The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  5

  FATHERLAND

  From the very beginning, the studios gave us Papas.

  —LUCILLE BALL

  I once had a beautiful fatherland. The oak tree Grew so tall there, the violets gently nodded.

  It was a dream.

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  LOS ANGELES, LONDON, AND SANARY-SUR-MER

  1934–1936

  THE ANTIFASCIST EXODUS FROM EUROPE was never homogeneous and never fixed. It evolved constantly, prompted by specific geopolitical events, and caused many different kinds of people with different motivations to move around the globe in different ways. The spirit of the Weimar Republic, the critic Alex Ross has written, “spoke in the meeting of opposites.” That clamor was no less dissonant in exile.

  In 1933, over 53,000 emigrants left Germany, of whom about 37,000 were Jews. At the time many of those emigrants believed that Hitler’s success was unsustainable and that those who had been forced to leave would soon be able to return. Kurt Weill, with whom Berthold had been reunited in Prague after the Reichstag fire, wrote about Germany at that time: “I consider what is going on here so sickening that I cannot imagine it lasting more than a couple of months…But one could be very wrong.” Like Weill, most emigrants in this period ventured only as far as the nearest safe place: Prague or Paris, Amsterdam or London. Few were thinking yet of Los Angeles.

  Even this early, for many the prospect of exile was so abhorrent that they considered suicide their only option. Paul Nikolaus, one of the leading political comedians in the Berlin cabaret circuit, killed himself in Lucerne at the end of March 1933. From one of his last letters: “For once, no joke. I am taking my own life. Why? I could not return to Germany without taking it there. I cannot work there now, I do not want to work there now, and yet unfortunately I have fallen in love with my fatherland. I cannot live in these times.” Others ended their lives with the same despondency in the following months and years, in Europe and around the world.

  * * *

  —

  THE LONDON OF BERTHOLD’S LITTLE FRIEND DAYS was not yet overflowing with refugees, as it would be four years later, after the Austrian annexation. (By the end of 1938, an estimated 11,000 would reach England.) But by 1934 plenty had gathered there already, including a convergence of Weimar cinema people. Actor Fritz Kortner emigrated with his entire family, and tried to persuade Brecht and the novelist Leonhard Frank to join him. Conrad Veidt was there, playing the lead in a British adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Jew Süss. (A second, malevolently anti-Semitic version of the film would be made in Germany in 1940 and would become a wildly successful propaganda tool.) Writers had begun to settle in London as well, for varying periods: Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler, Alfred Kerr, Elias Canetti. Yet for Berthold, assimilating into London’s moviemaking community came with frustrations. His grasp of English was good, but he had difficulty adjusting to yet another new film culture whose pace was even slower than Hollywood’s, with too many long weekends and maddening tea breaks.

  Berthold lost his dialogue writer for Little Friend when she left abruptly to work on a production of her own play. Through a British cabaret singer named Jean Ross, Berthold heard about a friend of Ross’s who had recently published an interesting second novel. Berthold paged through the book and pronounced it “genial,” by which he meant in the German sense “gifted with genius.” He hired the boyish and handsome thirty-year-old writer, who had no experience in film and whose name was Christopher Isherwood, sight unseen.

  Berthold didn’t really need a writer. He was lonely, and he wanted an audience. Isherwood had spent five years in Germany before 1933 and was fluent enough in the language to understand Berthold’s ironic asides and to listen appreciatively when Berthold recited his poems. “He needed an amateur, an innocent, a disciple, a victim,” remembered Isherwood in the 1970s. Berthold admitted as much to Salka in a January 1934 letter. “I need disciples,” Berthold told her about Isherwood, “because they give me the necessary illusion that I am working in a community and not for an industry, [an illusion] with which I cannot dispense if I want to be productive.”

  Isherwood was happy enough to play the amateur for Berthold. He loved movies and was eager to learn what he could. More important to Isherwood, though, was his determination to record this experience for his own literary purposes, as he recorded everything. He went on to create a memorable portrait of Berthold as the Austrian filmmaker Friedrich Bergmann in one of his best novels, Prater Violet (1945). In that book he described Berthold, who was then forty-eight but looked much older, this way: “His head was magnificent, and massive as sculptured granite…I studied the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose, the bushy black hair in the nostrils. The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave.” “I knew that face,” the Isherwood character continues. “It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.”

