The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Garbo was living in New York then. She was a lifeline for Salka when she came sometimes to visit, “compassionate, unchanged, and very dear.” Their fondness played out in their longtime nicknames for each other: Salka was still “Salka lilla” (little Salka); Garbo was “Gruscha” or “Miss G.”

  Salka had never felt so unmoored. Her passport difficulties continued. Through some Hollywood connections she found an influential lawyer, identified in her memoir only as “Ernest C.,” who agreed to represent her at a hearing he arranged for her in Washington. They flew down together, and in a faceless office building two State Department bureaucrats confronted her with the FBI’s dossier of years of surveillance of Mabery Road: “the list of my sins,” as Salka described it, “as thick as the New York telephone book.” A litany of questions followed. What was her political association with Hanns Eisler? Had she signed an amicus curiae brief for the Hollywood Ten? A clemency appeal for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg? Had she said that she’d prefer any form of government to the one in the United States?

  While Salka admitted to signing her name on behalf of the Hollywood Ten and the Rosenbergs, she strenuously denied that she’d ever made that last statement. The interrogator only smiled. He knew she had written those very words to Berthold in July 1950, when she’d been sick in bed and despondent about the state of the nation. FBI agents had been opening her mail since the early 1940s, and did not mention to her that they possessed records of sentiments she had long ago forgotten or dismissed.

  As the functionaries deliberated over Salka’s case, perhaps they were influenced by the reputation of her high-powered lawyer, for they granted her a temporary passport that was valid for four months. Or maybe they had seen the final two documents in Berthold’s FBI file, which stated that there were no grounds to institute revocation proceedings against him, despite his “political indiscretions,” and noted that he had regained his Austrian citizenship before his death and was thus no longer a U.S. citizen or a threat to the nation.

  Salka decided she would use her temporary passport to travel to Ireland on December 26, where she’d been invited to stay at John Huston’s country house. She’d then go on to Klosters to greet the new year with Jigee and Vicky and Christine. When she returned to Los Angeles in early 1954 she would apply for a regular passport, and it would arrive without a fuss. In the spring of 1954 she would give up her home by the Pacific for good, selling it to John Houseman. Before she left for Ireland she wrote to him: “It would be wonderful to know that 165 Mabery Road, which has seen so much of life and love, struggle and happiness, and which was the ‘port of entry’ for so many stranded souls, is a happy home for you and your family.”

  * * *

  —

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE, her favorite time of year, Salka was alone in Etta Hardt’s ground-floor apartment. She had tried to phone Tommy in Los Angeles to wish him a merry Christmas, but there was no answer. Glumly she contemplated her prospects for a moribund evening. And then came a most welcome coup de théâtre in the form of a knock at the door: all at once there was Garbo, her face appearing just as it had in the cutout window of Salka’s red front door on a sunny afternoon in 1929. Salka scraped together a bare supper to serve them both. The two women lit the candles on a tiny Christmas tree, and they raised a glass of vodka into the silence to say skål.

  Not so long ago both of them, in different ways, had commanded multitudes. Now here they were on the other side of the continent, still standing, still vital, somehow still hopeful. But they were two Prosperos in exile on a cold steel island, playing to an empty house. The audiences had moved on.

  10

  HOME

  In the future, in my memory,I shall live a great deal in this room….

  Let me remember you with love and loyalty, until memory is no more.

  —QUEEN CHRISTINA

  LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, KLOSTERS

  1953–1978

  SALKA LIVED FOR ANOTHER QUARTER CENTURY, one year longer than her twenty-four years on Mabery Road. It was to be a fractious exile, its joys muted, its losses ascendant. First came seven years of itinerancy in Los Angeles and New York, followed by eighteen years in Switzerland. When Salka had complained to Berthold that her Mabery Road house was “a sort of Shangrila for everyone who enters it, built on my enslavement,” she could not yet imagine how grave would be the cost of giving it up. Just as she had imbued the house with her spirit, so had the house become a symbol of her sense of self. As for so many women, it was the only stable seat of power she could expect to inhabit. More than that, within the house she had built an intentional community that was as passionately committed to social support as the local ashrams, the Quaker cooperatives, and the Hollywood Canteen. Without the house, all those who sheltered there were once again set to wandering, including its helmsman. Who would take her in, hand her a cup of tea, soothe her mal du pays as she had done for others all those years? The loss of the house was as grievous to her as losing a lover, a mother, a husband.

