The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  And many of them truly were stars, these “forerunners of catastrophe,” as Sybille Bedford called them, who shouldered a highbrow international fame that is hard to imagine of writers today. Thomas Mann had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and the publications of his books were major events, generating vigorous sales around the globe. His elder brother Heinrich, author of Professor Unrat, the novel which became The Blue Angel on film, was if possible even more widely read in Germany than Thomas. Lion Feuchtwanger’s historical fiction sold in huge numbers in global translation, as did Stefan Zweig’s. Bertolt Brecht had come to worldwide prominence as the reigning iconoclast genius of the theater. Franz Werfel’s novels and plays made him a well-heeled celebrity whose glamour was increased by the formidable presence of his wife, the magisterial Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel.

  Traveling to Sanary with these emissaries of high culture were their entourages—wives and mistresses, secretaries, housekeepers, translators—who called them, with less irony than one might suppose, Dichterfürsten: princes of poetry. The princes were imperious and often pompous, but so substantial were their reputations that this moniker was not considered at all ridiculous. Exile did not endear the princes to one another, nor did their wives often do more than abide one another. “We were all victims of intolerance,” remembered Marta Feuchtwanger, “and then they were intolerant of each other.” Loss and fear made them jealous and disdainful, bristling and bitter. Often all they shared was a loathing for the National Socialists and the certainty of persecution—some of them for being Jewish, all of them for the “degeneracy” of their literature—had they remained in Germany.

  And when the princes took flight, leaving behind grand houses and villas and in some cases actual castles, what they took with them was a defiant resolution to preserve—not just the values the National Socialists were trampling, but an entire way of life. Thus on Sanary’s rocky hillsides they set up provisional households, trying their best to reimagine the homes from which they had been purged. Most of this work, as always, was the province of the women. Katia Mann, Thomas’s wife, complained sharply to Sybille Bedford that the batterie de cuisine at the Villa Tranquille failed to include a potato ricer. How could she be expected to make the mashed potatoes that must accompany the traditional German Sunday roast of veal?

  It was not as trivial a grievance as it seems. The idea of home is built on its details, perhaps most on those of its kitchen. The Manns would not adapt their ways of eating to the local customs of the Var, would not substitute their Sunday veal, as Bedford timidly suggested Katia might, for gigot and flageolets. “Where I am, is Germany,” Thomas Mann famously insisted, and by this he surely intended to uphold the sauerbraten of his fatherland every bit as ardently as its tradition of liberal humanism.

  What dissonance, for these gloomy Sanaryans, between the Mediterranean shimmer of the Côte d’Azur and the matte substantiality of the homeland for which they grieved, between the menace they had fled and the blitheness of the place in which they found themselves. What a dizzying clash of sensibilities: Weltschmerz grappling with luxe, calme et volupté. Though some of them managed to work and live well in the bright sunlight of their seaside garden havens, the climate was a peculiar kind of taunt. These were foreign kingdoms where one could never feel at home.

  Why were these holiday towns so often the last foothold in the old world, and sometimes the first foothold in the new? Why the grand promenades and casinos of Ostend for Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, and why, for Zweig again, the lush emerald forests of Brazil’s Petrópolis? Why these insistent reminders of beauty, of pleasure, for those whose dreams of security and permanence had been so carelessly snatched away?

  Moments ago, the princes had been the longtime householders, the patrons, the welcomers of strangers. Now dethroned, they were the fugitives, the strangers, the uninvited guests. Through fortunes of timing and geography, when many of them landed in Los Angeles they would be met in the comfortingly continental living room of Salka Viertel—herself a former vagabond, a trouper through a thousand badly furnished European boardinghouses, who in the new world had transformed herself into the very soul of what it means to be a host.

  6

  MOTHERLAND

  There’s an old joke. A Gentile says to a Jew:

  “The Jews were to blame for everything.”

  “Yes,” says the Jew. “The Jews and the bicycle riders.”

  “Why the bicycle riders?” the Gentile asks.

