The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Her greatest pleasure in Prague had been the opera. At that time the choir director was Anton Webern, who was a friend and colleague of her brother Edward, both of them protégés of Arnold Schoenberg. During the many evenings she and Berthold spent with Webern and his wife, discussing the war and the revolution in Russia, their most urgent conversations were about food—how to get it and where. Webern had little children, and she saw him once looking longingly into the window of a store that boasted a few sausages and a single can of sardines. He spoke no Czech and the prices were beyond him, so he only stared.

  It sounds grim, this honeymoon time she spent in Prague, and yet she and Berthold had had so much there: wonderful music and theater, an abundance of stimulating friends, their youth and their ambition and their early love. But the world was at war, and they were always hungry. The surplus of culture thriving alongside threats to basic human survival was a double-edged path that she would continue to navigate in different places through most of her life, in which it seemed she was forever cobbling together one meal after another for people whose hunger—for food, but also for consolation—could never be satisfied. These days she is almost never hungry. Sometimes she wonders why she is feeling so dizzy and weak, and then she scolds herself and has a bit of meat and a cup of coffee and she feels a little better. Unless she is invited to the Shaws’ or to Peter’s, she gets little pleasure from eating, as if food that is not shared, not offered to someone needier than she, has lost its satisfaction. Even so, she tells herself, she really ought to stop eating her suppers while standing over the sink. It is too depressing.

  * * *

  —

  AGAIN SHE WISHES she had not gone on so long to Orson about her memories of Prague. His Kafka would never be hers and she should not have attempted to offer him an alternative. Orson’s version is a grand, masculine, spectacular Kafka, loud and vast enough to fill the Gare d’Orsay. A Kafka reeking of paranoia, forever asking in a shout why he is being punished. And a Kafka, moreover, who has been forced to serve as an oracle for all the evils that have befallen Europe after his death. Her own Kafka is more private and more elliptical, fixed firmly in his place and time, a gentle, watchful man who wakes from troubled dreams, who is affable company in coffeehouses and drawing rooms, who silently fears his father. Ein Hungerkünstler whose very existence invites misinterpretation. She supposes that she and Orson have each taken possession of a Kafka composed mainly of themselves. But enough of this. She should keep these thoughts for her memoirs. They are all that belong to her these days.

  In the 1940s she had had a few run-ins with Orson at the studio, always about projects for Greta. At one point he’d been after Salka to write a picture about the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s affair with the actress Eleonora Duse, a farce, if one could believe it, to star Greta and Charlie Chaplin. Orson was mistaken to think that such a serious story could be played for laughs, even after Ninotchka, and they had all told him so. This took place after Charlie’s Monsieur Verdoux unpleasantness and it was interesting to see Orson still wrangling to direct Chaplin, who of course declined again for all kinds of reasons.

  Ah, Charlie, darling faithful friend of her California years, ever since the early 1930s. She has known only two geniuses in her life, Brecht and Schoenberg, but if Charlie has not the same kind of genius he is still a great artist, one of the greatest, as Greta was. He has been very generous to her over the years, even helping to save her Santa Monica house from foreclosure. She last saw him this past autumn when she had stopped in Vevey on her way back to Klosters from a trip to San Sebastián, which Peter had been eager to show her and which she had found enchanting.

  Even Charlie thinks that his manor house in the village of Corsier just above Vevey is pretentious. But he and Oona and their brood have settled in so happily there, on their thirty-seven acres with the enormous lawn that frames the mountains and the lake. There are orchards and a pool and of course a tennis court: Charlie is never so serious as when he risks losing a point, and has always so hated to lose. His five daughters are beautiful in their white cotton dresses and their pigtails, and the new baby, Christopher, is a darling. Everywhere Charlie walks or drives, the Swiss give a cheerful shout of “Bonjour, Charlot!” which he enjoys, and in restaurants or during meals at home he is never above indulging a guest or his children with his old dance of the dinner rolls from The Gold Rush, with forks stuck in the rolls so that they look like feet.

