The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  It fell to Salka to inform Murnau’s mother in Germany of his death. Salka and Berthold were among only eleven people, including Garbo, who gathered at a Los Angeles funeral home for a last farewell before Murnau’s body was shipped back to his homeland. Hints of a scandal had most likely kept away other studio folk, who feared their careers might suffer if they were spotted at the memorial. Gossip was spreading that before the crash Murnau had been “servicing” his teenaged male Filipino chauffeur while the boy was driving. The boy allegedly lost control of the car, which then rolled down an embankment.

  Thus without fanfare but with plenty of whispered disparagement, Hollywood lost an international giant of the silent cinema. Bestriding the backlots of the Fox Film Corporation, Murnau had enriched the technologically advanced but idea-poor American film industry of his era with an indelible stylistic legacy. Among those who watched and learned from Murnau at Fox were the American directors John Ford and Frank Borzage, whose own films became infused with Murnau’s pioneering brand of cinematic poetry. Murnau’s first American picture, Sunrise, is endlessly and justly cited as a major cinematic landmark. Its enormous sets were used again and again by Ford and other filmmakers, while Murnau’s pictorial language pulses throughout American film history, engraved on the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Werner Herzog and continuing more recently in the work of Terrence Malick and Barry Jenkins.

  From Tahiti, Murnau had written to his mother: “I am never at home anywhere—I feel this more and more the older I get—not in any country or in any house or with anybody.” If Murnau could be said to have found any kind of rapport in Hollywood it would have been among his longtime friends Salka and Berthold Viertel, who understood his genius, with its distinctively European sources, and who did what they could to help him translate it so that baffled studio chiefs might be able to understand. Instinctively, Salka went out of her way to provide literal sustenance for Murnau (that caviar, those road-trip sandwiches) while pragmatically she was flexing her capacity to protect a specialized group of artists, among whom she counted Berthold and herself. Artists who act outside conventional expectations and are often, as Murnau said, never truly at home in any country.

  With Sergei Eisenstein and Que Viva Mexico!, Salka was an even more hands-on advocate than she had been with Murnau. Eisenstein asked Salka to be a witness when the financing agreement for his Mexico film was signed with the writer Upton Sinclair, Sinclair’s wealthy wife, and their group of Pasadena investors on November 24, 1930. Salka had plenty of misgivings. Few of the Pasadena women knew who Eisenstein was, and Salka said she was certain that “they would have been horrified had they ever seen one of his films.”

  In December 1930, Salka drove Eisenstein and two of his filmmaking colleagues to Union Station as they departed for Mexico. Sinclair and his wife, along with a few reporters, were on hand to witness the director’s disappointed farewell to Hollywood, whose culture Eisenstein had declared so garish that it was as if “decadence and blight wrote a last chapter to history.” Once he reached Mexico, Eisenstein’s film shoot tried to move forward despite delays from bad weather and illness. But the Pasadena group’s original investment of $25,000 quickly evaporated. Eisenstein asked Salka to persuade his sponsors to add more financing, which she did. He also appointed Salka to be his representative in Hollywood to view the rushes, which had to be sent to Los Angeles because there were no facilities in Mexico for developing the film. It became Salka’s job to explain each of Eisenstein’s camera angles to the Pasadena women, in an attempt to justify what they saw as his needless extravagance.

  In January 1932, Eisenstein wrote to Salka in a desperate mood. He had four-fifths of a completed film, with footage that Salka noted was some of the most extraordinary ever to be caught on camera. “The Christian-pagan rites and processions, the peons and Indians, the desert and the forests were breathtakingly beautiful,” Salka wrote. (Much of it, “still shown and admired in film museums all over the world,” Salka noted in the 1960s, is available on YouTube.) But Sinclair and his investors had run out of patience. They accused Eisenstein of continuing idleness and waste, and insisted on halting the financing altogether. Eisenstein begged Salka to intervene with Sinclair and his wife, who controlled the purse strings. “Use your Medea flame,” Eisenstein urged Salka in an exchange of letters, “and convince him (but especially her) to let us finish our film.”