  And the Jew answers: “Why the Jews?”

  —ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, SHADOWS IN PARADISE

  One does not wander without punishment under palms.

  —BERTHOLD VIERTEL

  LOS ANGELES AND PARIS

  1936–1939

  IN 1936, Germany and America were gazing at each other across an ocean, and each offered a reflection of race hatred to the other. The Nuremberg Race Laws had been announced by the National Socialists at their annual party rally the previous year. A codified entrenchment of the Third Reich’s white supremacist ideology, the laws had been compiled after a careful study of race-based legal systems around the world. Particularly inspiring to the National Socialists was the American system of immigration quotas, which was designed to accept more “racially desirable” people from northern Europe (whites from Britain and Scandinavia) and fewer undesirable emigrants from eastern and southern Europe (mostly Jews and Catholics) and from Asia.

  As the National Socialists created their own system of legal inferiority for non-Gentiles, they also admired America’s classification of residents of the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines as “non-citizen nationals.” And to fortify their criminalization of mixed marriages, the National Socialists looked to America’s Jim Crow laws—in particular those laws in thirty U.S. states which decreed marriage between whites and Negroes illegal. Many of those American states defined a “Negro” as anyone with a black ancestor—with, as they called it, “one drop” of Negro blood. Interestingly, the National Socialists considered the “one-drop” definition too severe. Instead they decreed that a Jew was any person with three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of whether those forebears had converted to Christianity.

  With the Nuremberg Laws in place, the National Socialists now had a legal framework with which to pursue the persecution of Jews in Germany. Jews were no longer citizens and they no longer had most of their former political rights. When the Olympic Games opened in Berlin in the summer of 1936, the Reich momentarily hid these strictures from view, showing off a false spirit of international amity. Once the games were over, for Germany’s Jews the situation quickly and systematically grew much worse.

  Just as the tightening noose around the rights of Jews in Germany had been partially inspired by the National Socialists’ study of American racial legislation, so in turn was the robust climate of anti-Semitism in America directly fueled and abetted by the Third Reich.

  * * *

  —

  ABOUT A FORTY-MINUTE DRIVE NORTHEAST from Salka’s house in Santa Monica lay Hindenburg Park, a large public green space in the neighborhood of La Crescenta. There, on a gorgeous summer afternoon in 1936, the annual German Day picnic was under way. Beneath the leaf-laden oaks, a sign draped in ivy bade Willkommen! in Gothic script. An enormous bust of Paul von Hindenburg, the former president of the Weimar Republic who had opened the door for Hitler’s 1933 stroll into the chancellorship, was adorned with a swastika. Although the Depression ground on and unemployment was still high, the crowds wore their Sunday best and put on a show of easy living. Towheaded boys in neckties ran around waving flags. Babies and toddlers, matrons and courting couples sat at picnic tables dotted with newspapers and snacks. Smiling vendors sold cup after cup of post-Prohibition East-side Lager (“Healthful Enjoyment”). There was a smattering of lederhosen. There were oompah bands and there was dancing.

  But more was in the air on this day than the annual disp
lay of Gemütlichkeit. The mood grew martial when the speeches and parades began. They took place under banners declaring, in German, “The Enemies of Germany Are Also America’s Enemies.” The processions featured American flags flanked on both sides by the swastika, and when the speechifiers thrust out their straight-armed Nazi salutes, many among the crowd followed suit.

  The Los Angeles branch of the German American Bund, which had rebranded itself that year, staged rallies at Hindenburg Park during the 1930s and had two major goals: to Nazify the German-American community and to sway public opinion toward a positive vision of Hitler’s New Germany. The Bund characterized itself as standing for “constitution, flag, and a white gentile ruled, truly free America,” and it worked hard, according to the historian Laura B. Rosenzweig, “to recruit as many U.S. citizens as possible into its ranks,” “to normalize Nazis into the social fabric of the community,” and “to portray itself as a patriotic American defense organization.”

