The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Peter added to Salka’s anxieties by trying to enlist in the Canadian Royal Air Force. He was certain that the United States would remain neutral and was frantic that he might never get a chance to fight the Nazis. Salka was relieved when the Canadian draft board rejected him for deficient eyesight. She later wrote: “I dreaded the thought of his being a pilot and my only hope was that my former housekeeper, Jessie’s husband, was on the recruiting board. War or peace, the world is rather small when you think of it.”

  In the meantime, at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club that spring, Peter befriended a twenty-seven-year-old writer who seemed surprised that Peter at nineteen not only played a decent game of tennis but had already written a novel. Peter invited his sporty new acquaintance to the Mabery Road parties, where he became the first of Peter’s “tennis friends” to impress Salka with his love of literature and the theater. Always ardent around handsome young men, Salka warmed to his charisma. The Bronx-born Jewish writer, whose name was Irwin Shaw, was dazzled by Salka’s Sunday crowds and added many of the émigrés he met there to his own large social circle. Shaw was to become one of the most prolific and popular of the Greatest Generation American novelists, beginning with a spectacular war saga called The Young Lions in 1948. He had a Salka-like gift for generosity, nurturing the ambitions of younger writers, including the entire original Paris Review crowd. He was Peter’s closest friend for the next fifty years and played a key role in Salka’s later life as well.

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  IN SOUTHERN FRANCE during that springtime of 1940, Sanary-sur-Mer had never seemed lovelier to les Allemands who clung to its hillsides. After seven years, Lion Feuchtwanger still appreciated the morning views of “the azure coast, the mountains, the sea, the pines,” and the nighttime quiet, “broken only by the wash of the sea or by the gentle call of some bird.” As dusk fell one mild evening in mid-May, Feuchtwanger was listening to the radio in a little room on the bottom floor of his house, the Villa Valmer, when he heard this report: “All German nationals residing in the precincts of Paris, men and women alike, and all persons between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five who were born in Germany but are without German citizenship, are to report for internment.”

  Villa Valmer, Sanary-sur-Mer.

  Feuchtwanger had already been interned and released the previous year, in the brickworks at Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence. This time, he hoped the edict would apply only to those in Paris and not in southern France. He walked out to his garden, where the fig, cherry, almond, and olive trees cast their shadows in the velvet dark. One of his cats twined playfully around his ankles, wanting her dinner.

  Franz Werfel, too, remained under Sanary’s spell, writing away in his workroom on the top floor of an old watchtower he had bought in 1938 called the Moulin Gris, “a bright room in the sky,” his biographer called it, “on the edge of a precipitous coastline.” Almost every day Werfel met Lion Feuchtwanger and other writers in the cafés, where they would argue over the most recent news bulletins. Werfel was plump, rumpled, and excitable (“he smudges so easily,” said one of his friends). The compact Feuchtwanger was infinitely more self-possessed.

  Heinrich Mann, a lifelong Francophile, had been living a couple of hours up the coast in Nice for the last six years. Though few remember Heinrich today, he once vied with his younger brother Thomas to be the most exalted German writer of the Weimar era. Left-wing readers flocked to Heinrich, while the more conservative leaned toward Thomas. Heinrich’s leadership among the writers of the antifascist campaign was so august that Ludwig Marcuse called him “the Hindenburg of the emigration,” the president in absentia of their hijacked country. But as the continent began to crumble, so did Heinrich’s reputation. His latest novel, The Last Days of Henri Quatre, marked the beginning of the end of his international stature, the last to be translated into English. In a letter to friends in 1939, Heinrich had written that the times themselves had become the real novel of the age.

  Berthold Viertel had met Heinrich years earlier through Karl Kraus, who considered Heinrich one of the few contemporary writers worth his attention. Heinrich also knew Lion Feuchtwanger well, having been a frequent visitor to Sanary during and after the brief time that Thomas Mann had lived there, in 1933. Sybille Bedford took note at a party: “Heinrich Mann, even more stiff and formal than his brother, arrived in a high collar and black coat, extending, like Monsieur de Charlus, two fingers to anyone offering to shake hands.” Salka later wrote that Heinrich had “the manners of a nineteenth-century grand seigneur.”

