The Kindness of Strangers

by Salka Viertel

  “The unconcerned sunbathers on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown,” she writes at one point,

  the gigantic trucks rumbling on the highway, the supermarkets with their mountains of food, the studio with the oh-so-relaxed employees, the chatting extras pouring out from the stages at lunch time, the pompous executives marching to their “exclusive dining room” or the barbershop, stopping to flirt with the endearing “young talent”—all these familiar scenes were a nerve-wracking contrast to the war horror I constantly imagined.

  And indeed, throughout its extraordinary middle half, Salka’s memoir shifts back and forth between the grim comedy of life in the studios and the anguish of the war (the terrible reports of the slaughters on the various fronts as her sons, all the while, are coming of age and itching to hurl themselves into the fray; the increasingly desperate rumors of rampaging ethnic carnage as one by one she nevertheless manages to extract her sister and older brother and presently even her mother, the latter by way of an epic sequence of bureaucratic interventions, out of the maelstrom, her mother then coming to live with her, even as the fate of her youngest brother, the soccer player, grows increasingly uncertain).

  In the studios, however, Salka seemed to glide from success to success, her friendship with Garbo becoming ever more intimate and inseparable. Salka cobbled together and often coauthored the scripts for films in which the star got cast, variously, as the doctor’s adulterous wife in an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and then as Marie Walewska (Napoleon’s adulterous Polish lover), Marie Curie (the adulterous Polish Nobel prize–winning chemist, in a project from which Garbo was subsequently separated), and Anna Karenina (the legendary Russian . . . well, you get the idea). Salka is wonderful at telling stories of the hurdles these projects had to surmount: the meddling of midlevel studio muckymucks, and the countervailing antics in the various writers’ rooms. One of her favorite writing partners was Sam Behrman, such that

  When Sam asked me to dictate to the secretary the shots of Anna’s suicide, I truly regretted that this was the last scene of the film. Walking up and down I described the night train approaching relentlessly—the lights from the carriage windows on Anna’s face—her running down the embankment and throwing herself between the cars, then—a prostrated figure on the rails—the train disappearing in darkness—and last, a woman’s handbag on the embankment.

  “And that’s what’s left of a human being,” I concluded, almost in tears, and turned to Sam who burst into roars of laughter. For years these words remained our special code. We signed telegrams and letters with: “What’s left of a human being. . . .”

  Which, come to think of it, would have made a much, much better title for this book: Salka Viertel’s What’s Left of a Human Being.

  Because for all her success, the life was exhausting, and as the war came to an end, her own began to fall apart: Her marriage with Berthold was continuing to deteriorate, her own love affairs were ending badly, and the perversities of studio life were becoming less and less endurable. One day Brecht drove up to the house on Mabery Road, with a question: “Why shouldn’t we be able to do as well as any Hollywood hack?” To which she replied:

  Because what the producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece. When they have that, then they can ‘work on it’ and make it ‘commercial,’ to justify their high salaries.

  In 1947, Salka, now at Warner Brothers, was completing the screenplay for one of her relatively few non-Garbo, non-adulterous films—this one, Deep Valley, a vehicle for Ida Lupino and Dane Clark. One day the studio workers went out on strike, and Salka, like most of the writers, honored the picket line. She contributed to the strike fund as well, although her writing partner on the film refused to be intimidated by “communists” and ostentatiously crossed the line.

  “It was customary at Warner Brothers,” Salka writes, “that when a film was to be previewed, the producers, director, writers and technicians (but not the actors) who had worked on it dined with Mr. Warner.” And so, some months later, she reported to the executive dining room, noting her own sense that the enveloping mood doubtless mirrored “the Gemütlichkeit when Stalin’s staff was dining with their boss.” There Warner pontificated on the communist menace and how terribly the Soviets had treated the Jews during the war, finally turning to ask Salka’s opinion. No sooner did she speak, however, than the unctuous co-writer “interrupted smilingly: ‘Salka is a communist, Mr. Warner.’ It was supposed to be a joke—but it prompted Blanke [the film’s producer] to jump to my defense: ‘She is not!’ he said. ‘One need not be a communist to say that Soviet anti-semitism is not to be compared to the horrors that the Nazis committed.’ ”

  Be that as it may, and notwithstanding the subsequent success of the film’s premiere (after which Warner expressed particular satisfaction with the screenplay), that was to be the last time Salka worked in a major studio, “but it took me several years to realize why.”

  •

  Thus begins the final section, in some ways the saddest and most dispiriting, of Salka’s memoir. Blackballed, her means of livelihood began drying up, she diversified, teaching small acting classes and taking sub rosa writing assignments (notably including consulting on postproduction and then providing, without credit, the voice-over narration for Jean Renoir’s first color film, The River). To save money, she and her mother rented out the Mabery house, transposing themselves, along with a much loved dog, into the garage apartment out back.

