The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  When Thalberg brought Salka in to pitch the story to the PCA censors in the early summer of 1935, they were far from enthusiastic. “Since the characters and the events…are all historical facts and this illegitimate child survived and became a rather important person in France…it is not possible to ‘clean this story up’ under the code…The story looks dangerous to me,” carped an internal PCA memo. But the Breen office paid grudging respect to Thalberg’s reputation and reluctantly allowed him to proceed. Fortunately for Salka, the censors’ opposition had the virtue of increasing Thalberg’s enthusiasm for the project. He asked Salka how quickly she thought she could write the treatment.

  Salka was willing to dive in, but she asked for permission to work on the script while away from the studio. She had not seen her mother and her siblings for seven years, she told Thalberg, and she needed to travel to Europe to spend some time with them and with her London-based husband. Thalberg was sympathetic. The studio allowed Salka a two-month absence on full salary. She arranged to sail for Southampton from New York on June 26. She had never been to England and was eager to see how Berthold was getting along. But personally this voyage was a big risk for Salka, as she could not be sure that her relationship with Gottfried, who was now twenty-four, would survive so long a separation. As always, Hollywood was full of glossy distractions, with newer and younger ones arriving every day. Salka was forty-six years old. Her eldest child would be heading off to college in a year.

  The anxiety Salka felt during the ocean crossing did not dissipate on her arrival at Southampton. Berthold was waiting for her at the pier with Francesco von Mendelssohn, the same friend who had seen them off from the train station in Berlin on their way to America in 1928. The three sped toward London in Francesco’s new cherry-red convertible, the weather as gray and stifling as a sick headache. At last Salka was back across the Atlantic, and the strangeness she felt was a bitter surprise. In the open car, in her agitated state, hot hazy drizzle mixed with her tears. The city’s manicured parks looked hyper-green in the sullen weather and utterly foreign, much more foreign than America had been when she’d first arrived there. It seemed impossible that Berthold could ever feel at home in this rigid and suffocating place.

  Nonetheless both Berthold and Francesco were in good spirits and full of plans, Berthold beginning a third picture for Gaumont-British about Cecil Rhodes, and Francesco off soon to New York to assist Max Reinhardt in a Broadway production of Kurt Weill’s and Franz Werfel’s The Eternal Road. In the lobby of the Dorchester where Berthold had booked Salka’s room, she immediately ran into Max Reinhardt himself. It seemed she was forever happening upon Gottfried’s father in hotel lobbies in one country or another. A day or so later she also saw Gottfried’s producer brother Wolfgang, who was eager to hear her tales of Hollywood.

  Everywhere Salka looked in London there were German refugees, many of them her former colleagues. The luckiest among them were starring in West End plays or acting in British pictures. But most were scrounging for work and living in squalid hotels or boardinghouses. All were furiously studying English and hoping for visas to get them to New York or Hollywood. Francesco and his sister Eleonora had abandoned their Grunewald mansion in Berlin and had gone into voluntary exile. Though their family had been Christian for six generations, they were honoring their original Jewish ancestor, Moses Mendelssohn, by turning their backs on their fatherland and joining the antifascist cause. Eleonora had bought herself a castle near Salzburg which she filled with Jewish and Communist artists on the run, and with as much of her family’s art collection as she had been able to sneak out of Germany.

  Berthold brought his girlfriend Beatrix Lehmann to lunch the following day. Salka liked her instantly. The three spent a weekend at Beatrix’s house on the Thames, where Salka was grateful to escape the breathless heat of the city among the imperturbable old trees in the garden. From there, Berthold took Salka to Paris, another city new to her, which was baking through the same hot weather as London. He wanted to show her as many revolutionary monuments as possible as research for her Napoleon picture, but the heat was too exhausting. Instead he and Salka spent three days among the usual tourist spots, reminiscing about their seventeen-year-old marriage. It was a friendly interval and they did not talk about their current liaisons, until Salka candidly asked Berthold if he wanted a divorce. At that point he became angry. “I believe in our marriage as I always have and we will find each other again,” he told her. “I know that we will grow old together.”

