The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Conquest is a somewhat inert contribution to Metro’s library of lavish historical dramas, but it is far from a disaster. Boyer, one of the world’s most brilliant actors, managed to wring enough Napoleonic bluster from the role to earn an Academy Award nomination, while Garbo, looking beautiful but alarmingly thin after her recent role as the dying Camille, was vulnerable and dignified.

  While Metro’s simulacrum of European conquest was unspooling on the backlot, Hollywood was transfixed by the civil war in Spain. Its Popular Front deplored the U.S. government’s official neutrality and decried the abuses of Franco and the fascist Falange. It organized banquets and receptions to raise money to buy ambulances, food, and medicine for the Republican cause.

  In early 1937, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League sponsored a rally in the Shrine Auditorium downtown, where many thousands gathered to hear the writer André Malraux deliver an impassioned speech on behalf of the Spanish Loyalists. The previous evening, Salka had invited Malraux—whose novel Man’s Fate, according to Salka’s friend Fred Zinnemann, was the bible of his generation—to speak to a gathering of about a hundred film VIPs at her home. In the living room Malraux warned her guests of the support Franco was receiving from Hitler and Mussolini and managed to collect five thousand dollars. After his similar address the following night at the Shrine, Malraux thanked the roaring crowd by raising his fist in the Communist salute. Salka turned around to gauge the response and was surprised to see “ladies in mink rising and clenching their bejeweled hands.”

  A few months later, in July 1937, Ernest Hemingway and the filmmaker Joris Ivens also made a pro-Loyalist fundraising tour through Hollywood after a stop at the Roosevelt White House to screen their documentary The Spanish Earth. Again they stopped first at a private reception on Mabery Road, and again they followed that appeal with another much larger gathering, this time at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. Their efforts summoned up about fifteen thousand dollars from members of the film community for ambulances and medicine.

  In her memoir Salka mentioned that among the thousands in the Shrine Auditorium crowd listening to André Malraux’s address were a mix of “stars, producers, writers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, shop clerks, workers from the studios, the Douglas and Lockheed factories, and practically every German refugee in Los Angeles.” It was a hallmark of the Popular Front that the politics of these individuals varied widely, from Salka’s vaguely socialistic leanings to New Dealers to Trotskyites. The same was true of those who flocked to hear Hemingway. At that point in 1937, no one among these crowds, and certainly not Salka herself, could imagine that the events would come under suspicion by the Dies committee in 1940–1941 as a rally dedicated to “premature antifascism,” meaning antifascist activity that was nefariously controlled by Communists. Nor were they worried that the diverse assortment of German refugees, doctors, and shop clerks in the Popular Front would be as equally damned for attempting to sabotage the ideals of American democracy as the actual Communists in the auditorium that night. The grandstanding ideologues of the Dies committee and its successor HUAC were as eager to demonize as many people as possible with the crime of Communism, most particularly immigrants and Jews.

  At this point in 1937, sympathy for the Spanish Loyalists was so widespread that Salka, who was between writing jobs after Conquest, was moved to start work on a non-Garbo screenplay about shipwrecked Spanish orphans which she titled Cargo of Innocence. She knew that her friend William Dieterle was directing a picture about Spain for Walter Wanger at United Artists called Blockade and went ahead with an outline for her own story, with the approval of a left-leaning young Metro producer named Frank Davis.

  Salka’s continuing attempts to write a story independent of Garbo may have been partly inspired by Berthold, who was back in London trying to drum up work while Salka sent him living expenses of two hundred dollars a month. “Do you think the time has come not to work for Greta any more?” he wrote. “For some time now it has felt like a burden to you.” Cargo of Innocence did not get far. Even though Salka cowrote the screenplay with the novelist James Hilton, writer of the popular 1933 novel Lost Horizon, Metro shelved the picture. Once again she got a refresher course in the lesson of her Hooverville script: Metro opposed any screen story that showed what it considered unreasonable sympathy toward Communism. And regardless of Salka’s own ambitions, her value to the studio was and always would be as a “Garbo specialist.”

