Now here was Salka forging toward Toch, a warm smile on her broad, frank face. She took up with confidence her allotment of space in the world. She was not a small woman, but neither would one call her heavy. She dressed in the style of the day, without fuss: that day a tailored pinstripe suit with a longish skirt. Often she added a colorful scarf or shawl. As she crossed the room there was just the slightest hitch in the step of her right leg. It was a distinctive gait and a bit curious for an actress, but if her walk was not as graceful as one might have imagined it was still purposeful, as if she were always leaning slightly forward.
Her hand on Toch’s arm, Salka offered greetings in her songful German. Silently he blessed her for the offering of his mother tongue among the harsh English consonants ricocheting around the room. She began to absorb him into the web of connections among the guests. In one corner was Johnny Weissmuller, the star of Metro’s Tarzan pictures, patiently answering question after question posed by Salka’s awestruck eleven-year-old son Tommy. In another was the screenwriter Billy Wilder, Toch’s fellow Viennese, who had known the Viertels’ close friend Fred Zinnemann since their neophyte filmmaking days in Berlin. At the moment Wilder was laughing with Oliver Garrett, Salka’s former lover or so it was whispered. Garrett and Wilder were frequent tennis partners and they had recently coauthored two screenplays for Pioneer Pictures. Toch was hoping for a glimpse of Garbo, but he had heard that she rarely made an appearance at these parties, preferring to come to the house during odd hours when she could have Salka to herself.
Salka directed Toch’s attention to a gangly laughing young man. He was pleased to recognize that this was the writer John Huston, whom Toch had met on several occasions in London. Salka began to entertain Toch with a story about Huston. She had taken an interest in him after hearing of his somewhat wild reputation and had invited him to dinner. When the evening arrived, Huston was less interested in conversing with Salka’s adult guests than in talking to her sons Hans and Peter. Once he discovered that the boys were learning how to box with an instructor who came to the house, Huston asked to see the garage, where he wanted to inspect their gloves and punching bag. He himself was serious about boxing and liked to do some sparring whenever he could.
Peter, who was fifteen, was reluctant but too polite to refuse. Soon he found himself and Huston shedding their coats and ties and going at it in the empty garage, with Hans uncomfortably looking on. Huston got carried away and ended up smashing Peter rather too authoritatively in the jaw, after which he apologized as the two, breathless and sweaty, took a break. It was then that they discovered that their shoes were slathered in dog shit, because Salka often locked her dog Prinz in the garage when she had guests and had not had time to clean up after him. The pugilists washed up as best they could and went to rejoin the others at dinner.
Salka laughed richly at her own performance of the story. Toch smiled too, appreciating the harmless little anecdote, understanding that she offered it to him as a balm, as a respite. To an extent she succeeded and for that he was grateful.
Toch knew that Salka understood what he had been through over the last few years, the nature of his exile, its anguish and its costs. She knew that the doctorate he had earned back in 1921 might have saved his life, for it meant that he was eligible for the teaching position in New York that allowed him to emigrate in 1934 after his work on Little Friend was done. She well knew Toch’s reputation during the Weimar years in Berlin, when he was one of the stars of the International Neue Musik, his concertos and chamber operas in great demand, his contribution to experimentalism as assured as Schoenberg’s and Hindemith’s. And she knew that this foment of innovation had come to an unambiguous end one day in Cologne in 1933, during a rehearsal of his latest opera, when Brownshirts stomped into the hall and ceremoniously snatched the baton out of the conductor’s hand because the music was the work of a Jew. Soon after that, the newly Nazified musical journal Die Musik published a special anti-Semitic issue in which reproductions of Toch’s face, along with those of the composers Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Weill, were distorted into hook-nosed and dead-eyed caricatures, the Shylockian images festooned with quotations including this from Hitler himself: “The Jew possesses no power or ability to create culture.”
