The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  By 1966, three other U.S. publishers had turned down the book or made unacceptably low offers. At the time Salka was without U.S. representation and was dejected when Carol Brandt, a leading New York agent, assessed the first half of the manuscript as too long and uninteresting for American readers. In early 1967 the Berlin-born agent Robert Lantz, who represented James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and a slew of movie stars, agreed to take on the memoir. By August Lantz had submitted Salka’s complete manuscript to a young editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston. His name was Tom Wallace and he was interested enough in the book to pay Salka a visit in Klosters in October.

  When Wallace arrived, Salka told Behrman she’d been expecting an “American, martini-addicted Madison Avenue editor” but met instead a most sympathetic Viennese-born Jewish intellectual who was impressed that she was reading Malraux’s Antimemoires in the original French. (She loved Malraux as a writer, she told Behrman, “although he himself is not a pleasant man.”) Salka and Wallace agreed that she should cut the first half of her manuscript and then, if he decided to buy it, they would work on the second half together. Behrman had read several drafts and insisted that Salka delete passages about Wychylowka’s servants and anything about menstruation or puberty and the births of her children. “Couldn’t you have had those three in one day?” he shuddered. Irwin Shaw, too, had warned her that she included too many of her lovers; “he is such a Puritan,” Salka wrote to Behrman. But she told Behrman that she had dutifully relented: “One governess and the menstruation are already out.”

  By January 1968 Tom Wallace agreed to publish the book. It would join a collection of Holt titles that were known around the office as “Wallace’s Follies”—books by authors he considered culturally important but who would not be recognizable names at his sales conferences. On her own in Klosters, Salka labored doggedly to cut down the manuscript. She thanked Sam Behrman for his editing help, joking that “although I don’t think I will get rich on ‘The Kindness of Strangers’ I am still young enough to write ‘The Unkindness of Lovers’ and make it a best seller.” She was seventy-nine years old.

  Salka asked that bound galleys be sent to Isherwood, who praised the book for maintaining a clear narrative line, like a good novel, and for avoiding the pitfalls of most memoirs, which in his view tended to dissolve into crowds of people. The Kindness of Strangers was published on April 17, 1969. Salka used the opportunity to travel to Boston and New York for the book’s debut. She was delighted with the attention and glad to be back in America, telling Sam Behrman that “in spite of the filthy young people with long hair and beards, in spite of Nixon and cemented spiderwebs spreading over the cities, there is a lot I love and cherish in my ‘adopted country.’ ” She was both amused and disgusted by hippies, writing that “the middle-aged ones go around dressed in such fantastic costumes that they reminded me of Purim in Sambor. Only the Jews in Sambor always washed for the holidays. Really unbelievable how dirty people are.”

  On that trip Salka visited Hans, who was living with his family in Massachusetts and had become a colleague of the linguist Noam Chomsky. Salka suffered her first attack of Parkinson’s disease while she was at Hans’s house. It was the same disease her mother had endured. Even so, on that visit she directed her attention toward her twelve-year-old granddaughter Valérie, asking her to show her where she went with her friends for a treat. Valérie took her to the local diner, a hilly twenty-five-minute walk away, where they shared an order of fries and each drank a lime rickey. “She was not a person of pretense,” Valérie remembers. “She was a person of great generosity, who was able to really be present with you, no matter what age, and make you feel important.”

  The novelist Carl Zuckmayer, in his foreword to the 1971 German edition of Kindness, fixed on the same egalitarian ability to honor each person’s humanity that Valérie appreciated in Salka: “Everyone, even only fleeting acquaintances, felt himself understood by Salka Viertel, just as he was, even in his weaknesses.” Nor did Zuckmayer consider Salka’s merits to be exclusively feminine, pointing out that “willpower, tenacity, constructive deliberation, spontaneity and especially generosity” are no less aspirational qualities for men than for women.