  She rented an apartment on Veteran Avenue in Westwood from 1954 to 1956, cramming it with as many of her books and papers as she could. She gave drama lessons and hustled for scripts, eventually earning credits on two more pictures, both European productions: Loves of Three Queens (1954), starring Hedy Lamarr, and Prisoner of the Volga (1959). In early 1956, having at last received a permanent passport, she sublet her apartment to an actor named Jack Larson—who along with his life partner, the director Jim Bridges, was among the closest friends of her late life—and went to London, where she was reunited with Hans. She had not seen her firstborn son for half a decade, and was delighted to meet his wife, a young Frenchwoman named Violette Poulain-Salveton, whom Hans had married on December 31, 1954. Salka ever after expressed admiration and love for Violette, and later for her and Hans’s daughter Valérie, born in Paris in 1957.

  After she left London, Salka traveled to Munich with Hans and Violette, there to attend meetings about Prisoner of the Volga and to see Rose, who came to meet them from Vienna. It was Salka’s first trip back to Germany since 1928. In Munich she announced her determination to see Dachau. Hans refused to go, but Violette reluctantly agreed to accompany her. When the two women arrived in the town after the half-hour train ride, their taxi driver insisted he did not know where the site was. Salka and Violette spoke to him harshly. He suddenly seemed to remember the route and took them without asking anybody for directions. At the time Dachau was operating as a center for homeless German refugees. The grounds were open to the public, but they were in a state of flux amid an impassioned debate over how much evidence to display and how much to conceal of its mass murders of the Jews. Fierce arguments erupted over how many people died there—a number that most likely will never be known.

  Violette chose not to enter the camp, waiting outside while Salka went through the wrought-iron gates emblazoned with the Nazi slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI. After some time Salka came out alone. If she said anything, Violette did not report it.

  Salka reflected on what she had seen in Dachau a year later, when she was living in New York. She had got to chatting with a neighbor who hailed from the city of Tarnopol in Poland. What a small world, the neighbor had said after learning that Salka came from nearby Sambor. In her diary, Salka reflected on the subjective notion of a “small world,” writing: “The world is certainly not big enough for the Jews—especially the Polish Jews. Millions had to die because there was nowhere a place for them. Israel is also much too small—only the gas chambers were big enough…”

  She continued to grapple along with the rest of the world with the impossibility of comprehending the breadth of the genocide.

  In the meantime, yet another personal heartbreak entered Salka’s life. A family tragedy ripped a hole in her American life and sent her off to a more isolated exile in Switzerland.

  When she returned to the States from Munich, Salka became more and more devoted to her granddaughter
Christine, who had moved with Jigee and Vicky from Klosters back to California in 1954. In 1956 Jigee decided to move to Manhattan to work at a literary agency, and Salka went also, to stay close to Christine. Vicky, who was then sixteen, remained in boarding school in California. In 1958, when Christine was six, Salka followed Jigee and Christine back to Los Angeles, where Salka returned to the Westwood apartment she had sublet, and Jigee rented a house on Monte Grigio Drive in the Palisades, paid for by Peter. (Vicky had gone off to college by then, and married at age eighteen.) Salka spent much of her time with Jigee and Christine at the Monte Grigio house and the three of them formed “a small female family,” Salka’s diary notes, “held together by our love for Christine.” The little girl who looked so much like her was “the last grand passion of my life,” she had written to Sam Behrman the previous year.

