The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  After this little tableau, because after all it was a birthday party, there was a cake. It was Salka’s own recipe: a simple flourless cake, a brisk mix of butter, sugar, eggs, and chocolate. Some called it a Sachertorte, though this is not exactly right. Salka called it her “speciality of the house.” But for her family and friends it was more than that. Just as her house was a representation of all the lost houses, for a great many people her cake also had symbolic powers, nostalgic depths, Edenic traces of mystery and memory. If anyone else had baked it, it would not have been the same. Its secret was that Salka somehow imbued it with her own spirit. Adam Shaw, Irwin Shaw’s son, remembers many boyhood afternoons he spent devouring the cake after hockey practice in Salka’s tiny kitchen in Klosters, Switzerland, in the 1960s. “Perhaps one had to live her life to make it,” he said. “The density of it, the hint of bitterness buried in the rich, moist, slightly undercooked core.”

  He is happiest who can forge a connection between the end of life and its beginning. So devoted was Thomas Mann to Salka’s Sachertorte that, as another family member recalled it, some years after this evening he showed up at a wedding reception in Beverly Hills for a couple he did not know, because he heard that Salka was bringing the cake. For Thomas and for Heinrich, the party, the cake, the sense of being looked after and cared for, the comforts of this book-lined living room—all brought back their childhood and their mother, brought back the first sense of freedom their mother had encouraged in them to improvise and play and dream and create, brought back her fierce championship and eternal love. Salka and her house gave the Mann brothers permission on this bittersweet evening to forge the connection between the past and the present, to inhabit their ends and their beginnings all at once: to be at the same time the august statesmen in exile, eloquent in their anger and their survivors’ guilt and their gratefulness to the country that took them in; but also to be the little boys, avidly licking up the last crumbs of the homemade chocolate birthday cake. It would not have been the same at a restaurant or even at someone else’s house. In grief, in confusion, in relief, the brothers’ souls cried out to the soul of the house, and the motherly soul of the house embraced them. After Berlin, after Sanary and Nice, after Zurich and Marseille, after all the stations of their expulsion and their long separation, the brothers found themselves reunited at a table sharing a childlike big moment, in what must have seemed like the last safe place. Which was in so many ways a copy of the first safe place, in Lübeck, all those years ago.

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  —

  “I’VE STARTED WORK ON A FILM, which probably won’t amount to much,” Garbo wrote to a Swedish friend on June 23, 1941. “It’s strange that I should be writing about films when war is on our doorstep.”

  The film was the twin-sister comedy, retitled that summer as Two-Faced Woman. It was Garbo’s twenty-sixth picture for Metro and had begun shooting on June 18. Most of the filming was done on the lot, except for ski sequences which were shot on location at the Sugar Bowl Lodge near Donner Summit, a 475-mile drive from Los Angeles.

  The script was still incomplete when filming began. Salka, Sam Behrman, and George Oppenheimer churned out new scenes, still trying to appease the censors, who continued to veto the faintest hints of premarital or extramarital sex, while hoping somehow to maintain the airiness of Ludwig Fulda’s farce. Meanwhile, Gottfried argued with director George Cukor over the script. Toward the end of filming Garbo wrote again to her Swedish friend: “I’m only very sorry that the story has changed so much. Salka had a much better story to begin with. But since I would rather go walking in the country than fight for stories, it will have turned out like it has.”

  Two-Faced Woman is often accused of failing so completely that Garbo was unable to recover from the humiliation and consequently abandoned her career. Often the blame went to Salka: for suggesting and then botching the story, for meddling in the reshaping of Garbo’s image, for the fact that the picture was not Ninotchka. While it’s true that Garbo never appeared in another film, the actress had no plans to quit acting at the time. Once Two-Faced Woman was finished, with another picture remaining under her current contract, Metro again enlisted Salka to continue searching for Garbo vehicles. And in fact Two-Faced Woman earned reasonable box office returns, with a foreign and domestic take (minus a full release in Europe and Japan) of $1.8 million. This was in spite of the Catholic League of Decency’s “condemned” rating and its decision to ban the film in Boston and Providence. Urging Catholic filmgoers to boycott it, the league condemned the picture for its “immoral and un-Christian attitude toward marriage and its obligations; imprudently suggestive scenes, dialogue and situations, [and] suggestive costumes.”