  The publication of Kindness brought all kinds of correspondence to Salka, from forgotten Hollywood colleagues to complete strangers. Many warm letters came from Israel, where survivors from Galicia told her how in their youth they had admired her brother Dusko, “the football champion.” A lawyer in Tel Aviv who had grown up in Sambor wrote that he went to the town after the war to investigate what was left, and found “all the Poles and Ruthenians had been deported (or killed) during the Stalin era and [were] replaced by Tartars, Gruzinians, Kirgizians, and [a] completely Mongolian population. There is only one Jew there, a party functionary of course…”

  Holt printed no more than four thousand copies of Kindness, and the book was out of print within five years. Nonetheless Salka was energized enough to plan for a second volume of memoirs as well as a novel. She gathered her store of papers, hired a secretary, and continued to write for several hours on most days. She finished neither book, though “the tenacity is there,” her son Tom wrote to Vicky in 1975.

  Reviews of Kindness were few but complimentary. In The Nation, Harold Clurman summarized it as a chronicle of its author’s limitless capacity for “this gift of love, this passion for life which sustains and ennobles all the artistic, intellectual, social and political events which her book narrates…Without that core of warm humanity all the rest would be vanity.” In a private letter to Salka, Marta Feuchtwanger offered her admiration. “What a great gift you have to make a human being just with a few words,” she wrote, and went on to praise Salka’s discretion. What Marta admired most in the book, she told Salka, “is what you did not say.”

  Yes, Kindness displayed its author’s capacity for love, and yes, it was discreet, but these are not the qualities that make it a great memoir. Its importance lies in what Salka did say, which nobody else before or since has said as thoroughly or convincingly. Alexander Granach poignantly evinced the texture of life in the Galicia of his childhood and his Reinhardt theater years in his 1945 memoir There Goes an Actor, but its narrative ends long before his time in Hollywood, where he portrayed in movies both Nazis and Jews. The marvelous actor S. Z. Sakall wrote about Europe and America in The Story of Cuddles: My Life Under the Emperor Francis Joseph, Adolf Hitler and the Warner Brothers (1954), but as its title suggests he was reduced to playing his story for laughs. As for most books about Hollywood published before Salka’s, Carl Zuckmayer was correct to point out that, from those, “One knows the working world of Hollywood only from the perspective of glorification or satire, of worship or disgust.” Salka’s Hollywood, Zuckmayer wrote, was infinitely bigger and more nuanced. Through her own life story, she connected the dots between Granach’s Galicia and Sakall’s Warner Bros., mapping Hollywood’s global origins and its webs of connections, identifying her role as a bridge between cultures. Through her experience as a woman, an immigrant, and a Jew, she charted Hollywood’s role on the twentieth-century world stage, from the mass migrations triggered by Hitler’s rise in Europe through the war and its aftermath into the early 1950s. She showed that women’s influence in the picture business was not limited to that of movie stars. Zuckmayer again: “Without Salka’s mind and bravery, a film like Queen Christina of Sweden—I mention only this one—would never have been made.”

  During the many times she had been cast adrift throughout her wandering life, Salka had always been able to steady herself by creating a refuge in a house. Wychylowka was her first touchstone, followed by its reincarnation on Mabery Road. Each of her houses contained the imperative to open its doors to strangers and absorb them into a community. Now, in her memory, she lived a great deal in those rooms. During her final exile in this vapid Swiss resort town, she sat at her desk and built one last house, a house of leaves, the house of the story of her life,
and invited readers inside, adding them to her circle. It’s a house infused with her confidence, her compassion, her generosity, and yes, her love: kindergarten virtues that one might deride as boringly earnest. They are not. They combined into nonviolent resistance against mass expulsion and genocide, a cultivation of life to resist the National Socialist cult of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death.

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  —

  IN MAY 1971, Tom Viertel came to visit his mother in Klosters accompanied by his wife Ruth, whom he had married the previous November. Salka told Sam Behrman that Tommy “was two years old when he left Europe and you can imagine what this trip means to him and his wife.” At twenty-six, Ruth Jenkins Viertel was twenty years younger than Tom and had met him at work. Both were employed by the city of Los Angeles in the Department for Social Services, Ruth as a social worker and Tom as an administrator. Salka was relieved to see her son looking so happy and settled after she’d worried for so many years about his waywardness. In his leisure hours he remained a poet, with an abiding devotion to his poetical father. He and Ruth went to Vienna after their visit with Salka. Tom was as keen to commune with Berthold’s milieu as Peter had been to cast it off.