Even after all that, Toch was fortunate. He had the good timing to attend a music conference in Florence, where he determined that exile was his only hope of survival, via Paris and London and now Los Angeles. He was lucky to have the chance to work in the picture business, which made him less likely to become a public charge and thus less likely to be expelled from yet another country. He was painfully aware that his sixty-four cousins who remained in Europe did not have this good fortune. He did not know what happened or what would happen to them. What he did know was that der rote Faden, the red thread of the narrative of his life, was severed, and that the pain was somewhat like that of an amputation. He suffered from depression which would stalk him throughout his years in America. His concert music would never find an audience in this country. The studios would cynically recycle his film scores again and again, his orchestrations often going uncredited and without compensation. There would be many years in which he would be unable to produce any serious work.
What could one do under the brutal weight of these times? What could any one person do? Only the smallest of gestures. Salka was in Paris and London not so long ago, she’d seen those cities full of exiles like Toch. She set for herself the mission of personally tending to those who landed here in Santa Monica. She set for herself the mission of creating a zu Hause, a provisional home, a familiar place in a strange land, a home that had become more real than the Heimat which had been forged into a cauldron of lies, lies that led inevitably to violence, fantasies about blood and soil concocted by thugs who had denied the right to exist to so many thousands of citizens and had expelled them all.
Zu Hause was Salka, and Salka was her house. Laughter and tears came easily to her; her moods were dramatic and unpredictable, just as the house itself was histrionic, layered, complex. The chattering cross-talk of the people at the party registered to Toch’s sensitive ears as distractingly and sometimes painfully out of key. The air was jangly and syncopated with nerves. Arguments rose and fell. Insults couched as witticisms punctuated the anxious manners. Near the fireplace, Berthold Viertel was arguing rather violently about pacifism, a position he usually defended but on this occasion considered cowardly. Berthold was as temperamental and dramatic as Salka, and these displays of his volcanic rages were not only about politics. His and Salka’s civilized arrangement was sometimes less civilized when Gottfried Reinhardt was present, as he was that day. The undercurrents of the tension were a riptide below the surfaces of the room. The Viertel children made brief appearances at these parties, and Toch wondered how their parents’ volatility shaped their lives.
For an exile, a house is a mix of nostalgia and hope, a reminder of what has been lost and what might yet be recaptured. Soon Toch’s own beloved wife would arrive in Los Angeles, and she would design for him a home on a hill not far from here with an Italianate view of the mountains, a view intended to lift his eyes and his spirits. His wife would return Salka’s hospitality with many a dinner party invitation. And for himself, on a deserted stretch of beach a bit north of here called Malibu, he would construct a shed out of the enormous shipping crate that transported his family’s possessions from Berlin. He would outfit the shed with a beat-up old piano, and he would go there to practice and compose, and sometimes he would invite the Viertels and other friends and he would give a little concert. He would name the shipping crate the Villa Majestic.
At the moment Toch was between worlds. His hostess knew that, he could see it in her expression as she handed him a plate of her apple cake and a cup of her excellent coffee. She was rehumanizing him who had been dehumanized, giving him back his name and his reputation. He understood that her act of imagination in creating this stage set of his s
tolen life was an act of defiance, a refusal to be humiliated or destroyed.
* * *
—
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1936, Salka and Sam Behrman finished their draft of the Napoleon picture for Metro, and Hans Viertel left for his freshman year of college at Berkeley. In the middle of that month, Peter and Salka took a driving trip up the coast to see how Hans was settling in. On their way back to Los Angeles, stopping for coffee in a drugstore, they saw a newspaper headline announcing that Irving Thalberg had died. He was thirty-seven years old and his son and daughter were so young that Salka did not think they would remember him.
