In the meantime, Salka wrote to Berthold about her anxieties about the job, worrying that her paycheck “only goes from week to week…difficulties have already started but this time I don’t have a Garbo behind me…” Worse still was the news that the government had placed a lien of six thousand dollars on her salary for tax debts.
If Salka lacked Garbo’s support at Warners, neither did she have Thalberg’s firm stewardship or Sam Behrman’s bon mots to sparkle up the dialogue. She swallowed her pride during arguments over the script, complaining only to Berthold that Blanke “will not do anything that requires any courage,” and that the picture’s director, Jean Negulesco, “is also no pleasure but a big star here in the studio.” Soberly, Salka told Berthold that, of the twelve hundred current members of the Screen Writers Guild, only three hundred had jobs. She had no choice but to try to keep hers.
Salka gave no hint of these fears in her memoir, remarking only that “work in the studio was pleasant,” and praising Blanke for setting a tone of culture and intelligence. Blanke had been the coproducer, with Hal Wallis, for Max Reinhardt’s production of Warners’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935 and had helped establish the studio’s biopic library with his supervision of The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. His reputation for good taste made him one of Warners’ most enduring producers. Deep Valley was his sixty-eighth production for the studio, and he continued to make movies there until 1961.
Born in Berlin, Blanke had begun his filmmaking career at UFA at age twenty. He arrived in Hollywood as personal assistant to Ernst Lubitsch in 1922, then returned to Berlin to supervise Warners’ operations in Germany. When Blanke returned to the Burbank studios in 1931, he brought with him the distinguished director William Dieterle, a friend from his Berlin theater days, who went on to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with many other films for Warners. Through affidavits, Dieterle was instrumental in getting Lion Feuchtwanger and Brecht to the States, and it was his wife Charlotte Dieterle who with Liesl Frank was the coordinating force behind the European Film Fund.
Blanke himself had persuaded Jack Warner to arrange the first studio contracts for refugees when the EFF was originally established. And Blanke was a significant benefactor to the fund, a top-twenty-eight donor who contributed $2,260.50 between November 1938 and June 1945. When the EFF reinvented itself in September 1948 as the European Relief Fund, Blanke served as a founding board member, along with Walter Reisch, Gottfried Reinhardt, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Henry Koster, and Paul Kohner. The reconfigured fund’s mission was to support relatives and friends of Hollywood’s émigrés who were now suffering under difficult postwar conditions. The ERF coordinated the distribution of CARE packages and raised money to help insolvent refugees in the States to return to Europe.
Thus Blanke and Salka had long traveled in the same circles when he hired her to write the script for Deep Valley. As with Queen Christina, a majority of others who worked on the film were also Europeans. Yet unlike Christina, Deep Valley derived from a homegrown story about longtime inhabitants of the American West. “They were the descendants of pioneers,” wrote the novelist Dan Totheroh about his characters, “turned in on themselves, imprisoned by sea and hills, dead traditions and ethics long since discarded by the world outside.”
Salka’s first Hollywood screenwriting credit and her last were women’s pictures and star vehicles, the first featuring a regal Garbo, the second a destitute Lupino. Just as the two indelible scenes in Christina conveyed apprehensions about leaving much-loved places and people behind, Deep Valley is suffused with yearning representations of a dream of home. Lupino plays Libby Saul, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of embittered parents who treat her like a servant. Numbly she caters to her bedridden mother, who has commandeered the upstairs portion of their ramshackle house, and serves meals to her churlish father, who rules the rooms downstairs. The Sauls’ house and farm lie in a remote valley, hemmed in by mountains and the sea. But big changes loom. Amid a postwar building boom, a road gang of prisoners arrives to construct a portion of the coastal highway that will connect the valley and the Sauls to civilization.