  To that end, the studio was eager to have two scripts ready for Garbo when she returned from a long vacation in Europe with her then companion, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Thus Bernie Hyman asked Salka to find another story for Garbo at the same time that Gottfried Reinhardt was beginning to prepare the comedy that was to become Ninotchka. Although Salka’s involvement with Ninotchka was limited, she was responsible for its inception. Casting around for ideas, she remembered that the Hungarian dramatist Melchior Lengyel had amusing stories to recount among the writers’ rooms at Metro. In mid-1937, Salka made arrangements for Lengyel to pitch and sell his idea for Ninotchka directly to Garbo from the side of her swimming pool while the film star took a dip.

  Gottfried cowrote an early draft of the Ninotchka script with Sam Behrman and was originally assigned to direct, though Ernst Lubitsch ended up with the job. Salka also wrote at least one draft, which as usual was reworked many times by a number of writers. Screenplay credits eventually went to Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch, Sam Behrman for additional dialogue, and Melchior Lengyel for the original story.

  For the second of the two projects, Salka suggested a story about the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Marie Curie, who had died in 1934 and whose daughter Eve had recently written a biography. Nearly everyone at Metro was appalled at the notion that a self-respecting movie queen would consider portraying so boring and sexless a figure as a scientist. But right away Garbo agreed to take on the role. Reluctantly, Bernie Hyman instructed Salka to go ahead with the treatment.

  In the meantime, at the house of her fellow screenwriter Anita Loos, Salka met and befriended the novelist Aldous Huxley. In April 1937, the tall, courtly Englishman had left his villa in Sanary-sur-Mer with his wife and teenaged son to travel in the States, where he gave some lectures and stayed for a time at the ranch in New Mexico owned by Frieda Lawrence, the widow of his old friend D. H. Lawrence. By February of 1938 Huxley was in Hollywood writing screenplays, his beloved house in Sanary abandoned—only for the moment, he imagined, but in fact for the rest of his life. By June he found himself sitting at an alfresco lunch at Bernie Hyman’s beach house, discussing Marie Curie with Salka. Also present was the director George Cukor, who’d been hired for the Curie picture after his great success for Metro with Garbo’s Camille.

  Salka and her new friend Huxley were like-minded about the Curie story, each determined to remain faithful to the details of the physicist’s prodigious career which Hyman found dull and unglamorous. The Anglophile Hyman was dazzled by the success of Brave New World and the fact that Huxley’s family included a number of illustrious scientists. He took Salka off the treatment and hired Huxley to write a scenario on his own. In late August, Huxley turned in a novelistic 145-page treatment highlighting Marie Curie’s dedication as she labored with her husband to discover radium in a squalid one-room laboratory and became the first woman appointed to a lecture chair at the Sorbonne, as well as the first to win a Nobel Prize. Huxley was paid twenty-five thousand dollars for his treatment, but he heard no further from Hyman and “it was instantly forgotten,” Salka wrote in her memoir. When she later asked Hyman what became of Huxley’s work, he confessed that he’d never read it and had given it to his secretary, who told him without hesitation, “it stinks.”

  Huxley’s friendship with Salka took root quickly and lasted till the end of their lives. But close as he was to Salka, the prolific author left behind scant references to their friendship. Christopher Isherwood spoke of Huxley among those of Salka
’s famous friends who “were sincerely fond of her but perhaps they tended to take her for granted. It is slightly shocking to find that, in the indexes to the collected letters of two of her ‘stars,’ Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, Salka’s name isn’t mentioned.” Huxley’s Belgian wife Maria was more voluble, writing in a letter to her sister that Salka was very “us” because “above all she is a European. She loves perfume and takes lovers.” For Maria, Salka offered proof that “Europeans can live in Hollywood while retaining their charm and personality.”

  At Metro other writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, submitted versions of the Curie story, all of which were rejected. Among this group was the German-Jewish novelist Bruno Frank, who had strong connections with many who were or would become members of Salka’s circle. Bruno Frank had left Germany in 1933 and moved with his wife Liesl to London, where the couple had become acquainted with Berthold. They were former neighbors and good friends of Thomas Mann, who had also recently landed in Los Angeles. The Franks had lived in Sanary-sur-Mer, where Bruno had contributed to Klaus Mann’s magazine Die Sammlung, of which Aldous Huxley was one of the founding sponsors. Now reunited with Huxley and Mann, among many of their other European friends in Los Angeles, the Franks were living quite handsomely in Beverly Hills after Bruno had signed a lucrative contract with Metro in 1937.

