The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  All the same, Salka wrote, “it tortured me to think that Peter had become a tiny, passive particle in an immense, grinding mechanism…I loathed people who said: ‘The Marines will make a man of him.’ The training alone: this teaching of killing, of brutality, the drill sergeants demanding that it be done enthusiastically, was amply gruesome.” But Salka kept her misgivings to herself. They would not have been warmly received in the court of public opinion at the time. Hitler’s war was a referendum on America’s mothers as well as its men.

  Just before Peter left for basic training in San Diego, he invited Salka to dinner at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, where they sometimes met when he had something important to discuss. When Salka arrived she was pleased to see Harold Clurman already seated at their table. The theater director was a friend of the family and a frequent guest at Salka’s parties. When Peter appeared, Salka began to understand that he had invited Clurman to soften the edges of an awkward moment, for Peter had brought a young woman with him. She was someone Salka already knew slightly, because she was married to Peter’s friend Budd Schulberg. It was obvious that Peter wanted Salka to know that he and Virginia Ray Schulberg were in love.

  In a city with an ever-replenishing stock of beautiful people, it was difficult for any woman who was not a movie star to stand out. But Virginia Schulberg did. Half of Hollywood was besotted with her, particularly the brainiest screenwriters. It was not just that she was exquisite, though she was: effortlessly graceful and slender, with thick, shining dark hair that she pulled back with a velvet ribbon or twisted casually into braids, and a perpetually flushed complexion that suggested good health and outdoorsiness. It was that her beauty accompanied a searching intelligence—she was never happier than with a stack of books under her arm—and a quick, acerbic wit. She was the daughter of a working-class American family ruined by the Depression, and grew up roller-skating around Beverly Hills when it was still a sleepy village. She graduated from Fairfax High, where one of her best friends had been Marian Edwards, now married to Peter’s friend Irwin Shaw. She’d appeared briefly as a dancer in a few Hollywood pictures, but her passions were more literary than cinematic. She hated the name Virginia, preferring the childhood nickname her sister had given her: “Jigee” (pronounced JIE as in pie, GEE as in gee whiz).

  Jigee and Budd Schulberg had been married since 1936 and they had a two-year-old daughter named Vicky. Nineteen thirty-six was also the year that Jigee joined the Communist Party. In the Benedict Canyon house of Budd’s unsuspecting father, B. P. Schulberg, she and Budd hosted Marxist study groups of Hollywood’s up-and-coming writers, among them Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, Robert Rossen, and Maurice Rapf. But unlike, say, Hans Viertel, by the time Jigee met Peter she was no longer an ideologue. Her political convictions grew from her sympathy for the victims of the Depression, and she had believed in and worked for the cause of early Hollywood unionizing. But she found Marxist texts tedious, and for her the meetings were largely social: they were the arenas in which the chic young people of her milieu drank and flirted and jousted. Nonetheless, for a time she was an active Marxist and became something of a romantic advertisement for the American Communist Party, the magnet through which many a lonely young man in Hollywood became drawn to its bright, empty promises.

  In 1941 Budd had published a provocative critique of the picture business in a novel called What Makes Sammy Run? At the same time he was enjoying the benefits of a thriving screenwriting career. The Schulbergs’ marriage crumbled not long afterward when Peter and Jigee began their romance. Five years younger than she, Peter was already at twenty-one a dashing personality, athletic and handsome, with his mother’s social ease. Salka later wrote that Budd’s mother Ad Schulberg had had “strong reservations” about Jigee and Budd’s marriage and had warned Salka, shortly after they broke up, about Jigee’s “destructive character.” The Schulberg family naturally had its reasons for feeling protective of Budd and bitter toward his unfaithful wife. But Salka confessed that at the time she saw little to dislike about Jigee. Over the next few days the women established a quick intimacy as they accompanied Peter on errands before he left for basic training. Salka’s reservations about the relationship centered on Peter: she doubted that he’d be able to support Jigee and her daughter on a Marine private’s salary. In Jigee she saw a lovely, intelligent, but brittle young woman who, she guessed, “would need a lot of courage to face the future.” “We both knew,” Salka wrote, “that once Peter was gone we would need each other.” And so they did, then and for many years that followed.

