The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Salka Viertel and her dog Prinz at Mabery Road, 1944.

  She continued to scrub, wash, iron, cook, and tend the garden. She drove Helli Brecht to the Grand Central Market, where for ten or twelve dollars they could buy food for an entire week. “At the stalls previously owned by Japanese,” Salka wrote, “Mexicans and Filipinos now stood behind mounds of fruit and vegetables. If only one could send some of it to Europe.”

  During a time of private heartbreak, Salka kept providing what Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson E. Randol Schoenberg has called “the social glue that made the exiles into a community.” It was a job without end. Fissures opened constantly throughout the German colony, its old and new feuds made more stinging and less forgivable under the particular conditions of the southern California exile. In 1943, a trio of Salka’s friends—Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and a youngish German philosopher and music theorist named Theodor W. Adorno—entered into a simmering confrontation that erupted five years later and produced lifelong bitterness among them. A significant portion of the drama took place on Mabery Road.

  That summer, Thomas Mann had begun work on a new novel. It was a reimagining of the Faust legend in which a modernist composer named Adrian Leverkühn sells his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of otherworldly artistic inspiration. To help Mann understand the more abstruse details of avant-garde music, he turned to what he called “benevolent connoisseurs” of his acquaintance, including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, and Hanns Eisler. The most eager of these connoisseurs was Theodor Adorno, whom Mann had met at the Pacific Palisades home of Adorno’s colleague Max Horkheimer in July.

  Adorno was a Frankfurt-born musical prodigy who had studied piano with Salka’s brother Edward and composition with Alban Berg in 1920s Vienna. He was a champion of modernist music and his characterizations of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method caught the attention of Schoenberg himself, at least in part through Adorno’s continuing friendship with Edward Steuermann. After Adorno’s ejection from Europe in 1934 and eight frustrating years of exile in England and New York, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1940. He made the journey on the heels of Max Horkheimer, his fellow Frankfurt School philosopher, on whom he was dependent for financial support. Adorno settled with his wife in a duplex apartment in Brentwood and went about trying to resurrect his professional life in the alien environment of Los Angeles. He brought with him an as-yet-unpublished manuscript called Philosophy of New Music, which contained a critique of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method and which he gave to Thomas Mann, who saw in it much that might be helpful for the novel he had titled Doctor Faustus.

  Throughout that year and over the next four, Adorno became deeply involved in the manuscript for Doctor Faustus, advising Mann on its many composition-related technicalities and even writing some descriptions of Leverkühn’s fictional music. In January 1944 the two men met at Salka’s house, where according to Mann’s diaries they discussed “the musical problematic of the novel.” Adorno also showed Mann a collection of essays about Alban Berg to which Adorno had made several contributions. Those essays of Adorno’s became important source material for the book. Many similar meetings followed. Mann made use of Adorno’s writings on Wagner and Kierkegaard, early versions of his critical-theory work Minima Moralia, and the sections of his Philosophy of New Music that featured Schoenberg. Adorno accepted no payment for his efforts, but he clearly hoped his relationship with Mann would open doors toward the relaunch of his career.

  When Doctor Faustus was published in 1948, Schoenberg was deeply insulted by Mann’s portrait of Adrian Leverkühn as the creator of a twelve-tone system that mirrored his own. He was especially distressed that Mann, with whom he was casually friendly if not especially close, had portrayed the Schoenberg-like protagonist as syphilitic. Schoenberg fumed and fulminated over what he saw as an intolerable character assassination. He startled Marta Feuchtwanger when he ran into her one day at the Brentwood Country Mart and began yelling in German that he did not in fact have syphilis.

  When Mann agreed to append a note to future editions of the book attesting that a real-life contemporary composer named Arnold Schoenberg was the true creator of the twelve-tone system, Schoenberg was only partially mollified. And when he learned the extent of Adorno’s contributions to the book, Schoenberg transferred much of his anger from the older man to the younger. He had never much liked Adorno, and now he despised him. As if to highlight Adorno’s abiding deceitfulness, Schoenberg insisted on calling him “Wiesengrund”—the surname of his Jewish father which he had changed to his Italian mother’s name upon his arrival in America. In 1950, Schoenberg added a codicil to his will in which he made a list of potential advisers who could be trusted to safeguard his reputation. He took care to note: “Wiesengrund should be excluded altogether.”

