The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  By the time Greta was fourteen, in 1920, she had left school and was working for about a dollar a week in a barbershop as a tvålflicka, a soap-lather girl. The position nominally involved assistance with shaving chores but more truthfully gave men a socially acceptable opportunity to grope young girls. Fending off grabs and pinches, Greta faced this work with as much dignity as she could muster. When she was not at the barbershop Greta spent much of her time caring for her father, who had become ill and could not work. On one particularly traumatic afternoon, she feared he was dying and went with him to a charity hospital. They waited in a long line while her father blazed with fever, only to be humiliated at the reception window with questions about whether they could pay for treatment. Greta’s shame and anger in the face of this callousness remained with her for the rest of her life.

  A few days after they were turned away from the hospital, her beloved father died of a kidney inflammation. He was forty-eight. His death threw the family’s already grim finances into yet more disarray.

  Greta inherited piteously little from her father aside from his willingness to work hard, his love of the outdoors, and his infinitely expressive eyes. She learned to use that expressiveness as she began to pursue a career as an actress. At seventeen she got a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy in Stockholm, one of the most prestigious drama schools in the world. Through contacts there she met the great Swedish director Mauritz Stiller and became his protégée. It was in Stiller’s Saga of Gösta Berling that Louis B. Mayer first noticed her and resolved to bring her to Hollywood. Clarence Brown, who later directed seven of Garbo’s pictures at MGM, told the film historian Kevin Brownlow: “Greta Garbo had something that nobody ever had on the screen. I don’t know whether she even knew she had it, but she did…Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn’t see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought.”

  When Garbo first arrived in Hollywood in 1925 at age twenty, an unsentimental woman journalist offered a more superficial perspective: “Her shoes were run down at the heels. Her stockings were silk but in one was a well-defined run. As a sartorial masterpiece, she was a total loss.” Here during that nativist era was a typically cruel and condescending attitude toward an immigrant—and a famous one at that. Garbo’s first year in America was dampened by homesickness, her grasp of English tenuous, her foreignness isolating. In those initial months there was little attempt to welcome her, or to pay much attention to her at all. Her friend the playwright Sam Behrman once asked her why she got involved during her early Hollywood days with the troubled actor John Gilbert, whom she almost married in 1926. Thoughtfully, Garbo replied, “I was lonely—and I couldn’t speak English.”

  Yet Garbo persevered. She had no choice. In the interminable three-month wait for MGM to assign her to a film project, she took a room at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica and spent her days walking along the shore. She had found the elegant white beach she had dreamed of as a girl atop the outhouse behind her tenement. Yet no matter how far she ran from her origins, they refused to let her be. The avalanche of fame that followed would not transform or appease her. The restless hunger to outrun her painful childhood would remain during her hardworking ascension to Hollywood queendom and throughout her long life.

  These origin stories of Mayer’s and Garbo’s were the stories, for the most part, of those who built the house of Metro and of almost every one of those who built Hollywood, from its earliest carnival days to the era of corporate efficiency that was now developing. They were the stories of Mary Pickford, Samuel Goldwyn, Charlie Chaplin, William Fox, Joan Crawford. They were the hardscrabble beginnings of people who were scarred by the absence of lost fathers or by the presence of terrifying ones. They had suffered in poverty, vowed never again to endure it, risked all their own money, and were made frantic by the prospect of passing up their shot. The Hollywood pioneers were, as the film historian Cari Beauchamp has noted, almost all women, Jews, and immigrants: outsiders for whom the twin specters of privation and discrimination shaped the ways they behaved and everything they created. Their early miseries inspired the angry resolve they would need to survive in this grueling, misogynistic, fiercely anti-Semitic new world.

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  ON AUGUST 2, 1932, when Salka walked through the Greek-colonnade gates of Metro’s Culver City studio to meet again with Irving Thalberg, she entered an organization teeming with women. Mostly unheralded, all of them were vital to the studio’s welfare in large ways and small. Among the women of Metro were not only actresses and secretaries: women populated every corner of its vast campus. They filled the story department, where they read scripts and reported to executives about incoming books and plays. Women taught in the Little Red Schoolhouse, which was the studio’s on-site school for child actors, under the supervision of head instructor Mary McDonald. They worked in the commissary, which fed up to 2,700 people daily—where a menu staple was the matzoh-ball soup that was prepared from a Mayer family recipe—and as nurses in the first-aid department, where two doctors and a dentist were always on call. A whole floor of the wardrobe building, it was said, was assigned to hand embroidery and beading performed by immigrant women, like a factory in the garment industry of the time.

  “Through their collective efforts, these women were the fuel of Hollywood’s large-scale, industrial production process,” wrote Erin Hill in a history of women’s work in film. True—but also true that more than a few of Metro’s female employees had prominent positions at the studio. They had influence, but no authority; responsibility, but no glory. Lofty rewards for achievement went only to men.

