The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

At this Salka exploded. “Whom do you mean by ‘you people’? The refugees? They were the first victims of the Nazi horror, the first enemies of the regime with which the U.S. is at war. And aren’t the Russians our allies?” Then just as quickly she took hold of herself. “I realized that my outburst was a waste of time and energy,” she wrote later, “so I assured him once more that Annie was not and had never been a communist and had never read a word of Das Kapital.”

  Since the human capacity for empathy is very small, it must be nurtured.

  —HEINRICH MANN, IN A LETTER TO EGON ERWIN KISCH, JUNE 18, 1945

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  MOST OF THE EXILES lacked Salka’s equanimity, haunted by the possibility that soon, right here in Santa Monica, they could be reliving their recent waking nightmares in southern France, or in Germany during 1933. Fears about the war, about their trapped families and friends, the daily revilement they endured as enemy aliens and Jews, the growing sense that they would never again belong anywhere, the unrecoverable loss of their homes, their occupations, their languages: all this took a serious toll.

  In their distress they looked for acts of kindness, and in many instances they found it. The British actor Charles Laughton, perhaps the finest film actor of his time, befriended many of the exiles he met at Salka’s. Recognizing that their nights under curfew were long and lonely, on many evenings he would visit one or another of them, and sit with them deep into the night, and read to them in his marvelously pliant West End voice. Thus he made those anxious hours more tolerable, playing chess with the curfew-bound Austrian director Henry Koster, reading Shakespeare to Salka’s friend Jean Renoir and his wife Dido. He also read regularly to recuperating GIs at Birmingham General Hospital in the San Fernando Valley.

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  AS 1942 BARRELED INTO 1943, Salka’s already tenuous composure collapsed when Gottfried, who was still serving with the Signal Corps in New York, announced that he was leaving her. He wanted children, as he had often told her, and he had met someone, a divorced former actress from New York named Silvia Shapiro, and he was planning to marry her.

  Salka would soon be turning fifty-four. Although the tensions between her and Gottfried had escalated and she could hardly expect to be surprised, she felt his rejection as the cruelest of blows and the end of their relationship as no less than a bereavement. “The death of this love is horrible,” she wrote to Berthold. Decades later in her memoir she wrote with some understatement that “it was difficult to extricate myself from an involvement which, for ten years, had been a vital part of my life.” She also noted with characteristic perspective that “it is senseless to compare one’s own grief with the enduring horror suffered by millions, but the consciousness of unspeakable tragedy makes sudden loneliness even more desperate and hopeless.”

  In truth she had found that she liked Gottfried less and less the older he got. She had thought him more mature in the first months of their romance, when he was twenty-two, than he was today. Nonetheless she had continued to pour her love into him, an investment that now left her—still ardent, still willing—with nothing. None of the power, the prestige, the socially approved support that coupledom conferred on women of her age. Women in their fifties without men were degraded creatures, sexless and irrelevant, objects of pity and scorn. After Garbo’s exit from Metro, Hollywood had been warning Salka ever less subtly of her disposability. Now Gottfried was confirming it. She staged a mighty pretense of superhuman cheerfulness and industry, and told no one aside from her closest family of the news.

  Her difficulties multiplied when Berthold returned from New York at the beginning of the year. He had moved around so frequently that his U.S. citizenship could not be finalized until he established residency for six months, so he decided to wait it out on Mabery Road. There he confronted the inconvenience of a front-row seat to Salka’s depression. “Just as he had resented my happiness,” she wrote in her memoir, “he now resented my sadness.” His girlfriend Liesel Neumann followed from New York and took a room across the street, in a house also occupied at the time by Salka’s brother Edward. Hans was back living at the house, along with Auguste and Tommy, Berthold, his niece Susan and her little son, and Edward’s daughter Margret. Salka continued to cook and clean for all, arranged her Sunday parties, and ventured off daily to her ever-more-precarious job at Metro.

