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BERLIN AND HOLLYWOOD WERE GAZING AT EACH OTHER, and each sold images of modern womanhood to the other. One after another, the revues in Berlin’s packed cabarets marched American-style kicklines of young girls through their paces. Girlkultur was the word for these mechanical parades of often naked dancers, which commented on American consumer culture as well as sexuality. In other revues, pairs of singers warbled teasing homoerotic lyrics to each other as they pretended to go shopping. Women dressed as men, onstage and off, and men as women.
Hollywood was watching, and was drawn to the fluidity and the freedom. Onscreen and off, Dietrich and Garbo helped inspire a fashion trend for men’s wear among women, while the films of the comedian Marion Davies took pains to show her in trousers to satisfy the fetish of her patron, William Randolph Hearst. For many in Hollywood, “a knowing, blasé attitude toward lesbianism became a signifier of worldly cosmopolitanism,” according to the film historian Laura Horak. “Everyone had to be a lesbian in the thirties, even if they didn’t want to be,” noted Sam Green, an art dealer who became a good friend of Garbo’s in the 1970s. “They certainly dressed up and went to lesbian bars—it was the thing to do.”
For the studios, as Thalberg had suggested, the Weimar Republic’s spirit of freewheeling sexuality was marketable. Hollywood was happy to impersonate Berlin’s lesbian-chic culture as long as it brought a profit. But there were those in Hollywood who were also willing to use it to inflict harm. As was the case with Murnau, innuendo about homosexuality was an industry-wide cudgel, wielded by the jealous and the confrontational. “Interestingly,” wrote Patrick McGilligan, biographer of the director George Cukor, “that’s the first bit of juicy gossip you hear about everyone in Hollywood.” When Garbo, with Metro’s encouragement, cultivated an aura of ambiguous sexuality to appeal to women as well as men, malicious gossip about her relationship with Salka began to circulate, and continued well after Salka’s death in 1978. In fact, if Salka is remembered today, it’s not for her screenwriting career or her role in the antifascist emigration; it’s most often for her alleged lesbian relationship with Garbo. These allegations are seldom expressed with tolerance or sympathy.
“Salka was AC/DC” (bisexual), Irene Mayer Selznick, Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, told Garbo’s biographer Barry Paris, years after Salka had died. “Lots of people knew about that. She was quite masculine, I thought—overweight and unappetizing, but charming.” Never mind that Salka herself identified as heterosexual publicly, in her diaries, and in her memoir, and strenuously denied that she and Garbo ever had a sexual relationship. There is not a shred of evidence to prove that they did. In pointing this out, however, Barry Paris manages to be just as disparaging toward Salka as Irene Selznick was, writing that Salka, “as everyone, might well have been attracted to Garbo, but the reverse was unlikely, and none of the many claims that they were ‘lovers’ offers anything but conjecture to back it up.”
The truth about whether there was ever a physical expression of Salka’s and Garbo’s intimate bond is not available and may never be. It’s possible that there was, and just as possible not. Yet the kind of casually damaging homophobia and misogyny in Irene Selznick’s assertion was not about homosexuality at all, but about fear and power, and it came just as frequently from women as from men. The smaller the portions for ambitious women in Hollywood, the more vicious they tended to be toward other women. An accusation of homosexuality, as the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about HUAC-era Communism, “was not the target but the weapon,” and its real function was “to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere.” In Salka’s case, the fear and resentment was directed toward a politically progressive foreign woman who had helped to bring in the permissive culture of the Weimar Republic, who had the ear of one of Hollywood’s most powerful actresses, and whose influence must be kept vigilantly in check.