  Salka was deeply lonesome, and her pages chronicling these years provide a different sort of illumination from her earlier chronicle of the cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century. Her book becomes instead a deep meditation on the nature of life and love, grace and forgiveness, equally valid and relevant perhaps for people in all places at all times. In this context, hers is a profoundly adult book—and I don’t mean in any XXX-rated sense, the way that word has come to be degraded over the years. In fact, on the contrary, her hard-won and generously shared insights get proffered in the context of a finely tuned discretion. Marta Feuchtwanger once told me how the really great thing about Salka’s book was “the stuff she left out.” Hers was no traditional Hollywood tell-all, though she certainly knew a great deal, having become the nexus of a great many people’s lives.‡

  A meditation on life and love, and indeed a profound love story, though one about not any single love but rather all the sorts of love—for parents, siblings, husband, lovers, children—that can fill out an individual life. Berthold and Salka were clearly the great loves of each other’s lives, and Salka writes movingly of the end of their marriage:

  It is terrifying how suddenly fate becomes invincible and how unsuspectingly we accept it. “When our marriage breaks up, I shall cease to exist,” Berthold once said. But in spite of all the things binding us, all the tenderness and love we had for each other, our marriage was not a marriage anymore. Torn and inconsistent, Odysseus resented bitterly that Penelope had not waited patiently for his return, though he himself had not renounced the Nausicaa’s.

  And though the two never renounced the love they continued to share, Salka writes with equal grace and verve about what came next for her, how “Much against my wish and my will I did not jump, but slid into a love affair, which to many people appeared quite insane”—this with the much younger son of Max Reinhardt, Gottfried, himself a rising force in studio production.

  “But what did your sons say?” I was asked by a woman, who had herself sacrificed her love, with the result that her children thought her a frustrated and embittered bore. I answered that my two older sons were now adolescents; they understood that I had a right to some happiness. [. . .] Psychoanalysts are convinced that children want good, simple, conventional moms and dads, preferably sexless; however, I am sure that my sons were not unduly disturbed by the fact that their parents had a compl
icated relationship.

  The “insanity” in question “gave me ten years of happiness and became a very serious commitment,” Salka insists, but then “the unavoidable but predictable occurred: Gottfried’s falling in love with a young woman he was soon to marry brought an end to our relationship. It is senseless,” she went on to note, “to compare one’s own grief with the enduring horror suffered by millions, but the consciousness of unspeakable tragedy makes sudden loneliness even more desperate and hopeless.”

  It was around this time, as the war (and that relationship) ended and the anti-communist hysteria began to take hold, that Salka also learned the probable fate of her brother Dusko. She received a letter from Viktoria, the beloved daughter of family servants, a girl who’d been raised as a virtual member of the Steuermann family. “In 1943,” Viktoria now reported, “he came to my house begging me to hide him, but as we were living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again.” She followed up this news with a request that “Salka, who had always been like a sister to me,” send a food parcel to her and the four children she’d had in the meantime. Appalled at the way this virtual member of the family had so “cruelly denied shelter to a hunted Jew,” Salka began tearfully to compose an angry letter of recrimination. But then she thought again, “tore up the letter, mailed a CARE package [. . .] and never told Mama what Viktoria had written.”

  All of which is to say that this was a woman of preternatural balance, judiciousness, and wisdom.§

  •

  “Estuary” is how Salka describes these later years (perhaps with a knowing nod back to the gypsy’s prophecy). The deaths continued to mount—Schoenberg (“Hollywood did not recognize his genius and only a few attended his funeral”), Max Reinhardt, Salka’s beloved mother, and presently even their dog. Still blacklisted, and no longer able to afford the Mabery Road home, Salka was forced to abandon it for more spare and quotidian lodgings a good deal farther from the sea—and then in 1953, she received word that Berthold, now settled in Vienna alongside the woman with whom he had long been living, was in failing health and longed to see her one last time. She immediately applied for a passport, preparing to travel to Europe, only to receive word, by way of an officious, long-winded, bureaucratic communiqué from the State Department in Washington, that her application had been denied on the grounds that “it has been alleged that you were a Communist.”

  Desperate, she loaded up a car with her few irreplaceable belongings (notably including a heavy suitcase brimming with the decades of correspondence that would come to constitute the basis for this memoir) and headed back East, intending to appeal her case in person. When she finally arrived, at length, in New York, her brother Edward, his eyes averted, had to inform her that it was too late, they had received word that Berthold had died the previous night. (He would be buried next to his friend Karl Kraus.)

  She carried on. She appealed her case, eventually achieving surcease, and at long last made her way to Europe, and to Klosters, Switzerland, where her novelist-scenarist son Peter (yet another stellar Steuermann) had recently settled with his wife and young daughter (upon whose birth the couple had decisively separated). And it is there that Salka ends her tale (and an odd place to end at that, given that she would live another decade before she published these memoirs, a decade she chose for some reason to occlude, and beyond which she would live for yet another two decades, only dying, in Klosters, in 1978, at age eighty-nine—for more on which, see her biographer Rifkind’s afterword to this volume). Ending it though on a perfect three-word note (and don’t spoil things for yourself, don’t go peeking ahead, let things come, let them come), the true summation of her essential nature and indeed the words by which the German translation of this memoir would eventually come to be titled.