  To those ends, Bund members visited the tourist steamers docked in the port of Los Angeles, where they received propaganda materials in unmarked packages that came directly from Berlin. They then reprinted the pamphlets to mask their German provenance and distributed them from their local headquarters, the Deutsches Haus on West Fifteenth Street near downtown, a brown stucco mansion that also housed the Aryan Bookstore, a restaurant, and a shooting range.

  In collaboration with the Bund was another anti-Semitic organization called the Silver Legion of America, boasting fifteen thousand members at its peak nationwide, many of whom were based in Los Angeles. Local members of the Silver Shirts, as they called themselves in homage to Hitler’s Brownshirts, had recently begun construction of a ranch on a secluded fifty-five-acre site in Rustic Canyon. It was said that the land belonged to a Nazi-friendly mining heiress named Jessie Murphy, who had purchased it from the actor Will Rogers. The Silver Legion was working to develop the Murphy Ranch into what they hoped would become a headquarters for Hitler as soon as “der Tag,” the day of fascist world conquest, at last arrived.

  The Silver Shirts and the Bund worked to spread anti-Semitic propaganda around Los Angeles, hoping to attract press attention by picketing Jewish community meetings and by “snowstorming”—dropping leaflets from the rooftops of downtown buildings calling for boycotts of the Jewish-dominated movie business. Many of the Silver Legion’s recruits were disaffected U.S. veterans of the Great War who were drowning in the undertow of the Depression, seeing in their mutilated pensions and rejected disability claims the sinister workings of Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal.” They were glad to pin the blame for their hardships on the Jews, who they were convinced were masterminding an international conspiracy to replace them with non-white inferiors. The Silver Legion did everything it could to stoke their anger. The Los Angeles police department was more sympathetic to this homegrown fascism than not, perceiving Communists, not Nazis, to be the real threats to the city’s safety. And Communists, for the local police just as for the National Socialists and, later, for the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, almost always meant Jews.

  In the meantime, Bundists and the Silver Legion concocted plans to assassinate Hollywood celebrities, via lynching and execution-style murder, and to firebomb their houses. On the lists of targets for these never-realized acts of terrorism were Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, B. P. Schulberg, Joseph Schenck, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, and Paul Muni.

  Just outside the fortresses of the picture business, this was the Los Angeles of the 1930s. It was a city churning with anti-Semitism both locally grown and transatlantically inspired, directly targeting as many high-profile Hollywood Jews as possible. The hatred was organized and institutional. It was in government and within the police; in real-estate covenants and in restricted private schools and country clubs; in paramilitary groups performing marching drills in the streets; in oratory swearing allegiance to Hitler in the parks and beer halls. And it was quotidian: in everyday slurs, in boardinghouse signs warning NO JEWS, in leaflets raining on downtown pedestrians. The hatred sprouted from the same seeds that had taken firm root in Germany, inciting nativist resentment and paranoia.

  What would stop the poison trees from flourishing here?

  * * *

  —

  ON THE SAME SUNDAY AFTERNOON of the German Day picnic in 1936, the sun over the bay in Santa Monica was a Klieg light gleaming in the painted blue backdrop of the sky. Below, the surf tumbled over itself like yards of tulle from Metro’s costume department, then smoothed to satin as it draped along the shore. Beachgoers baked themselves in the sand or ran after their children toward the merry-go-round on the pier. Through the little tunnel under the highway and up the hill to the canyon, the sea breeze rose to greet the arriving guests as Salka’s weekly party was reaching its stride. In the living room the Capehart warbled German songs out into the street as the red front door opened again and again.

  If the tone of the German Day picnic was bellicose on that day, the mood on Mabery Road was by necessity restorative. For the American studio folk who attended these afternoon parties, Salka’s house offered a respite from a grueling work schedule. Sundays were their only days off, and they looked forward to the refreshment that Salka’s house offered. But for the recently arrived Europeans who found themselves there, it was a place of shelter. Sunday open house was a custom transplanted from Europe, comforting and familiar. Here at Salka’s was a sense of continuity, an enactment of ritual during an anxious time.