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IT WAS NOT JUST IMAGES of women’s sexuality that Hollywood and Europe were exhibiting to each other as they gazed across the Atlantic. Berlin was pulsing with its best simulation of American jazz. Visiting African-American musicians and dancers imported what Berliners perceived as something primitive and authentic, as “wildness” and “wantonness.” Meanwhile, in Culver City, Metro prepared to build an illusion of seventeenth-century Sweden on its backlot, while on Lot Two, a large faux-antique Austrian-style house near the French Courtyard and the London-style Copperfield Street faced an area that would come to be called, for the Garbo film, Christina Court. And back in Berlin, occupying nearly all of Potsdamer Platz was a gigantic proto–Disney World dining emporium called Haus Vaterland, operated by a Jewish family-owned hotel firm called Kempinski, in which eight thousand diners at once could choose among six floors of themed restaurants. On the fourth floor was the Wild West Bar, in which waiters in cowboy hats served American cocktails while jazz bands, showgirls, and minstrels in blackface performed.
Germans co-opted American popular culture for political as well as commercial reasons. National Socialist leaders admired the insouciance of American pictures as they prepared to spread their völkisch ideology through the power of film. The frenzied language of Hitler’s speeches, the philologist Victor Klemperer noticed, was designed to create suspense in a manner deliberately copied from American cinema. And that language was effective. While Berlin’s cabarets were mocking Hitler as a preposterous Austrian clown, by July 1932 his party had won 230 parliamentary seats. Amid more and more dire economic conditions that surpassed the worst aspects of America’s Great Depression, within four years the National Socialists had gone from winning barely 1 percent of the vote, in March 1929, to becoming the largest party in the Reichstag.
Salka was getting a few glimpses of the European mood from Berthold, who was in Paris during that summer of 1932. She missed him terribly and wished she could join him, but Berthold’s letters provided a corrective. “You ask how Europe is, Salka? It is overwhelming. Impoverished, poisoned by politics, which means by hatred.” By November he had moved on to Berlin, where the producers and directors he knew were either hankering for an invitation to Hollywood or hastily adapting themselves to the pervasive influence of National Socialism. Berthold mentioned to Salka that the prostitutes offering flagellation services on the Kurfürstendamm were complaining to onlookers that the police would no longer let them wear their black fetish boots. Despite the new rules, he said, there were more prostitutes than ever. “The Eden bar and other night spots are ultra-chic and full of foreigners and film people,” he reported; “an enormous amount of beggars in front of luxurious eating places: Kempinski, Mampe, and new Viennese and Hungarian restaurants—does it give you a picture?
“On every street corner you see youngsters in uniform shaking their collection boxes,” Berthold wrote, “opposite them, on the same corner, the Communists. Lately both the young Communists and the Hitler Youth went on strike together. Four dead. The Government reacted with strong measures, but the strike continues.”
Immersed in the volatility of Berlin, Berthold was sanguine about Salka’s newly influential position at Metro, sending her an essay about Queen Christina he had found (“perhaps it will inspire you”) and trying to boost her morale. Not least on his mind were the large portions of her paycheck Salka was cabling to him, some of which he used for himself, while he doled out the rest to family and friends. Sometimes, Salka noted tartly, “he would forget bank notes in hotel rooms or lose them on the streets.”
Salka’s weekly Metro paycheck of $350—at a time, in August 1932, when the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 25 percent—shifted the scales of the Viertels’ marriage more dramatically than their current geographical separation or their ongoing infidelities. Salka was still involved with Oliver Garrett, but their affair was winding down and both he and his wife Louise had been getting on her nerves. As with all of Salka’s liaisons, the situation was nuanced
and complicated. Oliver was her film-business adviser and a beloved surrogate father to her sons as well as her lover; Berthold knew all this, and sanctioned most. In the meantime, Salka was sure that Berthold was not sexually faithful to her during what would turn out to be an entire year spent abroad. Life imitated The Marriage Circle; or maybe Lubitsch’s bittersweet European comedy was itself reflecting the intricacies of just this kind of European marriage. Even so, beyond matters of extramarital sex the Viertels remained a committed couple. In their letters, each to the other was still “mein Herz.” When Salka sent Berthold a telegram asking him not to forget her, he replied: “What should I say to that? Not only that I can’t forget you, on the contrary you are even more present to me…I am only planning the future in the ‘we’ form.”