  Berthold was pleased that Salka had managed to make this voyage. But from the moment of arrival she was sorry she came, gripped by loneliness and loss. She was filled with guilt for abandoning her fellows who’d been forced out of their fatherland, made stateless, and set to wandering. Writing in her memoir of her black mood in refugee-packed London and Paris, she quoted an old French proverb: Les absents ont toujours tort. Berthold’s longtime friend Stefan Zweig had used the same quotation in a book about Erasmus which he’d published the previous year, a book that was as much about the rise of Hitler as it was about the Reformation humanist. Zweig had cited the proverb as a stern self-rebuke, in the same way that Salka was bitterly reviewing her own choices now. The absent are always wrong.

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  —

  SALKA LEFT BERTHOLD TO HIS LONDON LIFE and set off to reunite with her Steuermann family. But to her sorrow she was not going home to Wychylowka. To save money, Salka’s mother Auguste had divided the big family home into smaller units which she’d leased to tenants. There was now no room for Salka’s sister Rose and her brother Edward to spend summers there with their families as had been their habit. Instead Rose and her husband Josef Gielen, desperate to escape the swastikas and goose-stepping parades in Dresden, found a holiday spot on the shore of Lago Maggiore in southern Switzerland. Joining them along with their two young children would be Auguste, Edward, and Salka. The youngest Steuermann sibling, Dusko, had gallantly offered to stay back in Poland so his mother could afford the trip.

  Salka had known that the last two years had been difficult for Rose, but it was not until she saw the worry lines in her sister’s face that she began to understand how much stamina Rose needed to live as an internal exile in Dresden. Rose’s life “must have been hell,” Salka later wrote. Nonetheless, her children looked innocent and happy, and it was good to sit in the garden with them while Edward’s piano playing drifted through the open windows of the rented house.

  In the warm evenings the family sat and talked on the veranda, sharply aware that their time together was short. Auguste had aged a great deal and had lost much of her hearing. But she was full of stories about her charity work at home in Wychylowka. She went routinely to all the local households and shops of Sambor, asking for old clothes and packages of food for the poor.

  Much of the family’s talk was about Hitler and whether the world would allow him to carry out his promise to destroy all the Jews. Salka made an emphatic case that Edward should emigrate to America. But he declined for the same reasons Auguste had given, uncertain that he’d be able to adapt to such a radically new life.

  The visit ended too soon, amid tears and promises not to let another seven years go by. “More than ever we are apprehensive about our fate, and our helplessness to interfere with it,” Edward wrote to Salka after she had gone. This was her dark mood as well. But she did not set off immediately for the return trip to California. Letters from Berthold indicate that Salka stopped first at a nursing home in England where she underwent a cosmetic surgery procedure, most likely a facelift. “Do not think, mein Herz,” Berthold wrote to Salka afterward, “that the wrinkles that are gone now are necessary to your face. Go away, damage! You wanted to do it and you have done it, and that’s that. Basta! I kiss your new old face.”

  Cosmetic surgeries were routine among Hollywood actresses by the 1930s, and not uncommon among the general population in Los Angeles. It’s easy to imagine that a fo
rty-six-year-old woman with a boyfriend half her age, Greta Garbo for a best friend, and scores of teenage beauties surrounding her on the Metro lot—and one who, in her heart, had not given up the hope of acting again—would be keen to look as young as possible. One also wonders whether medication from the procedure may have exacerbated Salka’s depression that had set in when she first arrived in London in June, for during her journey back to America she was dogged by the blackest mood of her life. Her dread worsened when she stopped in Paris to say goodbye to Francesco and a few other friends. There she was confronted by enormous posters on the Champs-Élysées advertising Emil Jannings in a German propaganda picture. To Salka’s deep disgust, the great Swiss actor was now one of the Third Reich’s most visible promoters, soon to be designated by Goebbels as a prized artist of the National Socialist state.

