The Sun and Her Stars
Page 39
$250,000 per picture…her own director and costars: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 285; Paris, Garbo, pp. 284–285. Garbo signed the contract on July 9, 1932.
“masculine education and complicated sexuality…contemporary character”: KOS, p. 152.
recently founded the Progressive School…Bertrand Russell: memories of Christine O’Sullivan.
the last time in Piłsudski’s Poland that Jews and Gentiles would mourn together: KOS, pp. 167–168.
“The Depression was at its worst…was sure that the misery would not last”: ibid., p. 164.
the Viertels would need to apply for an Immigration Quota: ibid., p. 168.
often proved so daunting that many were too discouraged to apply: Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, pp. 31–32; www.ushmm.org, “Roosevelt and the Refugee Crisis.”
Berthold and Tommy were applying for an Austrian quota number…and Salka for a Polish: KOS, p. 168.
they could then reenter as legal immigrants who had declared an intention to become permanent citizens: P. Viertel, Bicycle on the Beach, p. 7.
reminded him of the joyless streets of Berlin: ibid., pp. 7–10.
“yet I felt frightened at the thought of losing America forever”: ibid., p. 9.
“that I was safe again in the land of the free”: ibid., p. 10.
to see his father, who had become seriously ill: KOS, p. 170.
“This is Mr. Thalberg,” said Garbo: ibid., p. 169.
“I would not produce it if I did not think it would make a great picture”: ibid., p. 169.
4: THE HOUSE OF METRO
“Movies aren’t made, they’re re-made”: Thalberg quoted in Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, p. 63.
though the film did not appear until 1938: Gavin Lambert, Norma Shearer, p. 197.
240,000 Jews had already fled during the previous decade: Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, p. 18.
Before leaving school at around age twelve: ibid., p. 24.
always desolately hungry: ibid., pp. 21–22.
“The habit of a rapid pace…all his life”: ibid., pp. 22–23.
its assets holding steady at $130 million: ibid., p. 170.
“the greatest money-making proposition ever put on the screen”: Paris, Garbo, p. 284.
“Other studios made fantastic offers”: KOS, p. 152.
the freedom to approve film subjects…portrait photographers: Paris, Garbo, p. 285; Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 7.
The first film under the terms of her new contract: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 174.
surrounded by ugly apartment buildings and dingy shops: Swenson, Greta Garbo, pp. 22–23.
to pretend she was sunbathing on an elegant white beach: ibid., p. 25.
a soap-lather girl: Paris, Garbo, p. 21.
A few days after they were turned away from the hospital: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 33; Paris, Garbo, p. 18.
one of the most prestigious drama schools in the world: Swenson, Greta Garbo, pp. 42–43.
“Greta Garbo had something that nobody had ever seen on the screen…You could see thought”: Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, p. 148, quoted in Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 237.
“Her shoes were run down at the heels…she was a total loss”: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 11.
John Gilbert, whom she almost married in 1926: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 123.
“I was lonely—and I couldn’t speak English”: ibid., p. 313, quoting S. N. Behrman, People in a Diary, p. 151.
she took a room at the Hotel Miramar…walking along the shore: Paris, Garbo, p. 90.
as film historian Cari Beauchamp has noted: Beauchamp quoted in The Story of Film, PBS, 2011.
when Salka walked through…to meet again with Irving Thalberg: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 175.
They filled the story department…Mary McDonald: Stephen Bingen, Michael Troyan, and Stephen X. Sylvester, Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, p. 77.
a Mayer family recipe: Louis B. Mayer’s mother’s matzoh-ball soup: “Take nine fat, two-year-old kosher hens for every three gallons of liquid, stewing them overnight, then separating the broth from the chicken. Add chunks of chicken and delicate matzoh balls”: ibid., p. 62.
where two doctors and a dentist were always on call: ibid., p. 78.
A whole floor of the wardrobe building: Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production, p. 4.
she had approval on the final editing of every film the studio released during her tenure: Obituary for Margaret Booth by Ronald Bergan, The Guardian, 2002.
Kate Corbaley in the reading department: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, p. 301; and biography of Kate Corbaley on www.imdb.com.
Louis B. Mayer’s executive assistant, Ida Koverman…Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign: Bingen, Troyan, and Sylvester, Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, p. 27; and Hill, Never Done, p. 145 onward.
Mayer’s personal physician…were women: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, pp. 64 and 562.
or to pit them against one another when those tactics proved useful: Lenore Coffee, Storyline: Reflections of a Hollywood Screenwriter, quoted in Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, p. 93.
“A mouse at the feast”: Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Women of Early Hollywood, p. 11.
“Pardon me, Mr. Thalberg—it’s putting one right word after another”: Bob Thomas, Thalberg: Life and Legend, p. 183.
Rounding up her dignity…she said her goodbyes and walked out: Salka’s recounting of this episode appears in KOS, pp. 172–173.
“I should never have been so generous to Peg as to let her share the credit”: Tagebuch, June 21, 1959, DLAM.
