The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

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  THE CHODOROVS’ LEASE EXPIRED and they moved out of Mabery Road. Salka returned to the house with Auguste and rented the garage apartment to a young couple who could not find housing because they were intermarried. Carlton Moss was a pioneering African-American screenwriter who had made recruitment films for the army during the war and was now directing educational films for black schoolchildren. His wife Lynn, who was white, was a blacklisted actress. Ignoring the suspicious glances of some of Salka’s neighbors, the Mosses became her irreplaceable friends, with Carlton stepping in as a diligent father figure to twenty-four-year-old Tommy, who was sorely missing Berthold.

  Both Hans and Tommy were living in the house, each trying to finish the college courses that their army duties had delayed. In late July 1950 Salka wrote to Berthold from her bed, felled by the flu and depression, “terribly tired and too poor to call a doctor. Oh this daily constant struggle for a dollar is so crushing.” Feverishly she railed to him about the corruption of the Truman administration and the futility of the newly launched Korean War. Her friends Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner Jr. had gone to prison in June to serve one-year sentences for contempt of Congress. She declared to Berthold with certainty: “Fascism is here.” “I couldn’t give a damn about freedom of the press and thought in a world and in a country where lies and brutality are tolerated,” she wrote. “Today I am convinced that only in a socialist community, a communist one if you will, which aspires to anarchy, can humanity be cured of the damage done to it. One thing is clear to me, no government is worth a human life. But any government is preferable to the one we have here.”

  In the same letter Salka complained to Berthold about Hans and Tommy, who she felt were taking too long to assume financial responsibilities. “The house is a sort of Shangrila for everyone who enters it, built on my enslavement,” she told him. She asked for help with the boys. “I can’t carry this burden all alone. From the minimal money I earn as a boarding house mother and what I get from Peter I can scarcely feed everybody and pay off the mortgage.” Two years earlier she had mentioned to Berthold that she would have liked to move to New York, to “seek my fortune or my living there but Mama is weak and in need of care and is too old to be transplanted. It isn’t easy with her now. Her memory has declined greatly. Sometimes I think, Thank God!”

  There was no hope of moving anywhere. Edward was contributing some money toward Auguste’s care, and whenever Peter was on a studio payroll he helped Salka if he could. But the expenses were crushing her. Twice during this time the house was threatened with foreclosure, bailed out at the last minute by loans from Donald Ogden Stewart and Charlie Chaplin.

  Parties at the house were subdued now, often staged to help those who needed professional introductions: for the novelist Norman Mailer, touchingly young and polite; for the critic and screenwriter James Agee, who sat at the piano and played Schubert; for a trio of Peruvian performers—the soprano Yma Sumac, her guitarist husband, and her dancer cousin—whose avant-garde recital in the living room became an informal audition in front of the Chaplins, Hedy Lamarr, John Huston, and John Houseman. For the actor Montgomery Clift, off-putting to many who met him socially but solicitous toward Salka, who thought Clift resembled her old friend Francesco von Mendelssohn. (“He always presses his sex towards me when he embraces me like Francesco,” she wrote about Clift in her diary.) Salka retained her ardor for beautiful young men; was not above kissing them impetuously on the lips during her parties; had been spotted by the actress Shelley Winters “necking in a rather sexual manner” with Monty Clift in a convertible late one night after a party at Gene Kelly’s house.

  To make money Salka began to give drama lessons. Among her students were Susan Kohner, the daughter of Paul Kohner; Margo Thomas, the daughter of comedian Danny Thomas, later to become famous as Marlo Thomas in the television show That Girl; and Arianne Ulmer, the daughter of the director Edgar G. Ulmer. Once a week Salka picked up fifteen-year-old Arianne from the bus stop, fed her a snack of stuffed cabbage or some other European delicacy, and did her best to improve what she deplored as the girl’s hopeless American diction. She taught Arianne all the gestures she had learned from her Reinhardt theater days—the same gestures she had once taught Garbo—and together they rehearsed scenes from Shaw’s Saint Joan for Arianne’s upcoming audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, which was successful, earning the teenager a spot at the school. Jigee and her sister Anne balked when Salka tried to teach them elocution, privately smirking at her accent when she conveyed the finer points of projection to them: “Now say faaaaaaahzer,” she would instruct, meaning “father.”