  Isherwood was fifteen years younger than Salka, born in 1904. The heir to a once-grand country estate in Cheshire, he was a schoolboy of eleven when his father was killed at Ypres during the Great War. In 1929, at age twenty-five, Isherwood moved to Berlin, eager to escape from a homeland in which his homosexuality was a criminal offense. Because he considered himself a fugitive from a country that rejected him for the ineradicable truth of his sexual orientation, Isherwood came to identify deeply with refugees. In Prater Violet the Berthold character delivers a mild objection to this, insisting that Christopher, for all his sympathy, can’t really understand what it means to be a refugee. “You have always been safe and protected,” he tells Christopher. “Your home has never been threatened. You cannot know what it is like to be an exile, a perpetual stranger…I am bitterly ashamed that I am here, in safety.”

  When he was living in Berlin, Isherwood fell in love with a German boy named Heinz Neddermeyer, with whom he fled the country in 1933. During the Little Friend months, after Heinz’s tourist visa expired and he was required to return to Germany, Isherwood spent much of his time seeking permission for Heinz to return to England. Working with Berthold helped to distract Isherwood from this personal anxiety. He became captivated and highly entertained by Berthold’s work habits.

  These included hours of manic procrastination in the older man’s smoky Knightsbridge lair, during which Berthold would expostulate brilliantly about everything except the project at hand: his Die Truppe productions in the 1920s, from which he would recite entire speeches; the poetry of Hölderlin; the dark future of the world; the Reichstag fire trial, which was then in the news. Berthold was furiously energetic in some hours and balky in others. There were black diabetic rages if he forgot to eat, and ravenous mealtimes when at last he did. He missed his family in California and talked to Isherwood constantly about Salka and his sons: Hans, tall and thin at sixteen, with a passion for Marxist politics; Peter, a sporty fifteen, with effortless charm and good grades; Tommy, at ten, bewildered by the world, with the soul of a poet. Berthold would show Isherwood their latest photos and letters, and would describe the white house with its green roof, and the canyon and the Pacific shoreline, all of which seemed powerfully exotic and romantic to Isherwood. Berthold told Isherwood that when he came to visit them in California he would meet Garbo, would see her every day, because she came to swim and ride horses with the boys.

  About a decade later, this came true. Isherwood would be living over the garage on Mabery Road, and would become one of Salka’s dearest friends, perhaps the only one of her famous writer friends to mention her more than cursorily in memoirs and diaries. For now, Isherwood introduced Berthold to an actress named Beatrix Lehmann, a very good actress from a distinguished literary family who was not afraid to transform herself utterly for a role, and who came to meet Berthold for the first time, as Isherwood remembered it, wearing an ensemble made mostly of green feathers. Berthold a
nd Beatrix embarked on a serious romance, a “humanly consolidated” relationship, as Berthold wrote candidly to Salka. By 1935 he had cast Beatrix in the second of his Gaumont-British films, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, and was living with her in her Victorian house on the Thames, as he told Salka, largely “in seclusion.”

  By then Isherwood had moved on, seeking corners of the world where he and Heinz could live together without fear of arrest. But Isherwood called the making of Little Friend “a new and absolutely necessary phase of his education as a writer,” and he wrote movingly about his friendship with Berthold. “Beneath outer consciousness, two other beings, anonymous, impersonal, without labels, had met and recognized each other, and had clasped hands,” Isherwood wrote. “He was my father. I was his son. And I loved him very much.”

  * * *

  —

  IN SANTA MONICA, Salka had been writing letters begging her mother to leave Poland for America. But Auguste Steuermann could not imagine starting a new life in a strange land. She would not abandon her home, her husband’s burial site, and her three other children who were scattered around Europe. Salka’s brother Edward was busy giving concerts in Krakow and Warsaw and teaching piano master classes in Lwów. For the moment he was undeterred by the robust anti-Semitism flourishing under Poland’s authoritarian leader, Józef Piłsudski.

