The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

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  AT METRO, preparations for Salka’s next picture were not going smoothly. The Painted Veil was scheduled to ride along on a wave of Asia-themed pictures, including Paramount’s Shanghai Express and Columbia’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen. The production adhered to Metro’s formula of lavish spending and compulsive micromanagement, but it was ill-fated from the outset. The newly empowered Production Code Administration, commandeered by Joseph I. Breen, had begun its enforcement in June 1934, a month before shooting was scheduled. Breen went to war right away against the picture’s blasphemies, insisting on diminishing its characters’ adulterous misdeeds and ratcheting up their punishments.

  But the picture’s problems went beyond the imposition of PCA sanctimony. While most of the factors that made Queen Christina so successful were present again—a huge budget and promotional campaign, elaborate reproductions of exotic locales, an international supporting cast, a luminescent Garbo—the magic was not. Creative antagonisms sparked by the many screenplay drafts from competing writers, which had given Queen Christina both its precision and its depth, in The Painted Veil produced an insipid drama with little emotional accessibility. Garbo’s costumes, so expressively designed by Adrian in Christina, flirted here with the ridiculous. In a 1934 letter, Berthold remarked to Salka of “the abuse of Greta as a mannequin for the tailor Adrian.”

  Salka’s participation as a writer was much narrower this time. After Christina she had hoped to expand her credits, complaining in letters to Berthold that she didn’t want to write only for Garbo. Salka was consigned mostly to rewrites for The Painted Veil, particularly for some of its problematic last scenes, and she collaborated with fellow writers John Meehan and Edith Fitzgerald on the final complete screenplay. But her contributions were fewer than those of Vicki Baum, the Viennese author of the best-selling novel on which Metro’s popular 1932 film Grand Hotel had been based. Baum changed The Painted Veil’s lead character from an Englishwoman named Kitty to an Austrian named Katrin to explain Garbo’s accent and to add some Continental glamour. As with Christina, a succession of other writers including Salka then reworked the script until the picture began shooting in June 1934.

  “I have repressed the memories of The Painted Veil,” Salka later wrote, perhaps because she shared Garbo’s private opinion of the finished picture as “rubbish.” While Garbo biographer Mark A. Vieira takes pains to undervalue Salka’s contributions toward Queen Christina, both he and Barry Paris exaggerate Salka’s participation in the inferior Painted Veil, pinning the blame for its faults squarely on her shoulders. Writes Vieira: “[Garbo’s] reliance on Salka Viertel, who was not qualified to judge literary properties or dramatic values, was undermining the best efforts of producers like Stromberg, directors like [Richard] Boleslawski, and even visual artists like [cinematographer William] Daniels.”

  In fact, Salka was highly qualified to judge this literary property. She knew Maugham’s works well. She had read The Painted Veil—which the English critic Lytton Strachey called “a novel at the top of the second rank”—shortly after its publication in 1928. And she appeared as an actress in the German-language film version of Maugham’s play The Sacred Flame in 1931. Salka had informed opinions about the novel and its prolific author. “He is admittedly imaginative, or better half imaginative,” Salka wrote about Maugham in her diary in 1961. “Still I should take to heart the lesson he gives. Hard work can make a writer.” The film adaptation of Veil was quite faithful to Maugham’s novel, thanks in no small part to Salka’s familiarity with the author.

  For most people in Hollywood, Maugham was a kind of literary avatar of Metro’s luxury brand. Multiple versions of his novels, stories, and plays have been made and remade into more than sixty films. Salka was less than enthusiastic about the Veil project, which had been kicking around the studio since 1932, and which Garbo herself had chosen as her next picture after Christina. Salka called Veil “a nightmare of a film,” and wrote to Berthold in confidence that she thought Garbo’s performance ruinously bad. “The ‘mystery-fake’ does not work anymore,” she said to him about Garbo’s acting. “I am sick of it.”

