The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  At the end of August, the production was ready to travel to the town of Pendleton in northeastern Oregon, where Murnau planned to shoot essential scenes including the picture’s climactic wheat harvest. Aboard the train, Berthold wrote to Salka that he had never before seen such hot weather, not even in Serbia during the summertime miseries of his army duty. In the days after his arrival in Oregon, Berthold sat in the hotel making script revisions while Murnau, on location forty-five minutes away, communed with the field of standing wheat which the studio had bought and would sell, thriftily, once the harvest was in and the picture was done. Berthold had little to do during this time except write, swim in the hotel pool, and continue his English lessons with Herman Bing, his only companion. “In this way,” he wrote to Salka, “the illusion of my existence as a prisoner is perfect.” He drifted through the town, bought Native American figurines and toy boats for the boys, asked Salka if she would like him to buy her a shawl.

  In the meantime Salka enrolled her two older boys in elementary school, doing her best to allay their worries that their limited English might put them with younger children. Thanks to their tutor and the help of Emma and De Witt, after only three months in America the boys had made good progress. Salka was proud to report that Hans had landed properly in third grade while Peter, in the second, declared his satisfaction with the school and with his teacher. “She speaks very slowly,” he told his mother, “and I understand every word she says.”

  Salka did not mind being the driver of their family life. She was accustomed to its requirements and she threw herself briskly into the work. It was not in her nature to complain. But lately she had been feeling unwell, suffering from back pain that had emerged from an operation she’d had several years ago, which now triggered an attack of melancholy.

  It was in this low state, in early September, when she was tidying Berthold’s perennially messy study and happened to read a sentence in one of his open notebooks that overwhelmed her with rage. It was a dramatic and also an unequivocally literary moment: an emotional conflagration sparked by ink on a page, like something out of the life of Sofia Tolstoy, who read the Count’s diaries, which were displayed on a table at Yasnaya Polyana for the entire household to see. Berthold had written: Marriage is sex without desire. The bald statement revived many buried grievances in Salka while inflicting a new one, even as, in the bitter exchange of letters and phone calls from Oregon over the next two weeks, Berthold tried to deny that he’d written such a thing.

  I’d gone to America to start my life over with you, he wrote to her after her first recriminations; but in difficult times I believe that you want to make me feel: too late, my dear! And he, further: I never thought that you could harden so against me in a foreign land, where we represent home to each other. Salka responded: Only one thing has changed between us. You were the one person I felt I could talk to, but now has come something that I can’t manage, and I can manage a lot. It eats and tears at me. It’s a pity about youth: that it leaves you, but you cannot grow older while it happens. (Salka had turned forty the previous June.) You have it better: you can write. I have only my life and my love to create, while you are able to create with writing. In answer to his wounded sense of betrayal that they were not able to be a refuge for each other in a strange land, she had this to say: I’m not one iota more in a foreign country here than I was in Dresden, Berlin, or Düsseldorf. If you ever had any idea how dismal and lonely I felt when I was walking around on the Rhine Bridge—but you never asked me about it. The only kind of home that I had was the stage. It may have been a pseudo-life and meant little, but now in order to live I have become homeless. It’s over and there is no point in talking about it. But just to soothe you, California is not a bit more alien to me than Germany.

  It was as desolate a time as she had ever known. When they spoke of home, they both used the German word Heimat, with its centuries of contradictory volatile meanings, a word as likely to evoke exile and loss as belonging and fulfillment—and a word, moreover, which was soon to be grotesquely exploited in the blood-and-soil propaganda of the National Socialists. For the moment, Salka’s insistence that she and Berthold could never represent home to each other in the New World, and that he had never done so for her in any previous city, was the true instant of her arrival. She had loved and admired him since the first night they met, in a café in Vienna in 1916, when he had fixed his dark eyes on her and calmly announced that he was going to marry her, even though at the time he was married to somebody else. She loved and admired him still, and their fortunes were chained together. But she had been lonely in Europe and she was lonely now. For some time a link had been broken between them, a much more damaging impairment than the dull tarnish of his stupid little infidelities. Her grievance was not, she had told him, a question of geography. It was a question of self, of one’s place in the world.