Libby’s only loving relationship is with her devoted dog, Joe, with whom she roams the nearby woods in her free time. There she has found an abandoned cabin, and it’s in this makeshift refuge that she hides the convict Barry Burnette after he makes a run for freedom. With a wood-burning stove, a pallet, and the loyal dog, the place becomes a fragile representation of domesticity for them, an ideal of home—much as the snowbound room at the inn had been for Queen Christina and Don Antonio, and as Mabery Road was for so many of Salka’s refugees.
During the time that Salka was writing Deep Valley, her emotions about home and domesticity were more heightened than ever. Worries about maintaining her house and caring for her mother were always on her mind. She recognized her importance as a sustainer of her family and friends, but was growing weary from the long hours at the studio and the longer hours of housework. By January 1947, when Deep Valley was wrapping, she wrote to Berthold that she was completely broke, and that if she failed to get another screenwriting job she would have to rent out the house. “I’ve worked 14-16 hours a day in the last 3 years,” she told him. “I am simply dead tired.”
Salka knew what it would mean to lose the house, not only for her dependents but for herself. In the thirteen years since she had written Queen Christina, her identity had dramatically shifted. She was now an American citizen and a settled Californian. Plans to return to a Europe that lay in ruins had begun to take shape for many of her friends, but she wanted no part of them. The house had rooted her. Mabery Road was as close to belonging somewhere as she had felt since she was a child. In 1962, she wrote in her diary of her upstairs bedroom in Santa Monica, where every night she’d been “rocked to sleep by the waves” on the shoreline below: “That room in which I have been so miserable and so happy and which I loved so much. When I think back now it was my ‘home.’ This and Wychylowka.”
The psychic distance Salka had traveled between the years of Christina and Deep Valley was almost as far as her journey from Europe to America. In her first Hollywood picture she was a European writing about Europe, explaining it to Americans. In her last picture she was a Californian of European extraction, illustrating the postwar evolution of the Western landscape for an American audience. Her continental perspective was still there, but it had become grafted into a hybrid sensibility that was no longer purely European or American, but some of both. The aspirations and concerns of émigré filmmakers such as Salka—themes of isolation and belonging, of home and away—were now so fused into the language of Hollywood pictures as to be indistinguishable from it. In American moviemaking, Europe and Hollywood were no longer looking at each other. Out of a cauldron of global catastrophe, they had become each other.
Film noir, born in Germany, was finding American iterations in a variety of contexts, including the pastoral neo-noir of Deep Valley, with its deeply shadowed Expressionist palette. Europeans’ infatuation with the American West had evolved from a distant longing—interpreted through the novels of Karl May and the Haus Vaterland’s Wild West bar—to a close-up cinematic embrace.
As with Queen Christina, Salka was not Deep Valley’s only reinterpreter of these points of view. There was Henry Blanke, who contributed his own Berlin-born sophistication. There was the director Jean Negulesco, who had studied painting in Paris with his fellow Romanian Constantin Brancusi and had been working in Hollywood since the early 1930s. When Deep Valley fell forty days behind in its production schedule as 1946 drifted into 1947, Negulesco caught much of the blame for his painstaking slowness and his insistence on location shooting in Big Sur. Yet the picture’s drama owes much to his artistry with light and shadow, a style that possesses, as the film critic David Thomson has noted, “the entrancing, velvety quality of a dream world brought to life.”
Most distinguished of all of De
ep Valley’s European-born artists was the film’s composer, Max Steiner, a former child prodigy in his native Vienna, classically trained by Gustav Mahler, and known throughout Hollywood as “the father of film music,” nominated for twenty-four Academy Awards and winner of three. Steiner’s music for King Kong (1933)—one of the first American films to use music as “commentary sound” to enhance the story—made his reputation. But it was Steiner’s sumptuous (some say saccharine) orchestration for Gone with the Wind in 1939 that cemented it. It was he who so memorably incorporated the “Marseillaise” and the “Deutschlandlied” into Casablanca in 1942, along with “As Time Goes By.” Max Steiner was so busy in the 1940s that he wrote and supervised the music for Deep Valley and another Warners production, Woman in White, at the same time, using a large ensemble for the first and a smaller for the second, finishing both projects in six weeks.