  At Christmastime in 1973, at age eighty-four, Salka traveled once more to Los Angeles, where she stayed with Jack Larson and Jim Bridges, who had visited her over the years in Klosters. Again she saw Tom and Ruth and met their baby son Andrew, her third grandchild (though Salka would have included Vicky, and counted four). And she ventured to visit Mabery Road. Her house had changed hands several times after John Houseman had bought it. It was now owned by Houseman’s former theater protégé, the director Gordon Davidson, and his wife Judi. They threw a little party for Salka with remnants of the old Sunday crowd: Billy Wilder, King Vidor, Marta Feuchtwanger. Salka was pleased to see that the Davidsons had kept the feeling of the house, though she was taken aback to see that a swimming pool had replaced her rose garden.

  On that trip, Jack Larson took Salka to dinner at Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s house in the canyon. Isherwood reported in his diary that Salka was “so shaky and deaf and it is sadly dreary and exhausting being with her. You have to shout and she takes forever understanding what you’re saying.” It could not have been half as exhausting for him as it was for Salka, who was showing remarkable grit in traveling internationally while suffering from advancing Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, and deafness. “The intricate tortures of old age make me indignant,” she had written to Sam Behrman earlier in the year.

  By 1975 Peter was obliged to hire a full-time nurse for Salka, whose doctor had prescribed powerful drugs to combat her shaking and prevent strokes. Jim Bridges and Jack Larson spent time with her in Klosters in February, and Jim wrote to their mutual friend Katharine Hepburn to apprise her of Salka’s health. Salka had reacted badly to the drugs, Jim reported. She had hallucinations, telling him and Jack that she had just seen Rose, who said they were going to make a garden together. Rose had died in 1973.

  Then after two days Salka rallied, “her mind as clear as a bell,” Jim wrote to Hepburn; “she is weak and shaky, but she is full of piss-and-vinegar.” Peter made a big pot of spaghetti at his house and brought it to Salka’s apartment and she ate heartily. “Forgive me,” she told Jack and Jim, “for being so dilapidated that I can’t do anything for you.” Jim ended his letter to Hepburn: “At her weakest, the second day, she woke up when she saw Jack and me come into the room. She asked for her comb and slowly and painfully she combed and brushed her hair to receive the gentlemen.”

  Salka’s health continued to vacillate but her mind was lucid. She wrote to Vicky in January 1976: “The new medication seems to work and I am less shaking and stronger. I am also determined to vote for U.S. President which the Congress has made possible for Americans living in foreign countries.” But slowly she continued to decline, the exuberant sprawl of her signature with its voluptuous S reduced to a spidery blotch. She could no longer read and she had more and more despairing moments. “The mere fact that I need a nurse is depressing beyond words,” she wrote to Vicky. “What a dreary way to wait for death,” she had said to Jim Bridges.

  In April she wrote to Vicky and Violette about their gardens, and wondered if their fruit trees were in bloom. In October she praised Vicky’s description of her harvest, which “made me homesick for my youth. I remember well the harvests in our garden. My father liked apples very much and had all kinds of them.”

  * * *

  —

  ROSE WAS HERE, and we are going to make a garden together.

  No, Rose died in 1973.

  The sunsets at Wychylowka were blue and golden in summer, and purple-red in winter.

  There were hundreds of fruit trees in the orchard.

  Papa is feeding Viktoria corn kernels out of his palm as if she were a little bird.

  Darling Vick, when I think of my youth in Sambor, I remember vividly and with great pleasure when I worked in the gardens and in the fields under the supervision of my Niania. I also remember the peacocks promenading in the garden.

  When I remember the beach in Santa Monica, I see the millions of little silvery young gulls covering the shore and melting into the foam of the waves.

  Little Vicky has climbed into the fig tree but Jigee won’t let her fall. They both look so happy.