  Jigee brought joy into Salka’s life through her daughter Vicky, a shy child with great dark eyes and a halo of curls who was content to entertain herself for hours with simple toys or her little collection of baby turtles. While Peter was at boot camp near San Diego, Salka drove down frequently with Jigee and Vicky to visit him. “We spent Sundays on the beach,” she wrote. “When I was taking a walk Vicky would usually appear at my side and silently slip her hand into mine, trying to keep step with me; with this handclasp she also took hold of my heart.”

  Virginia (“Jigee”) Viertel and her daughter Vicky in the fig tree at Mabery Road, 1945.

  When his basic training ended, Peter shipped to the South Pacific on the Lurline, a former luxury cruiser that chugged off to war in a sea teeming with enemy submarines. Before he left, Salka gave him a copy of War and Peace, hoping he would find in it the wisdom and solace that she did. She forwarded any scant news of him to Berthold in New York, who was staging a few plays and had published a new book of poems. Salka made a brief trip to visit Berthold in New York and to see Gottfried and her brother Edward. On that occasion she also met the new woman in Berthold’s life, a Viennese refugee actress named Elisabeth (Liesel) Neumann, of whose cheerful attentiveness Salka approved. With Liesel, “Berthold was much more at peace with himself,” Salka remembered of him during this time, “and also with me and Gottfried.”

  Back in Hollywood, Christopher Isherwood was angling for a job at Metro, armed with recommendations from Gottfried and Salka. He saw Salka there frequently and described in his diaries the studio in wartime: “A surprisingly large number of elevator boys and messengers were still at their jobs, despite the draft. There are now exits to air-raid shelters at the ends of the corridors.” Isherwood himself had thus far avoided the draft, first as a conscientious objector and now as a theological student. He had established himself as a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, and was helping the Swami write a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Salka was interested in Isherwood’s adventures with Vedanta and told him she would like to try yoga. Berthold was less impressed. Still wrestling with his filial emotions toward Berthold, Isherwood complained that the older man was not nearly as open-minded as Salka, and prone to grumpy interrogations: “What am I doing with this old, unfashionable Indian stuff? What relation can it possibly have to America?”

  With Gottfried and Salka’s influence, Isherwood was eventually assigned to a yearlong contract at Metro. He had time there to observe Salka dispiritedly searching for a new story for Garbo. The studio was doing little to move the process along. Two years had gone by between each of the last several Garbo pictures, so this was not yet cause for concern. But Metro was concentrating its energies on a younger generation of stars, including another extraordinary Swedish actress named Ingrid Bergman. “For Garbo and her contemporaries,” the film historian Mark A. Vieira notes, “1942 was the Twilight of the Goddesses.”

  Nonetheless Salka kept at it, enduring the tedium of her nearly impossible job. The long hours gave her too much time to worry about Dusko in Sambor and Peter in the South Pacific. With England the only remaining European market for Metro’s pictures, the studio was brimming with wartime Anglophilia and tea breaks were a daily studio ritual. On a November afternoon Salka had tea with Isherwood and the British filmmaker Victor Saville, who
m Berthold had befriended during his Gaumont-British days. Saville had come to Hollywood in 1939 and had coproduced Metro’s first anti-Nazi picture, The Mortal Storm, in 1940. Though quite good, the picture was a failure at the U.S. box office. It was much more effective in Germany, prompting Goebbels to shut down Metro’s Berlin office and to forbid the screening of its films in all German territories. On this autumn afternoon the excitable Saville was energized by the latest war news, particularly the favorable reports from Egypt. He looked forward to seeing Italy invaded and pulverized by bombs, and hoped for the shooting of French collaborators. Isherwood later made Saville the model for the character called Chatsworth in his novel about Berthold, Prater Violet.

