthold had admired when they first landed in New York in 1928.

  Mamoulian was born an ethnic Armenian in 1897 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), in the Caucasus in imperial Russia. For centuries the city was a sophisticated crossroads for trade and culture between Europe and Asia, its cobblestoned alleys and bazaars and cafés ringing with the languages of many nations. Artists and writers flocked there. Drama societies and orchestras thrived. As a watchful child in this milieu, Mamoulian learned to speak at least five languages and went on to study acting and directing at the Moscow Art Theatre. Eventually he made his way to Broadway, where he specialized in the integration of movement, music, and Expressionist light and shadow, creating a syncopating energy on the stage that was, for its time, brand-new. When Mamoulian got to Hollywood, he translated his theatrical gifts to the screen in Applause, Love Me Tonight, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Garbo was sold on Salka’s suggestion of Mamoulian after the actress saw a rough cut of his picture The Song of Songs and noted the tenderness with which he had directed Marlene Dietrich.

  Always immaculately dressed in gray flannel, as if eager to trade his foreignness for the demeanor of an East Coast gentleman, Mamoulian was an artist whose power came from the creative tension between his outsider’s sensibility and his wish to blend into the American studio system. He was also a tireless perfectionist, his dedication reminding Salka of Murnau. After long hours at the studio Mamoulian would rush through dinner, she said, “to come to my house and go over new problems, prodding, correcting again and again, saying No to every suggestion, sure that only he himself could find the solution.”

  Mamoulian’s intensity paid off. Thalberg was fond of saying that every great film must have one great scene, and Queen Christina has two. Both are wordless, and both exhibit Mamoulian’s genius for soliciting emotion through a theatrical tableau. The film’s final shot, scripted by Harvey Gates, is the closing flourish in a picture that fuses Christina’s character in the minds of moviegoers with Garbo’s. “I’m tired of being a symbol,” Christina complains to her chancellor in an earlier scene. “I long to be a human being, a longing I cannot suppress.” Yet that final shot of the queen standing at the prow of a great ship and staring into an uncertain future is nothing if not symbolic. It made an indelible image of Garbo as the elusive queen of filmdom.

  Mamoulian knew, as he told the film historian Kevin Brownlow, that in this final scene “the audience will write in whatever emotion they feel should be there.” We imagine ourselves in Christina’s place, and we ask: What will happen to me in an unknown land? What will I lose by abandoning my home and my former self? They are questions every émigré asks every day. They are questions Garbo, Salka, and Mamoulian continued to ask as they assimilated their European perspectives into American film culture.

  The other great scene in Queen Christina takes place in a rural inn after the queen and her lover, the Spanish diplomat played by John Gilbert, have spent the night together. (The part had nearly gone to the young Laurence Olivier, but Garbo insisted on casting Gilbert, who was at that time down on his luck.) In a wordless reverie, Christina moves around the room, trying to ensure that she’ll remember this moment of happiness by touching all the objects in it: the walls, a mirror, a spinning wheel, an icon, a pillow, the bedpost. “This has to be sheer poetry and feeling,” Mamoulian told Garbo as she prepared for the scene. He filmed it using a metronome to time Garbo’s movements, a method he had used in Porgy onstage and in the film Love Me Tonight. “I have been memorizing this room,” Christina tells Don Antonio. “In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room.”

  As the biographer Barry Paris describes it, Mamoulian and Garbo composed the scene together using Stanislavsky’s technique of summoning emotion through sense memory. Four years earlier, after the death of Garbo’s mentor Mauritz Stiller, the actress had asked to be shown where Stiller’s belongings were stored. According to Stiller’s lawyer, Garbo had walked around the room, touching Stiller’s effects and making “sad little comments” about them: “This was the suitcase he bought in America,” she said; “And those rugs—I remember when he bought them in Turkey.”