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  —

  IN HER MEMOIR SALKA WROTE that when she returned to California “the homecoming was glorious.” Yet letters from 1936 add more somber details. A mutual friend, Gene Solow, wrote to Sam Behrman in September:

  Salka returned from Europe, sick in both body and mind. The joy of seeing her family again barely compensates for the mental depression chaotic Europe generated in her. Many of her friends are refugees from Germany—London and Paris are full of them, and the number of suicides amongst them are appalling—to say nothing of the pitiful circumstances of their present existences. Then, too, the clouds of a new war hang heavy over Europe…both London and Paris are seething with unrest…and she returned to Hollywood so fatigued in spirit that she didn’t even have heart to stay an hour in New York on her way back, but entrained directly from the boat.

  In her letters to Berthold, Salka’s melancholy eroded her confidence in every choice she’d made. “Europe deeply shook me,” she told him. “I have a terrible longing for the past, especially for the past that I dealt with in the wrong way…I feel spiritually empty to be back in Hollywood.” She asked him: “Why did we separate? Maybe out of egotism and selfishness, but you did not suffer as much as I did…You can write poetry, you can think, whereas inside of me everything is total chaos, sometimes chaos that pins me to the ground. Everybody loves me but they don’t know about me. Gottfried is afraid of me…” She went on to castigate herself for her decision to raise the boys in America: “The children are so strange to me in many ways. I love them more than my life, but after all they have been all these years in America…they see and feel so many things differently.”

  “I’m dramatizing as always, says Gottfried,” she reported. “It’s true because everything else is so undramatic and incredibly empty, gray and sad.” Knowing she was prone to histrionics but unable to help herself, she finally wrote to Berthold: “Once in your life you loved a woman. A very long time ago you saved her. But then you let her fall. And then you saved her again. And then we didn’t hold each other tight enough.”

  Salka had been in the habit of consoling herself that if her American life failed her she could always go back to Europe. Seeing her family scattered so far from Wychylowka, noting Rose’s strain under the pall of Nazified Dresden, and besieged by Emil Jannings’s propaganda posters on the Champs-Élysées, Salka had seen that this was no longer true. There was no going back. She now had a visceral feeling for the truth of Berthold’s letter from early 1933 when he told her that “the world is coming to an end in Europe, or at least the biggest part of what was our world.”

  On Salka’s return to Hollywood she learned that her brother-in-law Josef Gielen had been denounced and dismissed from his post in Dresden. The Nuremberg Race Laws prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans were being forcefully implemented. Unions such as his to Rose Steuermann were from now on considered a criminal act. It was unclear whether the laws would be applied retroactively. With the help of the conductor Clemens Krauss, Gielen managed to secure a contract at the Prussian State Opera in Berlin, now under the control of Hermann Goering. Fortunately for Gielen, Goering’s actress wife knew Gielen from her work on the stage and could offer some protection. But the National Socialists’ patience with Gielen wore thin when they discovered that he’d consorted in Switzerland with his Jewish wife’s family. They accused him, falsely, of meeting with the “Zionist Berthold Viertel,” though Berthold had not attended the Steuermann family gathering. Emmy Goering’s support would only go so far, and once again Gielen was dismissed. He was lucky to find a job with the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he moved with Rose and the children, grateful for the moment to be out from under the boot of Hitlerism.

  In the meantime Salka’s brother Edward at last agreed to emigrate with his daughter Margret, arriving in Los Angeles in June 1936. He stayed for a while in Salka’s house, and she rented a practice room with a piano for him from a neighbor across the street. Edward was glad to be reunited with Schoenberg and was invited by Otto Klemperer to play Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl, which was a success. But he had no interest in film work and recognized that the appetite for modern music in Los Angeles was less than keen, so he arranged to move to New York, which remained his home base for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  —

  SOME MONTHS BEFORE her siblings’ latest migrations, in November 1935, Salka took part in a now-legendary encounter between American commercial culture and European high modernism in the Thalberg bungalow at Metro. At the time, Irving Thalberg was busy negotiating with Charles Boyer’s people in Paris to secure the French actor for Garbo’s Napoleon picture. He was also immersed in preparations for Metro’s adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s blockbuster 1931 novel about China, The Good Earth. Thalberg had heard a New York Philharmonic radio concert that featured Arnold Schoenberg’s early string sextet, Transfigured Night. He thought the music was pretty. Well aware of Salka’s friendship with the composer, he asked her to arrange a conference with Schoenberg to see whether he might write the score for The Good Earth.