  Isherwood came to Mabery Road on occasional lunchtimes during this period. On a golden afternoon in May, “the air full of spray and falling light,” he walked on the beach with Garbo and Tommy as Garbo chattered away about her interest in Vedanta and her intention to visit Isherwood’s Swami Prabhavananda. This was no new fad for Garbo; she had expressed similar attractions to Indian philosophy as far back as 1939, when she and the Viertels had attended the all-star picnic in Tujunga Canyon with the Huxleys and Krishnamurti. And indeed in July Salka brought Garbo to pay a visit to Isherwood at the Swami’s temple on Ivar Avenue in Hollywood, where Garbo “played up outrageously, sighing about how wonderful it must be to be a nun, and flirting with Swami, telling him about his dark, mysterious, oriental eyes.” The Swami was equally infatuated.

  Isherwood also mentioned meeting Hans’s good friend Stefan Brecht, the son of the playwright, “a spotty boy with glasses” who bowed stiffly from the waist upon being introduced and was fond of playing chess with Edward Steuermann. “Everything in the household was just as usual,” Isherwood noted with satisfaction in July. “Berthold and Hans got into one of their heated arguments. It might easily have been 1939—except that Peter is in the Pacific war zone with the marines, and Tommy will shortly have to register for the draft. Salka came home around three o’clock, attended by collaborators, secretaries, etc. She is writing two stories at once—one about Iceland, for Garbo; the other about refugee domestic servants.”

  In fact Isherwood was wrong about the household proceeding as usual. In early July, Metro had canceled Salka’s contract for good. Its producers had rejected every project Salka recommended for Garbo, while Garbo in turn declined every screenplay they suggested. Of Salka’s old champions only Eddie Mannix remained, and swore that as soon as Salka found a good story for Garbo he would welcome her back wholeheartedly. “I am convinced he meant it,” Salka said sadly. From Hollywood executives, then as now: the more emphatic the yes, the more resolute the no.

  As in 1939, when Metro had last fired her, Salka was not unduly worried about her finances. That same July she sold a treatment for a domestic comedy to Paramount for three thousand dollars, and around that time she also sold a love story for Garbo set in Iceland for ten thousand. Neither was produced, but she was grateful for the income, which went toward paying her taxes and relieving her mortgage worries. There was still plenty of interest in Garbo from around the industry, even at age forty, even without the European market. And Garbo was interested in making pictures as well, as long as she approved of the scripts and directors. But without the backing of a major studio, both Garbo and Salka were cut adrift from the resources of the filmmaking apparatus. The actress was spending more and more time in New York. She didn’t need the money. Salka was tethered to her family and the refugee community, and she very much did. Donations to the EFF had been declining since the United States had entered the war. The fund declared itself in dire financial straits by 1943. Its coordinators began asking recipients to repay their loans. Few were in a position to do so. As ever, they continued to rely on whatever Salka could do to help.

  In early August, an FBI informant reported on a meeting that took place at Salka’s house to discuss a proposal suggested by the Free Germany Movement, an anti-Nazi organization that operated in the Soviet Union during the war. The movement was hoping to install Thomas Mann as the leader of a German government-in-exile. The FBI considered the movement’s American iteration to be a Communist front, claiming that its aim was to establish a postwar German government under the strict auspices of the Soviet Unio
n. Brecht’s participation in the movement earned him a place on the U.S. National Censorship Watch List.

  At the Mabery Road meeting were Salka and Berthold, Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, Thomas and Katia Mann, Heinrich and Nelly Mann, Ludwig Marcuse and his wife Sascha, Bertolt and Helli Brecht, Bruno and Liesl Frank, and Hanns Eisler. The next day, Thomas Mann decided to withdraw, rejecting any possibility of his becoming a president-in-exile. Bruno Frank and Ludwig Marcuse likewise withdrew their signatures. The event sparked a bitter disagreement between Thomas Mann and Brecht: Mann believed that the entire German nation was at fault for Nazism and should be uniformly punished, while Brecht argued for less draconian measures and grew angry with Mann for declining to serve as a leader. As in Weimar, as in Sanary, as in Marseille, as in Hollywood’s Popular Front, the umbrella of antifascism covered a broad range of political sensibilities—from Brecht’s Marxism to Salka’s pro-Roosevelt liberalism to Thomas Mann’s democratic humanism—many of them in conflict with one another.