Steiner’s brassily orchestral score, Negulesco’s Expressionistic tableaux, Lupino’s vulnerability, and the sensitivity of the script combine to make an affecting melodrama. Offsetting the moody lyricism of the Sauls’ house and the woods, the location shots in Palos Verdes, the Angeles Crest, Big Bear Lake, and Big Sur offered panoramic views of the ambitious road-construction expansions that were continuing up and down the state on Highway 1, using convict labor from the San Quentin and Folsom prisons.
Most important, Deep Valley offers proof that, however unwelcome F. W. Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein had been when they made their early Hollywood forays, their influence and that of scores of other émigrés entrenched American filmmaking in European sensibilities. Deep Valley is deeply American, but it is just as sincerely German and Polish and Romanian and Austrian. The critic Clive James wrote in 2008: “European and American cultures have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water in half with a knife.”
There is no better example of the contributions of immigrants to American culture than their enhancement of the motion picture business of the 1930s and 1940s. It is profound and it is enduring. Without immigrants, there would be no Golden Age of Hollywood.
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IRWIN SHAW TO SALKA VIERTEL, December 9, 1946:
Dear Salka,
How are you? What happens with you and Warner Brothers? How’s the large, insanely hospitable house near the beach? What new argumentative guests do you have for dinner? Have you solved the problems of the theatre, the motion picture industry, and the world over coffee in the living room this week? Have your dogs bitten anybody yet? Do you plan to come to New York? Does Vicky read Proust yet? How are things in Zuma Canyon?
Peter and Jigee returned from Europe, gathered up Vicky and her menagerie of animals, and settled into their house in Zuma Canyon. Peter had finished a novel and was casting around for screenwriting jobs, hoping to do what he could to help with Salka’s financial problems.
Shaw’s question about Salka’s dogs must have stung. Her big dog Sherry had fallen ill and had to be put to sleep, and Prinz had become so unmanageable that she finally had to give him away. Feeling bereft, she happened to see a notice about an English sheepdog puppy that needed a new home. She drove to a North Hollywood bungalow where she fell in love with the dog, whose name was Timmy. At four months he was already so huge and shaggy that he looked, Salka wrote, “like a medium size haystack.” Timmy rode back to Santa Monica with the majesty of a visiting dignitary, his paw on Salka’s shoulder and his mane rippling in the breeze. Neither Anna the housekeeper nor Auguste were thrilled with the new addition, but Salka and Timmy were inseparable. He parked his massive self upstairs in the hallway between Salka’s room and Auguste’s, where he alerted Salka every time he saw that her mother needed her attention.
Salka Viertel and her dog Timmy, mid-1940s.
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SALKA HAD NEARLY COMPLETED the Deep Valley screenplay in late September 1946 when the set decorators, carpenters, painters, story analysts, and cartoonists went on strike, preventing the use of the studio backlot. The picture’s shooting schedule was pushed back while the production scrambled to move locations from the Warner Ranch to Palos Verdes. This latest outbreak of labor unrest at Warners was the continuation of a bitter, violent ongoing war for power between two unions: the conservative, management-aligned International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the radical Conference of Studio Unions (CSU).
Reflexively sympathetic to progressive young people, Salka contributed to the CSU strike fund and argued with her cowriters against crossing the picket lines. She asked a group of secretaries about their allegiances. At first, they told her, most of them sympathized with the CSU strikers. Then one of the secretaries, who worked for the anti-Communist screenwriter Ayn Rand, “swayed them by insisting that the strikers were just a bunch of communists and that a decent person had to be against them.”
Blanke diplomatically suggested that the Deep Valley writers work at home and meet at his house for story conferences. The strike continued for many more months, well after Salka’s work at the studio was done. The chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade organization representing the six major Hollywood studios, blamed its slow resolution on continuing Communist agitation on the shop floor, though he was careful to insist that no Communist ideology had ever infiltrated scripts or the screen. In June 1947, the strike was resolved in IATSE’s favor through federal legislation in the form of the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted the power of labor unions and required union leaders to sign loyalty oaths disavowing any Communist sympathies.