  Salka had stopped dyeing her hair to match its original reddish-brown color. It was now a soft white cloud framing her face, on which worry lines had become engraved. Age had added bulk to her upper frame but her legs remained shapely. Housework and determination kept her strong. At sixty-three she still drove recklessly around the canyon in her Packard convertible, Timmy beside her, his paw on her shoulder, while the ocean coruscated to her west. In those moments it seemed, as John Cheever once wrote in his journals, as if all the days were mornings. As if now, even after all that had happened, goodness was still possible.

  Beware, oh wanderer, the road is walking too.

  —JIM HARRISON, AFTER RAINER MARIA RILKE

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  ALFRED DÖBLIN HAD RETURNED TO GERMANY in October 1945, trying to outrun the poverty that embittered his Hollywood exile. Carl Zuckmayer had followed in 1946, as had also, some years later, Ludwig Marcuse. All three of these writers surveyed the ruins of their birthplaces and felt the same radical disorientation that Berthold had described to Salka. Klaus Mann returned to his hometown of Munich as a soldier with the U.S. Army and found that the house where he had been born was now an empty shell. A young woman squatting there told him she thought the house had once belonged to a famous writer. Klaus searched for people his family had once known and came upon Emil Jannings, Goebbels’s acclaimed Staatsschauspieler, who was full of resentment at being taken for a Nazi when anyone could see he was very nearly a martyr.

  Klaus Mann had been suffering through decades of depression and drug dependency. In May 1949 he died of an overdose of sleeping pills in Cannes, after writing in his diary the previous January: “I do not wish to survive this year.”

  Ten months later, in March 1950, Heinrich Mann died. He had been planning to move to East Berlin with the hope that he could recover his lost literary reputation but also with dread that he might become a propaganda tool of the German Democratic Republic. Six weeks before his scheduled exodus, he suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage in his sleep in his Santa Monica apartment. For his brother Thomas it was “the most merciful outcome.” Salka’s mother was moved by Heinrich’s death and asked Salka to take her to his funeral. Auguste’s trembling had worsened so badly that Salka had to bathe and dress her, but they managed the trip to Woodlawn Cemetery, with memories of Nelly’s funeral no doubt in Salka’s mind. Lion Feuchtwanger and a minister from the Unitarian church offered eulogies. The Temianka quartet played Debussy. “He would have approved,” Thomas Mann wrote of his brother. Their bonds of love and rivalry were now undone, at least in this life.

  In September, Arnold Schoenberg died. He had been weakened by advanced asthma, his tall frame turned gaunt. “Only his huge, burning eyes remained the same,” Salka noted of his final months. “To the last,” she wrote, “Hollywood did not recognize his genius and only very few attended his funeral.”

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  AS IT HAPPENED, coaching skittish young actors was not the key to Salka’s financial salvation. She continued to hustle for screenwriting jobs. She had a new agent, Ilse Lahn, who worked for Paul Kohner and who encouraged her to write for television. Ilse managed to sell two of her scripts, refusing to acknowledge that Salka was on any kind of blacklist.

 
; In the meantime Salka noticed that Peter and Jigee were behaving with increasing irritation toward each other. Peter had early on established a pattern of infidelity, and Jigee had retaliated with affairs of her own. Their mutual recriminations kept mounting. Desperate for a change of scene, they sold the house in Zuma Canyon and returned to Klosters for the ski season, joined by Irwin and Marian Shaw, who now had a baby son named Adam, and Robert and Kathy Parrish. Vicky enrolled in a Swiss school and sent Salka and Auguste adorable little notes in German.

  The tensions between Peter and Jigee grew worse as they became stuck in a spiral of separations and reconciliations. The last of those resulted in a pregnancy, and in late April 1952, on the day of Salka and Berthold’s wedding anniversary, Jigee gave birth to Salka’s first grandchild, a girl named Christine. The baby was the very image of Salka from her first minute and continued to resemble her throughout her life, blue-eyed and sturdy-shouldered, with a similarly zestful energy and charm.