  Salka’s irritation with Garbo was real but momentary. Certainly it was understandable from someone who was on call, day and night, for the actress’s every professional and personal need, from redrafting her scripts to meeting her at the boat after her European vacations. Because of the magnitude of Garbo’s celebrity, by this point most of the actress’s relationships were purely transactional. Salka came the closest among Garbo’s few intimates to overriding this dynamic, but even she was restricted by its code. According to Salka’s son Peter, Garbo was “not all that great a friend. Actually, she used my mother more than my mother used her, which sounds funny, because she was a star and my mother was an oarsman in the galley.” (Peter was making a sly multilingual pun here: Salka’s last name, Steuermann, means “helmsman” or “first mate” in German.)

  Garbo’s enduring relationship with Salka was as complex as a long marriage. By letting go of grudges and combining their strengths, each became stronger. Years later, in her diary, Salka wrote about Garbo’s assets with longing: “If I had her position—her looks—her independence—I mean financial independence—what influence would I have in the world.” Despite their mutual annoyances, the two women managed for decades to weather the recurring ebbs in their partnership with their loyalty intact.

  In any event, Salka would never have confided even a hint of her frustrations with Garbo and The Painted Veil to anyone other than Berthold or Gottfried. The stakes were too high. Too many people were relying on her paycheck. Berthold provided his own reminders. “DO NOT BREAK UP YOUR SITUATION OVER THERE,” he wrote in a telegram to Salka in June 1934. Berthold respected Salka’s role as a champion of the dispossessed and he understood the value of her job and their Santa Monica house as means of providing refuge. In February 1934 he had written to Salka that it was “the instinct of the Mother” that had motivated her to entrench herself in Hollywood and to buy the house. By 1940 he would expand on these thoughts, writing to Salka that “the house is a position, a symbol, it is famous, one must defend it! So many people in our time, the most unfortunate and bewildered in the human migration, look forward to hope in you and the famous house on Mabery Road, a shelter, a place of cordial assistance and a sort of oasis in the ever-widening desert.”

  At Metro, Salka was next assigned to work on Anna Karenina for producer David Selznick, who had joined the studio in 1933 and was turning out a series of elegant hits, including Dinner at Eight and Manhattan Melodrama. Like most screenwriters, Salka thought highly of Selznick, gratefully remembering the help he’d offered in attempting to finance Eisenstein’s Mexico picture when he was RKO’s production head in 1932.

  Selznick’s arrival at Metro came about during a studio shakeup that took the shape, as so many film industry conflicts did, of an Oedipal drama. During the time that Salka wrote her first Christina draft, Irving Thalberg embarked on a nine-month absence from the studio, triggered by the heart attack he suffered at the end of 1932 and enduring through a long convalescence spent partly in Europe. In the meantime, Louis Mayer persuaded Selznick, who was married to Mayer’s younger daughter Irene, to come to work at Metro. (“The son-in-law also rises” was the quip about these developments around the lot.) In the summer of 1933, while Thalberg was still in Europe, he learned that Mayer had removed him as vice president in charge of production and restructured the studio’s organization. Instead of serving as the sole production supervisor, Thalberg would now head one of four production units, along with Selznick, Walter Wanger, and Hunt Stromberg, with a second string of unit producers working for the big four and everyone operating under Mayer’s prevailing authority.

  Mayer had a few reasons for decentralizing Thalberg’s role. There was the legitimate question about Thalberg’s fragile health: how much longer could he continue overseeing the
studio’s punishing schedule of fifty-two movies per year? Mayer was also hoping to prevent the younger man from usurping his sovereignty. In December 1932, the influential business monthly Fortune had published a long article that purported to explain why Metro alone among the studios was turning a profit during the Depression. Fortune’s answer, without equivocation, was Irving Thalberg. In fact the unsigned article, written in an arch tone that oozed anti-Semitism, did more to burnish the myth of Thalberg as a potent, furtive Jewish genius than anything prior to Fitzgerald’s 1941 novel The Last Tycoon. “Chattering at lunch,” the article wheedled, “Mr. Thalberg and his underlings resemble in their gloomy refectory the personnel of an agitated Last Supper, with Mr. Thalberg as a nervous Nazarene free, however, from the presentiment that any of his disciples will deny or even contradict him.”

