The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Nancy Gillette, Daniel Greene, Rebecca Erbelding, Nancy Hartman

  Skirball Cultural Center Los Angeles: Adele Lander-Berk

  Margaret Herrick Library: Sandra Archer, Stacey Behlmer, Genevieve Maxwell

  New York Public Library: S. N. Behrman Archives; Yizkor Books

  Warner Bros. Archive

  Gesher Galicia website and organization: Shelley Pollero

  Los Angeles Public Library, Studio City Branch: heroes all

  For extraordinary assistance, encouragement, and collegiality, thanks to Doris Berger, formerly of the Skirball Cultural Center, now at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

  For their excellence as translators and for the content of their good character, my thanks go to Pamela Selwyn and Friedel Schmoranzer.

  For reading portions and drafts of the manuscript, for offering suggestions, and for general bolstering, thanks to Diane Arieff, Diana Wagman, Lienna Silver, Kerry Madden-Lunsford, Ella Taylor, Ellen Slezak, Susan Caggiano, Tod Mesirow, Jeffrey Silver, Kiffen Madden-Lunsford, Todd Porterfield, and MJ Witt. Special appreciation goes to Joseph Epstein, my longtime teacher and friend, for his comments on the “Birthday Party” section; to Heather Dundas for her gimlet-eyed sense and sensibility; and to Denise Hamilton, one of the first people to imagine what this book could be, whose participation in discussions and book borrowings was an ongoing pleasure.

  For lending books and/or talking with me about subjects and themes, thanks to Hillary Heydle, Tom Astle, Saralee Mel-nick, Bryan Berkett, Ellen Lancaster, Meryl Friedman, Steven Totland, Rod McLachlan, Sudi Khosropur, Ruth Cushner, Jeanette Miller, John McDole. Extra thanks to Meryl Friedman at CAP UCLA for organizing the panel discussion on émigré musicians at the Villa Aurora in January 2017.

  Thanks to the following friends for their professional expertise: Craig Semetko, Bob Boorstin. To Debi Frankle, for the words. To Niki Saccareccia, for the breath.

  To Jess Rifkind, Thelma Rifkind, Julie Rifkind, David Rifkind, and Arthur Purdy, whose incarnations of loving enthusiasm I’ll always remember and sorely miss. To Carol Steinberg, who gave me many important books, shared her abundant knowledge, and cheered me on. To Leonard Steinberg, Leslie Steinberg, Diane Kopit, Neal Steinberg, Helen Rifkind, and their families. To Dale Russakoff, for writing advice, everlasting kindness, and a thousand other things. To Thelma Purdy, Matthew Purdy, Amy Purdy, and my extended Purdy clan including the Kurtzes and Ari Holsten, thanks to you all.

  For their belief in this project from the beginning and for good-humored support throughout, my fond gratitude goes to my literary agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt.

  For her early and continuing faith in both the idea and the reality of this book, for her rigorous patience, keen editing, generous care and feeding and walks on the beach, deepest thanks to Judith Gurewich. My appreciation goes also to the smart, kind professionals at Other Press, with particular thanks to Alexandra Poreda, Yvonne Cárdenas, Janice Goldklang, Jessica Greer, Kevin Callahan, Julie Fry, and Gage Desser, and an additional note of thanks to Walter Havighurst for his thoughtful copyediting, and to Andreas Gurewich.

  And finally, thanks to my husband, Joseph Purdy, and my sons, Ben and Noah Purdy, for the sustenance and joy they bring me every day.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history”: Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s, p. 367.

  “systematically omitted from the accounts of the past…as though only men have participated in the events worthy of preservation”: Martin Sauter, Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle, and the European Film Fund, p. 60.

  Salka Viertel has the double distinction…of being both maligned and dismissed: The most salacious of these portraits of Salka appear in Here Lies the Heart by Mercedes de Acosta; The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan; and Ich liebe dich. Für immer: Greta Garbo und Salka Viertel by Nicole Nottelmann.

  “…and a horrible witch”: Kurt Weill to Lotte Lenya, from Speak Low (When You Speak Love): The Letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, p. 7.

  “the history of Hollywood, which is not yet written”: Gottfried Reinhardt, Der Liebhaber. Erinnerungen seines Sohnes Gottfried Reinhardt an Max Reinhardt (München: Droemer Knaur, 1973), p. 269. Cited in Helga Schreckenberger, academic lecture, “ ‘They Say Hollywood Is a Paradise!’: Salka Viertel’s Perseverence During Hollywood’s ‘Inquisition,’ ” p. 5.