  The southern idyll was over for the Dichterfürsten, the deposed princes of poetry. It had been a warm and beautiful mirage. That late spring of 1940, after Holland and Belgium fell to Germany, France surrendered as well, signing an armistice on June 22 that ceded the northern half of the country to German occupation. A collaborationist regime now controlled the south, its provisional capital installed first in Bordeaux and then relocated to the abandoned hotels of the spa town of Vichy. An estimated seven million refugees, both French and foreign, took to the roads. They streamed toward the south hoping to cross the border, often penniless and hungry, carrying what they could. Down to the sea. Down to the sea.

  Many thousands of German and Austrian antifascists and Jews were apprehended and interned as enemy nationals. French authorities were immediately required to hand over—to “surrender on demand”—every German refugee they encountered. Among those at the top of the Gestapo’s long execution lists, for their crime of criticizing Hitler’s regime, were Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann.

  Despite his hopes, in May Feuchtwanger was interned again at the Les Milles brickworks, where sanitation was woeful, food and water were scant, and great clouds of brick dust made him cough up blood. Then he was sent to a military camp called Saint-Nicolas, outside of Nîmes. His wife Marta was interned as well, in the vast camp at Gurs near the Pyrenees, where inmates were confined to windowless, muddy wooden barracks and slept on straw-filled sacks on the floor. The political theorist Hannah Arendt was interned there too, along with thousands of other Jewish women who’d been arrested and detained in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris. To the fugitives on the run through the countryside, southern France now looked like nothing less than an enormous prison.

  Lion Feuchtwanger (center) behind barbed wire at the internment camp in Les Milles, France, 1939.

  Marta managed to flee from Gurs. She returned to Sanary, then made her way to Marseille. With the help of an American diplomat, she planned a successful but rather comical escape for Lion from Saint-Nicolas. Feuchtwanger was disguised as an elderly Englishwoman in a loose-fitting coat, sunglasses, and a shawl, and spirited into a waiting car. Once he reached Marseille, he was given a temporary haven at the home of the American vice-consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, who abandoned State Department protocol to offer that hospitality.

  Marta joined Lion at Bingham’s house after taking some time to return to Sanary to pack up their belongings. Once again, as in Berlin, another Feuchtwanger house, another writing space, another library of several thousand books was dismantled. “I never learned my lesson,” Feuchtwanger wrote in a memoir about this period. “I would always begin building over again, then cling spiritually and literally to what I had built, confident that this time I must surely be able to keep it.”

  Heinrich and Nelly Mann in Nice, 1936.

  Heinrich Mann and his wife Nelly, a former Hamburg bar hostess nearly three decades his junior, had made their way from Nice to Marseille and were hiding in a small hotel near the city’s railway station. They spent long days waiting for exit visas, hoping that Thomas Mann, then living in a rented house in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, could exert his influence. Franz Werfel and his wife Alma had hastily left Sanary with the hope of booking passage on any ship they could find leaving the Atlantic coast. In a grueling and fruitless seven-week pilgrimage that We
rfel called their “Tour de France,” they passed through Lourdes, where the Jewish Werfel visited the Catholic shrine dedicated to Bernadette Soubiros and prayed for a miracle. He vowed that if he managed to escape from Europe he would write a book to honor the saint. The shops in Lourdes were selling figurines of Saint Bernadette to the pilgrims who joined the swelling tide of fugitives to pray at her shrine. So many images of the saint. Not nearly enough miracles.

  Refugees at the U.S. Consulate in Marseille, 1941.

  Eventually the Werfels managed to obtain a safe-conduct pass to Marseille, a document issued by the Vichy government that permitted travel within France. In Marseille the consulate supplied the Werfels with American visas, but like the Manns they had no residency permits to allow them to stay, and they still needed exit visas to leave the country. Should they wait and hope to get exit visas, or try to leave illegally? They wrestled with the question as they sat in a hotel on one of the wide streets of the city which was packed with refugees, all bent on their daily hellish missions to petition the consulates. They had awakened from the daydream of Sanary to the nightmare of Marseille, a city that had trapped so many desperate hostages yet could not wait to be rid of them all.