  Salka was not successful this time. She did manage to make a persuasive case to David O. Selznick, at that time the young and promising production head of RKO. Through the Hollywood connections she was cultivating, Salka had already gained enough of a reputation to be taken seriously by a studio chief. After she vouched for the picture, Selznick told her he was interested in seeing the footage. But once again Sinclair and his wife were implacable. According to the contract, the uncompleted film belonged to the Pasadena group, they insisted, and could not be sold to or financed by anyone else. As a grieving Eisenstein wrote to Salka, it was fated to remain a “mutilated stump with the heart ripped out.”

  Eisenstein never recovered from the public failure and humiliation he suffered during his Mexican venture, or more generally from his experience in Hollywood, whose executives treated him at best with bemusement and at worst with indifference. His point of view was, to say the least, utterly foreign to them. As his friend Léon Moussinac remarked, Eisenstein was “a man of universal genius for whom the costume of the time was too small.” Yet he was also firmly fixed in his time and place. Many of this polymath director’s cinematic ideas, including his groundbreaking theory of montage, were born in the context of his participation in the Soviet revolution and as a citizen of the burgeoning USSR. Eisenstein disapproved of professional actors, preferring to use regular citizens in his pictures. He spurned the very notion of a film industry driven by profits.

  During his months at Paramount, Eisenstein became the victim of a malicious anti-Semitic and anti-Communist smear campaign, mounted by a right-wing agitator named Major Frank Pease. In a twenty-four-page pamphlet titled Eisenstein: Messenger of Hell, Pease ranted that the director was part of a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to turn the American cinema into a Communist cesspool.” (Eisenstein’s father’s family were “Christianized Jews” from Germany and Latvia; his mother was not Jewish.) The harassment was similar to the vigorous round of hate speech that greeted Charlie Chaplin during his visit to Berlin around the same time, when the National Socialists denounced Chaplin as a “Jewish Communist millionaire” and a “Jewish film clown.” (Chaplin was not Jewish.) As the hounding of Eisenstein escalated, Paramount executives Jesse Lasky and B. P. Schulberg—who were Jewish themselves, and reluctant to call any more attention to the fact—decided the Russian director was more trouble than he was worth. They terminated his contract.

  Eisenstein was forced to return to the USSR. Upon his farewell he gave Salka some photographs of himself with her on the beach in Santa Monica. He would later say that these were the only films he had managed to make in America. Though he continued to make pictures, Hollywood had diminished him. Back in Moscow, his idiosyncratic views of art and film clashed with the increasingly totalitarian strictures of Stalin’s regime, and his health failed early. He was found dead of a heart attack on the floor of his flat, alone, in February 1948 at age fifty.

  Sergei Eisenstein and Salka Viertel on the beach in Santa Monica, early 1930s.

  “I am very sad because I am not going to see you anymore and I have the feeling that all I have to ask you this time is to send me a family photo of all of you,” Eisenstein had written to Salka in another letter shortly after he had left Hollywood. “You have helped me in the most difficult years of my life and this shall never be forgotten.” Hailing Salka’s theatrical talents as she attempted to intercede for him (“use your Medea flame”), he also appreciated her flair for creating and sustaining a home and a growing community of friends, and was comforted by her welcome.

  With
compassion and esprit, Salka made Eisenstein’s and Murnau’s lives a little better in difficult circumstances. These men were cruelly derided for being homosexual, Jewish, and Communist in an America where such hatreds were routine. The hatred would crescendo to near-hysterical panic in decades to come. Being labeled as any of those was equivalent to being called a criminal and could easily cost a job or an entire reputation. To Salka’s constitutionally open mind, this was ridiculous. For her there were no outsiders. Or, just as true, everyone in Hollywood was an outsider. The very industry was created in America by its “others”—that is, by Jews and immigrants. To simplify a human being for the purpose of malice and exclusion was to insult every belief Salka upheld. Defying the nativist vitriol heaped on her artist friends in Los Angeles, she did everything she could to support them.

  Across the Atlantic, at just that time, a disaffected Austrian demagogue-to-be was exploiting the social and economic emergency in Germany to build a political platform that gathered strength through the demonization of Jews, Communists, and homosexuals. On November 18, 1930, Salka’s sister Rose wrote from Dresden to report that “I can feel Hitler’s influence already everywhere.” The American press had been carefully tracking Adolf Hitler’s political activities since the early 1920s. By 1930, the New York Times was still dismissing him as a buffoon. Yet National Socialism was already making substantial gains. In March 1929 the Nazi candidates in the parliamentary elections won barely 1 percent of the vote, yet by July 1930 they captured 18.3 percent, and doubled it two years later.