  1: THE WISHING SEASON

  The Wishing Season: SV to S. N. Behrman, 12/21/70; calls the Christmas season “the wishing times”: SV to S. N. Behrman, Behrman Archives, NYPL.

  she ordered the cheapest new dresses she could find: Salka Viertel, Tagebuch 1957, 6/24/61, DLAM: “terribly expensive though I chose the cheapest.”

  even a tiny step-great-grandson now: Vicky Schulberg’s son Tom.

  Christine, her darling, her Puck and her Ariel: SV to S. N. Behrman, 1957: “she is the last grande passion of my life. Puck—Ariel—simply enchanting”; Behrman Archives, NYPL.

  for the Ukrainian servants: Salka Viertel, Kindness of Strangers (hereafter KOS), p. 164.

  to the distress of her American-born neighbors: ibid., p. 165.

  Forever uprooted: Tagebuch 1957, 2/17/61. “I am homesick for California and when I am there I long for Europe. Uprooted that’s what it’s called.”

  She thinks of this time as her exile in the Alps: “Darling Sam, you don’t know what you mean and have meant to me during all these years of exile in the Alps”: SV to S. N. Behrman, 9/16/67, Behrman Archives, NYPL.

  The rye and wheat fields; the orchards and the little forest: Tagebuch 1957, 6/16/57; KOS, pp. 2–3.

  The Committee had already succeeded in wrecking her livelihood: SV to Berthold Viertel, 10/3/47, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLAM): “Please don’t be alarmed if you hear my name. I have been warned that it may happen. But I don’t really believe it because in my case they have already succeeded in ruining my livelihood.”

  How strange to find herself…rosy-cheeked tourists: insights courtesy of Adam Shaw.

  likes to regale her with tales of her dead father’s Nazi past: Tagebuch, 7/9/61.

  approached to be kissed by every man in the room: ibid., 1/1/63: “Irwin kissed me first…” While married to Berthold, Salka was the romantic partner of director Gottfried Reinhardt from 1933 to 1943. Reinhardt married Silvia Hanlon Shapiro in 1944.

  For some reason she thinks of a time: ibid.,1957, 6/22/58.

  She has demonstrated it all her life: ibid., 6/8/62.

  with a slight hesitation in the step of the right leg: conversation with Elizabeth Frank.

  “the foreign family up the street”: KOS, p. 24.

  Peter sent a copy of The Canyon to Ernest Hemingway: Peter Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 33.

  Peter has found himself another Ersatzpapa, Orson Welles: Tagebuch, 12/20/62: “I know Peter likes Orson now with the same intensity as he loved Hemingway…Orson is an Ersatzpapa.”

  More recently they worked together on a doomed film: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, pp. 388–391.

  his bulk draped in acres of soft dark clothing: observations by Adam Shaw.

  he was loud and to her mind not terribly interesting…with a better education: Tagebuch, 12/27/62.

  He has recently finished making a film of Kafka’s The Trial…when no one else was interested: Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 244–248. The “blithe Russian” was Michael Sal-kind, an uncredited producer on The Joyless Street, whose grandson Ilya would later marry Charlie Chaplin’s daughter Jane.

  even as they praised him to the skies as a great genius of the cinema: Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 391.

  Orson told Salka…. the haunted hopelessness of refugees: Welles and Bogdan
ovich, This Is Orson Welles, pp. 244–247.

  Peter who seemed bored and impatient with his guests: Tagebuch, 12/27/62.

  It was the spring of 1918…the Eastern Front: KOS, pp. 79–81; Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 119.

  a shopkeeper’s attention: KOS, p. 82.

  a profusion of cherries to the markets…the Castle District: ibid., p. 82.

  They had rented a furnished room…and so he only stared: ibid., pp. 81–82.

  It is too depressing: Tagebuch, 2/12/63.

  At one point he’d been after Salka…Greta and Charlie Chaplin: Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, p. 137.