  Katia and Erika Mann were also offended by Adorno. They found him pretentious and self-aggrandizing, and sought to minimize his role in the creation of Doctor Faustus. The controversy spilled into the press. Everyone was eager, even gleeful, to take a side. In her memoir Salka recounted the frequent “excited discussions” that took place on Mabery Road. “There were impassioned arguments about ‘Geistiges Eigentum,’ ” she remembered, translating the German as “spiritual ownership,” though today we would call it intellectual property. Then she attempted to smooth over the unpleasantness, writing: “But everything was amicably settled when Thomas Mann, in a short note in his book, explained that despite all his respect and admiration for Schoenberg he had never intended to use him as a model for his hero.”

  In truth nothing was settled. The discord went deeper. It could only have emerged from the circumstances of this exile, and it was exile—not injured feelings about intellectual property, and not even personal dislike—that lay at the conflict’s bitter root. In Minima Moralia, Adorno’s 1951 philosophical reflection on his “damaged life” in California, he wrote: “Every intellectual in emigration is mutilated without exception.” Adorno had been a young man of twenty-nine when he was expelled from Germany and had struggled ever since to regain a toehold in three foreign environments. There is more than a touch of autobiography in his musings about “every intellectual in emigration,” of whom he writes in Minima Moralia: “He is always astray…His language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped.” If Katia and Erika Mann disdained him for his sycophancy, his behavior was motivated at least in part by desperation and loss. He had hoped that his alliance with Mann might restore what was taken from him when der rote Faden of his career was severed in 1933. When instead his efforts fostered outrage and contempt, he could only have felt again the pain of the original amputation.

  For Schoenberg the pain was even greater. In his mid-seventies by the time Doctor Faustus was published, he perceived as under attack not only his livelihood but also his legacy. That the perpetrators were his neighbors and his fellow exiles rather than an external enemy was particularly galling. He had no trouble imagining a future in which his cultural contributions would be erased worldwide—as the National Socialists had erased his “degenerate music” in Europe—while Thomas Mann and Doctor Faustus endured. He agonized that generations would believe that Mann, and not Schoenberg, had invented the twelve-tone method. While he himself suffered no lack of self-worth, he repeatedly expressed his fears about the marginalization that he believed the Doctor Faustus episode encouraged. He wrote as much in a letter to Mann, lamenting: “To the Germans I am a Jew, to the Latins a German, to the Communists I am bourgeois, and the Jews are for Hindemith and Stravinsky.”

  The National Socialists’ expulsion had forever ruined the security of even so indomitable a figure as Thomas Mann, who unlike Schoenberg and Adorno did not suffer the stigma of being Jewish, endured no financial hardships, and seemed assured of a legacy as unshakable as that of Goethe or Nietzsche. Yet the determination of Mann’s wife and daughter to minimize Adorno’s role in the creation of D
octor Faustus suggests a keen vulnerability. Their exertions in shoring up the Nobel Prize–winner’s reputation at every turn were impulses born of the trauma of 1933, from which there was no recovery, only vigilance and suspicion.

  Salka knew she could not heal these wounds. She took no public side in the conflict among the three men, all of whom were her close friends. But her compassion for each of them was a position and a principle. It attempted to shift the climate of the drama, at least within the confines of her living room. Despite her ministrations, nothing was “amicably settled.” But without the tone she set through the constancy of her community-preserving efforts, the damage undoubtedly would have been worse.