  In Salka’s often-repeated account, she set up the meeting but first went out of her way to educate each of the men about potential conflicts. She told Thalberg that Schoenberg had long ago abandoned the glittering tonality of Transfigured Night for the austerities of twelve-tone technique, which she did not think Thalberg would like. For Schoenberg, who badly needed the money, she estimated that Metro might pay him as much as twenty-five thousand dollars, a lordly sum, but warned of Thalberg’s likely interference in every aspect of the composition.

  After much fussing over scheduling, the two men at last convened in Thalberg’s office along with Schoenberg’s wife Gertrud and with Salka, whom Thalberg had asked to serve as translator. The titan of the Second Viennese School leaned forward in his chair, clutched the umbrella he had refused to surrender, and trained his smoldering eyes on the last tycoon, who stood behind his desk and praised the composer’s lovely music.

  “I don’t write lovely music,” corrected Schoenberg.

  Thalberg changed course and explained that he was looking for Chinese-themed melodies to accompany scenes containing lots of action and not much dialogue. Schoenberg responded in surprisingly eloquent English that all film music was uniformly terrible and that he would not take on the project unless he had complete control over the sound, including all the actors’ words, which must be uttered in the precise pitch and key he would compose for them.

  Thalberg was fascinated and asked Schoenberg to elaborate. Schoenberg turned to Salka and asked her to recite some verses from his landmark 1912 melodrama Pierrot lunaire, which features an Expressionist technique called Sprechstimme (spoken voice) that sounds like neither natural speech nor singing—its closest counterparts might be the style of the French diseuse or early German cabaret. Gamely, Salka performed some of the work in its original German, using the correct swooping high and low tones and long and short holds: “The wine we drink with our eyes / pours down in waves nightly from the moon.”

  Thalberg mused on this for
a while and then remarked impassively that The Good Earth’s director would most likely have contradictory ideas about the dialogue and would want to guide the actors himself. Schoenberg, unbothered, assured Thalberg that the director would be free to handle the actors as soon as they had perfected their lines with Schoenberg.

  Still fascinated, Thalberg sent the composer home with a copy of the screenplay and encouraged him to offer more suggestions. When he’d gone, Thalberg declared to Salka that Schoenberg would learn to capitulate and would write the music on the studio’s terms, not Schoenberg’s. She was doubtful.

  The next morning, Schoenberg’s wife phoned Salka to let her know that Schoenberg was now asking for fifty thousand dollars for the complete control he would need over the film and its dialogue. At this Thalberg shrugged, telling Salka that the studio had on hand some Chinese folk songs which the sound department was using to write some very lovely music. Credit for the film’s score went to the studio stalwart Herbert Stothart, who had served as the composer for Christina. Schoenberg, who refused to write lovely music or to compromise on his radical notions about sound in film, was politely cast aside.

  It’s an excellent story, relayed in The Kindness of Strangers with characteristic self-effacement by one of Metro’s most literate and engaging storytellers. But self-effacement has its costs, for while the anecdote has been retold many times in different contexts, few bother to mention that Salka played a greater role here than merely recalling the episode. (No doubt much would have been different here had she been a man. And certainly nobody bothered to ask for the perspective of Gertrud Schoenberg, who was also in the room. Surely she too would have had plenty to say.) Salka’s position as a cultural broker between the two men shows that Thalberg and Schoenberg, each often portrayed as a stubbornly independent genius, operated as everyone does within a network of connections, without which they could not function.