  The only kind of home that I had was the stage. And now, for Berthold’s sake, in this newfangled city of sets and costumes but virtually no live theater, she was exiled from her calling. What could home mean for her now? Her childhood Eden, her Wychylowka, the place now in serious disrepair since the looting and burning it had sustained during the Great War, her parents straining to make ends meet, would never again be her refuge. The grand houses she had seen—their interiors gleaming with the patina of the Mendelssohn villa or glaring with the nouveau lamps in the Janningses’ rented mansion—none was steadfast, all were vulnerable. They were only as alive as the inhabitants who infused them with their character.

  Character, finally, was everything in the meaning of home. What kindnesses or cruelties breathe through the walls and floorboards? For whom do the doors unlock with welcome, and against whom do they close? Salka had been blown across the ocean to venture toward this hard lesson: home was not a privilege conferred on her by others, but an obligation that she would have to perform over and over again, alone.

  3

  A GREAT HOUSE FULL OF ROOMS

  LOS ANGELES

  1929–1932

  IN MAY 1929, the Viertels’ marriage was holding a truce. On the outside they were flourishing. They put all their energy toward the building and maintenance of their small domestic empire in the rented house on Fairfax Avenue. Their sunny mood matched the Los Angeles spring weather, which after a winter of heavy rain had produced carpets of green around the homes of Hollywood and a fanatical abundance of roses.

  Berthold was directing his first feature at Fox, a picture called The One Woman Idea that turned out to be the studio’s last silent film. It was a busy romance set in some notion of Persia, chock-full of minarets and veiled dancing girls and starring the suave screen idol Rod La Rocque. Berthold’s direction was inventive and sure-footed. The shoot went so well that Fox picked up his option and doubled his salary.

  It was during these florid hopeful months that Salka got Berthold’s permission to look for a house near the ocean, as long as they rented it only for the summer. On a balmy afternoon, the air rinsed to clarity after an early rain shower, she drove straight to Santa Monica.

  She remembered that there was a real estate office near Inspiration Point, where Ocean Avenue meets Palisades Park. An agent agreed to show her several houses, the first of which was just below, on a sloping street called Mabery Road at the entrance to Santa Monica Canyon. From the end of Mabery the beach was only a short walk away, down some steps and through a little tunnel under the Coast Highway.

  The house on Mabery Road, Santa Monica, 1930s.

  The breeze at the doorway of the house smelled of honeysuckle and the pink Belle of Portugal roses that hung in an overgrown tangle on the fence. A magnolia tree with huge waxy flowers spread its branches over the arched front door, flanked by two pines. Built in 1926 in the popular “English style,” painted white with a pitched green roof and green timber framing, the house was currently in receivership and owned by a local bank. It could be theirs for $900 for the th
ree summer months—about $13,000 in 2019 dollars.

  Inside, the rooms were spacious and comfortable, perfect for a busy family. On the ground floor was a large living room with a fireplace and a glass door leading out to the back porch and garden. There was a sizable kitchen with a separate breakfast area, and a dining room. Upstairs were four bedrooms with a view of a faraway slice of the sea. A garage and servants’ quarters stood in the back next to the garden, which was planted with hibiscus and a fig and an apricot tree. Salka noticed a single lilac bush struggling to survive in front of a rusting incinerator. The estate agent told her that the lilac had never bloomed. One day, she would see that it did.

  Salka took Berthold to see the house and he liked it. In June, after the school term was over, the Viertels moved—just for the summer months—from Fairfax Avenue to Mabery Road.

  And you are to love those who are strangers, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.