  Salka’s sister Rose—as delicate and reserved as Salka was forthright—continued to live in a now thoroughly Nazified Dresden, where her husband, Josef Gielen, was director of the State Theater. The position was too lucrative for Gielen, a Catholic, to abandon, and secure enough that Goebbels’s Ministry of Culture was willing to overlook the inconvenient fact of Gielen’s Jewish wife.

  Rose had been breathing the reek of National Socialism in Dresden since at least 1930. She had by now retreated from any kind of social life, declining to attend the theater so as not to be forced to hear the compulsory “Heil Hitler.” Salka had stopped corresponding with Rose for fear that the Gestapo, which periodically searched the Gielens’ apartment, would find her letters and use them to incriminate her sister.

  Salka’s youngest sibling, Zygmunt Steuermann, whose nickname was Dusko, was a gifted athlete who had been a star player for Sambor’s local soccer team. He went on to distinguish himself with other clubs in Lwów and Warsaw, and during the 1920s he played twice, brilliantly, for the national Polish soccer team. He had fathered a child with the pretty housekeeper at Wychylowka named Hania and was doing his best to provide for his family with poorly paid jobs in and around Warsaw. He accepted financial help from Salka, whose weekly Metro paycheck had risen to $550. In addition to Dusko and Auguste, more and more people were now depending on portions of Salka’s Metro salary, as were various rescue agencies and causes. Many refugees from Germany were already making appeals to Salka’s generosity. “There was not a day,” she wrote, “that I did not get letters asking for help, and I besieged my American friends for affidavits.”

  Affidavits were developed in accordance with the U.S. immigration policies instituted in 1924 and 1930, which denied entrance to anyone who might be “likely to become a public charge.” They were sworn testimonies from American relatives or friends that guaranteed financial support to particular immigrants in case of need. The governmental processing of affidavits was complex and time-consuming, and American citizens who agreed to provide them undertook a grave responsibility. Affidavits were neither offered nor granted lightly.

  Though he did not emigrate through Salka’s auspices, Arnold Schoenberg was among the first refugees from her wide European circle to reach Los Angeles after Hitler’s rise to power. The Viennese composer arrived in September 1934 with his wife Gertrud and little daughter Nuria. In October of the previous year, Schoenberg had been abruptly dismissed from the position he’d held since 1926 at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Denounced as a Jew and a leading purveyor of “degenerate music,” Schoenberg was stripped of his citizenship and any possibility of employment in Europe. As a refugee in Paris, just before his sixtieth birthday, he defiantly reconverted to Judaism (having converted to Lutheranism back in 1898) and departed for America, where he found a teaching position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston.

  Commuting between Boston and New York during the harsh East Coast winter worsened Schoenberg’s asthma, prompting him within the year to head west toward California. Salka looked forward to her longtime friend’s arrival. She had known him since 1911, when she was in her early twenties, through an introduction from the pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin. She wasted no time inviting Schoenberg and his family to her Sunday gatherings. On bright afternoons on Salka’s terrace, guests could spot Schoenberg, his dark eyes blazing in a finely sculpted head, as he played Ping-Pong and mingled with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx.

  Schoenberg’s welcome at Salka’s house helped to mitigate the cool reception his dodecaphonic works were receiving from the mostly baffled Los Angeles classical music community. Having been, as he later wrote, “driven into Paradise,” Schoenberg felt he had scant support on the West Coast for what many perceived as the too-bizarre evolution of his modernist oeuvre. Nor did he yet have the benefit in America of the talented disciples who were then touring throughout Europe, familiarizing audiences with his latest works. One of the most prominent of Schoenberg’s interpreters was Salka’s brother, Edward Steuermann.