  But Salka’s joy at the news was inextricable from sadness, for from the moment of Christine’s birth Peter and Jigee’s marriage was dead. Peter took up with a celebrated French fashion model named Bettina Graziani and thereafter with a series of high-profile women, including Ava Gardner and Joan Fontaine. While he accepted screenwriting jobs throughout Europe and in Hollywood, Jigee decided to remain in Klosters, where she had friends and where Vicky was happy at school.

  Berthold wrote to Salka: “I am terribly sorry for Peter and Jigee. I knew for some time that the marriage wouldn’t last and it is difficult to say that one or the other was at fault…Our tiny Christine has just started. I hope and trust, Salka, that she has inherited your lioness’s strength.”

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  IRWIN SHAW TO SALKA VIERTEL, Klosters, January 19, 1953:

  Dearest Salka,

  I just heard that grandmother died and I want to tell you how sad I am and how much I admired the gallantry and strength of heart of both mother and daughter in these last trying years.

  I will always remember your mother for the fortitude and cheerful avidity for life which nothing, not even these horrible times, could extinguish, and which she passed on to you in such splendid measure.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you, to help in whatever small way I could.

  We never cease to think of you and talk about you and love you—and we are constantly reminded of you by little Christine, who is a miraculous small image of you—and a certain promise that this line of powerful and valuable women will go firmly on—

  Love, Irwin

  Auguste Steuermann had contracted pneumonia and faded away as 1952 slipped into 1953. At her funeral that January, a light rain fell on Woodlawn Cemetery, which now seemed as crowded with Salka’s dear ones as had the house on Mabery Road. Among the pallbearers were Hans, Tommy, Fred Zinnemann, Carlton Moss, and Christopher Isherwood, who had attended Salka’s Christmas Eve party with a new and as it turned out a permanent partner, an aspiring young painter named Don Bachardy. At Auguste’s funeral the rabbi, unknown to all, spoke of Auguste’s courage throughout a long life upended by wars and mourning. He tried to guide Salka and her sons through a recitation of the Kaddish, but their voices were stifled by tears. Salka wrote to Berthold and Rose: “At the horrible moment when one had to leave her in this foreign earth, we found ourselves surrounded by people…not only those who were fond of her: the Renoirs, Feuchtwangers, Dieterles, Gottfried…but many Negroes and German refugees and young Americans…” Always thinking of others, Salka submerged the personal loss of Auguste, her moral compass, her role model in Zivilcourage and hospitality, her motherland.

  Hans and Tommy persuaded Salka to give up the house, worried about the toll on her of the physical labor and financial worries. In April 1953, Salka’s old friend John Houseman and his wife Joan offered to rent it for a six-month period with an option for another six. Carlton and Lynn Moss would continue to occupy the garage apartment. Tommy moved to Hollywood, where he had gotten a job cutting film, and Hans to Burbank, where he was working at the Lockheed plant and hoping to earn enough to return to his studies at the University of London. Salka hauled her giant dog and a number of suitcases around to the homes of a series of friends, a houseguest now, where for so long she had been the host. She was planning to go to Europe, with Peter agreeing to finance the trip. There would be a family reunion in Salzburg with Rose and Edward, Berthold and Liesel, and Peter, who was then in Paris. She would visit Jigee and Vicky in Switzerland and was pining to meet Christine.

  Berthold at age sixty-eight had recently been hospitalized with a number of serious ailments including bronchitis, asthma, and a circulation disorder. He was slowly improving, but his letters had taken a tone of finality that alarmed Salka. She lost no time in applying for her passport in June, expecting to receive it in a couple of days. But as the summer came and went, her letters and telegrams to the passport office went unanswered. In August a letter arrived from the State Department in Washington notifying her that her application was denied. “It has been alleged that you were a Communist,” it read, and “it is further alleged that you have been closely associated with known Communists.”