  Blanche Sewell was a film editor at Metro from the silent era through the 1940s, and would serve as the editor for Queen Christina. Even more formidable in the editing department was Margaret Booth, who edited many of the studio’s most prestigious productions, also from the silent era onward. Booth’s credits include The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Strange Interlude, and Camille, and she was nominated for an Oscar for her work on Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). In 1937 she became Metro’s supervising film editor, a role she held until the studio collapsed in the late 1960s. The position made her one of the most influential employees on the Metro lot, as she had approval on the final editing of every film the studio released during her tenure.

  Nathalie Bucknall, a multilingual polymath from St. Petersburg, began at the studio as a script reader in 1927 and by 1935 had created the research department, overseeing a library of four thousand volumes and supplying period detail for the studio’s historical blockbusters of the 1930s, including Garbo’s Anna Karenina. Kate Corbaley in the reading department was one of Mayer’s most trusted story editors, identifying potentially successful scripts and reading their summaries aloud to the boss, sometimes altering plot points to her own satisfaction. Louis B. Mayer’s executive assistant, Ida Koverman, was the dexterous traffic controller for all who clamored to see Mayer, as well as his adviser on important acquisition and staffing decisions. She was a forceful fundraiser for the California Republican Party, having previously served as a secretary for Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign. Additionally, and rare for the time, Mayer’s personal physician, Jessie Marmorston, and his lawyer, Fanny Holtzmann, were women.

  Mayer’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, liked women and was not above working with them, though he was quick to withhold his approval or to pit them against one another when those tactics proved useful. Women writers, many of whom had begun as scenarists or as actresses during the silent era, were obedient and discreet. They had been raised to expect much less than men did—less money, less credit, less respect. In one example, Thalberg enjoyed seventeen years of fruitful collaborations with the supremely accomplished screenwriter Frances Marion. She was the winner of two Academy Awards and the writer of more than three hundred pictures of every genre. For many of those she received inadequate credit, or none at all. (“A mouse at the feast�
� was how she once described her role in Hollywood.) Much of Frances Marion’s enormous value to the studio came from her facility with literary adaptations, including Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie in 1929, which Thalberg supervised and which was Garbo’s sound-film debut. Thalberg worked profitably with other of Metro’s women screenwriters as well, including Anita Loos, Bess Meredyth (the wife of the Warner Bros. director Michael Curtiz), and Lenore Coffee, who once reported that Thalberg had explained to her that writing wasn’t hard; it was just putting one word after another. To which Coffee replied: “Pardon me, Mr. Thalberg—it’s putting one right word after another.”

  Salka’s prospects thus seemed somewhat promising on this summer day, when she ventured onto the studio grounds for the first time to discuss Queen Christina with Thalberg. Yet this foray played out even more poorly than had their first encounter at his Ocean Front mansion. This time Salka did not have Garbo with her, as the actress had left for Europe several days earlier. Instead Salka armed herself with Garbo’s agent, Harry Edington.

  Salka noticed that Thalberg looked even thinner and more ashen than he had only a few weeks earlier. He had been born with a heart defect, as everyone knew, and had not expected to live past the age of thirty; he was now thirty-three. Salka and Thalberg exchanged a few pleasantries, and then his tone turned more businesslike. We have to start working, he told Salka. He asked her what arrangements she would suggest.

  Having been coached by Edington, Salka replied that she’d leave it up to Thalberg. To which he responded that he wanted very much to have Salka at the studio and thought it best that she join MGM on a weekly salary.

  Bravely, Salka said that she had collaborated with Peg Le Vino and felt that the studio should make a deal with both of them and buy the story.

  Thalberg let a long pause go by, then asserted his power. But there is nothing to buy, he told her charmingly. You have no copyright. Anybody can write a story on a historical subject.

  Salka was shocked into a rare speechlessness. Without saying it overtly, he was telling her he had every legal right to dismiss her and steal her treatment.

  You told me yourself that you wanted to make changes, Thalberg said soothingly. Still, I want to be fair. We’ll pay you a thousand dollars now and four thousand when the script is finished.

  No, Mr. Thalberg, Salka insisted. You know very well that this is not adequate compensation for a story which demanded a great deal of work and research.

  Rounding up her dignity along with the silent Mr. Edington, she said her goodbyes and walked out.

  Edington called Salka the next day to tell her that Thalberg was furious but wanted to continue negotiating. Salka asked the agent to tell Thalberg that her treatment was an original, was not in the public domain, and that Thalberg himself had said it was perfect for Garbo. On the advice of Oliver Garrett and her lawyer, she told Edington to ask for ten thousand dollars for the ninety-page story.

  A few days later, Thalberg made a counteroffer of $7,500 for Salka and Peg Le Vino, which they accepted and split between them. (Hollywood gossips gleefully inflated their shares to $37,500 each.) Le Vino would do no further work on the script, but would receive a story credit. In later years, in a politically motivated effort to discredit Salka’s achievements as a writer, the columnist Hedda Hopper maintained that Peg Le Vino was the sole original author of the Christina story. “It serves me right,” Salka wrote in her diary in 1959. “I should never have been so generous to Peg as to let her share the credit.”

  “All during that ordeal I was thinking of you, Berthold,” Salka wrote about the negotiation to her husband, who was aboard a ship on his way to Europe. “My first encounter with the world of film business made me very apologetic towards you! But if they don’t throw me out, I hope I will learn to cope with it.”

