The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  No one understood this network better, or maneuvered through it more effectively, than Salka. She was the mutual contact who first made it possible for the composer and the producer to meet. She was the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexities of both milieus, who took the trouble to issue honest warnings about each man’s expectations. She was the translator and the trained actress who was able to demonstrate Schoenberg’s arcane techniques, doing what she could to make them accessible to Thalberg. She conveyed to Schoenberg what Thalberg felt entitled to receive from the composer in exchange for the studio’s payment. She was the conduit here between two uncompromising sensibilities, and without her mediating presence it is very likely that there would have been no comprehension and perhaps no meeting whatsoever. Instead, after the two famous men had circled each other cautiously, each walked away with a respect for the other that came about completely through Salka’s nuanced efforts. Then there is the fact that she recorded the story in her memoir, without which we would not have her amused and amusing account.

  It’s noteworthy that even during a time of intense personal crisis Salka was able to expand the mission she had begun with Eisenstein and Murnau, softening the boundaries between high culture and commerce in Hollywood for the potential benefit of each. That mission was becoming more urgent as the situation for Jewish artists in Europe worsened. Once, those artists had had a fatherland. But it was a dream. They were beginning to understand that far-flung outposts must be built to preserve the humanist traditions that the National Socialists were destroying in Germany. Salka was establishing one of those crucial outposts, easing the hardship for exiles such as Schoenberg, who struggled to make a living throughout his California years. In bringing Schoenberg to Metro, Salka was not just a fly on the wall of Thalberg’s office as the two men tried to apprehend each other. She was a destroyer of walls, a builder of bridges, a welcome among strangers.

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  THE WHEELS OF TIME AND CHANGE were turning. Salka’s boys were growing up and out. Peter asked to have a room of his own, so Salka renovated the first floor of the garage to create separate quarters for him. Hans had been neglecting his schoolwork in favor of reading Das Kapital. He then surprised Salka by graduating from high school, and was accepted by the University of California at Berkeley for the fall of 1936. Shy, and impeded by the onset of a serious hearing disability called otosclerosis, Hans had nonetheless found a social life for himself in Marxist study groups, as many young men of the time did, defining himself as a devotee of Trotskyism. Writing of her dismay upon the news of the Moscow trials and “the growing Stalin terror,” Salka observed in her memoir that “the Popular Front extended into my family: Berthold had his own personal kind of socialism, Peter was a New Dealer, I was a ‘premature anti-Fascist,’ Thomas a Democrat and Hans a Trotskyite.”

  Politics were inescapable in every activity, large or small, on Mabery Road and at the studio. During story conferences for the Napoleon picture, Salka and Thalberg argued idly about socialism, neither expecting to change the other’s mind. (A socialist when he was a boy, Thalberg was now an unequivocal pro-business conservative.) Labor unrest had become a major subplot in the daily business of moviemaking. Thalberg had opposed the Screen Writers Guild (SWG) since its inception in 1933; now he was helping to sponsor a rival organization, the Screen Playwrights, made up mostly of affluent right-wing writers including Salka’s old nemesis Ernest Vajda. SWG founders Oliver Garrett and Donald Ogden Stewart (Metro’s witty “rescue writer of choice” for many a producer, who collaborated briefly with Salka on the Napoleon project and became her lifelong friend) worked hard to defeat the Screen Playwrights, whose efforts to break the SWG would eventually fail.

  “These were the days of meetings,” Salka recalled, and rare was the meeting she failed to attend, if not personally to spearhead. Though the word “activist” did not then exist, Salka was among Hollywood’s earliest and most energetic. She joined the newly created Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, cofounded by Don Stewart, who was, unlike Salka, an outspoken Communist. The HANL was a motley assortment of interest groups whose members agreed on little other than their opposition to Nazism. Its members were Stalinists and New Dealers and Republicans, Jews and Catholics, socialists and Trotskyites. Attending the league’s glamorous opening banquet in April 1936 at the Victor Hugo restaurant were the Irish Catholics John Ford and Joseph Breen, the Jewish studio chiefs Jack Warner, David Selznick, Irving Thalberg, and B. P. Schulberg, and a smattering of radicals including Stewart and another of the evening’s organizers, his fellow Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker.