  Salka managed to interest Garbo in a new project, the remake of a Russian film called The Girl from Leningrad. It was the story of a wounded soldier and a nurse, originally set during the Russo-Finnish war but now updated to the Soviet-German conflict. With Garbo’s consent, Metro bought the rights and Bernie Hyman told Salka to start developing the script. But in early September, Hyman suddenly died of heart failure at the age of forty-five. His death marked the end of an era for Garbo and Salka. He had been Thalberg’s close friend. He had given Gottfried his first job at Metro as his assistant. And Hyman had overseen many Garbo projects, from Conquest to Ninotchka to the ill-fated Marie Curie. Despite Salka’s complaints about his chronic indecision and his corny taste, she never doubted his sincerity, and she believed that he had Garbo’s best interests at heart. His death provoked much anxiety about what would come next.

  What came next was bad. Metro decided to pull the plug on The Girl from Leningrad and chose to make Song of Russia instead, a terrible picture starring Susan Peters and Robert Taylor that would have the distinction, after the war, of forcing Louis B. Mayer to defend Metro against HUAC’s allegations that the film fostered Communist propaganda. For now, Mayer told Garbo he did not want to make another picture with her, citing the loss of the European market. He offered to buy her out of the $80,000 left on her Girl from Leningrad contract, but Garbo refused the money, saying she had not earned it.

  A gaggle of Metro employees boxed up the contents of Garbo’s dressing room to accommodate its new and much younger occupant, Lana Turner. Metro continued to employ Salka for the moment, asking her to keep looking for stories that might bring the studio and Garbo back together. Salka was grateful for the paycheck. But she wasted no time trying to convince herself that her job was secure.

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  FOR MANY OF THE LOS ANGELES EXILES, the gap between sufficiency and penury was ruthlessly wide: you got everything, it seemed, or you got nothing. In May 1942, Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette was published in the United States to blockbuster sales and was chosen in July as a main selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Werfel sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox for the huge sum of $125,000. Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann likewise saw no interruptions in their sturdy international earnings and each prepared to move into large houses in the Pacific Palisades.

  Alfred Döblin, once considered along with Thomas Mann the finest Weimar-era German novelist, had no such good fortune. Döblin’s book sales dwindled to nearly nothing. The screenwriting contract at Metro which had secured Döblin’s escape from Europe expired in the spring of 1942 and the studio did not renew it. Döblin had hated the job, but losing it was worse. Although he had trained as a physician in Germany, his medical license was not recognized in America and his prospects for employment were dim. It was only the continuing financial assistance from the European Film Fund, he admitted, “that prevented us from destitution.” He narrowly survived a heart attack. His wife had a nervous breakdown.

  Depression lurked everywhere among the émigrés. The community was still absorbing the shock of the February suicide of Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte in Brazil, just as it had struggled to bear the suicides of Ernst Toller in New York and Walter Hasenclever in Provence. Heinrich Mann’s contract at Metro had been revoked and he too faced mounting debts. He fell behind on the rent. The monthly hundred-dollar check he received from his brother Thomas, issued through the European Film Fund for tax purposes, was his only lifeline. His wife Nelly began to take a series of low-paying odd jobs. Despondent, she continued to drink and drive. She dreamed of a rural life, maybe somewhere in the sunny San Fernando Valley, where she and Heinrich might one day rent a house with a bit of land and support themselves with what they could grow. They had moved several times in the past year to economize. In their small house on South Swall Drive, which sat yearningly just outside Beverly Hills, Nelly wrote out her will, leaving everything to her husband. At the time, she was forty-four.

  In late 1942, restless in exile, Klaus Mann joined the U.S. Army to join the fight against the Third Reich. He enlisted as a private, with an ordinary soldier’s duties, then became a staff correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

  The Hollywood Canteen opened its doors on Cahuenga Boulevard, offering free food and entertainment for members of the armed forces who were headed overseas. It was run entirely by industry volunteers, many of them movie stars and many of those émigrés who frequented Salka’s parties, including Paul Henreid and Paul Muni.

