The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Salka began to construct a film treatment, in German, of the early part of Queen Christina’s life. Berthold felt her work was promising and urged Salka to have it translated into English so she could present it to Metro. Ad Schulberg recommended a friend, Margaret “Peg” Le Vino, who spoke German and could help with the translation. Peg had no prior film experience, though her husband, Albert Shelby Le Vino, was a Paramount screenwriter. Peg was likable and smart: she and Ad Schulberg had recently founded the Progressive School in Hollywood, modeled on pedagogical ideas of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell. At first Peg dismissed the Christina project, declaring that historical films had no chance in Hollywood. But as soon as Ad mentioned that the treatment was a vehicle for Garbo, Peg became mightily interested, and Salka had herself a collaborator.

  In February 1932, just as Berthold was returning from his film shoot in New York, Salka received news that her father had died suddenly at home in Wychylowka. She had hoped to be able to visit her parents during the upcoming summer, with Berthold’s promise that he would stay with the children. Now it was too late. She would never see her proud, honorable Papa again. In her grief she took note of the obituaries in the Polish press, which applauded Josef Steuermann as a lawyer and a patriot, and later commented that it was the last time in Piłsudski’s Poland that Jews and Gentiles would mourn together. (In 1918, after World War I dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Salka’s homeland of Galicia had become part of Poland.)

  The death of Josef Steuermann caused Salka to feel deeply unmoored. Nothing seemed secure, particularly her economic future. Berthold’s Paramount contract had not been renewed and his prospects for studio work were vague. The previous year Salka had begged Berthold to give up the film business, to pursue his own poetry and fiction writing. Even with the physical distance between husband and wife and despite her affair with Oliver, Berthold was still the fulcrum of Salka’s life. He and their boys were the only truths that remained unwavering in a bewildering world. She was willing to go back with him to Berlin if he insisted. She even began to imagine that her treatment for Garbo’s Christina might be sold and filmed on the Continent. But she was reluctant to uproot her happy Californian sons and she was worried about Europe’s instability. At this point in 1931, she wrote, “the world was just as insecure as in 1919.” “The Nazis…[were] gaining power in Germany, and anti-Semitism and racism were spreading.” She did her best to retain her newly hatched American optimism:

  The Depression was at its worst. Hitler’s hideous, demented voice carried across the Atlantic, but I believed in the future. Often on the road I gave a ride to hitchhikers from the East Coast or the Middle West, who had come to California because it was less cold and hungry than back home. Our housekeeper, Jessie, kept a big pot of soup on the stove for them, when they came to the door. It reminded me of Niania feeding the Russian prisoners of war. But I…was sure that the misery would not last.

  In March 1932, as if to underscore Salka’s ambivalence about returning to Europe, the family’s visitor visas expired. To remain in America, the Viertels would need to apply for admission into an immigration quota. According to a law passed in 1924, the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act restricted the total number of immigrants who were legally permitted to enter the United States to a fixed 153,774 people per year. Of those, more than 50 percent were to be from Great Britain and Ireland. In September 1930, as the Great Depression took hold, alarming unemployment levels led to further immigration restrictions. The Hoover administration denied entry to those who were “likely to become a public charge”—that is, people who would be unable to support themselves without assistance. To comply with the “LPC clause,” immigrants were required to provide elaborate documentation about their identity, financial resources, and health histories. This paperwork, which included an affidavit from local police confirming their good character and many copies of their birth certificates, often proved so daunting that many were too discouraged to apply.

  After their visitor visas became invalid, the Viertels spent hundreds of dollars for legal help in assembling their documentation so they could take the steps that would allow them to remain in America. Because of their varying birthplaces, the process was more difficult: Berthold and Tommy were applying for an Austrian quota number, Hans and Peter for a German, and Salka for a Polish. The law then required the Viertels to leave the country and wait to receive their quota numbers while outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. They did not know how long this would take, but they hoped to be gone for only a couple of days. If their numbers were approved, they could then reenter as legal immigrants who had declared an intention to become permanent citizens.

  And so, in March 1932, the Viertels loaded up their boatlike secondhand Cadillac and steered south across the border, headed for the Mexican seaport town of Ensenada. Once they left the States, the changed landscape reminded them of Europe in different ways. The narrow, rutted roads and the colorfully dressed peasants in the fields reminded Salka happily of Poland. For her thirteen-year-old son Peter, the border officials in Tijuana brought back fearful memories of the trips he had taken across Europe when he was small, when strident soldiers at “arbitrary frontiers” questioned them in languages he could not understand. The crowds of begging children reminded him of the joyless streets of Berlin.

  When they reached Ensenada, the Viertels booked in at a fancy hotel with a casino, echoingly vacant now because of the Depression, while waiting for their quota numbers to arrive. There they spent a strange, fretful week, their mood at odds with the holiday atmosphere of the sun-drunk city by the sea. “We were the only guests in the hotel,” wrote Salka. “Before our windows a long sickle of soft, silvery sand hugged the bluest, most serene ocean.” But after three days the gloom of the ghost hotel, its ballrooms silent and its baccarat tables covered in sheets, brought on a sense of mordant claustrophobia. “I heard my mother ask what my father would do if the government refused to grant us our entry permits,” Peter wrote later, in a fictionalized account of the episode in his novel Bicycle on the Beach. “I was only thirteen and a half years old, and yet I felt frightened at the thought of losing America forever.”