There were religious imperatives to bury Thalberg perhaps earlier than otherwise, because the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah was to begin that night. Salka and Berthold were among the guests crowding into the Wilshire Boulevard Temple on September 16, 1936, for the funeral. Garbo did not attend, but had sent flowers. Outside, in the slanting light that is peculiar to the hot autumns of Los Angeles, some seven thousand fans gathered as if for a film premiere, hoping to catch a glimpse of movie stars. Inside the synagogue, Rabbi Edgar Magnin, who had officiated at Thalberg’s wedding to Norma Shearer, read a tribute from President Roosevelt and offered free publicity for Shearer’s Romeo and Juliet, which had opened the previous evening. On the ride home with Berthold, Gottfried, and Sam Behrman, Salka made jokes about the pompousness of Rabbi Magnin, over which she and the men all “laughed tears.”
Salka was nonetheless affected by Thalberg’s death. “To be honest,” she wrote later in a letter to Sam Behrman, “he was ‘Hollywood’ in all its pretentiousness and falseness but he had a certain dignity and talent. I liked him very much but then when I knew him, he was a sick, tired man and I felt sorry for him.”
In the early 1960s, when Behrman considered writing a book about Thalberg, Salka was encouraging. “It is a fascinating theme,” she told Behrman. “Scott Fitzgerald could not grasp the whole sadness of it. He was anti semitic.” Salka’s remark about Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Thalberg in The Last Tycoon is tantalizing. What more would she have said, if asked, about Fitzgerald’s failure to capture Thalberg’s attitudes toward Jews and Judaism? And, for that matter, how her own nuanced identification with her religion might have contrasted with Thalberg’s? Before his marriage, the producer had deferred to his mother’s request that Norma Shearer, a Catholic, convert to his faith. Thalberg was a generous supporter of Jewish charities and a big donor, from its earliest days, to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple. He’d been quick to join the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, as well as to represent MGM in an organization called the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, convened in March 1934 to raise funds to expose and combat the active pro-Nazi efforts of the Los Angeles branch of the Bund.
But the primary belief to which Thalberg adhered was in the American film industry, an entity whose health depended on its profits from a quickly Nazifying Germany. It was this fact that caused all the Jewish studio chiefs, at the beginning of the 1930s, to downplay the worst and hope for the best. In 1932, when Thalberg had traveled to Europe to recuperate from his heart attack, he had seen a Jewish couple assaulted on a street in Germany and had tried unsuccessfully to intercede. When he returned to America in 1934, Thalberg predicted that “a lot of Jews will lose their lives.” Pressed that perhaps millions, or even all of them, might be murdered, Thalberg responded: “No, not all of them. Hitler and Hitlerism will pass. The Jews will still be there.”
If in hindsight Thalberg’s equanimity seems strangely buoyant, it was not different from the mood at the time of many assimilated American Jews. New York–based Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, an ardent supporter of the New Deal and an adviser to Roosevelt, admonished against the “hush-hush policy” of those American Jews in 1935 by warning that the Jews in Germany were disastrously adopting the same strategy, naively convinced that if they “devoted themselves to assimilation” and “denied their Jewishness…they would escape persecution.”
It was only a bit later, as Thalberg was fatally ill and dying, that the studio chiefs began to take secretive action against Hitler’s threats, mostly by writing checks to resistance organizations. There is every reason to believe that Thalberg, had he lived, would have done the same. While the studio bosses spent every day trying to fit in as Americans, Germany’s well-publicized efforts toward declaring its territories judenrein, together with the evident anti-Semitism here in the States, would never let them forget that they were Jews, despised both at home and abroad. The favor was extended to the next generation as well. Budd Schulberg, the son of Paramount founder B. P. Schulberg, wrote in his memoirs that “all through my teens I considered myself un- or non-Jewish. It would take Adolf Hitler to bring me back to a sense of identification with the culture of my forebears.”
Many of the newly arrived exiles in Los Angeles were similarly unaccustomed to thinking of themselves as Jews. They had failed to take their heritage as seriously as Hitler did. Until, that is, they were forced into a single community, defined by Stefan Zweig as “the ever-recurring—since Egypt—community of expulsion.” Yet these sentiments were far from monolithic. As ever, in Hollywood and everywhere else, there was no one way to be Jewish or to feel Jewish. The condition was as personal as a fingerprint. As ever, it was the work of anti-Semites to universalize and simplify.