  By 1959, when Salka turned seventy, she noted: “I am an old woman. I don’t look it and don’t feel the burden of my years…I love as deeply and wildly as I used to in my youth. But now I love Christine. Let’s face it: It is all my present life.” Part of Salka’s devotion came from fear for the little girl’s welfare, and that was because Jigee had developed an increasingly debilitating addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills. When she could, Jigee did her best to be a mother to Christine, and tried to hold jobs—at the literary agency in New York and then as a story editor in Hollywood—but she spent more and more of her days incapacitated in her bedroom. In the meantime Peter had fallen in love with the British actress Deborah Kerr and was pressuring Jigee for a divorce. He visited Christine when he was in town and paid the household bills. But all that was left of his relationship with Jigee was a bitter mutual rancor. He had broken her heart and she, unable to tolerate his current happiness, could not forgive him. Nor could she manage to save herself. Her addictions came to dominate her, with Salka and Christine as intimate witnesses.

  Salka stepped in to care for her granddaughter, staying over at the Monte Grigio house, taking Christine to the beach, giving her dinner, putting her to bed. In Jigee’s better moments, Salka found that she preferred her company to that of any other adult, and she believed that when Jigee was sober she was an excellent mother. But she watched Jigee’s decline with helpless horror, reminded painfully of her late friend Eleonora von Mendelssohn’s enslavement to morphine. Salka wrote in her diary, “my heart bled. Nothing is so terrible to watch than the human degradation of an addict.”

  In July 1959, Jigee yielded to Peter and went to the Los Angeles courthouse to obtain a divorce. Christopher Isherwood went as her witness and noticed a bad bruise on Jigee’s temple—sustained, he supposed, “from falling down when drunk.” Jigee’s torment grew worse as the year wound down. One night in mid-December, she went into her bathroom late at night where, fumbling with a cigarette, she set her nylon nightgown on fire. Suffering massive burns, she was taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she lingered between life and death for five weeks.

  “I went to see her at the hospital Sunday the 24th of January,” Salka remembered in her diary. “She was swathed in bandages, the upper part of her face strangely austere and beautiful. She could not hear well and I had to shout, but she smiled when I said that the doctors praised her courage and admired her. Still, there was that faraway look and that estrangement, which I noticed in Mama’s eyes before she died.”

  Before dawn on February 1, 1960, at age forty-four, Jigee died. She was cremated and her ashes buried, or so Salka remembered, at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica.

  In her grief Salka was disturbed by how quickly and carelessly the world seemed to move on, by how few people seemed to be missing or even remembering Jigee. “She was such an audience for me, such a responding interested audience, when she was not in her destructive mood,” Salka wrote in March. “And now there is nothing left of her.” Plans for eight-year-old Christine’s care were quick to take shape: the little girl would move immediately to Klosters to join Peter’s household, which included Deborah Kerr and her two young daughters from her previous marriage. Salka moved to Klosters as well at the end of June, leaving California with reluctance but no longer able to survive in Los Angeles with no work, and too deeply invested in Christine’s welfare to abandon her. In July Peter married Deborah Kerr in a large and showy Swiss ceremony, with Irwin Shaw and the director Anatole Litvak as witnesses. Salka attended and wished the newlyweds well, but wrote in her diary that if Jigee were still alive, “she would have suffered beyond words, reading about this wedding in ‘her’ Klosters. The whole population turning out to wish Peter happiness with another woman.”

  Salka moved into an apartment an easy walk from the town center. She saw Christine whenever she could, submitted gratefully to the hospitality of Irwin and Marian Shaw, and began to work in earnest on the autobiography she had first thought seriously about writing in 1947. She had begun a diary in New York in 1957 which was an early part of the effort: she wrote it in English rather than in her more instinctive German as practice for the memoir which she intended for American readers. Occasionally she noted that the diary might itself make a fine book, were it not so hurtfully full of the “utter honesty” of Jigee’s decline. Clearly she perceived all her writing during this time—her diary, her brisk correspondence with family and friends, and the memoir—as writerly performances, worthy, she dared to hope, of publication.

  The Israeli writer Moshe Pearlman, Irwin Shaw, and Salka Viertel at Shaw’s house in Klosters, 1960s.

