The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Berthold and Isherwood’s screenplay had been commissioned by a shoestring producer whose relationship with Berthold deteriorated into bitter arguments over deadlines. The script went nowhere and the writers were never paid. In fact, “after much barking and little biting,” Isherwood noted, he himself paid several hundred dollars to settle with the producer out of court.

  At Metro, Salka had her own frustrations. She was sidelined in her office while Ninotchka hummed busily along without her. Her desk was groaning with novels and plays recommended by the story department for Garbo’s next picture, none of which seemed usable. Meanwhile her old pal Ernst Lubitsch, Ninotchka’s director, came every day to tell her which scenes they had shot and what a fabulous job Garbo was doing.

  After the outbreak of the war in Europe, the house on Mabery Road was also on edge. Berthold’s temper exploded at the tiniest perceived insult. He went around “snorting like a war-horse,” in Isherwood’s words, at Hans’s late hours at the Reinhardt school, at Peter’s unseriousness, at the always barking dogs. Tommy wandered through these domestic minefields in a good-humored reverie, a fourteen-year-old compilation of messy red hair and glasses. Salka too was impatient with the boys, berating nineteen-year-old Peter for spending all his time on the tennis court. In the living room one evening Peter brushed by her, racquet in hand, and casually dropped a letter onto her lap. It was from the publisher Harcourt Brace offering Peter an advance for a novel he had written in secret. The book was called The Canyon and it recounted his childhood days roaming around the neighborhood with his Mexican friends. Peter’s precociously self-assured book, published the following year, ends with a catastrophic flood, about whose aftermath Peter had taken careful note:

  The creek bed had gone. There were many trees, even some of the old ones, that had been torn down by the water. All through the canyon you could see the tops of cars sticking up out of the muddy current. Down to the sea. Down to the sea. It took everything. Telephone poles, toys, furniture, garbage cans, and always mud, heavy and brown, that was the water’s brother.

  Floods were regular local occurrences in the canyon and Peter was narrating events he had doubtless seen many times. But it’s hard to dismiss the ominousness of the passage as a reflection of the foreboding that everyone was feeling at Salka’s house that year.

  * * *

  —

  THE SUNDAY PARTIES continued insistently, even frantically, their nervous high spirits creating a soundtrack behind the regular family drama. “I suppose,” Isherwood ventured in his diary, “that people of Salka’s temperament actually prefer to talk to their intimate friends when they are surrounded by a chattering crowd. She creates huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores as a background to her meetings with Gottfried.” This was somewhat unfair. Salka saw Gottfried daily at the studio and nearly as often at home, and even with their frequent spats her alliance with him was strong. She hardly needed to cook for a crowd in order to see him. In any case, Isherwood himself was delighted to be folded into the drama. He basked in Salka’s attention as the two became confidants. Isherwood’s lifelong sentimental affinity for landladies—from Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle of his childhood’s favorite Beatrix Potter books to his own creation of Fräulein Schroeder in The Berlin Stories—drew him to Salka as a paragon of the form. He could not get enough of her unconditional acceptance, which Isherwood felt he had never received from his own emotionally withholding mother.

  As Berthold had predicted years ago in London, Isherwood and Garbo also became friendly, frequently running into each other when the actress came around to discuss some urgent matter or other with Salka. Garbo delighted Isherwood by girlishly climbing the Viertels’ fig tree to pick him the ripest fruit, and they picnicked together at a large gathering that autumn which was organized by the Huxleys in Tujunga Canyon, in the wilds of the Angeles Forest north of the San Fernando Valley. The party of about thirty people also included Salka and Berthold, Anita Loos, Bertrand Russell, and the Hindu spiritual teacher Krishnamurti. At the picnic Garbo wore trousers and her favorite straw gardening hat, with a plaster patch between her eyebrows to prevent wrinkles. She brought her own lunch in a basket. Much of the talk was of the war. When the party hiked toward a wire fence covered with trespass warnings, there was jumpy laughter when Anita Loos jokingly suggested that they tunnel under it like escaping refugees. Few in the party seemed to notice the area’s natural beauty. Isherwood remembered that “Berthold—that born city dweller—might just as well have been walking down Fifth Avenue.”