  * * *

  —

  SALKA TRIED TO HIDE HER ANXIETIES about the war and the absence of news about Dusko. But “it was impossible to conceal from Mama the pictures of the concentration camps, which appeared in newspapers and Life magazine,” she remembered, and sometimes Auguste was so overwhelmed that she remained in her room all day, pretending to read. In the evenings they listened together to the Southern California Gas Company concerts on the radio, and Salka put Auguste to work as her sous-chef in the kitchen. As she chopped and peeled vegetables, the older woman shared her memories of Polish and Russian recipes from Wychylowka, and of Salka’s father’s favorite foods. And then, wrote Salka, “after a while we would cease talking and plunge into our separate gloom.”

  Salka Viertel and her mother, Auguste Steuermann, at Mabery Road.

  Thomas Mann wrote his daily five hundred words of Doctor Faustus and then took his standard poodle for a walk, or napped in his backyard with a napkin over his face. Bertolt Brecht sat in the garden of the old wooden house he and Helli had rented on 26th Street in Santa Monica and worked on his poems and plays. Helli, an excellent actress and later a stage director, stayed up into the late hours to serve homemade cake to the visitors who came to discuss the war with Brecht.

  Heinrich and Nelly Mann were both unwell. He had attacks of bronchial asthma and worried about his heart. She was hounded by depression and suffered through migraines so painful that they made her cry, and continued to soothe herself with alcohol. In the spring Nelly went to stay at Ananda Ashrama, a spiritual community founded in 1923 by Swami Paramananda, a rival of Isherwood’s guru. Still operating today, the ashram sits in the La Crescenta foothills, a ten-minute drive from Hindenburg Park and its erstwhile Nazi rallies. Alfred Döblin’s wife Erna also stayed there around that time and in fact many of the ashram’s guests were émigrés, who must have sensed in the pine-scented air a therapeutic reminder of the magic mountains of their homelands. Nelly liked that she could stay for free, as she had no money to pay. She was treated with abundant kindness by the sisters, whose belief in life after death was a comfort to her, and who gave her lessons in English. Heinrich came to join Nelly later in the summer and stayed until October, finding as Nelly did a refuge from his fears about money and his health. Thomas and Katia drove over to see them in late September, glad to see Heinrich looking improved.

  Dim the lights,

  Wait for information,

  Most of all, obey your air-raid warden.

  Stop the panic,

  Don’t get in a huff,

  Our aim today is to call their bluff.

  Follow these rules and that is enough.

  Obey your air-raid warden.

  —“OBEY YOUR AIR-RAID WARDEN,”

  PUBLIC-SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT SONG PERFORMED BY TONY PASTOR AND HIS ORCHESTRA, 1942

  * * *

  —

  ONCE THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE WAR, Salka’s Sunday gatherings grew rowdier. No longer confined to the house and back garden, they spilled out onto the front lawn and the street and lasted all day and into the night, like a neighborhood block party. The Vienna-born director Fred Zinnemann, one of the Viertels’ dearest friends, lived a few houses away. His son Tim was a little boy at the time and remembered the parties as unruly, with lots of drinking. To him Salka seemed grandmotherly and strikingly European in dress and manner, and always the center of the show.

  Fred Zinnemann was the air-raid warden for the block during those years, and Tim would often accompany his father on his rounds. On one Sunday evening they were patrolling the blocks around their street to make sure the neighbors complied with the rules during a drill.

  The Zinnemanns could hear the music booming out of Salka’s house from all the way down the block. Her windows were wide open and German songs roared at full volume. As father and son approached, it seemed as if all of Santa Monica Canyon was sitting around on Salka’s front lawn. More people spilled out of the crowded interior.

  Fred Zinneman was serious about his responsibility as an air-raid warden. His government-issued handbook stated: “When the warning sounds after dark, the blackout will be enforced. You will warn householders at once of any light showing and if it is not at once turned out or covered, report the fact to the nearest policeman.” Zinnemann yelled at Salka in German through the open window to draw the blackout curtains and stop the noise. In German, Salka yelled back at him that she would do no such thing. The music kept blasting. The windows remained open. There was no way Salka was going to shut the party down, the Office of Civilian Defense be damned. This was Los Angeles in wartime: two Hollywood notables arguing in German about U.S. government blackout rules, while a houseful of enemy aliens who had barely escaped their deaths in Europe let off steam. It must have been, from Salka’s point of view, a thoroughly successful evening.

