The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  After denying Eisler the right to read an opening statement, the Committee established that the composer had lied on a visa application in 1941 when he claimed he was not a Communist. There was evidence that he had rather desultorily joined the party in Germany back in 1926. No help to Eisler was the fact that his brother Gerhart was perhaps the most notorious Communist spymaster in America. Two years later, in 1949, Gerhart Eisler was arrested, jumped bail, and made a brazen escape aboard a Polish ocean liner. But the Committee was after bigger fish than Gerhart’s mild-mannered and jocular brother Hanns, whose refugee life in America had been dedicated to composing music, largely for the works of Brecht, and to the social consolations of Salka’s parties. HUAC’s goal in interrogating Hanns Eisler was to expose those who had petitioned the State Department to allow him admission to the country in 1941, an illustrious group that included Dorothy Thompson, William Dieterle, and—its white whale—Eleanor Roosevelt. The former first lady’s recommendation on Eisler’s behalf offered proof to the Committee of the Roosevelt administration’s pink-tinged lenience toward the anti-Nazi (and thus, to their minds, pro-Communist) infiltrators who took advantage of American hospitality during the war.

  For violating U.S. immigration law, Eisler and his wife Lou were forced to leave the country and to sign a declaration that they would never return. The Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler viciously cheered Eisler’s exit, lamenting only that it was “too late for Hitler to gas him.” (Eisler was not Jewish.) Eisler himself made this statement upon his departure: “I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”

  Eisler eventually settled in East Berlin. He died in 1962, his later years mired in depression.

  After its gleeful manipulation of Eisler, the Committee was less successful with its one other European quarry. Answering a subpoena, Bertolt Brecht testified for about an hour on the ninth and last day of the hearings, on October 30, 1947. “I am a guest in this country and do not want to enter into any legal arguments,” Brecht told the Committee smoothly, and denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. “The Committee was utterly unprepared for this,” wrote Salka, “and even some of Brecht’s friends were surprised.” When asked if he knew Gerhart Eisler, Brecht remarked that they had played chess together in Los Angeles; when asked about Hanns Eisler, Brecht said that he was an old friend and his musical collaborator.

  Of Brecht’s elliptical performance before the Committee, Salka wrote: “The Chairman could do nothing else but thank him for having been a cooperative witness.” She reported that immediately after the hearing Brecht boarded an airplane and left the country for Switzerland, one step ahead of political storm clouds that looked very much like those that had propelled him out of Nazified Europe in 1941. A few weeks later, Helli Brecht packed up the house on 26th Street in Santa Monica and left with their children to join him. They ended up in East Berlin, where he received a hero’s welcome.

  Brecht was nowhere near as sorry as Eisler to leave America, having gotten what he wanted out of his Hollywood exile: a splashy American production of one of his plays. Three months earlier, during a July heat wave, the production of Galileo over which he had labored for two years with Charles Laughton premiered at the Coronet Theatre on La Cienega Boulevard. The weather was so hot that Laughton ordered trucks loaded with ice to park against the theater’s exterior walls, and fans to be kept whirring “so that the audience can think.” Among the graciously perspiring attendees on opening night were Ingrid Bergman, Gene Kelly, Frank Lloyd Wright, Billy Wilder, Igor Stravinsky, and Charlie and Oona Chaplin.

  The play’s brief run sold out, after which the production was set to move to Broadway. Salka wrote to Berthold: “I saw Galileo. I find the play quite beautiful, Laughton too private, the epic theater unbearable and the production a mixture of megalomania and rank dilettantism.”

  Public reaction was equally skeptical. The Hollywood folk were confused by Laughton’s underplaying, which seemed to them a willful lack of engagement. They could not understand the absence of high drama when Laughton as Galileo recanted his scientific principles to avoid being burned at the stake. Hanns Eisler’s music created no emotional swoon, and director Joseph Losey’s “living-newspaper” staging was monotonously episodic. Both Los Angeles and New York audiences felt cheated of big moments and of the kind of outsized performance they had come to expect of a larger-than-life movie star.

  With the influx of the refugees in the ’30s Hollywood became a kind of Athens. It was as crowded with artists as Renaissance Florence. It was a Golden Era…It had never happened before.

  It will never happen again.

  —S. N. BEHRMAN, PEOPLE IN A DIARY

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  THE BAFFLEMENT THAT GREETED GALILEO, with the HUAC hearings on its heels, signaled a loosening of the embrace between Hollywood and the exiles. Ernst Lubitsch and Samuel Hoffenstein both died that fall, taking with them a universe of European-Jewish sophistication. (“No more Lubitsch,” Billy Wilder lamented at the great director’s funeral. “Worse than that,” replied William Wyler, “no more Lubitsch pictures.”) After the anticlimax of Galileo and the exits of Eisler and Brecht, the remaining refugees in Los Angeles saw the earth below them shifting in familiarly unsettling ways. They felt the welcome in their place of refuge growing weary, their freedoms every day becoming less free.