  Together, Garbo, Mamoulian, and cameraman William Daniels made the “memorizing this room” scene one of the most poignant in film history, an anticipation of loss and a premonition of Christina’s abdication ad
dress later in the film, when she entreats her distraught subjects: “Let me remember you with love and loyalty, until memory is no more.” Garbo’s fondling of the objects in the room is more erotic than any love scene in the picture, made urgent by the memory and the expectation of grief. In the scene one senses that Garbo’s pain over the hardships and losses she endured during her childhood was the sense memory closest to her heart. Her ability to access and convey that pain elevated her art to the very highest level of her time, and perhaps of all time.

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  GARBO WAS INITIALLY WORRIED that her countrymen would hate the picture. “I am so ashamed of Christina,” she wrote to a Swedish friend in 1934. “Just imagine [our queen] abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard.” Yet the film was an enormous success in Sweden. Audiences there were thrilled to accept Garbo as the remade image of their monarch. In later years, Garbo felt more affinity for the role, telling Sam Behrman in 1962 that she personally resembled the actual Queen Christina more than any other character she played. As Thalberg had hoped, the picture did very well in Europe, grossing $1.843 million. American profits were a different story. Despite a lavish promotional campaign in the United States—a “talking billboard” on a Hollywood lot, a coloring contest, period fashion displays, and reviews that fused the tantalizing inscrutability of the star with that of the historical figure (“Queen Christina is entirely Garbo, and Garbo is entirely Queen Christina”)—the film brought in a disappointing $632,000 profit in America, marking the first time that a Garbo film earned less domestically than it did overseas.

  Even so, as Salka said in her memoir, thirty years later strangers were writing to her to praise the picture and to lament that such films were no longer being made. “The most important critic is time,” director Mamoulian was said to have once remarked. Christina’s enduring value, Salka believed, was “mainly due to Garbo and her unique personality, talent and beauty, but the film survives also on its own merits.” Berthold agreed, writing to Salka in 1934 that the picture was “all in all a decent, coherent work, a clean film. Hollywood instead of Sweden—but skillful and controlled.” He continued in a further letter: “You didn’t want to make anything of your success with Christina, and that is within your…character. And yet it was a fine and decent success, and a well-deserved one, for ultimately it was your idea, you fought for it, even Mamoulian…was your suggestion…God knows you deserve to be admired for it…It was a victory for your character, your personality.”

  About Salka’s work on the film, Garbo concurred. She appreciated how hard Salka had labored from the beginning to add sophistication to the script and to prevent it from devolving into a silly romance. Years later, Garbo had this to say about Salka to the photographer Cecil Beaton: “If there was ever any argument about a script I always had this woman to fight for me. She was indefatigable and worked on them to saturation point and always found something good that others wouldn’t bother about.”

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  DURING THE FILMING OF QUEEN CHRISTINA, from August to October 1933, Salka went to work on the script for Garbo’s next film. Ten writers, including Vicki Baum, had already been struggling to adapt The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel about a doctor and his unfaithful wife who travel to China to combat a cholera epidemic. Salka was reluctant to take on the challenge of tailoring this melodrama for the picture’s producer, Hunt Stromberg, a former sportswriter. The occasional call back to the Christina set to provide rewrites was a welcome interruption.

  In the middle of those hectic months, a new romance unexpectedly made its way over her door-sill. Salka got a phone call from her friend Fred Zinnemann, Berthold’s former assistant who was just beginning his directing career. Zinnemann told Salka that the Berlin-born younger son of Max Reinhardt was now living in Santa Monica and had asked to meet her. That evening, Salka’s ex-lover Oliver Garrett was leaving through her front gate after their customary after-work drink when he passed a young man who’d unfolded himself from a decaying old roadster and was heading to the door. Mildly jealous, Oliver wondered who this could be.

  Gottfried Reinhardt was twenty-two years old to Salka’s forty-four, a large boy-man with a wry smile, his father’s soulful gaze, and a thicket of shiny brown hair. He wanted to work in pictures, was then assisting Lubitsch at Paramount, and he told Salka that it had been Berthold, while in Berlin during the early months of that year, who had persuaded Gottfried’s mother to let him make the journey to Hollywood.