  Out of the fervency of the parties, partnerships continued to bloom. In the Mabery Road living room that March, Charles Laughton met Brecht. Salka reported that Laughton was “completely hypnotized” by the playwright. The two men arranged to work together on a new version of Brecht’s 1938 play Galileo. The actor Simon Callow observed in his book about Laughton: “The very fact that their meeting took place at the Viertels’ salon might have suggested to Brecht that Laughton was not like the common run of American actors; but Laughton, though not easy socially, always wanted to be near artists—painters, composers, poets, playwrights; and Salka Viertel had somehow created a space where that most un-English and largely un-American phenomenon, the community of artists, could flourish.”

  Brecht spoke little English and Laughton no German at all. During their collaboration on Galileo the two men communicated in French, in which Laughton had become fluent during a 1936 stint at the Comédie-Française. The large, mobile-faced actor and the crop-haired little playwright worked in the garden of Laughton’s house on Corona del Mar in the Palisades, perched high on an unstable cliff with views of navy warships and oil tankers in the sea below. Brecht’s mind was fixed on erosion—of Laughton’s hillside and of civilizations in general—and he wrote a poem about it called “Garden in Progress,” in which he compared Laughton’s transplanted fuchsias to immigrants. The poem ends with a warning: landslides had already sent parts of the garden tumbling down the hillside. Brecht cautioned that there might not be time enough to see it repaired.

  * * *

  —

  A YOUNG INDEPENDENT PRODUCER named Lester Cowan had approached Salka with a film project called Woman of the Sea, with a role for Garbo as the captain of a Norwegian steamer who becomes a heroine of the Resistance. Garbo was interested but would not sign an agreement until she approved the final script. In the summer of 1944, Cowan put Salka to work on a week-to-week contract at a thousand dollars per week. To help her he hired a Warners screenwriter named Vladimir Pozner as well as Joris Ivens, the Dutch documentarian who had made the 1937 antifascist film The Spanish Earth with Ernest Hemingway. The writers had completed two-thirds of the script when Garbo suddenly backed out of the project. She gave no reason and no one could change her mind.

  Garbo had been convinced by her agent that this type of war story was dated and that Pozner’s and Ivens’s Communist sympathies were box-office poison. He
r desertion was calamitous for Salka, who was now jobless. There was no studio infrastructure to cajole Garbo into continuing. Toward Salka, Garbo was unmoved. “I have done enough for you,” the actress told Salka. “I cannot do more.” Only Ernst Lubitsch, at whose house the two women had first met all those years ago, came to Salka’s defense, writing a reproachful letter to Garbo: “I haven’t read the script, but I must tell you that if it’s good, you behaved badly. If it’s bad, you behaved even worse. You threw an old friend to the wolves. You have been in Hollywood long enough to know how much damage you have done to Salka.”

  Garbo was furious at Lubitsch’s reprimand, but more so at Salka’s disloyalty. Although the women eventually reconciled, they did not speak for a number of months. Salka was too emotionally preoccupied—not just with Garbo’s betrayal, but also with her worries about Dusko, and Tommy in the army, and her depression over Gottfried—to heed the lessons of the Cowan debacle. Only with hindsight would she come to understand that her chances for independence from Garbo were dimming, and that her fortunes were tied to an unaffiliated actress with dwindling ambition and little self-confidence. Worse, Salka shrugged off the growing vilification of left-leaning filmmakers such as Pozner and Ivens as inconsequential. She underestimated her own financial jeopardy within the red scare that was beginning to engulf Hollywood.

  If adaptation in the eye of catastrophe is the key to survival in the picture business, the day every insider dreads is the day when adaptation is no longer possible. Obsolescence is the great Hollywood equalizer. Eventually it happens to everyone, from Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick all the way down the line. During her years at Metro Salka had proved herself to be more adept than most at diplomacy. Outside the studio she had built her personal reputation on remaining proudly uncompromising. Would that resolve prove to be her ruin or salvation?