  The ways in which people chose to treat those who were different among them would soon turn out to define the boundary between civilization and barbarism. The gestures of acceptance that Salka extended to Murnau and Eisenstein, in a time of institutional bigotry on both sides of the Atlantic that is not difficult to imagine today, was anything but minor. It was quietly but transgressively courageous.

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  BY 1931, Berthold Viertel was feeling as frustrated as Murnau had been at Fox. He lost faith that his studio colleagues would ever appreciate his ideas or see him as anything other than a baffling eccentric. “I became aware that we were constantly explaining ourselves to our American friends,” Salka wrote of this time, “trying to convey our identity and what really possessed us, who we were.” Berthold was reduced to hiding in the men’s room at the studio to read Kierkegaard and Kant, despairing of making his ambitions understood in the “primitive vocabulary” of his superiors. When his contract expired, Berthold signed immediately with Paramount, where he was relieved to witness the evident intelligence of his new boss, head of production B. P. Schulberg. Over the years the Schulberg family would become entwined with Salka’s in ways both beneficial and fraught. For now, Salka enjoyed meeting Schulberg’s energetic and progressive wife, Ad, and their gifted teenaged children, Budd and Sonya.

  Berthold directed four pictures for Schulberg at Paramount, several of which sent him to New York for filming from August 1931 until February 1932. While he was away, his family did its best to keep him current. His youngest son Tommy, now five years old, wrote to him in stalwart block letters: “WE HAVE A NEW DOG NAMED DUKE. HE IS AN ENGLISH ‘UPSETTER,’ BECAUSE HE KILLED THE NEIGHBOR’S RABBITS.”

  Tommy, Hans, and Peter continued to spend all their free time at the beach or roaming among the neighborhood creeksides with the local Mexican children, whose families had once owned all the land in the canyon. The Viertel boys were besotted with the liberty of their American lives, in which every day brought a chance to swim and ride their bikes and go fishing in mud ponds, and to stage Western scenes from their favorite Karl May and Fenimore Cooper tales. Their romantic boyhood inventions echoed Salka’s long-ago theatrics on the banks of the Dniester River with her siblings.

  While Berthold was in New York, the Mabery Road establishment grew more and more thoroughly into Salka’s house. She cleaned and organized, scheduled and shopped. In the garden she planted begonias, deadheaded roses, watered the fruit trees and the lilac, which had started to bloom. She sprinkled lavender in the linen closet and pine oil in the bath. She cooked goulash and stuffed cabbage, and an earthy Galician version of vichyssoise. (“You want a prevailing leek and potato taste,” she said years later as she prepared it for her step-granddaughter.) She baked Kugelhopf and a flourless chocolate cake so addictive that it became an obsession for nearly everyone who tasted it. Along with Salka’s cooking, every bit of house business on Mabery Road—the supervision of homework and tutoring for the boys, the preparations for the Sunday parties—was stamped with her Lebenskunst, her art of living. Her domestic style hybridized an adherence to European decorum with casual Californian improvisation. She required her children to bow when greeting visitors, yet gave her dogs the run of the house, granting them the same privileges as family members.

  A further improvisation unfurled while Berthold was away in New York. The Viertels had become friendly with a neighboring family on Mabery Road: the successful screenwriter Oliver H. P. Garrett, his wife Louise (both in their early thirties), and their son Peter. In Berthold’s absence, Salka and Oliver began an affair that lasted two years. It was an open liaison, most of the time endured if not endorsed by both Louise Garrett and Berthold. The families continued to mingle socially, with Oliver and Louise joining in at Salka’s Sunday afternoons. Oliver played football and baseball with the Viertel boys, who adored him, and took them to see the professional teams play. During the Halloween evenings of those years, Salka stood at her front door passing out candy while her sons went trick- or-treating with young Peter Garrett and the Mexican boys from the neighborhood. Christmas Day gift exchanges always included the Garretts as well.