  In 1962, Peter and Deborah sent Christine to boarding school in England. Salka missed her terribly in the long months between school holidays, though there were some distractions. Klosters came alive at Christmas, when such Hollywood stars as Gene Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Orson Welles piled into parties at the town’s most charming hotel, the Chesa Grischuna. Salka also managed to travel throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, in Europe and a few times back to the States. There were trips to see Edward perform in Salzburg, to the Chaplins in nearby Vevey, and with Peter to Biarritz, where he showed her his favorite surfing spots and took her to the bullfights. In Klosters in the late summers Garbo came for weeks at a time, with Salka setting up a favorite apartment for her, cleaning it and filling it with flowers. Garbo relished her walks around the hills and meadows, the townspeople respectful and not bothering her much.

  Salka Viertel in the snow at Klosters, 1970s.

  But in the dreary times between the ski and summer seasons, with Christine away at school and Peter and the Shaws often out of town, Salka felt depressed and unwell, bothered by arthritis and a worsening deafness that made socializing difficult. She was lonely, and told Sam Behrman in confidence that her purpose for moving to Klosters—to influence Christine’s upbringing—had been crushed when the girl was sent away to school. In letters to Vicky, she confessed that if she could afford it she would move back to California, telling her: “I never ceased regretting that I sold 165 Mabery Road.”

  There was little for Salka to do but to read and work on her own writing. Her reading tastes were wide-ranging and intellectual, and often they fueled her diary entries. While making her way through the second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, Salka remembered an afternoon in March 1947, just after Deep Valley had finished shooting, when de Beauvoir had dropped in at Mabery Road. The thirty-nine-year-old French philosopher had been traveling through the States on a lecture tour and was staying at the Westwood house of a mutual friend of hers and Salka’s, the screenwriter Ivan Moffat. Salka reminisced: “I remember how she sat in my kitchen while I was making a salad and when I asked her if she likes cooking she was quite indignant. I said that I think everybody should do some physical work, or at least know how to do it and she disagreed violently. Not really violently, but with great irony. BUT she has courage and this I admire…”

  Such memories of her kitchen and her competence there may have increased Salka’s melancholy. That same diary entry records “another one of those de
solate lonely Sundays” in Klosters, “which make me think constantly of death and my not being wanted anymore.” She fought against depression by working on draft after draft of her memoir. “The first sentences I put on paper are always horrible but then, once I said what I wanted to say, I can ‘translate’ it into quite decent English,” she noted in her diary. She wrote to Sam Behrman that she spent much of her time correcting her own prose, telling him: “I don’t want you to think, darling, that I was kissed by the Muse ten to twelve hours a day.” She had a title, she told him: “The Kindness of Strangers,” from the not-yet-clichéd line in Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, but she warned Behrman: “This is a secret, don’t mention it yet to anybody.” Behrman in turn suggested “The Incorrigible Heart,” which later became the title of the German edition. But Salka stuck to her original title for the American version, nostalgic perhaps for Berthold’s adaptations of Williams’s plays and more generally for the glamour of the theater.

  Daily she was plagued by her poverty, lamenting that she could no longer support herself or others, humiliated by constantly having to ask Peter for money, fearing that she would not be able to pay her medical bills as she aged. Selling the memoir was her last hope, though on her worst days she feared that nobody would buy it. She wrote to Behrman: “The only thing I can leave to my granddaughters are the dedications of great men in the books they have given me; other girls get mink, but those decrease in value.”

  In March 1962, Knopf and Random House rejected the memoir, based on 120 pages and an outline which Salka had sent. “The content is not gossipy enough. They don’t give a damn about the person who writes the book, they only want anecdotes of famous people. To hell with them,” Salka fumed in her diary. That November a German publisher called Rütten & Loening Verlag (a “politically irreproachable” firm, Salka reported to Sam Behrman) made an offer of three thousand deutsche marks for world rights—all countries outside North America. The offer was disappointingly low, but Salka hoped it would generate interest among American publishers. She was to deliver each chapter as she finished it so that the firm could translate it into German—a decision she later regretted, as she thought their translation inadequate.