  A Wedding, a Funeral

  The positions on the lifeboat kept shifting. Etta Hardt moved to New York, abandoning Salka to her own deplorable bookkeeping. Liesel Neumann also returned to New York, having been cast in a play, and Isherwood moved into her room across the street for a few days’ furlough from the Vedantans on Ivar Avenue. He mistakenly supposed that the Viertels would be free to devote themselves entirely to his entertainment. “They are quite pleased to see me,” he wrote, “but they’re all working hard, or busy with their own problems. Berthold has his play, Salka her movie stories, Edward his music…Salka’s mother her housework. Hans his sleep. Only Tommy is nearly always available.”

  Isherwood and Tommy continued their walks on the beach, the boy pelting the older man with questions “about politics, Buddhism, literature, everything…listening very carefully and earnestly to my replies.” At night Berthold read to Isherwood some of his poetry, along with some Hölderlin and Brentano, both men happily reenacting their London days. There was a big party at the Viertel house on August 23 which featured a lot of yelling about world affairs. Hanns Eisler (“the Red composer,” Isherwood wrote, “a little moon-faced man with peg teeth…who talks very rapidly in a loud unharmonious voice, with whirring wittiness”) made a spirited attack on the role of religion in politics, while Isherwood was called upon to defend pacifism. “They were all very apologetic about this,” he said, “as though they’d been guilty of bad taste in even mentioning the subject—rather as though a Negro had been dragged into a discussion of race prejudice. It was silly and futile. I felt like a fake.”

  Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades, with the Santa Monica Bay in background.

  At the Villa Aurora, Lion Feuchtwanger’s rambling Spanish house on a hill in the Palisades which he and Marta had bought that year with his book earnings, his exile friends gathered to wait for the radio news broadcasts from Europe that came at midnight. Observing the curfew, the exiles passed many nighttime hours by throwing darts at a board painted with Hitler’s image.

  Max Reinhardt had gone to New York to stage a play by Irwin Shaw called Sons and Soldiers. He celebrated his seventieth birthday there in September, in excellent health. Next he was planning, with less enthusiasm, to stage Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène on Broadway; he had recently told Salka that he would have preferred not to have the reputation in America of “a specialist in musicals.” Quite suddenly, while still in New York, he suffered a series of strokes, and by the end of October he lay close to death. Gottfried and his brother Wolfgang were with him, while in the living room on Mabery Road the Viertels held their own vigil.

  As they waited for news, Salka reflected on the elder Reinhardt’s influence in her life. “To be ‘discovered’ by Reinhardt had meant more to me than the best contracts at royal theaters,” she wrote. His ideas about spectacle had revolutionized Western drama and had generated endless imitators—had even influenced, unmistakably, the ultra-theatrical propaganda pageants of the Third Reich. The National Socialists had expelled him all the same, eager to grab his theaters and personal property and glad to be rid of his pernicious Jewish influence on the purity of German entertainment.

  In California Salka’s heart had hurt to see Max Reinhardt’s fortunes reduced to the staging of student productions in a humble auditorium, to hear affable young amateurs, their feet draped over the theater seats, thoughtlessly addressing him as Max. Yet he had been no less hardworking in exile as he had been in his former life, when he ran eleven stages in Berlin and founded the Salzburg Festival on the grounds of the castle in which he lived. “He once called himself a ‘negotiator between dream and reality,’ ” Thomas Mann said of Max Reinhardt. “With these words he not only characterized himself and the essence of his art, which was to render thought palpable, but he defined the essence of all art.” The master was lofty, but could be gently prosaic too: it was his custom, before the curtain rose on an opening night, to give each of his actors a little bag of candy.

  Max Reinhardt’s death was a deeply personal loss for Salka. It entrenched her grief for the death of her relationship with Gottfried as well as for the lost world of German culture that Reinhardt represented. To her son Hans he had been an important mentor, the first outside the Viertel household to give him creative encouragement. Hans went on to do translation work for Brecht and to distinguish himself as an intellectual and a linguistics scholar.

