“Let me remember you with love and loyalty, until memory is no more”: Queen Christina, Script Collection, AMPAS (Unpublished), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“I am so ashamed of Christina”: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 190.
Audiences there were thrilled to accept Garbo as the remade image of their monarch: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 163; and Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 190.
telling Sam Behrman in 1962 that she personally resembled…any other character she played…grossing $1.843 million: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 190.
a “talking billboard”…“Queen Christina is entirely Garbo, and Garbo is entirely Queen Christina”: Landy and Villarejo, Queen Christina, p. 21; Hay, MGM: When the Lion Roars, p. 117.
the film brought in a disappointing $632,000 profit in America: Paris, Garbo, p. 307.
marking the first time that a Garbo film earned less domestically than it did overseas: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 190.
“but the film survives also on its own merits”: KOS, p. 196.
“all in all a decent, coherent work, a clean film”: BV to SV, April/May 1934, call # 38.864/8, DLAM.
“You didn’t want to make anything of your success…It was a victory for your character, your personality”: BV to SV, undated 1934, call # 78.864/3, DLAM.
“If there was ever any argument about a script I always had this woman to fight for me…and always found something good that others wouldn’t bother about”: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 455, quoting Cecil Beaton, Memoirs of the 40s, p. 272.
The occasional call back to the Christina set: KOS, p. 190.
He asked Salka’s permission to smoke in an endearing way: ibid., p. 191.
“I did not jump, but slid into a love affair”: ibid., p. 195.
“Odysseus resented bitterly that Penelope had not waited patiently for his return”: ibid.
“He was as dear to me as ever…also the sad certainty that never again would we be lovers”: ibid., p. 192.
“then, exhausted, we all had a nightcap together”: ibid.
offering Peter money for every French novel he agreed to read: conversation with Ruth Viertel.
“remember, never do anything out of your mad generosity…only death can cure my addiction to you”: KOS, p. 193.
5: FATHERLAND
“From the very beginning, the studios gave us Papas”: A. Scott Berg, Goldwyn, first page of Chapter 6.
“I once had a beautiful fatherland”: quoted in Christa Wolf, City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud, p. 262.
The antifascist exodus from Europe was never homogeneous: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, pp. 12, 85.
“spoke in the meeting of opposites”: Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, p. 178.
In 1933, over 53,000 emigrants left Germany, of whom about 37,000 were Jews: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 85.
“I consider what is going on here so sickening…. But one could be very wrong”: Kurt Weill quoted in holocaustmusic.ort.org, “Composers In Exile.”
“For once, no joke. I am taking my own life”: Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, p. 231.
an estimated 11,000 would reach England: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 151.
and tried to persuade Brecht and the novelist Leonhard Frank to join him: ibid., p. 150.
Conrad Veidt was there: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 167. The non-Jewish but fiercely antifascist Veidt played a Jew here and, more famously, eight years later, played the Nazi Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca.
Writers had begun to settle in London as well: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, pp. 150–151.
he had difficulty adjusting to yet another new film culture: KOS, p. 196.
he hired the boyish and handsome thirty-year-old writer: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 150. Jean Ross was the real-life model for Isherwood’s most famous fictional character, Sally Bowles, who first appears in a 1937 novella and in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin.
“He needed an amateur, an innocent, a disciple, a victim”: ibid., p. 152.
“I need disciples…if I want to be productive”: BV to SV, January 16, 1934, call # 78.864/2, DLAM.
“His head was magnificent…the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave”: Isherwood, Prater Violet, p. 25.
“I knew that face”: ibid., p. 24.
“You have always been safe and protected…I am bitterly ashamed that I am here, in safety”: ibid., pp. 120–121.
Isherwood spent much of his time seeking permission for Heinz to return to England: ibid., pp. 147–148.