  Alarmed by the prospect that the protégé he had nurtured might be planning to overthrow him, Mayer acted swiftly to protect himself. “I’ll look after him like my own son,” he had said in 1923 when he’d hired the twenty-four-year-old Thalberg, who’d instantly been nicknamed the “Boy Wonder.” A decade later, the father sought to prevent the son’s ascendancy.

  All around the studios, in this early age of psychoanalysis, daddy issues were playing out among men and women from broken or wretched homes, among the fatherless or the cruelly fathered, the Hamlets and the Oedipuses, the Cinderellas and the foundlings. Thalberg himself served as a father figure to many. Donald Ogden Stewart, a close friend and writing partner of Salka’s, was five years older than Thalberg, yet thoroughly in his thrall. “It was a real father-and-son relationship,” Stewart said, “and you wanted to please father.” In the meantime, all the Metro actresses honed their performances under Thalberg’s paternal gaze.

  David Selznick was haunted by a painful love for his own father, Lewis J. Selznick, a high-flying film pioneer brought low by gambling and bankruptcy. The younger Selznick would reprise the same Icarian themes throughout his own career, forever trying to avenge his father’s losses. He doubled down on his filial obligations by marrying Mayer’s daughter Irene in 1930, then reporting for work at his father-in-law’s studio in 1933.

  They were all little fatherlands, the Golden Age studios—perhaps Metro most of all. Yiddish-speaking wits maintained that MGM stood for “Mayer’s Ganze Mishpocheh” (Mayer’s Entire Family), a wisecrack that perched on the edge of truth. Mayer had no problem with nepotism, insisting: “Sure, my nieces and nephews work here, and all my wife’s relatives, too. Why shouldn’t those with mazel in a family help out the others?” He considered himself a father to everyone in the studio, related or not, and was sentimental about his role. His favorites among all Metro’s pictures were the Andy Hardy series: sugary comedies in which a small-town judge presides over his orderly family with unswerving rectitude. This was Mayer’s perception of his own role as the studio’s paterfamilias: confident, magnanimous, and supreme.

  Mayer’s approach to leadership was a defense against the fear and loathing of Jews that was rampant in Los Angeles and throughout America. In his later years, Gottfried Reinhardt told the German writer Christa Wolf that during the 1930s “even the richest Jews were not allowed to join country clubs and other associations…and they couldn’t stay in certain hotels.” Gottfried’s father had had that happen to him, “his father who was a god in the theater world of Berlin.” This bigotry was likely suffered by Max Reinhardt at just this time, in September 1934, when he came to Hollywood to mount his legendary theater production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl.

  Certainly Mayer felt the sting of that same humiliation. The 1932 Fortune article that had praised Thalberg with such faint damnation had also dripped with disdain toward Mayer, sneering at his immigrant origins and accusing him of sucking up to power as only an avaricious Hebrew could. (“Mr. Mayer’s courtesies to U.S. Senators and Vice Admirals make it easier for M-G-M to borrow a battleship for Armored Cruiser or a fleet of Navy planes for Hell Divers…Mr. Mayer’s efforts fall into…the…category…of personal connections, intrigues, and affiliations…It is his business simply to get the most and give the least.”) In response, Mayer kept his head down, reinforced the coffers of the house of Metro, gave generously to a variety of charities and the Republican Party, and retained his faith in family.

  But family did not always keep its faith in him. Anna Karenina was one of the last pictures David Selznick produced before he left his father-in-law’s studio to start his own production company. As with Thalberg, Selznick’s was another bid for independence by a recalcitrant son. Before Selznick left, he was pleased that Garbo asked to work with him and hoped they could settle on a comedy for her, or maybe a new Broadway play called Dark Victory—anything other than a historical costume drama. But these failed to materialize, so they acceded to Salka’s preference for Tolstoy’s ill-fated heroine. Garbo had already played the role once before in a 1927 silent version that had diminished the story with an audience-pleasing happy ending.

  In her memoirs, Salka recalled her Anna Karenina days as smooth and collegial. She became friendly with her initial cowriter, a tall, full-figured Englishwoman named Clemence Dane, who told Salka that she had never had a love affair. “So we shall rely on your experience, my dear Salka,” she declared as they began work on the script. Selznick asked for major changes on the draft they turned in, but Dane had a play in rehearsal in London and begged off, so to Salka’s delight Sam Behrman was called in once again to cowrite the final script.