  After six days, their quota numbers arrived and the Viertels were allowed to cross the border again and to resume their American lives. Their signed declarations of intent from the Department of Labor read, in part: “it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein”; they had up to seven years in which to petition for naturalization. As soon as they were back on Mabery Road, Peter wrote: “I went immediately down to the beach, and when I found the cool water of the sea again, with the gentle surf breaking on the shore, I felt as if I had escaped some awful fate, and that I was safe again in the land of the free.”

  Declaration of Intention for Salka Viertel, 1933.

  It is difficult to take in this family anecdote and not to recognize it as a mild prequel to the scramble for documents that would determine the fate of the hundreds of thousands who would soon become desperate to escape from Hitler’s Europe through other picturesque port cities. In Marseille, in Vladivostok, in Lisbon, in harbors along the Black Sea in Bulgaria and Romania, a drama of life-or-death human migration would gather momentum into a full-blown global catastrophe. It was a story of waiting in festival-themed resort towns whose blithe spirit clashed with the aura of mounting anxiety. It was a story that unfolded through the power of paperwork, its tensions arising from government-issued numbers that might or might not be drawn, from exit visas that might or might not be granted. It was the story of Casablanca, of Surrender on Demand, of Hold Back the Dawn. And it was a story in which Salka, having learned the intricate steps of the bureaucratic paperwork shuffle while waiting for her quota numbers to come through in Ensenada, would play a vital part.

  First, she needed one more piece of education in order to perform her role in th
e largest refugee crisis at that point in European history. To gain the influence necessary to help save her fellow artists and intellectuals, she had to learn how to survive within the power structure of a Hollywood studio.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MONTHS after Salka returned from Ensenada, Garbo officially signed her groundbreaking new contract with MGM. She then promptly announced her plan to take a trip to Sweden at the end of July 1932. At this time Berthold decided to go to Europe as well, to chase a much-needed business opportunity. The Hungarian film impresario Alexander Korda was establishing a new studio in England and wanted to meet Berthold in Paris to discuss potential projects. From France, Berthold would travel to Vienna to see his father, who had become seriously ill.

  One morning, just before Garbo left for Sweden, she took Salka to a sprawling house on Ocean Front Avenue in Santa Monica. She did not tell Salka why they were there. At the entrance to the mansion, a fragile-looking man with soft, sad eyes answered the door. Salka took note of his fine features and delicate hands. “This is Mr. Thalberg,” said Garbo.

  Salka was caught off guard by the abrupt introduction. At thirty-three, Irving Thalberg was the tireless production head at MGM and one of Hollywood’s most powerful and enigmatic figures. When he mentioned that he had heard wonderful things about her, she answered numbly that she had heard much about him as well. “Of course you have,” warned Garbo, tacitly asking Salka not to ruin this suddenly very important meeting.

  Salka was unaware that Garbo had already given Thalberg the treatment she and Peg Le Vino had recently finished for Queen Christina. He was interested. But he told Salka he did not believe in historical films and thought the story needed a lot of work. Thalberg intended, he said, to give it his personal attention: “I would not produce it if I did not think it would make a great picture.”

  Garbo assured him that she too had a great personal devotion to the story. Nodding toward Salka, Thalberg replied: “I am always open to new ideas and new talent,” adding that he’d be in touch and would find Salka a qualified collaborator. Salka protested that she wanted to continue working with Peg Le Vino. Thalberg was unmovable. “I know Mrs. Le Vino,” he said. “She is a fine woman but not the person I want on the screenplay.” At that moment Thalberg’s wife, the actress Norma Shearer, entered the room and invited the women to lunch. Garbo made their excuses and said her goodbyes, with Thalberg once again assuring them that Christina would be a great picture.

  Salka left Thalberg’s house feeling shaken. She and Peg had worked hard on the treatment, grabbing the few available hours when the boys were in school and the cooking and housework were done, and she hated the idea of replacing her cowriter. Her hopes that the picture might somehow be made in Europe were now growing dim. Garbo tried to bolster Salka with reassurances that MGM was the best studio and Thalberg the finest producer. She was confident that Salka could elevate the picture above mere commercialism. A few days later, Garbo left for Sweden and Salka was on her own once again. She was going to have to toughen up, and quickly. As ever in Hollywood, the education she was about to receive would be as unsentimental as they come.

  4

  THE HOUSE OF METRO

  Movies aren’t made, they’re re-made.