  In 1921 I was bringing the children to Dresden from Wychylowka. Peter was only ten months old and Hans was two. We had to change trains at the Poland-Czechoslovakia border and I did not have enough money because of the changing currency and the inflation. A young woman recognized me from the stage, she said she was a cabaret singer, and she paid for our third-class tickets. We shared a crowded car with Transylvanian peasants. My children were hungry, they had not eaten since the previous evening. An old woman took pity on them and fed them home-baked bread with so much jam that my boys were covered in raspberries.

  The kindness of strangers.

  Please don’t forget what’s left of a human being.

  I filled Grusha’s apartment with flowers.

  Rose is here and we are going out to the garden.

  Rose and Mama are inviting me into the garden.

  * * *

  —

  TELEGRAM TO FRED ZINNEMANN in London from Klosters, October 27, 1978:

  DEAREST FREDDY SALKA DIED PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP LAST NIGHT LOVE PETER

  Footpath over the Landquart River in Klosters named in honor of Salka Viertel.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY DEEP THANKS to Salka Viertel’s family, who were abundantly generous with memories, stories, letters, photos, and patient answers to questions: Ruth Viertel, Violette Viertel, Valérie Viertel, Andrew Viertel. Eternal thanks to Vicky Schulberg, Adam Shaw, Elizabeth Frank, and Christine O’Sullivan, each of whom extended multiple kindnesses toward a stranger. Additional thanks to Vicky, Adam, Valérie Viertel, and Rachel Slade for reading early portions and/or later drafts of the manuscript.

  For sharing personal and family memories of Salka Viertel and her milieu, thanks to Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan, Don Bachardy, Jack Larson, Norman Lloyd, Chester Aaron, Lawrence Weschler, Ricky Pecker, Francine Schoeller, Sam Schoeller, Beatrice Siebenmann, Arianne Ulmer Cipes, Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, Ronald Schoenberg, Nuria Schoenberg Nono, E. Randol Schoenberg, Tim Zinnemann, John Waxman, David Wyler, Pancho Kohner, Danny Selznick, Monika Henreid, Francesca Robinson Sanchez, Regina LeBorg, Diana Soltesz, Dan Ford, Anne Edwards, Diane Leslie, Dr. Christian Grote, Ben Woythaler. Grateful thanks to Gordon Davidson and Judi Davidson for giving me a tour of the house on Mabery Road and for their reminiscences. Additional thanks to Ren Weschler for reading part of the manuscript and for engaging me to write the Afterword for the 2019 NYRB Classics reprint of The Kindness of Strangers.

  For assistance with permissions and for their valuable comments on the manuscript, thanks to the executors of Salka Viertel’s
estate, Thomas Kuhnke and Katharina Prager. I extend a respectful salute to Katharina Prager for writing the first biography of Salka Viertel, published in Austria in 2007, and for her ongoing scholarship on the lives and achievements of Salka and Berthold Viertel.

  For enlightening and amusing conversations about his experience as the original editor of The Kindness of Strangers and about his friendship with Salka Viertel, thanks to Tom Wallace.

  For help from writers, scholars, and artists whose work intersects with one or several themes of this book, thanks to Noah Isenberg, Cari Beauchamp, Farran Smith Nehme, Glenn Frankel, Emily D. Bilski, Jan-Christoph Horak, Helga Schreckenberger, Katherine Bucknell, Michael Shnayerson, George Cotkin, Henry Slucki, George Prochnik, Mark A. Vieira, Alex Ross, Olivia Kaferly, Terry Teachout, Nancy Riegelman, Louise Cullman, Donna Kanter, Neal Brostoff. Particular thanks to Andrea Simon for sharing her knowledge and her inspiring film, Every Sunday.

  For their guidance during my visits to the following institutions, thanks to the following:

  Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach: Thomas Kemme, Hildegard Dieke, Elke Schwandner

  Villa Aurora: Margit Kleinman, Friedel Schmoranzer

  USC Special Collections: Michaela Ullmann, Marje Schuetze-Coburn

  UCLA Special Collections: Ernst Toch Papers