These included hours of manic procrastination…when he came to visit them in California he would meet Garbo, would see her every day: ibid., pp. 154–156.
an actress named Beatrix Lehmann…an ensemble made mostly of green feathers: ibid., p. 168.
and was living with her in her Victorian house on the Thames: KOS, p. 203.
largely “in seclusion”: BV to SV, mid-October 1935, call # 78.865/11, DLAM.
“a new and absolutely necessary phase of his education as a writer”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 171.
“He was my father. I was his son. And I loved him very much”: Isherwood, Prater Violet, p. 159.
Rose had been breathing the reek of National Socialism in Dresden since at least 1930: Rose Gielen to SV, November 18, 1930, DLAM.
He had fathered a child with the pretty housekeeper at Wychylowka named Hania: KOS, p. 166.
He accepted financial help from Salka: Rose Gielen to SV, March 9, 1929, call # 80.1.146-7, DLAM.
whose weekly Metro paycheck had risen to $550: KOS, p. 195.
“There was not a day…besieged my American friends for affidavits”: ibid. p. 195.
denied entrance to anyone who might be “likely to become a public charge”…in case of need: David Wyman, Paper Walls: Americans and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941, p. 120.
through an introduction from the pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin: KOS, p. 56.
“driven into Paradise”: this was the title of a speech Schoenberg gave in 1935.
the puckish French playwright Marcel Achard: KOS, p. 196.
Salka and Gottfried, along with Charlie Chaplin and the film director King Vidor, went backstage to congratulate him: Dorothy Lamb Crawford, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California, p. 41.
known to address their conductor, a stringently formal personage, as “Klempie”: Mark Swed, “The Climb of the Century,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2018.
“how infinitely grateful I must be to the great America”: Crawford, Windfall of Musicians, p. 46.
In Salka’s living room…was the British director James Whale: The story of Franz Waxman’s introduction to James Whale comes from a conversation with John Waxman in May 2017 and from David Neumeyer and Nathan Plate, “Franz Waxman’s Rebecca: A Film Score Guide,” pp. 18–19.
an entire family in Vienna named Waxman…He saved them all: Dorit Beder Whiteman, The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy, p. 79.
“the abuse of Greta as a mannequin for the tailor Adrian”: BV to SV, December 29, 1934, DLAM, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 166.
complaining in letters to Berthold that she didn’t want to write only for Garbo: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 165; BV to SV, undated; September 16, 1933; February 28, 1934.
to explain Garbo’s accent and to add some Continental glamour: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 165, citing treatments by Vicki Baum, one undated and one from April 25, 1933, Margaret Herrick Library.
“I have repressed the memories of The Painted Veil”: KOS, p. 197.
she shared Garbo’s private opinion of the finished picture as “rubbish”: Greta Garbo to Countess Wachtmeister, from Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 200, and Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 325.
pinning the blame for its faults squarely on its shoulders: Paris, Garbo, p. 311; Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 195.
“[Garbo’s] reliance on Salka Viertel, who was not qualified to judge literary properties”: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 204.
“He is admittedly imaginative”: Tagebuch, July 6, 1961.
Salka was less enthusiastic about the Veil project: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 174.
“a nightmare of a film…. The ‘mystery-fake’ does not work anymore”: SV to BV, November 6, 1934, DLAM, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 166.
“not all that great a friend…my mother was an oarsman in the galley”: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, p. 220.
“If I had her position…what influence I would have in the world”: Tagebuch, November 19, 1960, DLAM.
“DO NOT BREAK UP YOUR SITUATION OVER THERE”: BV to SV, June 21, 1934, DLAM, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 167.
“the instinct of the Mother”: BV to SV, February 23, 1934, DLAM.
“the house is a position, a symbol, it is famous…a sort of oasis in the ever-widening desert”: BV to SV, June 21, 1940, DLAM.
gratefully remembering the help he’d offered in attempting to finance Eisenstein’s doomed Mexico picture: KOS, p. 158.
Thalberg would now head one of four production units…and everyone operating under Mayer’s prevailing authority: Gabler, Empire of Their Own, pp. 231–234; Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, p. 165.