  —DEUTERONOMY 10:17–19

  * * *

  —

  THERE WERE LILAC BUSHES under the front windows of Salka’s childhood home, Wychylowka, whose name came from a Polish word that means “leaning out.” The estate was situated just outside a town called Sambor. There was an orchard with hundreds of fruit trees, and a thriving kitchen garden. Just across the road from the house was a wood, which the Steuermann family called the little forest, with the chain of the Carpathians hazy in the distance. In the little forest Salka often hid from her tutor and governess and wandered among the arthritic old trees for hours, dreaming of her magnificent future as a leading lady on the world’s stages. A short walk from the house was the Dniester River, on whose banks Salka invented long impromptu melodramas with her younger brother and sister in the supporting roles, and beyond that were the potato and wheat fields.

  On their river outings the Steuermann children were sometimes accompanied by their nurse, whom they called Niania, a small Ukrainian woman who wore peasant skirts and an elaborate headdress that was common among the married women of her village. Illiterate but immensely clever, Niania was in charge of running the entire household, including the kitchen. Thus Salka remembered Niania in constant barefoot motion, “moving swiftly like a figure in a puppet show; rushing from the stables to the poultry yard, from the vegetable garden to the meadow, and over the fields.” It was to Niania that Salka appealed for consolation during her parents’ frequent and sometimes violent quarrels, and it was through Niania that Salka cultivated a love for animals, for outdoor country life, and for garden-inspired recipes. From Niania she also inherited a variety of deep-seated superstitions, including a dread of Friday the thirteenth, that she would spend a lifetime trying to shed.

  There was a roadside inn on the outskirts of the little forest. Here the peasants stopped for vodka on their way home from the market. The inn was owned by a tall, white-bearded Orthodox Jew named Lamet. Salka’s parents were also Jewish but they had little interest in any kind of religion including their own, and they did not speak Lamet’s language. Sometimes Salka would sneak over to peer curiously through the windows of the inn as old Lamet and his tiny bewigged wife and his many children and grandchildren gathered to light the Sabbath candles.

  As a girl, Salka’s mother, Auguste Amster, had hoped to become an opera singer. After Auguste’s father suffered a string of economic misfortunes, she settled instead for marriage to Salka’s father, Josef Steuermann, a prosperous lawyer in the garrison town of Sambor, forty miles southwest of Lemberg. (In time, Josef Steuermann would become Sambor’s first and only Jewish mayor.) Auguste’s people had been Russian Jewish landowners and their large country houses had been filled with guests who stayed for a week or a month or sometimes a year or more. Music wafted through these estates; the family spent many of their leisure hours around the piano. The two kitchens in Salka’s great-grandmother’s house—one strictly kosher for the observant guests and one run by an imperious French chef—steamed and clanged and sent out meals around the clock.

  Auguste Steuermann ran Wychylowka as her mother and grandmother had presided over their households, and much as Salka in Santa Monica would run her own. Wychylowka was, by any standard, an open house. Its rambling rooms were crowded with people throughout Salka’s girlhood. There were dances and garden parties in the warmer months and skating and sleigh rides in the winter. Sundays were reserved for salonlike gatherings, often featuring musical performances. As the years passed and Josef Steuermann’s law practice began to dwindle, many of the houseguests became paying boarders, though all were treated with the same hospitality. By the time Salka was establishing herself in Hollywood in 1929, her parents had turned Wychylowka into something of a proto-Airbnb in order to pay its substantial bank loans and bills. Auguste wrote to Salka in May 1929: “A woman from Lemberg wants to come with three children and a servant for four to six weeks, she seems to be a nice, modest woman and will not disturb us too much.” By December of that year, as the reverberations from the American stock-market crash resounded around the world, the Steuermanns were unable to find boarders for Wychylowka. Auguste asked Salka to send them three hundred dollars to pay the coal bill.