  In her account of her relationship with Oliver, Salka stated that she was always the less invested of the pair, insisting that “My life with Berthold was always predominant.” She made it clear that she would not leave her marriage, especially at the end of the affair, when Oliver’s marriage fell apart and Louise asked for a divorce. Nonetheless Oliver was a consequential figure in Salka’s life. Full of brio and an impressive Yankee sophistication, he motored around the canyon in a late-model convertible, his baldness obscured by a jaunty beret. Oliver came from a distinguished Massachusetts family and had enlisted in the Great War in 1917, after which he worked as a newspaper reporter in New York and then signed a lucrative long-term contract to write for Paramount in Hollywood. All the important New York journalists who’d been lured to the Coast to write for the pictures—among them Ben Hecht and Dudley Nichols—gathered on Oliver’s Mabery Road front porch to drink and swap war stories.

  Salka recognized that her foreignness was what attracted Oliver to her. He saw her, she wrote, as “part of that ancient, baffling continent of which he had caught a distorted glimpse during the war, and for which, like so many young Americans, he had brought home an unappeased longing.” If for Oliver she represented Old World sensuality and savoir-faire, for Salka he provided a valuable entrée to the complexities of America and Hollywood. He educated her in his left-leaning belief in democracy and his knowledge born of experience as a screenwriter in the trenches of the picture business. It was through Oliver’s introduction that Salka got the chance to appeal to David Selznick on Sergei Eisenstein’s behalf. And as a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild, Oliver did much to influence Salka’s interest in Hollywood’s early labor negotiations.

  More personally, she appreciated Oliver’s chivalrous conduct toward her, noting that other “devoted husbands” felt free to make unwanted passes at her. Clearly there was much Oliver and Salka were able to do for each other beyond the boundaries of sex—although control over her sex life was always, for Salka, an indispensable prerogative. She insisted on her right to sleep with Oliver regardless of the tensions it caused in the daily lives of both families. Through this sexual relationship Salka was expressing a variety of feelings not only toward Oliver but to Berthold as well.
Husband and wife spoke volumes to each other through their infidelities, which were demonstrations of fear and hurt and anger as much as they were love affairs. “I don’t feel guilty about…Oliver,” Salka mused nearly thirty years later in her diary.

  I felt sorry, heartbroken about hurting Berthold. But also I was terribly impatient and angered with myself and with him, because I was convinced that a lot of his suffering was due to hurt vanity. I remember the words he said to me when I was jealous and miserable, when he was in love with [X] or [Y]. He said that he expects me to be generous and maternal in my emotions. I did not expect him to be paternal towards me but when I was asserting my rights to love and to live I was not his wife anymore. I was his sister and friend…I could not combine the two things: lover and mother. Never. As a lover I was not a “mother.” To nobody. I loved. Basta. I never diluted passion—with motherliness—My tenderness was sexual—

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  AS HER ACTING PROSPECTS SPUTTERED, Salka’s professional idleness continued to nag at her. “Why don’t you write?” asked a sympathetic Garbo, and Berthold agreed, saying, “You would bear Hollywood much better if you worked.” Salka was not new to writing, after all: she had written and sold that film treatment to Gabriel Pascal in 1925, back in Berlin. Garbo’s suggestion began to percolate. In July and August of 1930, while waiting for her takes during the filming of the German version of Anna Christie, Salka had read a recently published biography of Queen Christina of Sweden. She began to think about adapting it as a picture for Garbo.

  Salka’s interest in the subject was auspicious. Garbo was negotiating a new contract with Metro that would pay the actress a staggering salary of $250,000 per picture for a two-picture deal. Even better, it offered her the unprecedented power to choose her own director and costars. She would have plenty of influence over the choice of film properties as well. Garbo was tired of being cast as vamps and prostitutes and eager for the chance to portray her homeland’s idiosyncratic seventeenth-century queen, whose “masculine education and complicated sexuality made her an almost contemporary character,” as Salka put it. Garbo made it clear that her next picture for Metro would be about the life, rule, and eventual abdication of Queen Christina of Sweden. Though other writers, including Garbo’s friend Mercedes de Acosta, were keen to develop the project, Garbo designated Salka as its screenwriter.