  —LAWRENCE WESCHLER

  * Such passages give one to wonder whether it was precisely this capacity for succinct visualization that so excellently fitted Salka for the screenwriting career to come, or whether, conversely, her late-life recollections of those earlier years got recast and colored precisely by way of the scenarist efforts of the intervening decades.

  † I have frequently written on my grandfather’s life and on the wider context of the émigré surround in Los Angeles during the thirties, forties, and thereafter, notably in my piece for The Atlantic, “My Grandfather’s Last Tale,” and in “Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles” (which included a map to all of their homes), my contribution to the catalog for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1997 exhibition Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler—both of which can be found at www.lawrenceweschler.com.

  ‡ And I bracket out here the whole question of whether Salka and Garbo ever became actual lovers, a piece of gossip much speculated upon elsewhere. Indeed, Salka’s biographer Rifkind recently commented to me how often she got asked that question. “And who’s to say,” she continued. “There is evidence for and evidence against, we will likely never know, but what’s been fascinating to me is how obsessively fascinated everyone else is by the question, and what does that say about them? I will say this: Salka would have done anything for Greta, been there for her in any way she ever needed, and having lived through the Weimar years, she likely would not have harbored any puritanical misgivings at the prospect.”

  § Such sage and measured sorts of consideration appear to have especially endeared Salka to Isherwood, in whose diaries of the period she repeatedly appears, the two regularly sharing breakfast before the start of their busy days.

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  To my sister, Rose

  and

  to my sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas

  I

  LONG, LONG AGO, when I was very young, a gypsy woman said to me that I would escape heartbreak and misfortune as long as I lived close to water. I know that it is rather trite to begin a story with prophecies, especially when they are made by gypsies, but luckily this prediction did not come true. It was utterly irrelevant as far as the happiness or misery in my life was concerned, how near or how distant I might be to a body of water. But I cannot deny that some of my inner storms would subside when I looked at the crested waves of the Pacific or listened to the murmur of an Alpine brook. And so I could never forget the prophecy of the gypsy which also evoked the landscape of my childhood and the house near the river, where I lived and grew up. The name of the river was Dnjester. It was young and wild where we lived, flowing only a short distance from its source in the Carpathian mountains in a pebble-lined bed, shallow in some parts, then suddenly deep and turbulent in others, following an irregular and unregulated course to the Black Sea.

  The country of my birth was Galicia. It was that part of Poland which belonged to Austria after the division of 1775. Now it is called Carpatho-Ukraine and belongs to the Soviet Union. The town Sambor had a population of twenty-five thousand. There were approximately four thousand Poles, eighteen thousand Ukrainians and about three thousand five hundred Jews. It also had a garrison which was very important to the younger female population, regardless of creed or nationality.

  The town Sambor was two kilometers east of the river and of our place which was called “Wychylowka.” “Wychylac” in Polish means to lean out.

  My father’s law office was in town. After he had been elected mayor, the first Jew to achieve this honor, Wychylowka became a suburb of the city, because the mayor could not live outside its boundaries. It remained untouched by the new status, and for us children it made no difference whether it was called town or village. Between the house and the river were our fields and a meadow; beyond the river was the wide, gently rolling country, practically uninhabited, with potato and wheatfields, pastures and forests. The sunsets were blue and golden in summer, and purple-red in winter.

  Just across the road from our house was a wood. The “little forest” we called it. Old gnarled trees stood in sparse groups, and the cattle gra
zed on the grass which grew in between. Beyond them was a wide space of cultivated land, then the long, bluish chain of the Carpathian mountains loomed, distant and hazy on sunny days, and dark, gray-green, terribly close when rain and snowstorms were threatening.

  A large, empty lot on the east side separated our property from the only industrial establishment in the area: a liquor refinery, which had once belonged to my father’s family but was now (as was also the empty lot) in the possession of the wealthy Pan (Mr.) Tiger, with whom periodically my father was not on speaking terms.

  Farther down the road, leaning close to the little forest was old Lamet’s Kartschma, an ancient, wooden roadside inn where the peasants stopped on their way home from the market for a drink of vodka.

  Old Lamet was a strikingly handsome patriarch, very tall, erect, his beautiful, noble face framed by a long, snow-white beard. He wore the kaftan and skullcap of the Orthodox Jew. On the Sabbath the kaftan was of silk and his hat trimmed with mink. I still remember his extremely pleasant voice and the clear, unaccented Polish he spoke. On Friday evenings, sneaking through the little forest to the back window of the inn, I could see old Lamet sitting at the white-covered table, surrounded by sons and daughters and innumerable grandchildren, waiting for his wife, a small withered woman in a brown wig, to light the candles. Then he would say the blessing. As my parents never cared about any kind of religion and did not practice their own, all this was to me very mysterious and fascinating.