  No matter how hard Gottfried, Salka, and Behrman had tried to please the censors, decency remained implacable. No less a personage than Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, was drawn into the controversy while visiting with his personal friend Louis B. Mayer in Los Angeles. Mayer screened the picture for Spellman before its release and asked him to make an assessment of its wickedness. Salka wrote that Spellman gave his blessing after suggesting that the writers add a scene showing that the husband could not be committing adultery with the twin sister because he knew all along that she was actually his wife. “This change did not improve the film,” Salka noted acidly.

  So aggrieved was Gottfried over these indignities that he was still complaining about them in a memoir he published in 1979. “More incensed than his minions,” he wrote, “[Spellman] took time off shepherding X-million souls to wage a one-man crusade—in a world torn by strife, with his own country on the brink of it—against my sinful Two-Faced Woman.” Salka had battled with Gottfried throughout the production, straining their relationship at home. But she was in total agreement with his sentiments about censorship and the war. Both of them felt hard-pressed to care much about the moral rectitude of a featherweight comedy “at the time,” Salka wrote in her memoir, “when each day brought news more horrible than one could bear.”

  In fact, if most of Salka’s “indecent” lines never survived the censors, the preoccupation with the war in Europe does emerge in the finished picture. In a ritzy Manhattan nightclub during a scene full of the sort of fizzy repartee that made Sam Behrman such a sought-after screenwriter, Garbo makes an appearance in a low-cut sleeveless black gown and loads of diamonds. She is pretending to be Katherine Borg, the sophisticated twin sister of Melvyn Douglas’s unglamorous wife Karin. Asked where she has come from when nobody had previously known of her existence, she concocts a quick explanation. But it is not just any flip answer. “From Lisbon,” she says gaily. “I caught the last boat out—I’m a penniless refugee.” And then, responding to a sensible follow-up question—did you escape in evening clothes?—Garbo laughs it off: “Oh, these! I just slipped into these.”

  Knowing the context within which that snippet of dialogue emerged, it’s impossible to watch the rest of the scene, if not the entire picture, without channeling the mood of its European makers: its producer Gottfried Reinhardt, its star Garbo, its Polish composer Bronislaw Kaper, and Salka, who, immersed as she was in refugee work, quite probably wrote the line. What follows is the picture’s centerpiece—an attempt at Thalberg’s “one great scene”—in which Garbo causes a sensation on the dance floor by improvising a Latin-inspired rhumba, the “chicachoca,” transporting the nightclub crowd into a unified ecstasy. Again knowing the context, the group dance feels not so much euphoric as frantic, even desperate, a frolic on the lip of a volcano. This was not only the last glimpse of a still-radiant Garbo that moviegoers would ever see. It was the last glance at an America that was still gazing in isolation across the ocean toward a blood-red Europe—an America that was soon to be pushed, in these waning days of 1941, headlong into the conflagration.

  * * *

  —

  METRO NEXT ASSIGNED SALKA to write a crime drama based on a novel called The Paradine Case, which the stu
dio had bought nearly a decade previously as a possible Garbo vehicle. Salka did her best to spark Garbo’s interest in the lurid murder-and-seduction plot. But the actress was not keen to play another femme fatale, so Salka labored on without her. In October 1941, through events worthy of Franz Werfel’s prayers to Saint Bernadette, Salka’s relentless efforts to rescue her mother yielded a miracle. When seventy-four-year-old Auguste Steuermann emerged from a Pullman car at the train station in Los Angeles, she was barely recognizable to Salka, who had last seen her as a still-vigorous woman during their family reunion in Switzerland six years before. At the end of a months-long journey from Sambor via Lwów, Moscow, Vladivostok, and Seattle, Auguste looked ancient, emaciated, and tremulous. She was dressed in rags, the pitiful “new” shoes she had bought in Moscow an emblem of the hardships she had endured.