  * * *

  —

  EVERYWHERE SALKA WENT IN LOS ANGELES she heard the clamor for affidavits. Every day the stack on her desk of beseeching letters from Vienna, Prague, and Paris grew fatter. Her secretary Etta Hardt stuffed them all into a file and labeled it “Years of the Devil.” For many of those who did manage to flee, the costs of exile were high. The previous May, the Viertels’ friend Ernst Toller, one of the first German exiles to find a haven at Sanary-sur-Mer, had hanged himself at the Mayflower Hotel in New York. Toller had recently learned that his brother and sister had been sent to concentration camps. He was also despondent over the decline of his playwriting career in exile. Salka and Berthold would lose other friends to suicide—former Sanaryans all, as it happened—in the years that followed, including Walter Hasenclever in the French internment camp at Les Milles in June 1940 and Stefan Zweig in Petrópolis, Brazil, in February 1942.

  What could any one person do? Salka took in Berthold’s niece Susan and her eight-month-old baby, who came to stay from England while her husband, a British Navy officer, was deployed abroad. She also welcomed a thirteen-year-old refugee named Andrew Frank, agreeing to look after him until his mother could scrape together a livelihood on the East Coast. Andrew’s father was the novelist Leonhard Frank (no relation to Bruno and Liesl) who was then in an internment camp in France. Eventually Leonhard would manage to escape to Lisbon. His life would be saved via passage to the States through a joint effort by the Emergency Rescue Committee, which supplied his visa, and the European Film Fund, which gathered affidavits for him. Andrew Frank was around Tommy’s age and a bright, affable boy. Salka had no trouble absorbing him into the household, which at this time also included her niece Margret, Edward’s daughter, who lived at Mabery Road throughout the war years.

  Salka’s salary of $650 per week was thus responsible for the daily care and feeding of Susan and her baby, Andrew, Margret, and the five Viertels. It financed the Sunday parties and paid for the Japanese maid and gardener, the somewhat fearsome German cook, and the indefatigable Etta Hardt. A good portion of that $650 then went to Europe for the refugees, including the percentage of Salka’s salary that she donated to the European Film Fund. Large sums also went to anonymous Jewish relief workers who promised to forward the money to Auguste and Dusko. (Years later, Salka learned that her mother had received only a tiny portion of what she had sent.) And now Christmas was coming, and with it a long list of extra financial obligations.

  It was at just this moment that Paul Kohner, the agent who had assured Salka that she deserved twice as much as Metro was paying her, approached the studio’s general manager Eddie Mannix to discuss her contract. On the same day, Salka learned that Mannix, who despite a fearsome reputation had until now always been her champion, was infuriated at her gall in allowing an agent to intercede after seven years of the studio’s steady and beneficent raises. Mannix summarily fired her. “She should see if Kohner can get her a better job!” Mannix shouted.

  There is no evidence to suggest that Garbo did anything to intervene on Salka’s behalf. Her attention was elsewhere. Ninotchka was finished and an enormous hit, grossing $1,187,000 domestically and nearly as much overseas, even without the now-defunct European market. Yet Garbo did not think the film particularly funny, worried that it was vulgar, and had not enjoyed working with Lubitsch. She was uninterested in talking about future projects. Her time was now devoted almo
st entirely to the companionship of a popular diet expert named Gayelord Hauser. At thirty-four, she was preoccupied with the specter of aging and was adhering hopefully to Hauser’s regimen of a raw-food diet and obsessive skin care.

  All during what Salka called “this autumn of tears and anxiety,” $650 per week had kept her crowded enterprise afloat. With no more paychecks coming in, how would she and her entire network survive?

  7

  LIFEBOAT

  It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.