  With her lawyer’s advice, Salka signed an affidavit stating that she was not and had never been a Communist. She wrote that her views occasionally coincided with the Communist Party line, “because it supported the fight against fascism.” She admitted that she had friends who had been mentioned as members of the Party. She emphasized that her reasons for travel were not political, that she only wanted to visit her family. Again there was silence from the State Department.

  Timmy became ill, would not eat or follow Salka into the car. The veterinarian, suspecting a tumor, performed an operation. Waking from the anesthetic, the dog tried to put his paw on Salka’s shoulder and failed. He died a few hours later. “He had been my constant companion and my comfort for seven years,” Salka wrote in her memoir. “He understood everything and he truly loved me. Now no one seemed to need me any longer. The shackles of love were falling off.”

  Salka allowed Hans to convince her that she needed a change of scene, should go to New York to stay with Edward and his wife Clara while she waited for her passport to clear. Hans even had a way for her to get there: he knew a man who wanted someone to drive his station wagon across the country, and Hans thought Salka could do it. Outlandish as the plan seemed, Salka in her vulnerable state agreed. She found an acquaintance to travel with her, a fortyish writer named Jay Leyda who had once studied with Eisenstein and who urged her, as she recounted some of her personal history to ease the tedium of the drive, to publish an autobiography. She reached New York on September 25, exhausted by car trouble and bad weather, and told Edward that she was going on immediately to Washington to fix her passport situation. “I have to go to Europe; I have to see Berthold,” she told him. Her brother looked away, then took her hand. Simply, almost sternly, he said, “Berthold died last night.”

  Berthold Viertel was buried in the vast Central Cemetery in Vienna, the city from which he had been exiled for all the years of his prime. Before his interment there was a religious service in a synagogue, and think for a minute of that: a public Jewish ceremony in the same city that, only fifteen years before, had sponsored the burning of its synagogues in full view of the fire departments, followed by the deportations of thousands of Jews to Dachau and Buchenwald. “Vienna excels in funerals,” Salka wrote years later to Sam Behrman. “A Hapsburg legacy for pomp and celebrations of the dead, especially when they were badly treated as long as they were alive.”

  Hans arrived in Vienna from London and Peter from Paris. They came too late to say goodbye at their father’s bedside, but in time to carry him to his grave. For Salka there would be no farewell at all.

  She had cried at every one of Berthold’s leave-takings, and now, over the next few days in Edward’s apartment on West 73rd Street, the tears came
in torrents. She had last seen Berthold nine long years ago, in March 1944, when he had dashed out of the house in a fury of impatience to go to New York, leaving Mabery Road for what neither of them had imagined would be the last time. “He was the mainspring of my life,” she wrote to Sam Behrman in 1964, when she was writing her memoir and wrestling with the impossibility of summing up her marriage. “I loved him more than anybody else and I am catching myself writing to him and for him.”

  Berthold’s last apartment with Liesel had been on the Zedlitzgasse in Vienna, next door to the house in which he and Salka had first met and where he had declared with absolute certainty that he was going to marry her. Though she had been alone now for many years, she remained bound to Berthold by their mutual respect for each other’s work, by their children, and now by a grandchild. For decades, all of Salka’s decisions had been made with an eye toward what Berthold might think. The years had bestowed on them a dynamic intimacy that separation and divorce could not dissolve. Only death could do that.

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  IN MANHATTAN, as autumn deepened into a cheerless November, Salka left Edward’s apartment and moved in with her old friend and former secretary Etta Hardt on East 73rd Street. Ghosts from her past flickered around her. In the house next door to Etta’s, Salka’s friend Eleonora von Mendelssohn had killed herself a year earlier after spending much of her emigrant life mired in a morphine addiction. Eleonora’s brother Francesco, who had entertained Salka in his Grunewald villa another world ago, was locked in a deep depression in a hospital in White Plains, with no visitors allowed. Eleonora and Francesco were among the staunchest exiles Salka had ever known, refusing categorically to return to Berlin. They had told Salka: “The name Mendelssohn obliges.”