  Oona is unchanged, sweet and intelligent. But their life of luxury is a cocoon from which they hope never to emerge. They eat wild strawberries and cream on the terrace, which he savors ostentatiously, and once in a while, he confesses, when he and Oona are alone they take out the caviar and champagne and they revel in the private indulgence.

  Salka understands, of course, that everything with Charlie including his art stems from the almost unbelievable misery of his childhood, the poverty and the hunger—more dire hunger than she has ever known—and the fear and the loneliness. He has asked her to read his memoirs which he is writing with a copy of Fowler’s The King’s English and a dictionary always at hand, declaring that he is entirely self-taught, hoping to impress the reader with his vocabulary. The first parts are the best, especially when he writes about his early years of movie making. But his philosophy is a rather hilarious mixture of socialism, undigested Marxism, and the worst parvenu capitalism, and his dictionary-plucked word choices are pompous and often wrong. She felt compelled to tell him that his overblown language makes it hard for the reader to understand him, that he should try to write simply and clearly, and she thinks he resents her for her honesty. Not too long ago he had read bits from her own memoirs and told her he was fascinated. But she doubts he believes her criticisms of his efforts. He is proud and does not want to hear them.

  She and Charlie are exactly the same age and both are hard at work revisiting their respective pasts. Their childhoods are like photographic negatives: hers was straight out of Turgenev in a big country house full of servants and music, while his was the purest Dickens, industrial and desperate. She had the advantages of the early tutoring of governesses and a boarding school in Lemberg; his education came from the terrors of the Lambeth workhouse and the London streets, his lessons only about survival and escape. Neither of them has ever really recovered from their early years, she from the security she took for granted, nor he from the humiliations he swore to avenge.

  And now that they are old, each of them stashed away in their Swiss exiles, how the negatives have been switched: he under his glass bell of comfort and she without more than a handful of coins in her pocket. When she visited him she did not have enough money to tip his servants and she had had to ask Oona to lend her forty francs to get home. They were always so kind to her, yet in the end she was eager to leave. Late in the evenings she had been tired, and yearned silently to go to bed while Charlie talked on and on.

  She is flattered that he mentioned her briefly in his manuscript, writing about her “interesting supper parties” in Santa Monica and comparing her to the great eighteenth-century hostess Madame de Staël. Perhaps she should be less modest about her reputation as a salonnière, though she never thought of herself in such lofty terms, only as a friend looking after other friends. But if she is remembered at all, it may be for her parties—along with the unshakable murmurs of gossip that she and Greta were lovers. Nobody will recall that she was once a good actress, or after that a screenwriter. Already too many people doubt that she even wrote those pictures at Metro. They believe that her name on the titles was just a hollow payment for playing gatekeeper between Greta and the studio. Well, let the naysayers believe what they wish. She doesn’t care.

  All the same, it is a bit painful to compare her life with Charlie’s, to note how substantial his achievements are, how indelibly the Little Tramp will remain engraved on the public consciousness. He built a studio with his own hands, composed the music for his own films, he can point
to City Lights and Modern Times and all the rest as the tangible artifacts of his immortality.

  And she? She leaves no monuments. She has only her life as her magnum opus, and what will anyone remember of it? The taste of her chocolate cake. The cadence of her voice. Her shadowy image in an upstairs bedroom with a view of the Pacific, as she lofts a billowing sheet over a mattress. Little things, quick to fade away.

  She would like to be remembered for her courage. For the way she rose to meet the twentieth century, maneuvered through its dangers across the wide screen of the world. “And meet the time as it seeks us,” as Shakespeare said in Cymbeline, the epigraph her doomed friend Stefan Zweig chose for his own haunted memoir. Unlike Zweig, she has never been trapped in the world of yesterday, yearning after its lost charms, paralyzed by the thought of the future. She has stepped forward with an open heart. For all the horrors life has shown her, she still believes in its goodness, and its infinite possibilities.