  As the curtain closed on the life of Max Reinhardt, Salka’s sorrow at being so recently abandoned by his son Gottfried must have felt especially raw. The grief she could not share took its place among the somber community in her living room on the night of October 31, 1943. “We jumped when the telephone rang,” Salka recalled. “It was Gottfried to tell us that his father was dead.”

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  WITHOUT WARNING, just before Christmas, Peter returned to Mabery Road. He was off soon to officer training at the Marine base in Virginia. The news was a bright spot in Salka’s dark year. She was relieved to know Peter would be out of combat for the next six months. He had participated in the Allied landing at Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. The destroyer on which he’d sailed toward home had been hit and slightly damaged by a Japanese bomb. He was thin but otherwise buoyant, appreciative of his good luck. And he would waste no more time: Jigee had gotten her divorce from Budd Schulberg and Peter intended to marry her right away.

  Peter Viertel en route to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, 1944.

  In early February of 1944, in Salka’s living room, a local judge performed the wedding. Only the families and a handful of friends attended. Berthold loved Jigee from the start and was happy to welcome her as a daughter-in-law. Jigee teased Salka for crying during the ceremony, then cried a little herself. Then they both burst into laughter, determined to grasp the moment of joy while it lasted.

  It seemed that a tinge of bitterness always tempered the sweet, for the war effort demanded that Salka immediately trade the safety of one son for another. The morning after the wedding, at dawn, eighteen-year-old Tommy left the railroad station downtown for the Fort MacArthur induction center in San Pedro. From there he would be sent to basic training in Alabama. Salka and Berthold drove to the station to say goodbye, queuing on the platform among a nervous scrum of parents and sweethearts. Salka watched her youngest son marching in a long line of boys in poorly fitting uniforms, looking undefended and lost. She broke ranks and ran up to him, engulfing him in a final hug and kiss, then retreated as the sergeant yelled. Tommy waved briefly and disappeared into the tide of uniforms. Salka could barely drive through her tears on the way home.

  No more young people remained at Mabery Road. Hans left for San Francisco to train as a machinist so he could work in the aircraft industry. Jigee and Vicky went to the East Coast to be closer to Peter at Quantico. Edward’s daughter also went east to continue her studies, and Berthold’s niece Susan rejoined her husband
in England. The house’s lightheartedness went with them. Now the breakfast room where Salka, Berthold, and Auguste had their meals was thick with tension. Salka felt weighted by depression, and Berthold was prone to snap at every provocation. He was working late into the nights on a play which he was determined to show to Manhattan producers, and in the middle of March he departed for New York in a furious haste, his study a blizzard of papers and manuscripts for Salka to wade through as she packed his suitcases.

  Berthold’s letters from the train were as fond toward Salka as they had ever been, perhaps more so in the relief of leaving. With physical distance he was able to grow emotionally closer. He was planning to return to California the following month, unless by some luck his play was produced. His impatience with Salka evaporated and his sentimentality returned as he wrote to her of his appreciation for her financial and emotional support. “For many years you have given me the possibility to do my literary work: in the drawers of the bureau in my room, on tables, chairs and in cupboards, among newspapers and books, are manuscripts and loose papers containing the lyrical output of my whole life, which one day will justify me before my children.” His mood improved as well with the prospect of returning to Liesel Neumann.

  March 1944 was also the month that Gottfried married Silvia Shapiro. The finality was a blow for Salka, even as she had known it was coming. In the early 1960s, she looked back at her grieving self from this time and wrote in her diary: “At that time, and this is now twenty years ago, I thought I could not live without his love…Now I wonder, why he had such a grip on me. Because he needed me?” Publicly, though, she said nothing, and distracted herself by looking after the house and the people who still needed her. “Why didn’t I let the house go dirty, neglect the garden, the dogs? I could not,” she wrote later, invoking the memory of her nurse Niania. “It was Niania’s heritage, her tidy peasant mind that had a firm grip on me and made me loathe disintegration.”