  During her collaboration with Behrman on the scene depicting Anna’s suicide, Salka paced the room, as was her custom, and dramatized the action. The night train approaches; Anna throws herself between the cars; we see her prone figure on the rails as the train disappears; the camera lingers on a woman’s handbag on the embankment. Finally, overcome by her own theatrics, Salka cried out, as much to herself as to Behrman: “And that’s what’s left of a human being.” At this Behrman couldn’t help but burst out laughing, and the line became a joking catchphrase between them, in later years often serving as the sign-off for their letters. (A sample New Year’s telegram from Salka to Behrman: “All good luck for a better 1942 in spite of all predictions. I hope it will bring us peace on earth and bring about a happy reunion on a happier assignment please don’t forget what’s left of a human being which is still your Salka…”)

  But the Anna Karenina production was not as lighthearted as Salka represented it. Selznick became locked in a battle with both the Legion of Decency, which exerted control over the nation’s twenty million Catholic moviegoers, and Breen’s Production Code Administration. Again the problem was the picture’s theme of adultery, without which there would be no story whatsoever, and for which the censors insisted that the characters be roundly punished. As Selznick put it: “We had to eliminate everything that could even remotely be classified as a passionate love scene; and we had to make it perfectly clear that not merely did Anna suffer but that [her lover] Vronsky suffered.”

  Offended that a classic of world literature might be so boorishly violated, Selznick worked hard with Salka and Behrman to preserve as much of its grandeur as they could. Still Breen continued to order rewrite after rewrite. Throughout, Salka appreciated Selznick’s vigorous leadership. Although they never again worked together, the two remained lifelong friends. Selznick would go on to give Salka’s son Peter his first job in Hollywood, as a summer filing clerk in his story department when Peter was seventeen, and would later put Peter under contract as a writer just before the United States entered the war.

  Neutered as it was by the censors, Selznick’s Anna Karenina is a solidly good picture but not a great one. Intimate instead of expansive, it’s lavishly inoffensive, so as to please the PCA, and impeccably tasteful, so as to please Selznick. The thrills it offers are chiefly visual: Cedric Gibbons’s opulent art direction, William Daniels’s lambent cinematography. Clarence Brown’s directing is reliably on brand, opening t
he picture with a dazzling reverse tracking shot of a sumptuous banquet table laden with delicacies. Over the unhurried course of the shot, the table appears endlessly elongated, as if to prove that the bounty of the house of Metro goes on forever. Berthold wrote to Salka in October 1935: “I saw ‘Karenina’ and found the film nicely told…And it occurred to me that every film with Greta has to be more or less the same. As a type, she no longer belongs wholly to our time…Sooner or later you will have to try, independent of her, to shape one of your more contemporary ideas—to make a film of your own invention, and where your story is the main and primary thing—whoever acts in it.”

  But there was no chance at this moment that Salka could separate herself from Garbo. At Metro the two women were roped together like mountaineers on a dangerous incline. Garbo was still the studio’s major revenue producer and every decision about her career was crucial. Thalberg was back at work, his mood much improved, and his production unit was turning out reliable successes. Once Selznick had departed, Garbo came back willingly into Thalberg’s fold. As a “Garbo specialist,” Salka moved offices from the rickety old writer’s building to the newly built Thalberg bungalow, really more of a Moderne villa, with Thalberg’s large office and a reception hall on the first floor, the writers on the second, and Thalberg’s dining room with a kitchen and pantry on the third.

  Salka’s next suggestion for Garbo was a historical drama about Marie Walewska, the Polish countess who became the mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. Thalberg was lukewarm about it, objecting that American audiences would be confused by the complex geopolitical milieu of the First French Empire, but when Salka suggested that her friend Charles Boyer play Napoleon, Thalberg became seriously interested. The French actor’s Hollywood career was starting to gather momentum and a starring role for him would earn the studio plenty of prestige. All Thalberg had to do was persuade the Breen office to green-light yet another period piece whose story began and ended with adultery—in this case a double adultery which resulted in the birth of a child.