As was also the custom with Louis B. Mayer at Metro, when a picture wrapped and was ready for previews Jack Warner invited the producer, director, and writers to have dinner with him in the executive dining room. Salka compared the suckuppery at such functions to “the Gemütlichkeit when Stalin’s staff was dining with their boss,” but she attended anyway, and got into an argument with Jack Warner about anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia. Warner averred that thousands of Jews had been killed by the Communists there, and asked Salka how her mother had managed to escape. Salka told him that her mother had lived for two years under Soviet rule; that in her hometown Jews were treated decently during the Soviet occupation; and that there had been no official anti-Semitism there.
Salka may have believed this, but the truth was more complicated. In fact the Soviets did trust the Jewish population of Sambor more than the Ukrainians and the Poles, and they appointed Jews to higher positions in city and government services. But life was often difficult for the Sambor Jews under Soviet occupation. Jewish refugees who declined to accept Soviet citizenship were deported to the interior. Some wealthy Jews were sent to Siberia. Under Soviet nationalization in Sambor a grim deprivation prevailed. There were long lines for inadequate supplies of food.
After Salka finished her pro-Soviet defense in the executive dining room, her cowriter jokingly jumped in to say, “Salka is a Communist, Mr. Warner.” Blanke objected: “She is not!” Salka replied evenly: “One need not be a Communist to say that Soviet anti-Semitism is not to be compared to the horrors the Nazis committed. It is just as unconstitutional in Russia as it is here, but uncontrollable in individuals.” She commented in her memoir: “As no one could deny that anti-Semitism existed in America, the discussion ended.” But the accusation was a sign of troubling times ahead in Hollywood for premature antifascists.
Jack Warner was pleased with Deep Valley and told Salka he was especially satisfied with the screenplay. The picture did a modest box-office business of $1.4 million, with postwar audiences less inclined to be in the mood for noirish gloom. Still, the paychecks allowed Salka to pay off some debts and part of her mortgage. Her financial situation was looking a bit rosier.
That is, until the IRS informed her that Berthold owed money for delinquent back taxes. Salka took out a second mortgage and in May 1947 decided to rent her
house to a New York playwright named Eddie Chodorov, who had signed a big studio contract. Since Isherwood was vacating Salka’s garage apartment for a trip to South America, Salka moved into the upstairs section of the garage and installed Auguste in the pine-paneled room downstairs, which Isherwood’s partner Bill Caskey had used as a darkroom. Salka cooked on an electric hot plate that Garbo had bought for her and hoped that her agent would find her another job. After her bills were paid each month, she had $150 left for herself and Auguste.
“The two of us need very little,” Salka wrote to Berthold. “We can live wonderfully on milk and fruit. Recently we have eaten meat once a week at most.” She went on: “I am going to plunge into another story and perhaps I will even dare to try a book.” For the first time she was thinking of writing a memoir, though it would be years before she began.
Salka later wrote that her Deep Valley days were “the last time I was to work at a major studio, but it took me several years to realize why.” There was no way for her to imagine how ruinous the red-baiting in Hollywood would become for her tenuous screenwriting career.
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SALKA TUNED IN EACH NIGHT THAT FALL OF 1947 to the radio broadcasts of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee investigation in Washington, which NBC and KNX recorded during each day’s events. Ever the actress, she fixed on their theatricality. “The Un-American Committee is giving a great performance and poor Hanns Eisler is still the target of the Inquisition,” she wrote to Berthold. “If the Communists had spent lots of money on propaganda they could not have done it better and more successfully.” Salka joined a fundraising committee in Eisler’s defense, along with Charlotte Dieterle and Lisl Henreid, the Vienna-born wife of Casablanca’s Paul Henreid. The proceedings were disastrous for Eisler, who submitted to three days of questioning in late September as a preliminary for the main show in October.
The Sun and Her Stars Page 32