  During those early years of the HANL, Ernst Lubitsch mentioned one day to Salka that he was giving up his membership because the league was run by Communists. He recommended that Salka do the same. Salka demurred, arguing that the Popular Front was the only way to fight fascism. Lubitsch repeated that he knew from a reliable source that the Reds controlled the Anti-Nazi League, and he relayed a few names that made Salka laugh. “But Ernst,” she said, “what all these people do is sit around their swimming pools, drinking highballs and talking about movies, while the wives complain about their Filipino butlers.” Still, Lubitsch huffed, he was getting out. And Salka told him she was staying.

  Salka’s response to Lubitsch pointed out hypocrisies that have existed among Hollywood’s leftist circles up to this day. But with the luxury of hindsight one can see that her remark also underestimated the perspicacity of Lubitsch’s warning. Membership in the HANL would become one of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s first lines of accusation during its hearings in the late 1940s. In denouncing the HANL as a Communist front, HUAC would cast a net wide enough to ensnare not only the actual Communists in the league’s midst (there were perhaps three hundred Communist Party members in the film industry from 1936 to 1946, nearly half of these writers), but also many of the other varyingly left-leaning idealists who joined the antifascist cause in its early years.

  For Salka’s career in Hollywood the consequences would be significant. Many years later, in 1963, Salka reflected in her diary: “It is very necessary for me to be able to see clearly and impartially how they [the Communists] have used me and how I have let them use me during the critical years in L.A…. I remember the girl who was [secretary of a Communist group], who always wanted me to get Garbo to sign something, or to give money, or make Charley [Chaplin] do things which would really damage his anyway bad reputation. The ruthlessness was not only stupid, but did not achieve anything.” Only decades later would she, who never joined a political party of any kind, understand how vulnerable her openheartedness had been to cynical political manipulations.

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  AT METRO IN JULY 1936, Salka was writing a first draft of the Napoleon picture with Sam Behrman and musing about world conquest while the newspapers were reporting Hitler’s escalating threats, the appeasement policies of England and France, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Berthold returned to Santa Monica from England that month, again only for the summer, and again most likely to renew his visa. (Gottfried tactfully moved out of Salka’s house during Berthold’s visits, and just as discreetly returned once the older man was gone.) Berthold had not yet found a new film assignment in England and was missing Beatrix Lehmann. He was anxious and moody that summer, spending much of his time in his upstairs office, chain-smoking and worrying about Europe and writing poetry. Occasionally he emerged to visit with Salka’s brother or with Fred Zinnemann. He walked on the beach in the late afternoons with sixteen-year-old Peter, the son deeply tanned from long days of surfing and tennis, the fifty-year-old father pale and drawn.

  On these walks Berthold sometimes wore his bathrobe with a kind of eccentric majesty as the shush of the ocean mixed with the cries of the sea birds. Berthold remarked on the beauty of the American bodies that surrounded them in what he called this Schlaraffenland, its pleasure-seekers oblivious
to the miseries taking place a continent and another ocean away. The seaside exhibition of muscles and bronze skin reminded Berthold of classical Greece, and to Peter’s embarrassment his father would perform a clumsy little dance on the sand, his eyes glinting as he chanted, “We are Greeks without brains! We are Greeks without brains! That is the song they sing.”

  On the indolent American shoreline, the breeze smelling of coconut oil and fried fish, the gulls wheeling blankly against the blue sky, no one was paying the slightest attention to the lone Austrian intellectual, sick with worry about the fate of his homeland and surrounded here by indifference. His only observer was his son, who would later grow to appreciate his father’s predicament but at that moment would rather have been anywhere else.