  Among the guests whom Schoenberg met on Mabery Road was the puckish French playwright Marcel Achard, who had arrived from France to work on Maurice Chevalier’s pictures. There were the Metro studio composers Dimitri Tiomkin (born in Russia) and Bronislaw Kaper (born in Poland). There was the American pianist and comedian Oscar Levant, whom Schoenberg would take on as a pupil in Los Angeles for a three-year stretch. (Schoenberg was an electrifying teacher; his other Los Angeles students included the cross-cultural maverick Lou Harrison, the studio composer David Raksin, and a twenty-two-year-old John Cage.) And at Salka’s house Schoenberg was reunited with his longtime Berlin colleague Otto Klemperer, the new conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

  A Mahler protégé with a vigorous devotion to innovation during this second phase of his long career, Klemperer had also fled from Europe the previous year. Five days after he arrived in Los Angeles, Klemperer made a thrilling debut with the Philharmonic, after which Salka and Gottfried, along with Charlie Chaplin and the film director King Vidor, went backstage to congratulate him. Klemperer was as disconcerted as Schoenberg was by the casualness of Los Angeles, where audiences clapped between movements and whistled their approval, and where the Philharmonic musicians were known to address their conductor, a stringently formal personage, as “Klempie.”

  Klemperer met this odd new environment with gusto, declaring in a letter “how infinitely grateful I must be to the great America, which gives me bread and work.” Schoenberg took to paradise with similar enthusiasm. He became a UCLA football fan and played tennis with Chaplin and George Gershwin. When Gershwin died suddenly from a brain tumor in 1937 at age thirty-eight, Schoenberg eulogized him in a moving radio address. “Music to him was the air he breathed,” Schoenberg said. “There is no doubt that he was a great composer…But may I mention that I lose also a friend, whose amiable personality was very dear to me.”

  * * *

  —

  AT CHRISTMASTIME IN 1934, an invitation to Salka’s house came to a newly arrived German-Jewish composer in his late twenties named Franz Waxman. Upon entering the living room at Mabery Road, Waxman recognized some of the guests from Berlin, where he’d worked as a musician and arranger for the Weintraub Syncopators—a popular jazz band—and in the German film business as the orchestrator of Friedrich Hollaender’s score for The Blue Angel. On his way home from work one evening in early 1934 in Berlin, a gang of thugs shouting anti-Semitic slurs had shoved Waxman into the gutter and beaten him. That night he and his fiancée boarded a train to Paris, where they found rooms in a ref
ugee hotel that also housed Peter Lorre, Billy Wilder, and Friedrich Hollaender. The former chief of Germany’s UFA studios, Erich Pommer, also in Paris at that time, gave Waxman his first major film assignment, the score for Fritz Lang’s Liliom. Pommer’s next producing job, Music in the Air, for Fox Films and director Joe May, brought Waxman to Hollywood.

  In Salka’s living room that Christmas, Waxman gave his name to a stranger who immediately started out of his chair and proclaimed, “My God! I’ve been looking all over the world for you! You are the composer for my next film!” This was the British director James Whale, who was then preparing to make The Bride of Frankenstein at Universal. Whale had heard Waxman’s score for Liliom and was impressed by the composer’s invention of a “ghost orchestra.” In that picture Waxman had put a microphone up in the dome of the theater in which he was recording to give the impression that the music was coming from heaven.

  Waxman’s film score for The Bride of Frankenstein was the debut for one of the most prolific composing careers in Hollywood history. He worked on 144 films, earned twelve Oscar nominations, and won twice, for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun. In 1947 he conceived and launched the Los Angeles International Music Festival and piloted it for twenty years, premiering works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich and significantly enhancing the city’s postwar sophistication. Could one say that Salka, by inviting Waxman to her house on that Sunday, was in some way responsible for his thirty-year career? “Absolutely,” said Waxman’s son John, who believes that, in Hollywood, talent counts for 25 percent and connections for 75. One could have all the talent in the world, as Franz Waxman did, but without a fortunate link to the right people, one was nothing. As a connector, Salka was more valuable than rubies to a foreign young composer who showed up at her door and was offered the introductions he needed. Waxman paid his good fortune forward by writing affidavits for Jews desperate to leave Europe. Many of those beneficiaries were strangers to him, including an entire family in Vienna named Waxman, to whom he was not related and of whom he had never heard. Their school-age daughter had written to him out of the blue after seeing his name on the credits at the cinema. He saved them all.