Salka was more than willing to earn the primary income. She was grateful for the chance to send cash to her family in Sambor and to Berthold’s family in Vienna, both households pinched by the straitened economic conditions throughout Europe. And her paycheck released Berthold from some of the urgency of securing movie work of his own. He was weighing the offer of a job from Alexander Korda and Gaumont-British Pictures, which would not begin until early the following year, against several other film and theater opportunities on the Continent. But Salka hoped again that Berthold would return to Santa Monica and to his true passion, his own novels and poems. “If you are not making a film or staging a play immediately, you should return as soon as possible,” she wrote to him. “Alas, I am sure that you are discussing a hundred projects, talking to a thousand people and dissipating your energy. Now that I am earning money we should consider it as a great chance for you to settle down and finish your books.”
Berthold wrote: “In business terms your Greta manuscript is surely the most promising for the future and materially the most promising thing happening right now, more important than any engagement that I might be able to secure. Strangely you do not seem to share my sense of the importance of your work. Are you already so disheartened?”
About her position at Metro, at that point Salka was indeed disheartened. Except for the money, it was impossible for her to attach any importance to her new job, as very little was happening with Christina. She spent most of her time waiting to confer with Thalberg, then was told he had to travel to New York. Frustrated, she decided to ask Thalberg for a two-week leave of absence. Oliver and Louise Garrett were taking a trip to Mexico and had invited her along. She put aside her mundane irritations with them and decided to accept. Thalberg was amenable, even offering to keep Salka on the payroll during her absence as a reward for her participation in story conferences. Salka left her sons—now aged thirteen, twelve, and seven—in the able care of her housekeeper, and set off with the Garretts by steamer and train to Mazatlán, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. It was restorative to be in Mexico again, which reminded her once more of Wychylowka, and again she missed Berthold and wished he could be with her, in the paisaje de campo that their friend Eisenstein had so loved.
After Salka’s return in the autumn of 1932, Christina moved glacially forward. No producer had yet been assigned, so she and Bess Meredyth worked on their first draft through November and December without supervision. Garbo remained in Sweden and Salka began to doubt that the picture would ever get made. Toward the end of the year, Salka’s usual holiday melancholy was unappeased by the little Christmas trees topping the lampposts along Hollywood Boulevard or the twinkle lights festooning the streets downtown. When she and Bess finally finished their draft and sent it to Thalberg’s office, they were told that he was leaving for Europe. Rumors spread that he was unwell, may even have suffered a heart attack, and was going abroad to recuperate.
Disheartened she may have been, but Salka was learning how to stay alive within the studio system. The occasion of her apprenticeship was a high-stakes, extremely expensive, star-powered production which would tolerate no false moves. Much would depend on her recognizing what not to do. After Thalberg left for Europe, having no idea what to work on while she waited, Salka started to write an original story about life in America’s Hoovervilles, the encampments built by citizens made homeless by the Great Depression. She was quickly rebuked by a story editor, who assured her that with twelve million people out of work there was little chance that anyone would want to see such a film. Lesson number one: gritty realism was not Metro’s style, then or ever. But that didn’t mean the studio was impervious to politics. While the presidential election loomed that autumn, the stalwart Republican Louis Mayer asked every studio employee to donate a day’s salary to Hoover’s reelection campaign. Salka demurred, with the excuse that she was not yet an American citizen. Lesson number two: she saw the futility of suggesting a story about Hoovervilles under a studio chief who happened to be a personal friend of the president. She was stirred by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speeches and was sorry she was unable to vote.
A secret to studio survival, Salka realized, was refining a talent she already had: the deft management of relationships. She understood that she had been hired to engineer a script that would please its star and generate profits in Europe as well as America. She saw also that as soon as she ceased to contribute measurable financial gains to the studio, she would be dismissed. In the meantime, she would need to develop the skills of a Mata Hari—whom Garbo had played with enormous success for Metro the previous year—to navigate the personalities around her.