  All three of the Dichterfürsten and their wives risked arrest and deportation to Germany if they remained in Marseille or if they tried to leave. The hotels in which they hid were filled with German officers. There was a circulating fear that at any moment the borders might be sealed. None of them had the proper documentation they needed in order to stay or to go. They were not young—Mann was sixty-nine, Feuchtwanger fifty-six, Werfel fifty—nor, after their panicky journeys to Marseille, were they emotionally or physically fit. On the waterfront edge of Hades, they joined a chorus of shades who belonged nowhere, who were not quite living and not yet dead, whose swelling voices called across the ocean to the New World. Save us.

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  AT METRO DURING THE EARLY FALL OF 1940, Salka was pulled into meetings to debate whether a Garbo comedy could earn enough domestic returns now that the European market for her pictures was gone. Because of arguments over The Twin Sister’s plot, the project had already lost a producer, Sidney Franklin, who was replaced by Gottfried Reinhardt. For the first time at Metro, Salka would be taking orders directly from her own paramour.

  Garbo was to play a sporty but unglamorous ski instructor who tests her husband’s faithfulness by disguising herself as a more alluring twin of her own invention. The husband falls in love with the counterfeit version, and hilarity, with some luck, ensues. As ever, writers with strongly opposing ideas cycled in and out: Walter Reisch, who had written on Ninotchka; the Marx Brothers’ stalwart George Oppenheimer; and then, to Salka’s relief, Sam Behrman.

  The story’s selling point was that moviegoers would get two Garbos for the price of one ticket. They could watch her ski and swim as one sister and dance in swanky nightclubs as the other. The risk was that Garbo, now thirty-five and forever an exotic, might not pull off the lighthearted sex appeal the role demanded. She faced comparisons with fresh American actresses like Lana Turner, who was sixteen years younger.

  From Twin Sister’s beginning, nobody got along. Gottfried was preoccupied with the news from Europe and took out his frustrations on the director, George Cukor. There were arguments over casting (Cary Grant was passed over in favor of Ninotchka’s Melvyn Douglas) and costumes (how glamorous for one twin, and how “sweater-girl” innocent for the other?). As the writers skirmished over the best ways to promote Garbo’s sexiness, the PCA warned against displaying any carnal knowledge at all. Tensions grew between Salka and Gottfried, though her memoir minimizes the discord. “As nothing divides people more than difference in their sense of humor,” she wrote, “it was a miracle that my friendship with Gottfried survived the severe test. Sam Behrman’s authority and intervention prevented many bitter feuds.”

  Gottfried Reinhardt, Wolfgang Reinhardt, and their mother, actress Else Heims, in the garden at Mabery Road, early 1940s.

  That August, Salka finally heard from her mother. In a letter dated March 12 and written in French, Auguste reported that Wychylowka had been nationalized by the Soviets, so she was now living in a one-room apartment in Sambor. Life was difficult. Auguste was too old to apply for work and was sharing the cramped apartment with Salka’s brother Dusko, his girlfriend Hania, and their little son. Also with them was a young woman named Viktoria who had been born to two of Wychylowka’s servants in 1917 and had always been treated as a member of the family. Auguste reported that she was cut off completely from news, had no radio or newspapers. But she was glad to report that Dusko had a job in the “physical culture” sector and was coaching the local soccer team for extra money. “I am thankful that he has become a responsible human being,” Auguste wrote.

  Salka also heard from the State Department that Auguste’s visa had been forwarded from Bucharest to the American Embassy in Moscow. But no emigration would be possible until she received permission to leave Sambor, which could take months. In the meantime, Salka heard that her sister Rose had managed to leave Vienna along with her two children. They were on a Greek steamer on their way to join Josef Gielen in Buenos Aires.