  2

  CARRIED ACROSS

  BERLIN, NEW YORK, AND LOS ANGELES

  MARCH 1928

  SALKA AND BERTHOLD VIERTEL had decided they would go to America. Their last weeks in Berlin were filled with parties, like a celluloid montage of farewell tableaux. The party Salka remembered most vividly was a reception for the French singer Yvette Guilbert. It was hosted by Salka’s friend Francesco von Mendelssohn at his family’s majestic Grunewald villa, in the white music salon among the celebrated collection of Corots. In attendance were ambassadors, socialites, and film stars, all in evening dress. Guilbert performed her chansons while the audience regarded her still-blazing red hair and her long figure, made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec in his drawings, and her now-ruined face and her fluttering hands. Afterward, during supper and dancing, Salka and Berthold were pleased to sit with the Belgian director Jacques Feyder, who had signed a contract from MGM and was also on his way to Hollywood with his actress wife and their three sons, who were around the same age as Salka’s boys.

  Midnight arrived and there appeared in the drawing room a sudden mirage, orchestrated by the slyly outrageous Francesco: a flight of bicycle racers, another collection of his beautiful young men, muscled and tattooed under their dirty striped T-shirts. They had just arrived from one of Berlin’s great spectacles, the six-day round-the-clock racing competition at the Sportpalast. The ambassadors and their wives discreetly evaporated as the party took on its louche new dimensions and the young changelings busied themselves about their pleasures, like something, Salka later recalled, out of Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  It was her last impression of Berlin. She would not return until forty years later, after both she and the city had withstood events beyond anyone’s imagination. Half a decade after Salka left for America, the feverish pageantry of her Berlin would fall, of course, into barbarous hands. The Mendelssohn palace would be seized and its Corots distributed among thieves. Francesco and his sister Eleonora von Mendelssohn—a talented Nefertiti-eyed actress, named for her godmother, Eleonora Duse—would be forced to flee to New York, their world in exile shrunken to the exigencies of melancholy and drug addiction. And what of Francesco’s white Lancia convertible, with its ermine seat covers, and his red leather suit, and the yellow dressing gown he often wore to parties: in whose possession did those land? And what about his beautiful young Berlin men, who can say what happened to them? Beware, oh wanderer, the road is walking too: Rainer Maria Rilke, whom Salka had met in Munich in 1918 while she was playing Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, knew a few things himself about the ruthlessness of change, and wrote that sentiment in his diaries.

  * * *

  —

  SALKA AND BERTHOLD were joining an early wave of artists who had been lured to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. Although it was some years before many thousands of their fellows throughout Europe would begin to be expelled—and worse—by the looming National Socialist catastrophe, by 1928 the signs were already more than evident in the war-torn old cities they were leaving behind. From Salka’s apartment window in Düsseldorf, where she had gone to perform and teach at the Schauspielhaus in the mid-1920s, she had often watched young men in steel helmets pushing people off the sidewalks while singing the Horst Wessel Lied.

  Yet in 1928 it was not politics but economics that was propelling Salka and Berthold to Hollywood. Their finances were in total disarray, and the money Berthold had been promised by the Fox Film Corporation, a weekly salary of $600 to write and direct, plus a travel allowance of $1,200, was far more than he could hope to earn in Germany’s vertiginously uncertain economy.

  The Viertels had been married for ten years and they were not young. Salka was thirty-nine and Berthold was forty-three. But they had not yet become their full selves. In time, the New World would tell them definitively who they were. As she prepared for the journey, Salka wanted to go to Hollywood but she was also reluctant to go. She had created contingencies to soothe herself: they were leaving their three little sons with a nanny in Berlin until they felt more confident that their “great adventure” would pay off. Their youngest child, Tommy, was two years old. They were anxious parents, and with reason. As a toddler their middle son Peter had nearly died of pneumonia, while a few years later their eldest, Hans, had contracted scarlet fever.

  Just after she booked passage, Salka suffered the full force of her misgivings. “Suddenly the thought of the six thousand miles separating me from my sons made me panicky,” she wrote decades later in her memoir. “If it had not been for Berthold and our determination to start a new life together, I would have stayed in Berlin.”