“Chattering at lunch, Mr. Thalberg and his underlings”: “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Playing to a Billion Pairs of Eyes, Has Recently Made the Best and Most Profitable U.S. Pictures. How So?” Fortune, December 1932, p. 114.
“I’ll look after him like my own son”: Gavin Lambert, Norma Shearer, p. 76.
“It was a real father-and-son relationship…and you wanted to please father”: Vieira, Irving Thalberg, p. 270, quoting AFI’s “Donald Ogden Stewart Oral History” by Max Wilk, p. 17.
“Sure, my nieces and nephews work here…help out the others?”: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, p. 185.
“even the richest Jews were not allowed to join country clubs”…“his father who was a god in the theater world of Berlin”: Wolf, City of Angels, p. 74.
“Mr. Mayer’s courtesies to U.S. Senators…It is his business simply to get the most and give the least”: Fortune, December 1932, pp. 118–119.
“So we shall rely on your experience, my dear Salka”: KOS, p. 198.
“And that’s what’s left of a human being”: ibid.
“All good luck for a better 1942”: Telegram from SV to S. N. Behrman, December 1942, Behrman Archives, NYPL.
“We had to eliminate everything that could even be remotely classified as a passionate love scene”: David O. Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick, p. 82.
to give Salka’s son Peter his first job in Hollywood: KOS, p. 222.
would later put Peter under contract as a writer: ibid., p. 262.
“I saw ‘Karenina’ and found the film nicely told…to make a film of your own invention, and where your story is the main and primary thing—whoever acts in it”: BV to SV, mid-October 1935, call # 78.865/11, DLAM.
Thalberg was back at work: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 217.
the newly built Thalberg bungalow: KOS, p. 199.
“Since the characters and the events…are all historical facts…The story looks dangerous to me”: December 5, 1935, quoted in Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 362.
had the virtue of increasing Thalberg’s enthusiasm for the project: KOS, p. 200.
She arranged to sail for Southampton from New York on June 26: ibid.
much more foreign than America had been when she’d first arrived there: ibid., p. 201.
she also saw Gottfried’s producer brother Wolfgang: ibid., p. 202.
All were furiously studying English and hoping for visas: ibid.
“I believe in our marriage as I always have…know that we will grow old together”: ibid., p. 203.
Les absents ont toujours tort: ibid., p. 202.
“must have been hell”: ibid., p. 203.
asking for old clothes and packages of food for the poor: ibid.
“More than ever we are apprehensive about our fate”: ibid., p. 205.
“Do not think, mein Herz, that the wrinkles that are gone now are necessary to your face…I kiss your new old face”: BV to SV, undated, DLAM, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 177.
soon to be designated by Goebbels as a prized artist of the National Socialist state: KOS, p. 205.
“the homecoming was glorious”: ibid.
“Salka returned from Europe, sick in both body and mind…but entrained directly from the boat”: Gene Solow to S. N. Behrman, September 1936, Behrman Archives, Box One, NYPL.
“Europe deeply shook me…And then we didn’t hold each other tight enough”: SV to BV, September 1935; October 28, 1935; November 11, 1935, DLAM, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 178. Prager mentions that in the letter of November 11 Salka even speaks of a “nervous breakdown.”
of meeting with the “Zionist Berthold Viertel,” though Berthold had not attended the Steuermann family gathering: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 176, fn 777; letters from Rose Gielen to SV and Edward Steuermann, August 18, 1938, and BV to SV, December 3, 1937, DLAM.
grateful for the moment to be out from under the boot of Hitlerism: KOS, p. 209.
so he arranged to move to New York, which remained his home base for the rest of his life: ibid.
“I don’t write lovely music”: ibid., p. 207.
Thalberg sent the composer home with a copy of the screenplay and encouraged him to offer more suggestions: More facts about the encounter have recently emerged through the work of the historian Sabine Feisst in the Schoenberg archives, which shows that Schoenberg was more invested in the idea of working on the film than has been previously suggested; see James Schmidt, “When Arnold Met Irving: A Tale from Hollywood,” Boston University.