  An Improvisation

  Indeed, I am a wanderer, a pilgrim on this earth.

  But can you say that you are anything more?

  Ernst Toch was forty-nine years old, a native of Vienna and a composer of modernist music. Nearly twenty years later he would cite the above lines from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther as the motto for his Third Symphony, which would win the Pulitzer Prize, and which he would call his “musical autobiography.”

  This was how he found himself on the doorstep of Mabery Road in Santa Monica in the summer of 1936. He’d first met Berthold Viertel in Berlin during the frenzied Weimar period before 1933. In 1934, in London, Viertel hired Toch to write the music for the Gaumont-British picture Little Friend. Film composing didn’t much interest Toch, but the pay was good and he found it a congenial job. When it was done, through a series of fortunate introductions, he seized an opportunity to teach and compose in New York, where for less fortunate reasons (a fight between music publishers, who then refused to publish or promote him) the money wasn’t enough to support him and his wife and young daughter.

  With further networking help from George Gershwin and others, he landed in Santa Monica, where he’d been holed up in a beach hotel writing film scores for Paramount at $750 per week. Under these palms he hoped to have time for more serious work, and also to resume teaching. But for now his livelihood was composing melodies for films, “a queer step-child,” he would one day call that music. And today, as a break from his labors, he decided to impose himself on the hospitality of the wife of his former colleague Viertel.

  The front door of the Mabery Road house opened directly onto the living room, with its piano and its many books and a print of Picasso’s Blue Boy hanging over the fireplace. On the far side of the room there were glass doors leading to a porch, and beyond the porch was a fig tree—a small miracle to Toch, as figs were a personal favorite of his—and a glimpse of some madly blooming rosebushes.

  Despite the glorious weather the crowd remained inside, soothed perhaps by the phonograph music and the smell of a just-baked Apfelkuchen. Several of Salka Viertel’s dogs were inside, too: a pair of unruly Irish setters and an old Alsatian. There was no sign at the moment of the huge German shepherd called Prinz, who was fiercely loyal to Salka but inclined to bite if one leaned in too closely over his head.

  The house, practical and unpretentious, packed to the rafters with people, was plainly all Salka’s domain, except
for an upstairs room which Berthold had conjured into a facsimile of the Knightsbridge flat to which he would return when the summer was over, a furious burrow of ashtrays, newspapers, manuscripts, journals, books and books and books, Aeschylus and Hindu mysticism and modern American poetry.

  Salka presently commanded a very good paycheck as a screenwriter at Metro, but whatever she was spending it on did not include fancy embellishments for the house. Some said that she found much of the furniture in the thrift shops in Glendale, where the studios cast off their extra properties. Salka chose instead to adorn her house with people: Sunday guests, houseguests, and a few long-term visitors who clustered around her night and day. There was a feeling of abundance here, but the extravagance was emotional rather than material, and it emanated from Salka herself, was an extension of her.

  The Los Angeles in which Toch found himself was discordant, composed in a notation he found nearly impossible to read. By contrast, everything felt recognizable in this Weimarstyle ghost house, which was why he and so many others were drawn to it. The prickly conversations throughout the living room brought back the hundreds of hours Toch had spent in the Romanisches Café, arguing about music and art. The books on the Viertels’ shelves were written by people he had known in Berlin, the same titles as those the chanting crowds had tossed into the bonfires on the Opernplatz in 1933. The songs on the record player might as well have been Toch’s songs. The aromas coming out of the kitchen were the same as those in his mother’s house in Vienna.

  Some might have blanched at the thought that there might be anything sexual between themselves and Salka Viertel, yet at the same time it’s true that there was never not a hint of seduction in any of Salka’s encounters. In the way she regarded her guests there was always an invitation, a pull toward her that could not be extricated from her reckless generosity, her impenitent laugh, her love of drama. Never an obvious beauty, she had learned during her theater days to use every other asset she had—her intelligence most of all, but also her voice and her glance and her gestures—to assume a forceful presence, to make one pay attention.