  On Mabery Road, Auguste and Salka shared the housework, with Salka complaining to Berthold that “Mama is no expert in the treatment of technical implements.” There was still no news of Dusko. Salka hid the details of the Molotov Report atrocities from her mother, still trying to believe that Dusko had escaped from Sambor with the Soviet garrison.

  In Los Angeles, a for rent sign hung on the Deutsches Haus, the headquarters of the Bund. Its leaders had been arrested by the FBI and were currently in jail, awaiting trial for sedition. There were no more pro-Nazi rallies in Hindenburg Park, whose picnic grounds were occupied by U.S. troops on the day after Pearl Harbor. The wartime clampdowns on homegrown fascism did not come with declining anti-Semitism. In fact, since the country entered the war there had been a rise in open hatred against Jews. Much of it was inspired by nationwide campaigns, including Charles Lindbergh’s speeches for America First. But plenty was local, fomented in part by a radio broadcaster named G. Allison Phelps, whose anti-Semitic diatribes attacked the Los Angeles refugee population for stealing jobs that ought to go to American citizens, and who vowed to expose immorality in the film community. Terror plots continued to fester underground. There were plans for lynchings, for vandalizing storefronts in imitation of Kristallnacht, for developing new ways to murder Jews.

  From nearly the moment of their arrival in Los Angeles, the exiles, Jewish and not, were under surveillance by the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Office of Strategic Services, all looking for evidence of both Nazi and Communist infiltration. The agencies were concerned as well that, once the war was over, Germany might institute a pro-Soviet government, with high-profile exiles returning as heads of state. The FBI began to compile lengthy dossiers for Brecht, Feuchtwanger, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and the composer Hanns Eisler. The antifascist organizations they supported were suspected of being Communist fronts. Their homes were watched; their telephones were tapped; their correspondence was intercepted. Heinrich Mann sometimes went outside to find his mail scattered on the street or in a neighbor’s yard. The National Socialists had used these same tactics when they came to power in 1933, as the historian Fritz Stern remembered from his German boyhood: “We learned to speak freely only at home or with our closest friends. It became an ever more controlled life.”

  Beginning in January 1942 and continuing for four years, Salka’s telephones were tapped and her mail opened and censored. Berthold’s and her FBI files—numbering over two hundred pages—contain opened correspondence from Brecht, Isherwood, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which the FBI considered a Communist front, and others. The files note that “for many years the motion picture actress Greta Garbo received a great deal of mail at…165 Mabery
Road.” In September 1942 Salka’s name was added to the FBI Watch List. Her participation in the Screen Writers Guild and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and her humanitarian efforts on behalf of the refugees were deemed “anti-capitalistic and communistically-inclined.” In 1943, an FBI report admitted that there was “no indication that either [Berthold or Salka] has important Communist Party connections.” Yet the agency continued to monitor Salka’s activities, keen to gather information about her many red-tinged friends.

  Salka willingly opened her door several times to FBI agents, “strong, handsome young men,” she recalled, “who would have served their country better in the Marines rather than in harassing the refugees.” As an American citizen she generally shrugged off these intrusions. But on one occasion, when answering questions about her friend Annie von Bucovich, she lost her temper. Von Bucovich was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin who had been scraping by in a low-paying job at Warner Bros. Now Annie was seeking a position with the Office of War Information in Washington, where the producer John Houseman, a friend of hers and Salka’s, was coordinating the radio programming that would become the Voice of America. When the FBI agents inquired about Annie, they repeatedly asked Salka whether Annie was a Communist, a Russian, an antifascist. Salka answered truthfully—no to the first two, yes to the third. Whereupon one of the agents sighed, “Oh, you people. You are anti-fascist but I have never heard one of you say: I am anti-communist.”