  Gottfried was funny and shrewd beyond his years, brimming with political opinions and vaulting ambition. He asked Salka’s permission to smoke in an endearing way that reminded her of her former lover, the Viennese art historian Ludwig Münz. In fact everything about Gottfried, as they laughed together that evening, called Salka back to her earlier life—to Berlin, to her days in the Reinhardt theaters, to all the old friends she’d left behind. Where Oliver Garrett had been an envoy to the world of American culture, Gottfried was a filament of her past thrown across the ocean, binding her once again to Europe. There was no resisting him. “I did not jump, but slid into a love affair, which to many people appeared quite insane,” Salka later wrote. Salka and Gottfried became an unofficial but unmistakable couple and remained so throughout the next decade, deeply involved emotionally, physically, and eventually professionally. For long periods Gottfried lived in the house with Salka. As often as not he performed the host duties at the Mabery Road Sunday parties, until the day came in 1943 when one of them would break the other’s heart.

  In July, Berthold at last returned from Europe and folded himself into this complicated household situation. He stayed only until the summer’s end, because he and Gaumont-British had at last agreed on the film which he would write and direct in London. It was based on a Viennese novel called Little Friend, and it told of the damaging effects of a disintegrating marriage on a couple’s young daughter. Once again, the financial dynamic of the Viertels’ marriage was shifting: Salka continued to draw her Metro salary, but now in London Berthold would be bringing in a decent paycheck as well. In the meantime their sexual relationship had continued down its regretful but certain path. Berthold’s “lost year,” so far from home, stood impassably between them. “Odysseus resented bitterly that Penelope had not waited patiently for his return, though he himself had not renounced the Nausicaas,” Salka noted. Still, they refused to abandon their marriage. “He was as dear to me as ever,” remembered Salka, “but the impulse which had always drawn us to each other, no matter what happened, was no longer there. I felt an enormous tenderness for him but also the sad certainty that never again would we be lovers.”

  This was the summer of the Christina shoot, and of Mamoulian’s round-the-clock obsession with every detail. On many midnights, after long evenings when Mamoulian came to Mabery Road to mull solutions to the problems that had arisen during the day’s filming, Berthold emerged from the room where he’d been working with his secretary, one of the first refugees to land in Hollywood. Gottfried, whom Berthold liked, would often be there as well, to lament the latest horrors perpetrated in Germany. Salka recalled that “then, exhausted, we all had a nightcap together.”

  Salka always insisted that her sons were undamaged by their parents’ complex relationship. During the day she was a sentimental and demanding mother, alternately insisting on her devotion and haranguing the boys about their studies. But the nights were her own. The boys adjusted to the domestic changes, as children do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching among the adults in the house. For them Gottfried was like a genial young uncle in a house that was constantly full of people—in fact increasingly crowded, even during these early years, with refugees. Gottfried was kind and encouraging toward the Viertel boys, offering Peter money for every French novel he agreed to read. But there was never any confusion for the boys about Berthold’s primacy for them among the Mabery Road relationships. They were happy to
see their father return from his travels, and sorry to see their mother in tears when he left again. Berthold’s long absences and the household’s shifting emotional alliances affected each of the boys, in different ways, more profoundly than Salka was willing to admit.

  When summer slid into fall, Berthold set off for London. Salka packed his suitcases and wrote out the instructions for his diet which she knew he would ignore. Hans, Peter, Salka, and Gottfried accompanied Berthold to the Pasadena train station. Tommy, age eight, was too sad to go with them. As always during farewells, Salka broke down in tears. She ran beside the train for as long as she could, until Gottfried brought her back to the children and they set off for home.

  From the Chief Berthold wrote to Salka: “remember, never do anything out of your mad generosity. Don’t jump head-on into decisions you might later regret. Cable me, phone me, and never give up loving me. Do you hear, never! As for me, only death can cure my addiction to you.”