  Hitler’s armies had invaded the Soviet Union in June, just after Auguste had arrived in Moscow to try to obtain a visa. She was alone and knew no one in the city. Salka had cabled infusions of money and with Garbo’s help had secured promises of intervention from the U.S. ambassador. Still the Soviet government denied Auguste permission to leave. Salka had also received pleas for money and help from her brother Dusko in Sambor, but after the Germans conquered the area no money or communication was permitted in the war zone in West Ukraine. Distraught about Dusko, Salka could only pray that he had fled Sambor with the retreating Soviets. She reread War and Peace to steady her nerves as the Nazis advanced on the capital.

  Through the ambassador’s efforts, Auguste’s visa was finally approved. In early September she left bombed-out Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, there to catch a steamer bound for America. Six weeks later, on her birthday, she arrived in Seattle, where she was received with a hospitality that would have been unthinkable toward a Soviet citizen just a few months earlier. A quirk of history had led to her good fortune: with the Nazi invasion the Hitler-Stalin pact was shredded, and Russia was suddenly America’s ally. So eager were the immigration authorities to welcome Auguste that they threw her a birthday party, after which they put her on the train that would take her to Los Angeles.

  “I could not wait to feed and dress and pamper her,” Salka wrote. She happily made room for Auguste in the crowded house on Mabery Road, and took great pleasure in mothering her mother. As with the other refugees in Salka’s care, Auguste recovered much of her energy, expressed her admiration for the beauty of her new surroundings, and began to learn English. And Salka did what she always did to mark such occasions: she threw a party. “Everyone brought friends,” she recalled, but as the afternoon wore on she noticed that the Hollywood ladies who flocked around Auguste had evaporated. “Old age even gallantly borne frightened them,” she wrote. By the party’s end, only Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel were attending to Auguste. The Brechts had arrived in California in July, along with their two children and Brecht’s translator/lover, Ruth Berlau. Alexander Granach and Marta Feuchtwanger met them at the train station. The Brechts’ exodus from Finland, Moscow, and Vladivostok was similar to Auguste’s but had taken even longer, their Swedish ship forced to dawdle through the Panama Canal. Their emigration was financed by many people, including the journalist Dorothy Thompson and Brecht’s longtime friend Lion Feuchtwanger, who, while never a major donor to the European Film Fund, quietly supported the evacuation of Brecht and a number of other refugees through its bureaucratic channels.

  Salka’s joy in her reunion with her mother and with the Brechts was challenged daily by her fears for those who remained in Europe, especially Dusko. In fact, the truth was unfathomably bad, much worse than her nightmares. Along with most Americans, she would not learn of the scope of the atrocities in Eastern Europe until the release of the Molotov Report in 1942: the advancing German armies turned the Eastern Front into a sea of flames, while on their heels came battalions of SS units into the occupied territories. The German police brigades served as mobile killing units, or Einsatzgruppen, slaughtering entire Jewish communities through mass shootings or by shoving people into sealed vans which were then pumped full of carbon monoxide gas. Because the SS contingents did not have enough manpower to carry out the massacres, their officers recruited local collaborators.

  From this time in 1941 until the Germans evacuated the Soviet Union in 1944, they slaughtered between 1 million and 1.5 million of its Jews by shooting them or poisoning them in gas vans. It’s estimated that 40 percent of Jewish victims of the Holocaust were murdered in mass shootings. It was a turning point in the National Socialists’ push for Lebensraum that had begun with the invasion of Poland: eviction of the Jews had now officially turned toward genocide. As of late October, it was unlawful for Jews to emigrate from Germany or any of its territories. Since the previous summer, nearly all who looked to America for asylum were rebuffed. In June the U.S. State Department had further tightened its already stringent restrictions to include those refugees with close relatives in Nazi states. In July all the American consulates in German territory were closed. To implement “a complete solution of the Jewish question,” three centers dedicated to the obliteration of the Jews were established in German-occupied Poland: Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II. Orders came for mass deportations of Jews from the seized territories to the killing centers. In these camps and through further shooting operations, up to 1,700,000 Jews were murdered in Eastern Europe. Many more camps opened and followed the same orders.