  Metro management’s indecision over the Curie project wore on, and personalities cycled in and out of the project. Bruno Frank left the studio after spending seven months on the story. Metro producer Sidney Franklin replaced Bernie Hyman. Cukor left to pursue other obligations, including work on The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Garbo was thoroughly occupied by Ninotchka. The only constant on the Curie project, it seemed, was Salka, who collected her much-needed paycheck and waited fruitlessly as other writers came and went, hoping without much hope to revive interest in Huxley’s treatment. “Like Ariadne’s thread, the work on Marie Curie was running through the labyrinth of my life, dangling before me, incessantly interrupted, exasperatingly close to my grasp, then suddenly disappearing,” Salka wrote. “Months went by…the Hitler menace grew.”

  In March 1938, the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria, brought the second-largest wave of panic to European Jews after Hitler’s rise in 1933. The Jews of Austria and the thousands of refugees from Germany who had recently sought safety in Vienna and its environs—including Salka’s sister Rose and her family—now again frantically feared for their lives, and sought any way possible to flee. “[Hitler] hated Vienna especially,” said Gertrud Zeisl, the wife of the Jewish Viennese composer Eric Zeisl, in an oral history; “it was a kind of triumph and pleasure for him to enter there with a regime of terror…People were picked up in the street, brought to Gestapo headquarters and tortured there, and imprisoned and shipped off to the concentration camps at night…everybody wanted to leave, and that caused such a storm that the other countries shut off their borders…you couldn’t get a visa; you couldn’t get out of the country. It was very, very difficult, and you had to try all kinds of things.” The Zeisls were among the lucky few, emigrating to the States in 1938 and settling in Los Angeles in 1941.

  For Salka, all direct communication with her sister Rose in Vienna had now ended. Salka could only trust that Josef Gielen’s connections in the classical music community might somehow help to get the family out of the country.

  Salka kept seeking affidavits for the desperate who were trying to leave Vienna and Prague. She also applied for a quota number for her mother in Poland. Gottfried’s father Max Reinhardt managed to reach Los Angeles and settled in Pacific Palisades. There he got word that his castle in Salzburg, which he had spent twenty years restoring for use as both a home and an event space, had been confiscated and occupied by Reich Commander Hermann Goering. Salka wrote that Max Reinhardt bore this theft, along with the loss of his entire theatrical empire, “with great dignity.” He opened a drama school on Sunset Boulevard and began to give acting lessons to young Californians, most of whom had little idea who he was. He also hired Salka’s son Hans, who had left Berkeley and enrolled at UCLA, to be his assistant and dramaturg. The previous year, Peter had graduated from high school at age seventeen and spent three months at Dartmouth, but he too returned to Mabery Road and continued his studies at UCLA.

  Berthold remained in London, sending updates to Salka about family and friends. In Vienna the SS had dragged his sister Paula to their barracks, where they jeered at her as they made her scrub the floors, then forced her to watch while they beat up an elderly Jewish man. Now Paula was searching for any way to leave. “She has written to you asking for an affidavit,” Berthold prodded Salka. “Can you do it?” He reported that Rose was unable to write to Salka and that her husband Josef was under constant surveillance; “If only they could get out!” In the meantime, Berthold’s hopes for film work had dried up in London and he was keeping himself busy directing for the theater. But he had little income aside from what Salka was sending him, one hundred dollars on the first and fifteenth of each month, and he apologized to her for costing so much. Around the time of the Munich Pact, in late September 1938, he wrote to her: “That you are forced to live and work in Hollywood, whether you want it or not and whether you can stand it, because you are supporting all of us, Mama and others, is hard to bear, first for you, but even more for me.”