  For as long as Salka could remember, Auguste had been a tireless organizer of Sambor’s soup kitchens and food drives. In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, Auguste had worked with other town women to provide a buffet service at the railway station, seeing to it that all soldiers, not just officers, would be fed. Outside the garden fence at Wychylowka was an ammunition dump where Russian prisoners of war were loaded and unloaded onto nearby freight cars. At night these men, starving and suffering from typhoid, would crawl under the fence to receive a bowl of cabbage and potato soup that Niania had cooked for them.

  Every beggar in the town came to Wychylowka and none was refused: the Christians on Thursdays and the Jews on Fridays, with the Gypsies coming and going on any day they pleased. Instructed by Auguste, Niania handed out copper coins or food. Those lines of destitute people made a searing impression on the very young Salka. “They were a nightmarish procession of misery,” she recalled, “crippled, whining old men and women, young paralytics and drooling imbeciles, some so severely maimed and afflicted that they crawled on all fours like animals. Their knees were padded with dirty rags, many were blind. Most pitiful were the children they dragged along, whom they cursed and beat with sticks.”

  The idea of home as the center of intense moral, civic, and cultural engagement was Salka’s most enduring inheritance from her mother. For both Auguste and Salka, notions of morality existed outside the rituals of the synagogue, yet were no less passionately observed. (In her letters and diaries Salka mentioned often that she believed in God and had spiritual impulses, but she did not specify what kind of God she had in mind.) In 1957, at the age of sixty-eight, Salka wrote in her diary: “I have no ties to any traditional Jewishness—my parents did not have them—and the ‘antireligiousness’ of my family when I speak of it to strangers is interpreted (I feel it so often) as a denial of Jewishness. As if Jews did not have any other heritage but religion! The Apostate—the Revolutionary—the Prophet—they had to leave the ‘Covenant’ when they wanted to talk to the world.”

  Although their rejection of ceremonial Judaism was total, both mother and daughter nevertheless had a gene for hospitality, a blueprint for compassionate behavior that had been handed down through centuries of Jewish life ever since Abraham, as the legend goes, kept all four corners of his tent open to welcome strangers. For the Jews, whose origin story is that of a people cast out of their homeland and forced to wander, the act of opening one’s home to the displaced and the hungry has always been the expression of an essential Judaic principle, known in Hebrew as hachnasat orchim, the taking in of guests. It’s a code motivated at least in part by survival, one that says: I am glad to take you in and offer you comfort, with the hope that one day, should it be necessary, you might do the same for me. Salka was almost certainly unaware of this pri
nciple, having been raised to embrace Enlightenment German and not Hebraic culture, to recite Schiller’s verses rather than psalms. Yet she and her mother and their female forebears embodied it nonetheless.

  Ever since Auguste had been forced to give up her dream of singing professionally in the capitals of Europe, resigning herself to life in a small town on the fringes of the empire, she determined that if she could not step out into the world, she would do what she could to bring the world to Wychylowka. She operated socially in the tradition of such famous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish salonnières as Rahel Levin and Ada Leverson. These were women who defied their double exclusion from society, as women and as Jews, by collecting influential figures—politicians, artists, writers, composers—within the confines of their own homes, the only arenas in which they exercised any power.

  Wychylowka’s houseguests may have been somewhat unsophisticated in comparison with Levin’s and Leverson’s statesmen. But Auguste did the best she could to wield some cultural influence, inviting, among others, a professor from the university in Lemberg and an eccentric but educated Englishwoman whom she had met at a spa in Kissingen. Attended also by a steady parade of cavalry soldiers from the garrison, Auguste’s Sunday afternoons featured the Steuermanns clustered around Salka’s brother Edward at the piano as the family sang arias and chorales by Mozart, Wagner, and Strauss, and lieder by Schumann and Brahms.

  Salka took careful note of her mother’s role as Wychylowka’s salonnière. As soon as she had established herself in Santa Monica, Salka began to translate Auguste’s instincts for friendship and hospitality into a foreign vocabulary. And as a global cataclysm gathered its forces, Salka turned her own Sunday afternoons at home into a place of welcome on a much larger, higher-stakes scale.