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  ON ANOTHER SHORELINE, in southern France, an unhappy collection of German-speaking exiles stared out at the sea with an anxiety that mirrored Berthold’s. The exiles were gathered in a spot that looked, though they did not know it yet, quite a lot like Santa Monica. Sanary-sur-Mer was a small fishing village on the westerly, less fashionable and cheaper stretch of the Côte d’Azur, near Toulon. It had the same steep rock cliffs as Salka’s beach, the same curve to its bay, the same gemstone sparkle to its sea. Where Santa Monica had the sudden bluster of the Santa Ana winds, in Sanary there was the sky-scrubbing mistral. In both places there were rosemary and oleander, palms and pine, yachts and gulls, whitecaps and the wide nets of fishermen.

  The Germans who found themselves on this festive coastline after 1933 had little in common with the cheerfully eccentric British expatriates who preceded them. The novelist Aldous Huxley had discovered Sanary in 1930 after visiting the dying D. H. Lawrence in Vence. He went on to live with his wife and son in the hills above the village until 1937. “Sun, roses, fruit, warmth,” he wrote serenely. “We bathe and bask.” The critic Cyril Connolly, who moved to Sanary to worship at the feet of his idol Huxley, would often bicycle home from the local restaurants with a pet lemur buttoned up inside his jacket, its little head poking out to sniff the wind.

  The British writers found the hot weather agreeable, their mornings spent swimming, the long afternoons reserved for working inside the cool whitewashed rooms of the old houses on the terraced hillsides. Anthony Powell wrote his first novel, Afternoon Men, in Sanary, and there too, in 1931, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. For them life in southern France was simple and inexpensive, yet lavish in its pleasures. Austere breezes plunged their houseguests all at once, Sybille Bedford wrote, “into the acerbic scent of the Midi: resin, thyme, hot stone.” Huxley’s wife Maria made potpourri from the local rosemary, geranium, lime, and rose, and kept it in a big urn by the front door. On Sunday nights the town’s ramshackle movie theater, converted from a garage, packed with boisterous locals, and blue with cigarette smoke, showed the silent films of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.

  Sybille Bedford was a German-born novelist and travel writer who first arrived in Sanary in 1926 at the age of fifteen and lived there on and off for decades. She recalled that from May to October no rain fell in the region. “Thus nothing changed: the earth was monochrome, the sea reverberated the sky,” she wrote in one of her novels about the year 1928. “How permanent they felt, these even summers, how reassuring—this will go on; we shall go on.”

  Of course there was irony in Bedford’s observations, which she published decades later, long after the war, in 1989. The traumatized Germans who came to Sanary after 1933 did not need hindsight to share the irony. They felt it immediately. For them, all reassurances were dubious. As much as they appreciated the beauty of their surroundings, they were unable fully to participate in it. What had been solid in their lives had now melted into air. They had been stripped of their homes, of their money and belongings, and of their citizenship. Without papers to prove who they were, they belonged nowhere and were unwelcome everywhere. Exile put them between worlds, forced them into marginality: they were in Sanary but they were also not in Sanary. “We lived in paradise—necessarily,” wrote the Berlin-born Jewish philosopher and theater critic Ludwig Marcuse, who lived in the village from 1933 to 1940. As with Bedford, there was well-earned irony in Marcuse’s formulation, and also when he called Sanary “the capital of German literature.”

  “Rather a dismal crew,” Huxley wrote to his brother in 1933 of the growing German colony, “already showing the disastrous effects of exile.” As with the British before them, the Germans had landed in Sanary because like called to like. The Jewish playwright Ernst Toller, a friend of Berthold’s, had found himself in exile there in 1926 after he was jailed for subversive activity in the Weimar Republic. Julius Meier-Graefe, a brilliant critic attacked by the National Socialists for his promotion of degenerate art, moved to the town next to Sanary in 1930. Others followed. Klaus and Erika Mann, the two eldest of Thomas Mann’s six children, got to know the area while smoking opium with Jean Cocteau in Toulon. By 1933 the Mann siblings were no longer enfants terribles, turning their energy toward a fierce and long-standing commitment to antifascism.