  —DOROTHY THOMPSON

  Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:

  You take my house when you do take the prop

  That doth sustain my house; you take my life

  When you do take the means whereby I live.

  —THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ACT 4, SCENE 1

  LOS ANGELES, SANARY-SUR-MER, AND MARSEILLE

  1939–1942

  FOR A WHILE SALKA TRIED TO PRETEND that all would be fine, and made no accommodations to adjust to her vanished income. Isherwood noted in his diary: “Faced by Salka’s lost job at MGM, the Viertels are displaying a fatalistic extravagance. Sheaves of cables to Europe. Shopfuls of gifts from an expedition to Tijuana. They are a real Chekhov family.” Salka threw a party on Christmas Eve, the tree ablaze with candles. The guests sang “Stille Nacht” and “O Tannenbaum.” Edward’s daughter played the piano. Peter gave Salka and Berthold the bound manuscript of his novel The Canyon, which made Salka cry. She also gave a boozy New Year’s Eve party, and got drunk while mixing her own punch. Tipsily she called Isherwood over, telling him, “I want to drink blood brotherhood with you.” They drank and embraced, and Salka said: “I am going to tell you a very important secret. If a man wants a woman enough, he can have her. Absolutely. It’s only a question of time and place…Any man. Any man on earth!” A perfectly timed pause, and then: “Except Louis B. Mayer.” Later, Isherwood drank so much that Peter had to take him home and put him to bed.

  Salka’s composure did not last long. She began to consider other ways to make money. Her friends fawned over her cooking enough to make her think seriously about opening a restaurant in the canyon or a goulash wagon on the beach. Her sons assured her that a hot-dog stand would be a gold mine. The idea caused a lot of teasing around the house, with Gottfried predicting that a few weeks as a full-time cook would drive Salka straight back into Eddie Mannix’s constricting embrace. The usually generous Ernst Lubitsch declined to finance her, warning her that she’d be feeding all of Hollywood for nothing.

  In fact this was most likely true. Joe May, the Austrian film pioneer who’d helped to bring Billy Wilder and Franz Waxman to Hollywood, endured the failures of two Hollywood restaurants after his once-flourishing directing career evaporated. May’s second venture, the Blue Danube on Sunset Boulevard, was bankrolled by many sponsors of the European Film Fund but closed soon after it opened in 1949, failing to attract customers outside the émigré community. May spent the remaining years until his death in 1954 in near-seclusion. Formerly a contributor to the European Film Fund, in his last years he lived entirely on its donations.

  Salka continued to feed the whole town for nothing in the comfort of her own home. Every Sunday her parties continued, along with frequent smaller gatherings during the week. On a random Tuesday in February 1940, she invited Aldous and Maria Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, and Gottfried to dinner. Berthold and Isherwood spent much of the meal seeking Huxley’s help in convincing a producer to bring Beatrix Lehmann over from England for a film role. Then Berthold started an argument about Russia’s war policy, skirmishing first with Salka and then with Gottfried about the Soviet invasion of Finland. Gottfried supported the Finns and happily contemplated the suffering of the Russian troops in the harsh winter cold. As Isherwood reported: “Berthold left the room. Although he isn’t jealous in the ordinary, sexual sense, there’s no doubt that the friendship between Salka and Gottfried has a lot to do with these fights.”

  Salka chose to ignore Berthold’s outburst and attended instead to Huxley, who was telling her about a scientific advance in which female rabbits could be impregnated by other female rabbits but would then produce only females. He and Salka proceeded to entertain each other with a Huxleyan fantasy about a future era of women without men, imagining a “lesbian tyranny” in Hollywood: the “Warner Sisters, Louisa B. Mayer, United Artistes, Twentieth Century Vixen, etc.”

  Berthold’s ill temper during this unhappy period of his life was not his only emotional key. Just as frequently he was mild and distracted, and often funny. (Peter remembered that Berthold characterized agent Paul Kohner, whom he justifiably regarded at this time “with good-natured distrust,” as “the comparative of Kohn.”) Berthold was a full participant in Salka’s mission to absorb émigrés into the ever-widening Mabery Road circle, generous to every refugee who crossed his path and happy to play host to them whenever he was living at home. And he loved all three of his children, if he did not always sufficiently let them know this, and worried extravagantly about them.