  —IRVING THALBERG

  LOS ANGELES AND BERLIN

  1932–1933

  DURING THE 1930s, as the Great Depression slogged on, Hollywood was raining queens. Salka’s Queen Christina was the first picture in the decade’s royal flush, following on the heels of a British production, The Private Life of Henry VIII. As always in Hollywood, others of the kind followed. In 1933, Metro was preparing a picture about Marie Antoinette to star Norma Shearer, though the film did not appear until 1938. In 1934, Paramount launched The Scarlet Empress, which starred Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great, as well as Cleopatra, with Claudette Colbert. In 1936, John Ford directed Katharine Hepburn in Mary of Scotland for RKO, while Bette Davis finished out the decade in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, for Warner Bros., in 1939.

  Why all the crowns? The studio heads were eager to promote the celebrity of their own movie queens, in particular their exotic Europeans, Garbo and Dietrich. They were also tapping into Americans’ long-standing fascination with royalty, on whose opulence filmgoers made ravenous by the Depression could visually feast. In fact the Hollywood studios, solid as they seemed from the start, were themselves built as bulwarks against earlier periods of hunger and poverty by men, almost all of them Jews from Europe, who spent every waking breath outrunning the destitution of their youth. The studio bosses built their celluloid fantasies of palaces to eclipse the memories of the hovels in which they were born.

  Louis B. Mayer, the cofounder and chief of MGM, endured a childhood of near-mythic harshness. Mayer’s father had moved his family to Canada in the early 1890s to escape from a Russian empire so determined to cripple its Jewish population with conscription laws and economic prohibitions that 240,000 Jews had already fled during the previous decade. Life was not much better in the seaport town of Saint John in the Canadian province of New Brunswick where the Mayers landed, with patriarch Jacob Mayer scraping out a paltry living by selling junk from a cart. Louis, his third child, then known as Lazar, learned quickly that survival meant determination and aggression.

  Before leaving school at around age twelve, Louis spent his childhood navigating the brutality of his father, fighting off the anti-Semitic taunts of his schoolmates, and peering into the windows of noodle shops, always desolately hungry. In those years he also began his working life. He was a small boy who took to the streets with a large bag, searching for scrap metal to add to his father’s salvage pile. “He kept his eyes on the ground,” his biographer Scott Eyman wrote. “When he saw something, he would dart forward, grab it and toss it into the bag. It was his now, but he had to have more, so he would keep moving quickly, so nobody else could get to the precious metal before he could. The habit of a rapid pace, almost a trot, would stay with him all his life.”

  From such beginnings, wrestled into being with the same frantic resolve and some lucky gambles, Louis B. Mayer’s house of Metro ascended. MGM had been in business for only eight years by 1932, the year Salka began working as a screenwriter. Yet already Mayer’s studio was Hollywood’s richest. In early 1933—a nadir year of the Great Depression—while Paramount, RKO, and Fox were declaring bankruptcy or entering receivership, MGM was the only studio to show a profit, its assets holding steady at $130 million.

  Mayer had wagered correctly that the cultivation of movie gods and goddesses would be the key to Metro’s success. “More stars than there are in the heavens” was the publicity department’s slogan, which sprang from a profitable business plan. Single-handedly generating much of that profit was Metro’s reigning idol, Greta Garbo, who in the early 1930s was “the greatest money-making proposition ever put on the screen,” according to one of her biographers, Barry Paris. Garbo was one of the few survivors from the silent era who became an even bigger star once audiences heard her voice. Her cello-toned cadences with their Swedish inflection perfectly matched her audiences’ expectations. Luxury product was what Metro was selling in its feature films, and the Garbo of the 1930s exemplified that luxury: the exquisite face, the erotic physicality, the expensive clothing and furs, the air of androgyne mystery, the European exoticism. Depression-mired audiences could not get enough of her.

  Of the period just before Garbo’s contract with MGM expired in June 1932, Salka noted: “Other studios made fantastic offers…She had only to choose.” Mayer was haunted by the prospect of Garbo’s defection to another studio, which for Metro would be financially catastrophic. And he understood that more than money would be necessary to keep the Swedish queen in his court. Boldly, he offered her something no star had ever yet been granted: power.

  Hollywood stars at that time were tethered to draconian seven-year contracts whose mandates entitl
ed the studios to dictate everything about their actors’ careers, including which plastic surgery and dental work they must undergo, which roles they must play under which director, and much of their off-screen behavior. If actors refused to cooperate, they were suspended without pay. But under the terms of Garbo’s new two-picture deal, she would have a degree of freedom unheard of since the dawn of the silent era: the freedom to approve film subjects, starting dates, cinematographers, directors, costars, unit still photographers, and portrait photographers. The first film under the terms of her new contract was to be Queen Christina, and while the contract did not give Garbo approval for scriptwriters, Mayer made no objection to Garbo’s request that Salka, who had already written the treatment, should begin to develop the screenplay.

  Like Mayer, Garbo had climbed to her commanding position from the most discouraging origins. The third child of a Swedish laborer and his wife, who were forced to abandon their rural heritage for an attempt at survival in the big city, Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was raised in a cold-water flat on the fourth floor of a tenement in Stockholm’s working-class district of Södermalm, surrounded by ugly apartment buildings and dingy shops. She was a dreamy child who liked to sit on the tin roof of the outhouse in the tenement’s back courtyard, there to pretend she was sunbathing on an elegant white beach.