Peter asked to have a room of his own: KOS, p. 209; Isherwood, Lost Years, p. 74.
a serious hearing disability called otosclerosis: KOS, p. 222.
“the Popular Front extended into my family”: ibid., p. 211.
made up mostly of affluent right-wing writers including Salka’s old nemesis Ernest Vajda: ibid., p. 206.
“rescue writer of choice”: Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life, p. 92.
“These were the days of meetings”: KOS, p. 211.
Attending the league’s glamorous opening banquet…his fellow Algonquin Round Table mate Dorothy Parker: Thomas Doherty, “The Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League,” paper presented at annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Washington, DC, 2014.
“But Ernst”…And Salka told him she was staying: KOS, p. 211. See also Laura B. Rosenzweig, Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, p. 130, in which a banner at the Anti-Communist Federation Conference (a Nazi front) in August 1938 accuses the Anti-Defamation League and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League of persecuting Christian patriots; accuses both groups of being allies of the Communist Party; and urges people to track down the “sponsors” of both groups, including Lubitsch, and to demand a congressional investigation.
perhaps three hundred Communist Party members in the film industry from 1936 to 1946: Gabler, Empire of Their Own, p. 330.
“It is very necessary for me to be able to see clearly and impartially…The ruthlessness was not only stupid, but did not achieve anything”: Tagebuch, March 25, 1963, DLAM.
the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War: KOS, p. 211.
Occasionally he emerged to visit with Salka’s brother or with Fred Zinnemann: ibid., p. 212.
“On these walks Berthold sometimes wore his bathrobe”: Isherwood, Diaries, Volume One, p. 40.
oblivious to the miseries taking place a continent and another ocean away: P. Viertel, Bicycle on the Beach, p. 68.
“We are Greeks without brains!…That is the song they sing”: ibid., p. 5.
“Sun, roses, fruit, warmth…We bathe and bask”: Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, p. 240.
to worship at the feet of his idol Huxley: Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley, p. 236.
its little head poking out to sniff the wind: Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, p. 111.
“into the acerbic scent of the Midi: resin, thyme, hot stone”: Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education, p. 147.
“potpourri from the local rosemary, geranium, lime, and rose”: Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p. 234.
On Sunday nights the town’s ramshackle movie theater…the silent films of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd: Bedford, Jigsaw, p. 117.
“Thus nothing changed…this will go on; we shall go on”: ibid., p. 149.
“Rather a dismal crew”: Bedford, Aldous Huxley, pp. 280–281.
after he was jailed for subversive activity in the Weimar Republic: Bedford, Jigsaw, p. 94.
Julius Meier-Graefe…smoking opium with Jean Cocteau in Toulon: Bedford, Quicksands: A Memoir, pp. 280–282.
“The communist and Jewish literati who have fled from Germany are now trying to surround Germany with a wall of literary stink-gas”: www.kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Objects/mann-klaus-zeitschrift-die-sammlung-en.html?single=1.
A short time later he and his wife Marta moved to Sanary…where they remained until 1940: Manfred Flügge, Fry, Bingham, Sharp: The Americans Who Saved Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, p. 50.
All his possessions…and his bank accounts were frozen: Lion Feuchtwanger, The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, p. 32.
“How do you like my house?…The result of this remark is that you are now living in my house”: www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org; “Thou shalt dwell in houses thou hast not built,” Feuchtwanger, Pariser Tageblatt, March 20, 1935.
stayed only briefly, including Bertolt Brecht…Fritzi Massary: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 196.
As many as four hundred German and Austrian political refugees found themselves in the district of le Var up until the end of the decade: Frank Estelmann, e-paper from ASA Conference, April 2007, London Metropolitan University, quoting Manfred Flügge, 1994.
The Sun and Her Stars Page 40