  In addition to begging her studio contacts for affidavits, Salka found jobs for arriving emigrants. She met a non-Jewish German woman, Etta Hardt, who before 1933 had been an executive secretary for a Berlin publishing house. An outspoken antifascist, Etta had been chased by Nazis to the Dutch border, then drove to Spain, only to be forced to leave when the civil war began. Finally she made her way to Los Angeles on a ship via the Panama Canal. Salka engaged Etta to be Garbo’s housekeeper, then hired her a year later to be her own majordomo on Mabery Road. At Salka’s house Etta applied a Teutonic vigor to sorting out the household’s disarray, tackling everything from the Viertel boys’ untidiness and Salka’s chaotic bookkeeping to the tangled coats of the two Irish setters.

  Salka Viertel with one of her Irish setters, Mabery Road.

  Eight months after the Anschluss, on the night of November 9, 1938, a forty-eight-hour mass pogrom exploded throughout Germany and Austria that came to be known as Kristallnacht, “Night of the Broken Glass,” and marked a turning point in Germany’s war against the Jews. The legal, political, and economic harassment of Jews was already paramount in official National Socialist policy. Now the procedures changed to incite physical brutality and, wherever possible, murder. The annihilation of the Jewish people tipped over from rhetorical threats into organized widespread implementation. Kristallnacht marked the night, as the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz wrote, that “the Jewish community of Germany went up in flames.”

  During Kristallnacht, with the full encouragement of their government, German citizens engaged in an orgy of terror and violence that destroyed an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned commercial establishments; killed at least 91 Jews; tortured thousands more; arrested up to 30,000 Jews and sent them to concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen; and destroyed 267 synagogues.

  On orders from Hermann Goering and the Gestapo, local police and firefighters did nothing to prevent the destruction. The government blamed the Jews for the riots and fined them one billion reichsmarks to pay for the very destruction that had been perpetrated to harm them.

  All these facts were reported in the American press by early December 1938. Information was also abundantly available in U.S. newspapers about the Anschluss and the mounting refugee crisis. Yet Roosevelt and the Congress declined suggestions of any legislation to ease the immigration quotas, not even willing to identify Hitler’s victims as Jews, as Hitler did, but referring to them more vaguely as “political refugees.” Polls showed that after Kristallnacht 77 percent of Americans opposed an increase in the number of refugees who should be allowed to enter the count
ry. The official government position was “sympathy without hospitality.”

  By November 29, 1938, the American consulate in Berlin reported 160,000 applications for U.S. visas. Without new legislation to ease the quotas, the consul general declared that none of those who applied could hope to receive permits for at least three years. Yet “flight was both necessary and possible in the weeks and months following [Kristallnacht],” Haskel Lookstein wrote in a 1985 book. “It remained so through 1941. What could not be fully foreseen, however, was the future—the human price that would be paid after 1941 for the failure of the world to open its doors while there was still time.”

  At some point between the nine months separating the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, appalled by anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States and by the ineffectiveness of the official American response to these atrocities, Bruno Frank’s wife Liesl took the first steps toward establishing an American grass-roots response to the Jewish refugee emergency. Liesl was the daughter of an internationally popular Viennese opera star named Fritzi Massary. She became active in refugee work in Europe immediately after 1933. When she arrived in Los Angeles in 1937, she continued to raise money to support Jewish emigration to America. By 1938 Liesl Frank, along with Charlotte Dieterle and a group of like-minded Hollywood folk, had established the European Film Fund in Hollywood.

  The EFF asked all Europeans employed by the studios to donate 1 percent of their salaries toward refugee relief. When Casablanca wrapped at Warner Bros. in 1942, for instance, the cast and crew—almost entirely European émigrés—gave that percentage of their earnings to the EFF. “You paid in,” said the German actor Paul Andor, who played the man without a passport who is shot by Vichy police at the beginning of Casablanca, “for the next guys who were coming along.” In fact, Jack Warner was the first studio head to arrange for incoming refugees to receive studio contracts through EFF funds. He was urged on by an aggressive young producer on the Warner lot named Henry Blanke, who was born in Berlin and had gotten his start as an assistant to Ernst Lubitsch.