  Coping meant acceding to the whims of the studio schedule, in which work could charge forward or stop cold during exasperating waiting periods. At Salka’s first story conference just a few days later, there seemed to be plenty of momentum. Thalberg introduced Salka to Bess Meredyth, the dimpled, pink-cheeked screenwriter of Ben-Hur as well as three of Garbo’s hits. A former silent-film actress, Meredyth was prized for her brisk solutions to story glitches and was one of the most highly paid writers on the lot. Over time, Salka grew to become fond of her.

  Meredyth smiled placidly while Thalberg outlined his ideas for Christina. Also in the room was Paul Bern, his German-born production assistant, who exclaimed admiringly at each of Thalberg’s pronouncements about how daring the film must be, but also how human, so that audiences could identify with the characters. Salka intensely disliked Bern, who had supervised the German version of Anna Christie in which Salka had appeared opposite Garbo. He was pompous and patronizing toward Salka, all the while keeping up his sycophantic cooing over Thalberg: “Marvelous, Irving…I see! Now it certainly makes sense! Now it becomes an important film…”

  When the conviction arose during the meeting that audiences only wanted a good love story, Salka was moved to remind the men that Queen Christina, being after all the ruler of a powerful kingdom who had inherited a little problem called the Thirty Years’ War, was far from some ordinary love-starved woman. Thalberg asked how Salka might portray this fact without making the film dull. Instantly Salka’s dramatic instincts came alive. She had composed the Christina treatment in the fall and winter of 1931 by acting out each scene for Peg Le Vino to transcribe onto the page. Now Salka again began to act out several incidents from the treatment, careful to make it seem as if Thalberg, with her help, was inventing the scenes à la minute. “My suggestions were pure theater,” she later remembered, and she was gratified to see how thoroughly Thalberg the inveterate showman was entertained by her performance. In pitch meetings and in writer’s rooms throughout her screenwriting career, Salka would continue to do her storytelling as if it were live theater. Performance was turning out to be her key to survival.

  The meeting was breaking up when Thalberg called Salka back. Standing behind his enormous desk, he said to her: “You had a very bad entrée, but if I were not sure that you will be an asset to the studio I would not make you an offer. We need talent, but talent needs us too. You have no experience and I want you to work with Bess Meredyth. She has written great films.” They agreed that Salka was to be paid $350 per week on a week-to-week basis. She didn’t want a long-term commitment until she knew whether Berthold would be able to get a contract with Alexander Korda in Europe.

  Unexpectedly, Thalberg then asked Salka whether she had seen Mädchen in Uniform, a 1931 German film about a lesbian relationship between a teacher and a student in a girls’ school that had become a great sensation in Europe and more recently in New York. Thalberg recommended that Queen Christina’s passionate affection for her lady-in-waiting might be drawn along similar lines, and asked Salka to keep this in mind. “Handled with taste,” he suggested, “it would give us very interesting scenes.”

  Such open-mindedness from an American film producer was a pleasant revelation for Salka, and it was at this point that she decided she liked Thalberg very much. His enthusiasm brought her back to Europe, to the sexual fluidity of the Weimar culture that she had left behind in Berlin. Then she remembered farther back, to the Vienna of the mid-teens, when she had worked at the Neue Wiener Bühne. There she had known an actress named Leontine Sagan who had since turned to filmmaking and was the now-celebrated director of none other than Mädchen in Uniform.

  Thalberg’s comment revealed that he, too, was thinking of Europe, though from a different perspective. He was indeed open-minded about sexuality: he had undergone Freudian analysis and harbored a deep commiseration with—if he did not himself possess—the boundary-pushing impulses of artists. But his suggestion to Salka about the Sagan film was more about business than it was about art or sex. Wildly popular as Garbo was, her success depended significantly on the European market. Thalberg took careful notic
e as Mädchen in Uniform became big box office in Europe, and he sought to replicate that revenue for Metro in any way he could. For Thalberg, the lavish depiction of an enigmatic seventeenth-century European queen portrayed by Metro’s most enigmatic twentieth-century movie goddess was a good financial bet at home and abroad. Add to that a suggestive continental embrace or two between women during these freewheeling pre-Code days (the brief period between the advent of sound in 1929 and the imposition of Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines in mid-1934), and he calculated that the odds of a hit on both sides of the Atlantic were in Metro’s favor.

  Every historical drama is as much a reflection of the time in which it is written as the time it attempts to portray. By hiring Salka, Thalberg was building a bridge to the Europe of his own era as much as to the Europe of Christina’s. Just as important, he understood that Salka would serve as the bridge between Garbo and the studio.

  When the special girl friend

  Meets a special girl friend

  With great tenderness she’ll tell her friend she’s special….

  Just last week

  Her boyfriend had her in a whirl

  That romance is over

  She’s dropped him for a girl…

  —“WHEN THE SPECIAL GIRLFRIEND,”

  FROM THE 1928 BERLIN REVUE IT’S IN THE AIR,

  BY MARCELLUS SCHIFFER AND MISCHA SPOLIANSKY;

  SUNG BY MARGO LION AND MARLENE DIETRICH

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