  This took place after Charlie’s Monsieur Verdoux unpleasantness…for all kinds of reasons: ibid., p. 135. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux is a 1947 black comedy based (Welles claimed) on a true story about a serial wife killer, a Frenchman named Henri Landru. (Chaplin suggested it was also inspired in part by another man, Thomas Wainwright, a nineteenth-century British forger.) The idea for the picture originated with Welles, who approached Chaplin about playing the lead. Chaplin decided he would rather write and direct his own version, and paid Welles $5,000 for the rights. Welles consented, with the stipulation that he be given a screen credit, to read “Idea suggested by Orson Welles.” The film was a box office flop in America, though more successful in Europe, and was praised by the likes of James Agee and Evelyn Waugh. Welles was sure he would have done a better job as its director, while Chaplin claimed Welles had little to do with the picture. Chaplin regretted giving Welles the screen credit, and neither man was thrilled with the other in the aftermath.

  Ah, Charlie…helping to save her Santa Monica house from foreclosure: KOS, pp. 290, 313.

  She last saw him…enchanting: Tagebuch, 9/27/62.

  Even Charlie thinks…is pretentious: Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 477.

  that frames the mountains and the lake: ibid., p. 476.

  and has always so hated to lose: Lillian Ross, Moments with Chaplin, p. 48.

  in their white cotton dresses and their pigtails: ibid. p. 43.

  “Bonjour, Charlot!”: ibid., p. 36.

  so that they look like feet: ibid., p. 48.

  Oona is unchanged: Tagebuch, 9/27/62.

  and they revel in the private indulgence: Ross, Moments with Chaplin, p. 37.

  He has asked her to read his memoirs…impress the reader with his vocabulary: Tagebuch, 9/27/62; and Ross, Moments with Chaplin, p. 50.

  But his philosophy…pompous and often wrong: Tagebuch, 9/27/62.

  When she visited him she did not have enough money to tip his servants: ibid., 9/27/62.

  She is flattered: Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 434.

  She would like to be remembered for her courage: Tagebuch, 2/17/51: “The greatest achievement of my life is probably to have created the image of a very courageous woman. Nobody will ever know what it has cost me.”

  “And meet the time as it seeks us”…his own haunted memoir: George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile, p. 8.

  2: CARRIED ACROSS

  The party Salka remembered…among the celebrated collection of Corots: Salka’s description of the party at the Mendelssohn villa appears in KOS, p. 125.

  Beware, oh wanderer, the road is walking too: This line from Rilke’s diary, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (“protect yourself wanderer / with the road that is walking too”) was changed into this formulation by the American poet Jim Harrison. The latter version appears as the epigraph to Joseph Kertes’s 2014 novel, The Afterlife of Stars, and in Harrison’s poem “After Ikkyu.”

  while singing the Horst Wessel Lied: KOS, p. 119. Most sources cite the song as having been written around 1929, which does not match Salka’s chronology, as she was in Düsseldorf in 1926 or 1927. She may have conflated it with other songs from the National Socialist Anthology songbook, cited by Lion Feuchtwanger in his 1933 novel The Oppermanns (“When Jewish blood spurts from the knife / Then all goes well again,” p. 158). Hertha Pauli cites similar lyrics in Break of Time; it seems evident that these anti-Semitic chants were common on German streets in these years.

  a weekly salary of $600…a travel allowance of $1,200: Katharina Prager, “Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!”: Salka Viertel—ein Leben in Theater und Film, p. 98.

  their “great adventure” would pay off: Berthold Viertel to Salka Viertel, undated (sometime before 8/20/27), DLAM; also ibid., p. 96.

  Peter had nearly died of pneumonia: KOS, p. 108.

  Hans had contracted scarlet fever: ibid., p. 115.

  “I would have stayed in Berlin”: ibid., p. 126.

  maybe they would stay longer: Berthold Viertel to Salka Viertel, 8/3/27, DLAM.

  while she spoke all the parts: KOS, p. 4.

  only slightly less vulgar than prostitutes: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 118.

  sometimes she appeared in playbills as Mea Steuermann…for others Viertel-Steuermann: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 31.

  “It saddens me deeply…But fate calls us and we must follow”: BV to SV, undated (before 8/20/27), DLAM.

  “Garçonnes…the Eldorado”: Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, pp. 66–67, quoting Stefan Zweig in Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge, pp. 128–129, and Zweig’s The World of Yesterday.