“All during that ordeal…I hope I will learn to cope with it”: KOS, p. 173.
three of Garbo’s hits: Meredyth’s screen credits for Garbo pictures at Metro were for The Mysterious Lady and A Woman of Affairs, both 1928, and Romance, 1930.
Paul Bern: The forty-two-year-old Bern was found dead the following month, under suspicious circumstances. He was said to have committed suicide, but there were hints that he may have been murdered. The studio threw itself into damage control, anxious to downplay the scandal to protect its investment in Bern’s widow, the sexy blond actress Jean Harlow, whose new film Red Dust was about to be released. Thalberg was deeply shaken by the death of his close friend and colleague, which could only have underscored his fears about his own ill health and mortality.
had supervised the German version of Anna Christie: Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, p. 295.
“Marvelous, Irving…becomes an important film”: KOS, p. 174.
She had composed the Christina treatment…to transcribe onto the page: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 150. (“Peg LeVino is an excellent audience and her excitement when I play a scene enlightens me and makes me suffer at the same time”: SV to BV, November 12, 1931, DLAM.)
“My inventions were pure theater”: KOS, p. 175.
“You had a very bad entrée…She has written great films”: ibid.
“Handled with taste…very interesting scenes”: ibid.
it was at this point that she decided she liked Thalberg very much: ibid.
“a knowing, blasé attitude toward lesbianism”: Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, p. 16.
“Everyone had to be a lesbian in the thirties”: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 260.
“Interestingly…that’s the first bit of juicy gossip you hear”: Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life, p. 346.
“Salka was AC/DC”: Irene Mayer Selznick quoted in Paris, Garbo, p. 263.
and strenuously denied that she and Garbo ever had a sexual relationship: conversation with Tom Wallace.
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br /> Salka, “as everyone, might well have been attracted to Garbo”: Paris, Garbo, p. 263.
“was not the target but the weapon…to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere”: William J. Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969, p. 41, quoting Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963).
“wildness” and “wantonness”: review of Josephine Baker from Berliner Tageblatt, January 4, 1926, quoted in Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, p. 171.
would come to be called, for the Garbo film, Christina Court: Sylvester, Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot, pp. 172–173.
a gigantic proto-Disney World dining emporium…and minstrels in blackface performed: Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts, p. 54; “Cabaret Berlin” blog, www.cabaret-berlin.com, April 3, 2012.
The frenzied language of Hitler’s speeches…copied from American cinema: Larson, In the Garden of Beasts, p. 134, citing Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich.
“You ask how Europe is, Salka?”: KOS, p. 177.
the pervasive influence of National Socialism: ibid. p. 179.
“The Eden bar and other night spots…does it give you a picture?”: ibid., pp. 177–178; and BV to SV, November 9, 1932, DLAM.
“On every street corner…but the strike continues”: KOS, p. 179.
“perhaps it will inspire you”: BV to SV, November 9, 1932, DLAM.
“he would forget bank notes in hotel rooms”: KOS, p. 187.
“What should I say to that?…I am only planning the future in the ‘we’ form”: BV to SV, December 9, 1932, call # 78.860-23, DLAM.
He was weighing the offer of a job from Alexander Korda…on the Continent: KOS, p. 180.
“Alas, I am sure…settle down and finish your books”: ibid., p. 180.
“In business terms…Are you already so disheartened?”: BV to SV, October 7, 1932, DLAM.
Garbo remained in Sweden and Salka began to doubt that the picture would ever get made: KOS, p. 178.
may even have suffered a heart attack: Thalberg’s heart attack occurred on December 25, 1932.
She was stirred by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speeches and was sorry she was unable to vote: ibid., p. 179.
where with uncontested authority she took dominion everywhere: the observation, with its homage to the line from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” is from Elizabeth Frank.
This became clear to her…when…the studio appointed Walter Wanger to serve as producer on Christina: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 177.
“assistant and artistic advisor”; “full of snappy dialogue and anachronistic ‘Lubitsch touches’ ”: KOS, p. 183.
while Vajda accused Salka of exploiting her position as Garbo’s personal friend: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 155, fn 661.
“the prototype of a modern woman, who…shrinks from both marriage and maternity”: H. M. Harwood’s review of script, March 23, 1933, quoted in Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 178.
With the actress’s support: Vieira, Greta Garbo, pp. 179–180.
“Salka has overcome all these difficulties by her own strength…she knows exactly what she owes to Salka and tells her, too”: BV to Auguste Steuermann, August 2, 1933, quoted in Prager, “Ich bin,” pp. 154–155.
seeing no “cultural necessity” for him to be working in Germany: KOS, p. 185.
“sheer madness to do this film in such times” and “a blond, blue-eyed giant”: ibid., p. 185.
“Foreigner” was already a dirty word: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, p. 123.
Metro’s Berlin representative…then resettled in London, where the studio hastily moved its European operations base: Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, pp. 23–33.
“One can really say that the world is coming to an end in Europe…it will be a question to what degree we saved ourselves from it”: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 159; BV to SV, February 15, 1933, and March 9, 10, 20, 27, and 30, 1933, DLAM.