  In December 1947, the Screen Writers Guild magazine put out a defiant special edition devoted to arguments against HUAC’s impingement on free speech. Among the contributors was Thomas Mann, who offered a statement about the Committee’s “ignorant and superstitious persecution” of proponents of the First Amendment. “I testify that this persecution is not only degrading for the persecutors themselves but also very harmful to the cultural reputation of this country,” Mann wrote. “As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’…this is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.”

  Salka contributed a longer essay which she titled “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Like Mann, she offered a Continental perspective to the subject of censorship in American films. Her essay performed a star turn in what the historian Thomas Doherty has called “the ritual enactment of a great Constitutional conflict” in American civic life: the clash between civil liberties and national security.

  Cover of The Screen Writer, December 1947.

  Salka’s essay is a pungent recitation of her political convictions and points out historical nuances which the HUAC committee was opportunistically reducing to one suspicious shade of red. Like Thomas Mann, she located the signposts of fascism which she believed the House Un-American Activities Committee was erecting. She told about the clampdowns on progressive artists that she had witnessed in Germany during meetings of the Actors Guild in the 1920s, when “the first ones to be denounced and verboten as ‘Kulturbolsheviks’ were Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Remarque, James Joyce, Picasso, Sigmund Freud and many others, some of whom have since contributed their great gifts to the cultural life of the countries which gave them refuge.” She reminded readers of the stink bombs the National Socialists tossed into theaters during showings of All Quiet on the Western Front, and of the Composers League complaints against Brecht and Eisler (“it seems it always starts with Hanns Eisler,” she noted). “As in the tone poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” she wrote, “uncontrollable forces were released; and no sorcerer has been able to banish them.”

  Salka then turned her attention to the current climate in American filmmaking, in which such great pictures as William
Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives were being labeled subversive, and she called on citizens to guard against a culture determined to follow the same dangerous path. “Democracy is a precious thing,” she wrote. “So is freedom. But in wartime both are the first casualties.” She expressed her faith in the American people, whom she praised for continuing stubbornly to think for themselves: “Neither yellow journalism nor hysterical gossip columnists will make their minds up for them.” But she ended more soberly:

  …being free from political affiliations, I still cannot forget that twenty million Russians died in the fight against fascism, that to the Soviet occupation of Poland in 1939 I owe the life of my mother, and that the Nazis murdered my brother. These are my politics: they are simple enough, and I am not afraid to state them. And after having lived through two world wars and seen the destruction of my home and native land and mourned my dear ones, I dare to express the hope that the screen shall remain free of the censorship of moronic haters.

  Salka sent her essay to Berthold, telling him: “It is the beginning of my journalistic career. But I can only do this as a sideline, since I have to look around for a more lucrative occupation. I will probably work in a restaurant if our film project does not come to fruition.”

  “Our film project” was the George Sand story for Garbo, which she and the actress were hoping to make abroad with Pathé in France and Laurence Olivier’s production company in London. Salka’s new agent, an up-and-comer named Irving Lazar, was tireless in his advocacy. But over the next couple of years the financing for the picture unraveled, then pulled together, then unraveled again as the property hopscotched from one producer to another. Salka wore herself out with draft after draft of the screenplay, only to be sidelined when other writers were brought in. After finally signing a contract, Garbo balked at the last minute, and the picture never happened. Neither did a handful of other projects that producers tried to dangle in front of the actress.

  Nor, despite dogged efforts, were other offers coming Salka’s way. The recitation of her political beliefs in The Screen Writer did not help her cause. It turned out that moviegoing audiences were more fearful about Soviet totalitarianism than incipient fascism, which, after all, America had already defeated. The studio chiefs, again forced to adapt, took action. At the Waldorf Conference in November 1947 they capitulated to HUAC, agreeing to fire the writers the Committee had condemned as the Hollywood Ten—which included Salka’s friends Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner Jr.—and to make this pledge: “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” The years of the blacklist had begun.

  What did this mean for Salka’s career? Despite the FBI’s determined efforts, it failed to establish through its surveillance of her house and activities that she was or had ever been a Communist. Salka herself consistently denied ever being a member of any political party, and there is no evidence to refute her claim. She leaned toward a vaguely imagined kind of socialism, with an emphasis on equal rights and helping the poor. It was a politics that hewed slightly to the left of Roosevelt’s New Deal. But her most ardent dedication was always to the cause of antifascism.

  Salka was no longer a studio employee, and thus not important enough to be summoned during the HUAC hearings. At the same time, because of her friendships with Hollywood Ten members and her alliances with Brecht and Eisler she was considered guilty by association, so her name was never officially cleared. As Garbo’s biographer Karen Swenson put it: “Technically she avoided the blacklist, but not J. Edgar Hoover’s unofficial ‘pink’ list of suspected Communist sympathizers; the FBI remained in the background as long as Salka remained in Hollywood.”