  “I was always hungry and cold…any money at all”: Friedrich, Before the Deluge, p. 122.

  that reflected the hurly-burly of contemporary Berlin: KOS, p. 104: Die Truppe would “bring back great but neglected plays of the past, and introduce meaningful ones of the present.”

  far too intellectual even for Berlin’s sophisticated audiences: KOS, pp. 106–108.

  Die Truppe continued its frail existence: ibid. p. 107.

  “We got paid every day…swept away by the value of the old ones”: ibid.

  But its death knell came in March 1924: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 74.

  a currency speculator seeking cultural cachet: Friedrich, Before the Deluge, p. 125, and Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 72. The speculator was a Viennese Jew named Richard Weininger, whose philosopher brother Otto Weininger became famous before his suicide at age twenty-three for publishing a crackpot thesis called Sex and Character that was both misogynistic and anti-Semitic and was later taken up as propaganda by the Nazis. Richard Weininger wrote to Salka on May 17, 1969, after her memoir had been published (Prager, p. 72), angrily refuting her version of the demise of Die Truppe and denouncing Salka’s abilities as an actress, and invoking his brother Otto’s name (“the glory of Die Truppe could have been multiplied by mentioning the name of the man who has a brother who wrote a work that’s translated into 18 languages”) as a way of defending his own actions.

  On April 24, 1954, Irwin Shaw published a short story in the New Yorker called “Instrument of Salvation” in which the main character is based on Salka during the period of Die Truppe’s demise. It’s likely that the story was inspired by an anecdote Salka herself told Shaw; according to Michael Shnayerson, Shaw’s biographer, Shaw rarely made up the situations on which his stories were based. In this one, the character based on Salka, here named Inge Clavered, reminisces about rejecting the sexual advances of the patron of her theater company, which caused him to revoke his financial support. Decades later, Inge reflects that this fateful decision saved the lives of her and her husband because the ensuing bankruptcy forced them to leave Germany before Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship in 1933.

  The Viertels declared bankruptcy: KOS, pp. 108–109.

  at the Volksbühne in Leipzig: ibid., 88 and 91.

  and to murder her make-believe children offstage: ibid., pp. 86 and 96–98.

  Mary Stuart in Düsseldorf: ibid. p. 118.

  Judith in Berlin: ibid., pp. 100 and 105.

  Romanisches Café: ibid., p. 101.

  all the important composers: ibid., p. 56.

  Be
rlin’s wild young things: ibid., p. 113.

  hoping the waiters would turn out the lights: ibid., p. 111.

  Nora, based on Ibsen’s Doll’s House for UFA in 1923: ibid., p. 102.

  F. W. Murnau asked Berthold to be the writer for his pictures: ibid., p. 116.

  and she a saucy Amazon…able to soften his Prussian inflexibility”: ibid., p 116.

  In November of 1927: www.tcm.com biography of F. W. Murnau. 38 just after staging Peer Gynt for Reinhardt’s theaters in Berlin: KOS, pp. 124–125.

  and the great Swedish director Mauritz Stiller: ibid., p. 102.

  a very young Greta Garbo: ibid., p. 111.

  Chaplin’s Little Tramp: ibid., p. 102.

  Salka had written a film treatment of her own: ibid., p. 111.

  the first new form of storytelling to come along in five hundred years: observation by William de Mille, quoted in Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, p. 310.

  “an immense political tool of the future”: “ungeheures politisches Mittel der Zukunft,” Katharina Prager, lecture on Berthold and Salka Viertel from “Quiet Invaders Revisited: A Workshop on Biographies of Austrian Immigrants to the United States in the 20th Century,” Vienna, June 18, 2015.

  “I often wish you had a worthier man…with all of my failings”: BV to SV, April 30, 1927, DLAM.

  twenty cigarettes a day…his frequent raging: BV to SV, August 3, 1927, DLAM.

  Ludwig Münz…Luise Dumont: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 87. In her memoir Salka mentions that Luise Dumont saw in Salka “what she had always longed for: a daughter” (KOS, p. 114), and tells the story of their alliance from first infatuation to later disenchantment. Letters between Salka and Berthold indicate that the relationship was complex, but it’s unclear whether there was a sexual component. Katharina Prager points out that several of these letters hint at the possibility of an actual love affair; in one, Salka links Ludwig Münz and Luise Dumont in a way that suggests she’s listing them together among her marital infidelities. SV to BV, September 4, 1928, DLAM; Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 87.