  In February 1940 Paul Kohner came through for Salka, selling a story of hers to Warner Bros., an adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Katalin Gero about a woman who goes to heroic lengths to build orphanages in Budapest. Kohner managed to finagle for Salka a whopping thousand-dollars-per-week salary. Among other reasons for celebration, Salka owed money to the bank for back debts on her house and was glad to afford the payments once again. In April Berthold went to New York to stage a Terence Rattigan play called Grey Farm starring his former Die Truppe leading man Oscar Homolka. He left with relief, glad to have a job and secure for the moment that the family finances were more stable.

  About her Warners gig, Salka later wrote, “in the long run the hotdog stand might have given us more permanent security.” The job lasted less than three months. There were licensing problems with the story and the picture was shelved. As their cash-flow problems resumed, Salka and Berthold exchanged worried suggestions about putting the house up as collateral to get a new loan. Just as Salka was finishing up at Warners, Gottfried’s prediction about her return to Metro came true. Most likely at Garbo’s insistence, Eddie Mannix called to ask when she was coming back—without Paul Kohner, he added. Kohner graciously agreed to drop Salka as a client, but advised her to insist on the thousand dollars she’d been getting at Warners. When Salka went in to see Mannix, he enfolded her in his beefy arms, declared his love for her, and insisted that she rejoin the studio at $750 per week. Salka became flustered by Mannix’s fast talk and agreed to his terms. “And so,” she recalled, in June 1940, “much to Greta’s pleasure, I returned to the ‘MGM fold’ and to the perennial search for a Garbo story.”

  Salka first suggested a Western based on a novel set in northern California called Woman of Spain, by the Los Angeles writer Scott O’Dell. But producer Bernie Hyman was not keen on expensive location shoots. What he and everyone at the studio most avidly wanted for Garbo was a comedy—preferably something like an Americanized Ninotchka. Salka halfheartedly proposed the adaptation of an old staple she remembered from the Vienna Burgtheater, a silly bit of fluff by Ludwig Fulda called The Twin Sister. George Cukor was assigned to direct, and Garbo gave her assent.

  One wonders how many at Metro aside from Salka and Gottfried Reinhardt knew that Ludwig Fulda, The Twin Sister’s German-Jewish playwright, had killed himself in Berlin the previous year after being denied entry into the United States. In 1943, Sam Behrman wrote a tribute to Ludwig Fulda in the New York Times in which he explained the aging playwright’s final days:

  My friend Bruno Frank tells me that he last saw Fulda in Switzerland just after the advent of Hitler. It was impossible for him to assimilate the concept of no longer being considered a German. He was completely bewildered by what had happened both
to Germany and to him. He was over seventy. He had held high honors in his native country. He was distinguished in philanthropy and in letters and yet here he was in Switzerland—an exile—with his country making a virtue and a slogan of the racial principle that had ousted him. He could not take it in. He was stunned and, I gather, never recovered until he died.

  Heedless of fate and cataclysm, Metro invested itself in Fulda’s comedy for Garbo. But the continuing bad news from Europe made it hard for Salka to concentrate on writing silly jokes for a mindless farce. When Berthold in New York admitted to Salka in May that “the imminent conquest of Paris does not aggravate my diabetes so much as the bombings of London and Berlin,” Salka told him that she “could not write nor work nor think coherently” and “remained glued to the radio in despair.”

  Isherwood had noted the obsessive dependence on radios among the Hollywood Europeans. “The radio broadcasts claimed large portions of each day,” he wrote. “Liesl Frank (wife of Bruno, the writer) carried a portable set about with her, like a sick baby. She nursed it in her arms, bent over it as it muttered its advertisements, tuned it up loud for each new bulletin.”