“expurgated from the culture of the Third Reich”: KOS, p. 186.
In April, the first general boycott…and listened without comment: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, pp. 122 and 124.
“Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn human beings”: www.ushmm.org, “Book Burnings.”
“The era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end!…From its ruins will arise victorious the lord of a new spirit”: www.ushmm.org, “Books Burn as Goebbels Speaks.”
“See the black souls of the Jews fly away”: Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 46.
They would be lucky to be kept alive, and many would be sent to concentration camps: ibid., p. 88.
“regardless of how much worse it was going to get…in these first months”: Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, p. 48.
“Hitler is the triumph of the German Spiesser”: KOS, p. 186.
Its writers began to organize into a guild: ibid., pp. 186–187.
it might have been caused by deep drilling in nearby oil fields: “So. Cal’s deadliest quake may have been caused by oil drilling, study says,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2016.
She warned Berthold as well that his visa would expire if he did not return in July: KOS, p. 187.
“I was sure…that after all his wanderings Odysseus would be pleased to have a home”: ibid., p. 188.
the Viertel boys, dreaming of summer vacation…the student’s lamp Salka had bought: P. Viertel, Bicycle on the Beach, p. 30.
Vicki Baum, whose two sons had become friendly with Hans and Peter: KOS, p. 174.
Salka read the Yiddish writer…moved them all to tears: ibid., p. 180.
in the mouse-infested writers’ building: Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, p. 91.
gaining a reputation as “Garbo specialists”: Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo, Queen Christina (BFI Film Classics), p. 14.
“As long as I know that you are well…your Jewish girl from Sambor”: SV to S. N. Behrman, September 22, 1964, Behrman Archives, NYPL.
which contained more historical fidelity than Vajda’s or Harwood’s versions: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 162, upon reviewing multiple drafts of the script at the Margaret Herrick Library.
at least ten writers worked on iterations of the script…Ben Hecht: Peter Hay, MGM: When the Lion Roars, p. 74. Harvey Gates wrote the famous final scene in which Garbo stares into the distance from the prow of a ship: Prager, “Ich bin,” pp. 100–101.
Mark A. Vieira’s suggestions…that more or less became the shooting script: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 280.
the similarity of the sets, camera angles, and action would have been evident to audiences who had seen both pictures: credit for this insight to Horak, Girls Will Be Boys; see also the book’s film stills on pp. 211–212.
“To the unreasonable tyranny of the mob…I shall not submit”: Queen Christina [script]; Rouben Mamoulian; 1933, Dialogue cutting continuity, December 22, 1933, Script Collection, AMPAS (Unpublished), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
“Friends and strangers wrote to me praising it”: KOS, p. 197.
One of the reasons Salka feared so for Berthold’s safety…a weekly magazine serving as the organ for the pacifist left in Germany: ibid., p. 186.
“Nothing…you must make your mind and your heart a complete blank”: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 189, quoting Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors, p. 292.
“knights of the inkwell”: quoted in Palmier, Weimar in Exile, p. 23.
played for a robust forty-four days after its 1943 premiere…who in turn regarded him with absolute authority”: Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, pp. 108, 126.
“Did I ever tell you…and her pacifism”: SV to S. N. Behrman, September 27, 1968, Behrman Archives, NYPL.
“to think of you and me slaving away in
the Thalberg building to provide a thrill for the Stalin girl”: S. N. Behrman to SV, October 11, 1967, Behrman Archives, NYPL.
“a daily consultant in matters of historical importance”: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 303.
at the hands of the scene designer Alexander Toluboff…and the country inn: Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent, pp. 110–111.
William H. Daniels…with whom he’d worked regularly early in his career: Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo, Queen Christina, p. 12.
The final candidate, proposed by Salka, was Rouben Mamoulian: BV to SV, undated 1934, call # 78.864/3, DLAM: “even Mamoulian…was your suggestion…”
Mamoulian was born…Drama societies and orchestras thrived”: David Luhrssen, Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen, p. 9.
Garbo was sold on Salka’s suggestion…Marlene Dietrich: Swenson, Greta Garbo, p. 304.
as if eager to trade his foreignness for the demeanor of an East Coast gentleman: Vieira, Greta Garbo, p. 178, quoting Maria Riva (Marlene Dietrich’s daughter).
“to come to my house and go over new problems…sure that only he himself could find the solution”: KOS, p. 192.
Thalberg was fond of saying that every great film must have one great scene: Vieira, Irving Thalberg, p. 37.
“I long to be a human being, a longing I cannot suppress”: Queen Christina, Script Collection, AMPAS (Unpublished), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
“the audience will write in whatever emotion they feel should be there”: Paris, Garbo, p. 306, quoting Mamoulian interview with Kevin Brownlow, 1970.
“This has to be sheer poetry and feeling”: Paris, Garbo, p. 301.
“In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room”: Queen Christina, Script Collection, AMPAS (Unpublished), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“This was the suitcase he bought in America…I remember when he bought them in Turkey”: ibid., pp. 300–301.