  Salka’s refugee work was accelerating. She continued to gather affidavits and to make donations to the European Film Fund, which was organizing fundraising events around town. The émigré conductor Bruno Walter gave a concert which raised $1100, while Liesl Frank collected proceeds of $332.42 from a gin-rummy benefit whose participants included many of Salka’s friends and colleagues: Alexander Granach, Ernst Lubitsch, Henry Blanke, William Wyler, and Paul Kohner.

  Around this time Salka also persuaded Garbo to make a substantial donation to the EFF. Through the years Garbo was criticized for her lackluster participation in aiding the European refugees. Mostly she feared the breach of privacy that these kinds of gestures would require. Yet if Garbo’s involvement was much more subdued than that of high-profile Hollywood antifascists such as Marlene Dietrich, she was far from indifferent, having made a five-thousand-dollar donation to the Finnish Relief Fund for its war orphans program in December 1939, under the condition of strict anonymity. There is also some evidence to suggest that Garbo used her influence to help the physicist Niels Bohr escape from occupied Denmark to Sweden and later to America. Salka pulled Garbo into her humanitarian network, persuading the actress to donate $500 to the EFF, the equivalent of nearly $9,000 in 2019 dollars. Garbo’s donation put her among the top twenty-eight contributors to the EFF—one of only a handful of women to earn that ranking.

  After the United States entered the war, gossip columnists and fan magazines criticized Garbo for refusing to participate in war-bond drives or entertain the troops. Salka rushed to her defense: “If anyone has made the suggestion that Garbo isn’t selling bonds because her sympathies are on the wrong side,” Salka said, “it’s too preposterous even to be discussed. There are some people who just cannot face crowds, no matter for what cause. Garbo is such a person. Instead she buys many bonds herself [and] has done the utmost to help me in my work of rescuing anti-Fascist refugees from Europe.”

  Salka was correct to point out that Garbo did what she could for the war effort, given the intensity of her social anxiety. The actress’s famous aversion to public attention, stemming from a combination of childhood trauma and the intense pressures of Hollywood celebrity, directed much of her behavior. She checked into hotels as “Harriet Brown” and made a trademark of disguising herself with sunglasses and hats. And she hid behind Salka whenever she could.

  In October 1940, when Garbo filed a Preliminary Declaration of Intent for American citizenship, she listed Salka’s house as her official address, though she had a residence of her own on South Amalfi Drive near the Huxleys in the Palisades. One of Garbo’s biographers, Karen Swenson, points to this fact as evidence that “Salka Viertel, her family and friends remained Garbo’s anchor in
Hollywood,” and this is true: for Garbo, as for so many others, Salka’s house was a shelter. But the use of the Viertels’ address also shows how much Garbo relied on Salka to safeguard her anonymity, to shield her from the fearsome, faceless crowds of everyday Americans who had made her a star.

  Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary. We had no idea whether this situation would last till tomorrow, another couple of weeks, or our entire lives.

  —ANNA SEGHERS, TRANSIT

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  RESCUE WORK FOR EUROPE’S REFUGEES required coordination among various organizations within a cooperative network. As the European Film Fund was partnering with Salka to integrate those who had already arrived in Los Angeles, it also joined forces with the Emergency Rescue Committee, which had convened in New York in June 1940 after the fall of France. The ERC was the American extension of an international committee founded in 1933 by Berthold’s longtime friend Albert Einstein to provide relief for Jews and antifascists trapped in France. Its founders and supporters included such public intellectuals as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the novelists John Dos Passos and Thomas Mann. It also involved a number of women who were firsthand witnesses to the National Socialists’ rise to power, including the German-Jewish banking heiress Ingrid Warburg, the journalist (and good friend of the Viertels) Dorothy Thompson, and Erika Mann, who had been working as a war correspondent.

  The ERC’s long arm extended to Los Angeles, where much of its fundraising took place. In her memoir, Salka admitted that while she did not remember the first time she met Thomas Mann, it must have been around this summer of 1940 at a meeting or a banquet for the ERC. It was during these summer months, when Thomas and his wife Katia were renting a house up the street from the Schoenbergs in Brentwood, that Salka and Thomas forged a friendship.