  Their plan was to return to Europe in one year, or three, or five—as quickly as they could manage to rebuild their finances. If Hollywood was good to them, maybe they would stay longer. Either way, they were making a forceful break. As they told themselves and each other again and again, it was to be a new life.

  Leaving Berlin required Salka to pass up another offer for a good acting job there. And who knew how many more there might be for her, coming up on the wrong end of forty? She had been a working actress for twenty years and had dreamed of a life in the theater since she was five, when she had built a stage in the corner of her bedroom and created performances that lasted for days, using paper cutouts from her mother’s fashion magazines while she spoke all the parts. She had fought hard to enter the profession and to succeed within it, battling against a general presumption that actresses were only slightly less vulgar than prostitutes. Never a star and not a classical beauty, she was nonetheless as employable in Europe as an actress of her age and station could hope to be. She was tall enough to be authoritative, with broad shoulders, a full bosom, and lovely legs. Her auburn hair was fine, with a tendency toward frizz. She drew audiences in with a blue-eyed gaze that was natural but not naive.

  Two views of Salomea Sara Steuermann as a young actress.

  Each new acting job was hard-won, each position tenuous. Even her name was protean. While her legal name was Salomea Sara Steuermann and her childhood nickname was Salka, sometimes she appeared in playbills as Mea Steuermann, sometimes as Mia, sometimes as Salka; for some productions she was Steuermann-Viertel, for others Viertel-Steuermann. Her identity was as variable as the roles she played in the many cities to which she routinely traveled to play them.

  Berthold was acutely aware of the sacrifice Salka was now ready to make in giving up her stage career in Europe. “It saddens me deeply that you should not immediately pursue your livelihood as an actress. And I do not at all think that a trouble-free paradise awaits in Hollywood—that exists nowhere,” he had written to her with the voice of a man living in a supremely destabilizing time and place. “But fate calls us and we must follow.” Yet if she were no longer to be an actress, what else could she possibly be?

  Salka was also abandoning the double edge of economic upheaval and cultural innovation that gashed the air of the Weimar Republic, that caused h
er and everyone she knew in Berlin to veer many times daily between alarm and elation. The gray streets were filled with the unemployed, with real and fake cripples from the Great War, with shiny-booted prostitutes and skinny rent boys on every corner. Garçonnes wearing trousers and sporting monocles pushed their way past corseted and rouged young men as jazz tangos spilled from the open doors of the Königin-Bar and the Eldorado. Lurid images of sex murders splashed across the pages of tabloids and on painters’ canvases. Foreign opportunists had plenty of money and spent it shamelessly, while many natives of the city went hungry. Throughout a series of disastrously failed governments, the German mark had until recently been plummeting from one stomach-dropping depth to another. What little food available in the city was hoarded and furiously bartered. “Hunger is what I remember from those years,” Salka told the journalist Otto Friedrich when he interviewed her in the 1970s. “I was always hungry and cold. And sometimes slightly drunk, because that was one thing you could always get if you had any money at all.”

  Yet in this jumpy milieu and out of nothing, it seemed, art was happening everywhere, and Berlin’s many theaters rarely lacked for audiences. During the inflationary crisis of the early 1920s, Salka and Berthold had launched a repertory company of their own called Die Truppe, a longtime dream come true. They hoped to offer performances that reflected the hurly-burly of contemporary Berlin. But for practical reasons their first offering, The Merchant of Venice, did not provide a commentary on the increasingly pernicious anti-Semitism that Die Truppe’s Jewish directors encountered. Instead they designed the production to showcase the company’s star, Fritz Kortner, along with jarring geometric sets by a pair of Bauhaus artists. Their next two shows—Eugene O’Neill’s half-Expressionist, half-realist Emperor Jones, followed by Knut Hamsun’s Driven by the Devil, starring Salka—spoke more to the moment, tackling current questions about race and class. Next came Vincent, a farce by Robert Musil about the fluidity of sexuality and the power of money. The last was a failure, proving far too intellectual even for Berlin’s sophisticated audiences.