  In Santa Monica, in the dissonant calm of this same autumn, all Salka and Auguste could do was pray that their former servant Viktoria might be sheltering Dusko’s girlfriend Hania and their little son. Viktoria was not Jewish, so unlike Dusko she had some measure of protection against German persecution. From Dusko himself Salka had had no word in months.

  On a quiet Sunday morning, a few weeks before the release of Two-Faced Woman, Gottfried Reinhardt was sitting in a dubbing room at Metro, mixing soundtracks and listening to the New York Philharmonic broadcast. At that same moment, after another fraught week at the studio, Salka was taking her mother for a drive along the Pacific highway in her open car, basking in the freshness of the sea air. Mother and daughter also had the radio tuned to the Philharmonic concert from New York. Salka remembered: “Arthur Rubinstein was just finishing the first movement of the Tchaikowsky Piano Concerto no. 1, when the broadcast was interrupted and the announcer said that early in the morning Japanese airplanes and submarines had attacked and sunk the American fleet in Pearl Harbor.” All at once, the United States was at war.

  8

  ILIUM

  Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.

  —JONATHAN HAIDT, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND

  In Hollywood there are only two categories of writers, those who are loaded and those who are penniless.

  —ALFRED DÖBLIN

  LOS ANGELES

  1942–1945

  EVERYTHING WAS CHANGING, more bewilderingly than ever before. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued proclamations designating citizens of Japan, Germany, and Italy as enemy aliens, restricting their movements and authorizing their arrest. Salka wrote: “All the Japanese living in California were sent to concentration camps or, as they were politely called, ‘internment centers.’ ” German refugees in Los Angeles were required to register as enemy aliens and to observe a curfew, confined to their houses every night from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Policemen warned that it was forbidden to speak German on the street. They could not own or use short-wave radios, and—in the earliest days of the restrictions—could not travel farther than five miles from their homes.

  Everywhere there was the fear that Nazi spies and fifth columnists were lurking, and often they were. The FBI rounded up many of the prominent Reich sympathizers who had marched so proudly in Hindenburg Park, and sent them to federal prison on Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor. While it seems preposterous to suppose that those refugees in Los Angeles who
had fled Nazi persecution might now be working as agents for the Reich, the paranoia of the times made this a reasonable assumption. Wartime suspicions were especially hysterical in Los Angeles, with its easy access from the Pacific and its large concentration of military sites. Interestingly, Salka noted, “there was no curfew in the East, where the ‘Bund’ and the ‘Silver Shirts’ had an impressively large membership of racists and pro-Nazis of German origin. In Hollywood,” she continued, “most refugees goodnaturedly accepted the restriction of their liberty. They observed the blackouts and spent their evenings at home, convinced that a ‘fifth column’ existed and caution was necessary.”

  Gottfried, just turning thirty, was in uniform immediately. He went through basic training and was sent to New York to make training films for the Signal Corps. Hans Viertel, now twenty-three, was unhappy to be excluded from the draft because of his hearing impairment. He left Max Reinhardt’s workshop for a job in the shipyards at the Port of Los Angeles, fulfilling a proletarian dream and seeking, as he wrote to Berthold, “to build my place in life so that I do not have to reproach myself.” Tommy, at seventeen, was too young to serve. But twenty-one-year-old Peter, now a screenwriter at Warner Bros. on a loan-out from David Selznick, saw his chance at last and enlisted with the Marines. The news filled Salka with dread.

  Berthold wrote to Salka from New York that Peter “is compelled to face the monster, man to man, as in a duel, otherwise his own existence will become worthless to him.” Hitler’s war was a referendum on the manliness of all America’s men. Participation or avoidance told you exactly who you were. In Peter’s case, becoming a Marine was a way of separating himself from his European parents while also fighting on their behalf. It was proof to himself that he was irrefutably an American, whose patriotism in helping to defeat his parents’ greatest enemy could never be doubted.