  What the blacklist represented for Salka, as for so many others in Hollywood, was a convenient excuse for the studios to close the door on those whom they no longer considered useful. To be “graylisted” meant that the reasons for Salka’s professional rejections were thenceforth shifting and vague. In 1950, Salka’s friend Jean Renoir was concerned that preview audiences were struggling to understand the narrative of his picture The River, which he had adapted from Rumer Godden’s 1946 novel and filmed in India. When he appealed to Salka for help, she suggested a narration, “something like a nostalgic recollection which would tie the story together.” Renoir liked the idea and asked Salka to write it. The budget was small and she was paid little, but she loved Renoir and enjoyed working with him. In the end she was stunned to learn that her contribution would not be acknowledged. She explained in her memoir that Renoir’s investor refused to add her name to the credits; that the filmmaker was in France and could not help her; and that her SWG contract stipulated credit for “additional dialogue” but not for a narration, “even,” she wrote, “if it represented 25 percent of the screenplay.”

  Salka’s letters to Berthold tell a different story. “I don’t have any credit in the Jean Renoir movie, political reasons,” she wrote to him in July 1951. It’s possible that she was talking about the intransigence of her SWG contract, but just as possible that she was hinting at Renoir’s wish to distance himself from a friend who was under suspicion as a Communist sympathizer. After Renoir hired Hanns Eisler to provide the music for his 1947 picture The Woman on the Beach, he had begun to act more circumspectly in his alliances, avoiding political organizations that might cost him work. In a letter to Berthold in March 1953, Salka said that she and Renoir had talked about working together on another unnamed project, but that it had come to nothing. She needed the work: she told Berthold that she had no money to go to the grocery store or buy gasoline. “Financially it is bleak. My work with Renoir fell through; in the last moment he pulled out, not very nice, not very friendly, I don’t know why but I do think it has something to do with my situation. That I’m on the list there’s no doubt. If this will spread into television work I’m going to starve to death.”

  The graylist meant that Salka could not even trust her good friends to tell her why they were turning down her story ideas. But she had every good reason to suspect that the answer was political fear.

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  IN NEW YORK, Berthold was receiving offers for directing jobs in Europe, and he decided to go. Salka said that leaving America seemed to him “like a second emigration, or like a return to somebody once very dear but now disfigured and scarred by a horrible disease.” Berthold hoped eventually to direct at the Burgtheater in Vienna, but there were rules there against his cohabiting with Liesel Neumann without the benefit of marriage. So at last Salka got from him the decision she had long pursued: the amicable dissolution of their marriage. On December 20, 1947, Salka took Renee Zinnemann as her witness to the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles and stood before a judge to obtain a divorce. Telling Berthold about it a week later, she wrote: “Thirty years ago, when I married you, I was convinced that our relationship would be exceptional in our absolute truthfulness toward each other. I loved you and I shall always do so. We have held each other and belonged to each other through all the storms. Nothing will ever change that.” Berthold responded: “You must know that I consider this formality an act of your kindness and utmost generosity and it makes you more lovable than ever. It moves me deeply as it only strengthens our bond…If only you were happier.”

  Berthold Viertel, 1950.

  Salka was surprised by his last line, as she did not consider herself unhappy. “I was exhausted, impatient, frustrated, often desperate, overworked,” she wrote in her memoir, “but my life still had moments of joy, of sensuous and intellectual pleasures. Even getting old was no threat. I never had the temperament nor the leisure to become aware of it.”

  Berthold and Liesel went to London. There Berthold was to direct German programs for the BBC, who sent him to Germany to report on the postwar situation of the cities along the Rhine. From Düsseldorf he wrote to
Salka, remembering their long-ago life in that city together:

  There are no words to describe what this place looks like. No words, no photography can give you a glimpse of the total destruction. That’s what totalitarian total war looks like, and that’s how the whole world will look after the next one…I saw our old colleagues and friends; no one has changed much…the most amazing thing is that the Hitler years have left no mark: it seems they have not existed. Only we know of the millions dead, murdered and martyred, of the unspeakable horrors. The people here pick up exactly where they left off in 1928.

  From London, Berthold accepted a position at a theater in Zurich, then returned to his hometown of Vienna for a directing contract at the Burgtheater. The sumptuous old institution on the Ringstrasse had recently appointed as its director none other than Salka’s Viennese brother-in-law Josef Gielen, who had moved from Buenos Aires to take the job. Rose was not happy to leave her children and a grandson in Argentina, but she acquiesced, unable to deny her husband this prestigious chance to return to the theater where he had last worked in 1935. Berthold, who married Liesel in September 1950 in Vienna, settled into a part-time job at the Burgtheater, translating and directing the plays of Tennessee Williams among others. He tried to persuade Salka to relocate there to pursue her own theater work, but she would not consider it. She hated Vienna, telling Sam Behrman that her allergy to the city “was the major disagreement between Berthold and me,” calling it “the anti-semitic, false, corny city of Gemütlichkeit.”