  From Amsterdam and Sanary, Klaus Mann edited an international anti-Nazi journal, Die Sammlung, between 1933 and 1935. The publication was the first of its kind and was singled out as especially abhorrent by the National Socialists, whose own leading magazine, Die Neue Literatur, trashed it in November 1933: “The communist and Jewish literati who have fled from Germany are now trying to surround Germany with a wall of literary stink-gas from their crevice…Undoubtedly the most dangerous reptile is…the Sammlung published by the half-Jew Klaus Mann.” (Klaus and Erika’s mother, Katia Mann, was a daughter of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Germany, the Pringsheims.)

  After much argument, in June 1933 Klaus and Erika Mann convinced their reluctant parents to abandon their house in Munich for a villa they found for the family in Sanary—a villa called, with a particular sense of disconnection, La Tranquille. Thomas and Katia Mann did not stay in Sanary long, departing for a town near Zurich in September 1933, though Thomas’s brother Heinrich, an equally illustrious author whose books were now banned in Germany, remained in a hotel in nearby Bandol.

  The Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who had once been Thomas Mann’s neighbor in Munich, though the two did not then know each other, arrived in Bandol on May 10, 1933—the same day the National Socialists were burning Feuchtwanger’s books throughout Germany. A short time later he and his wife Marta moved to Sanary, establishing themselves in a comfortable house above the bay, where they remained until 1940.

  During his flight from Germany, Feuchtwanger learned that his Berlin home had been plundered by the National Socialists. All his possessions, from his furniture to his pet turtles, were stolen or destroyed, and his bank accounts were frozen. Perhaps most grievous of all for Feuchtwanger was the confiscation of his large personal library and manuscripts. Like the book burnings this was a deliberately emblematic act, underscoring the National Socialists’ contempt for freedom of thought and of the press, for all language and ideas that deviated from their own crude and turgid inventions.

  In Sanary in 1935, Feuchtwanger published an open letter in a French exile newspaper to the new occupant of his house on Mahlerstrasse in Berlin. “How do you like my house?” inquired Feuchtwanger. “Do you find it pleasant to live in?…I wonder to what use you have put the two rooms which formerly contained my library. I have been told…that books are not very popular in the Reich in which you live, and whoever shows interest in them is likely to get into difficulties. I, for instance, read your ‘Führer’s’ book and guilelessly remarked that his 140,000 words were 140,000 offenses against the spirit of the German language. The result of this remark is that you are now living in my house.”

  In the letter Feuchtwanger noted that, though the value of his confiscated house and savings far exceeded the amount of his mortgage, the German government still commanded him to continue the mortgage payments as well as to pay his
German taxes from whatever income he might continue to earn abroad. Thus the Nazi authorities were able to siphon off the frozen funds from Feuchtwanger’s bank accounts. This was the case for all who fled from Hitler’s Reich. Beginning in 1934, those who left were also obliged to pay a “flight tax” that began at 25 percent of their total worth but kept rising as the decade wore on, until nearly all the assets of fleeing Jews and antifascists were seized. In Sanary, burning with anger, Feuchtwanger began to amass a new and even larger library. In his villa overlooking the bay he wrote The Oppermanns, a novel about a Jewish family’s subjugation under the Third Reich in the Berlin of 1933, and another novel called Exil (published in English as Paris Gazette), about German refugees in Paris in 1935.

  Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger in their library, Sanary-sur-Mer, 1936.

  Unlike Feuchtwanger, many of the German-speaking exiles who passed through Sanary stayed only briefly, including Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler, and the Austrian singer Fritzi Massary. But as the 1930s wore on, the smattering of luminaries who had followed Ernst Toller to the Midi became a constellation. As many as four hundred German and Austrian political refugees found themselves in the district of le Var up until the end of the decade.