Among those skills were diplomacy, tact, charm, subterfuge, strategic compromise, and the occasional targeted aggression. In managing the Realpolitik of the studio, these were talents that Salka cultivated more handily than Berthold, who was more inclined to wander off from conflicts, darkly quoting Kant or Karl Kraus, than to dig in and negotiate. It was a different skill set from the one Salka used at home, as the manager of a busy household, and as the host of her Sunday parties, where with uncontested authority she took dominion everywhere. In the studio Salka had to find ways to exert her influence that looked unthreatening but were nonetheless effective. Her authority had to remain a bass note: patiently insistent, but reliable and subordinate.
It was only after Thalberg left for Europe that Salka began to see him as more of a champion than an adversary. This became clear to her at the end of the year when, on December 21, the studio appointed Walter Wanger to serve as producer on Christina. Salka found she much preferred Thalberg’s arrogance to Wanger’s evasiveness. In January 1933, Wanger’s first decision was to send Bess Meredyth off to another writing assignment and to take Salka off the script as well, promoting her to his “assistant and artistic advisor.” He then hired an obnoxious Hungarian writer named Ernest Vajda, who had worked for Lubitsch, and a countervailingly soft-spoken Englishwoman, Claudine West. These two proceeded to turn Salka’s historical drama into a lurid comedy, full of snappy dialogue and anachronistic “Lubitsch touches.” The script was now just the sort of crass Hollywood vehicle that Garbo had asked Salka to avoid.
A fierce battle followed. On behalf of the still-absent Garbo, Salka objected to the Vajda script, while Vajda accused Salka of exploiting her position as Garbo’s personal friend. Wanger placated Salka by ordering another draft of the screenplay from a British writer, H. M. Harwood, who refashioned the Swedish monarch into, as he put it, “the prototype of a modern woman, who…shrinks from both marriage and maternity.” When Garbo returned from Sweden in April, the trade papers reported that she objected to the current iteration of the script and was demanding changes. With the actress’s support, in an impressive show of force, Salka won her battle against Vajda. He and his version were dismissed, and she remained employed. Berthold explained the situation in a letter to Salka’s mother in Sambor: “Salka has overcome all these difficulties by her own strength, by her spirit and personality. After some incidents, she is not only personally respected, but she has also achieved a great deal, and the final manuscript has moved closer to her original design…Garbo is superstitious, she knows exactly wh
at she owes to Salka and tells her, too.”
While l’affaire Vajda played out at Metro, Berthold continued his wandering year in Europe. He had intended to spend Christmas of 1932 with Salka’s sister Rose and her husband in Dresden. But Berthold’s father became critically ill and he rushed to Vienna instead. Berthold remained at his father’s bedside until his father died. Under the burden of this loss, along with more diffuse anxieties about the instabilities of the European moment, Berthold suffered his own health scare. His diabetes worsened dangerously and he checked himself into a Viennese sanatorium, where he purged his diet of his beloved rich desserts and gradually began to recover.
In the meantime, Berthold got an offer from Europa Film in Berlin to write and direct a film version of Little Man, What Now?, Hans Fallada’s blockbuster 1932 novel about postwar German unemployment. (In Hollywood two years later, Universal would make an American version of Fallada’s story, directed by Frank Borzage and starring Margaret Sullavan; not every studio vetoed stories about widespread poverty, as Metro had done when Salka ventured to write about Hoovervilles the previous year.) Berthold arrived in Berlin on January 31, 1933. Newspaper headlines were shouting of Hitler’s appointment the previous day as Reich chancellor of Germany. It was, to say the least, a very risky time for Berthold to return. He was an outspoken leftist intellectual Austrian Jew who’d spent the last four years in America. The swiftly consolidating National Socialist regime deliberated over his work permit, seeing no “cultural necessity” for him to be working in Germany.
But the official stance softened after several of Berthold’s high-profile friends made entreaties on his behalf, and so Berthold joined the Europa Film production along with the composer Kurt Weill and the set designer Caspar Neher, both of whom had worked with Brecht. While Berthold enjoyed his collaboration with these artists, he acknowledged to Salka that it was “sheer madness to do this film in such times.” The picture’s producer—“a blond, blue-eyed giant,” Berthold wrote—was falling over himself to please the new Ministry of Culture by working hard to turn the screenplay into ingratiating kitsch.
The Sun and Her Stars Page 11