Louis B. Mayer and the other studio chiefs were in a precarious position, they who had built their dream cities from the shards beneath their feet. They had managed to survive through the Great Depression and were now faced with death threats from anti-Semites at home in America while worrying about their relatives in Europe and their profits locked up in the fortunes of the Third Reich. But the history of the movies is the history of adaptation in the eye of catastrophe. The chiefs would not buckle under these threats. Quietly they agonized about closing their offices in Germany. While Warner Bros. and Universal shut up shop there in 1934, Metro, which had the biggest German investment of all the studios, maintained its offices in Berlin as late as 1938, staffed by non-Jews, while Paramount and Fox remained in business there until at least late 1940. Quietly they continued to fund the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee in its battles against the Silver Legion and the Bund. Quietly they issued affidavits for Jews seeking to come to America, and wrote checks to the United Jewish Welfare Fund and other organizations to aid Jewish refugees in Europe. In the meantime, the work of film production in Hollywood clattered on.
At Metro, Salka was also learning to adapt in the eye of catastrophe. She survived the waves of firings as Metro scrambled to rearrange itself after Thalberg’s death, then hastened to adjust when Thalberg’s Napoleon picture was reassigned to the producer Bernie Hyman. A close friend of Thalberg’s, Hyman was an equivocating sort, prone to sentimentality. Gottfried Reinhardt, who was now rising quickly through the executive ranks at Metro, had once served as his assistant. Hyman seemed at first to be Salka’s ally. But he could not abide any screenplay that he had not supervised from the beginning. After much dithering he ordered a total rewrite of the Viertel-Behrman script. Sam Behrman had gone back to New York, so Salka was assigned to work with another Sam, the screenwriter and poet Samuel Hoffenstein. The droll Hoffenstein, born in Russia with, as Salka said, a “Chassidic soul,” became her instant friend, and the two worked well together. Nonetheless, as Salka remembered, the Napoleon rewrite “became first a small, then a huge nightmare.”
Already hampered by PCA censorship, the story suffered further from a disagreement about where the audience’s pathos should lie. Hyman wanted moviegoers to cry for the exiled Napoleon, while the writers preferred to highlight the emperor’s ruthlessness, particularly in his treatment of his mistress, the Polish countess Marie Walewska. The historical reality was that Marie, a patriot and a married woman, submitted to be pimped to the emperor in exchange for a broken promise to liberate her country from a repressive Russia. Then she had the misfortune to fall in love with Napoleon and to bear his i
llegitimate child.
“If you want to feel sorry for Napoleon then let Garbo play him,” Sam Hoffenstein offered helpfully to Bernie Hyman. The producer responded in prime Metro style by throwing more money at the problem, hiring seventeen writers in all to try to struggle toward a compromise. At significant expense he brought Sam Behrman back to rejoin the fray, who later recalled: “I wished to convey my personal feeling that the existence of Napoleon…was a disaster for the human race. But it was not easy to get sympathy for this point of view from a group of men who had busts of Napoleon in their offices, since he represented their secret wish-dreams of conquest.”
In fact for American audiences the picture was retitled Conquest, though it retained its original title, Marie Walewska, in Europe. Filming began in March of 1937 but fell months behind schedule, piling up costs. Overall it was Metro’s most expensive venture since its 1925 epic Ben-Hur. It was the first and only Garbo sound film to finish in the red, incurring losses of nearly $1.4 million, though it did much better in Europe. Salka wrote that it was “an exhausting experience for everyone, especially for Garbo and Boyer, who patiently suffered to the very end (although at doubled salaries).” She also pointed to a personal victory: with Gottfried’s influence, she and Sam Hoffenstein were able to reinstate several scenes from her and Behrman’s original script in the final version.
The Sun and Her Stars Page 19