The Kindness of Strangers

by Salka Viertel

  My interview was brief but promising. Selznick authorized me to tell Upton Sinclair that he would like to see all the film Eisenstein had shot, as he intended to buy out the Pasadena group and finance the picture himself. Of course, he did not believe that eight thousand would be enough to finish it.

  That evening Eisenstein telephoned from Mexico and I told him of Selznick’s offer. Afterward I called Upton, repeated what Selznick had said and added that I had talked to Sergei. But Mrs. Sinclair was adamant. She was determined to call an end to the Mexican venture, and that was that. “Mr. Eisenstein was notified days ago that the production would be stopped. The film belongs to the Pasadena group and can neither be sold nor financed by anybody.” That was final.

  No one, not even Eisenstein himself, ever saw the assembled film in the form he had planned. It remains a magnificent “mutilated stump with the heart ripped out.”

  He and his companions waited a whole month in Laredo, Texas, for visas to the U.S. which they never got. We talked often over the telephone. Sometimes I could do him a small favor. Before he left America, he wrote:

  I am very sad because I am not going to see you anymore and I have the feeling that all I have to ask you this time is to send me a family photo of all of you. You and Berthold have been our best friends in the stormy and hard times. I hope the great distance will not interrupt our friendship. . . . [Then, recovering his boyish, unsophisticated humor:] Thanks to our guardian angel, Mr. Kimbrough, we are sitting now a month in this lousy hole . . . I remember that when they were shooting the Faust film in Berlin the publicity chief of UFA said to me: “Goethe intended Mephisto to be a mixture of filth and fire.” Three years later I saw the film and the same publicity man (now with another firm) added: “Unfortunately, we forgot the fire.” Mr. Kimbrough is also a mixture, but it is difficult for me to say of what.

  [And later:] . . . we are heading now for New York. We hope to cut the film in Moscow. I am really homesick and very glad about it. I have decided to change the plan of the whole film and to use everything I have shot, but in a different continuity. I hope it can be saved.

  Once again, Zalka, I thank you deeply for everything. You have helped me in the most difficult years of my life and this shall never be forgotten. I hope you won’t forget me either. Give my best wishes and greetings to Berthold and the whole family. When are you coming to Moscow? Anyhow, I shall see you.

  With my love forever . . .

  The last letter, in 1936, was from Moscow.

  I have just returned from the Caucasus where—strange as it may sound—I have been shooting a new film . . . I am slowly recovering from the blow of my Mexican experience. I have never worked on anything with such enthusiasm and what has happened to it is the greatest crime, even if I have to share the guilt. But there are things which have to be above all personal feelings. Let’s not talk about it anymore.

  25

  THE NEIGHBORLY RELATIONS with the Garretts developed into a friendship. I suppose that the differences in our background, tastes and opinions attracted us to each other, though I appeared to them very often as odd as they to me. Oliver was intelligent, talented, objective, liberal and emphatically unprejudiced, except when he discussed socialism.

  He came from a respected New England family, had enlisted in 1917 and loved to talk about the war, understating the dangers and exaggerating his fear; but the balance of both made him look very brave. After the Armistice he took a job with a newspaper in New York—I think it was The Sun or The World, and soon became a featured reporter. The gangster film Underworld, for which he wrote the scenario, brought him a long-term contract with Paramount and a most impressive salary. With their only child Peter, he and Louise lived comfortably on Mabery Road, in the corner house overlooking the Pacific. On Sunday afternoons his former New York colleagues, now also writing films, gathered on the front porch for drinks, shoptalk and nostalgic memories of the war. All were well-known journalists and successful dramatists. Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings had What Price Glory playing on Broadway for years; William Faulkner, small, thin, with a dark, drooping mustache, reserved, polite and taciturn, had just published As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary, and of course Warner Brothers had signed him. The producers never even looked at the scripts he wrote for them. (Many years later, when I was employed by that studio, I was asked to read the previous scenarios based on the novel I was adapting. One of them was unfinished and contained fifty pages written by Faulkner.) Edwin Justice Mayer, author of Firebrand, a Broadway success, worked for MGM, Sam N. Behrman made sporadic appearances at Fox, Dudley Nichols, Ralph Block, permanent refugees from journalism, wrote for Paramount, while Ben Hecht, with his Midas touch, commuted between Hollywood and New York.

  •

  In his novel Madame d’Ora, Johannes V. Jensen writes about a young American passionately in love with a middle-aged primadonna. She tries to ward off his infatuation by saying: “It’s not me you love—it’s Europe . . . For you I am San Marco, the Alps, Rome, Paris, the Italian lakes . . . you are infatuated with Europe.”

  Something similar must have taken hold of Oliver. For him also, I was part of that ancient, baffling continent of which he had caught a distorted glimpse during the war, and for which, like so many young Americans, he had brought home an unappeased longing. As he deeply distrusted all emotionalism, he rarely admitted it. “That sounds sensible,” was his strongest approval. In Louise’s sober and determined matter-of-factness, he had found his terra firma. Her lack of imagination irritated him, but it inspired confidence.

  They gave the impression of a happy, congenial couple, now and then in need of outside stimulation, but basically loyal to each other. As I had encountered similar American couples, I did not take their flirtations seriously. Toward me Oliver was chivalrous and protective, while other devoted husbands did not hesitate to “make passes” at the “foreign woman up the street.” My sons adored Oliver. He played football and baseball with them, and took them to the big games at the Los Angeles stadium.

  Meanwhile I had shown Peg Le Vino my outline of Christina and, eagerly, she offered to help me. The love story had to be invented; young Christina’s sentiments seemed to have been centered on her lady-in-waiting, but there were some indications that she had been ardently interested in Count Pimentelli, the handsome ambassador from Spain. The passionate affair with a Roman cardinal occurred only after her abdication, when she was forty and converted to Catholicism, but this would have been unacceptable in the film. Besides, Garbo was much too young to play a middle-aged woman.

  •

  Berthold meanwhile was finding New York more invigorating than the Hollywood atmosphere, or the idyllic isolation of the Santa Monica Canyon.

  Yes, I think this job was a godsend, though I have never felt as lonely in my whole life—so undecided and tormented. What I would like most is to sit in my hotel room, high above the city, secluded like a hermit. I am reading every morning about comparative religions, while in the afternoon I work on my film story. You will say that I am torn between Tallulah and Jeremiah, but without dwelling in the past millenniums I could not bear the present, the “Here” not without the “Days of Yore.” I am reading Hindu philosophy and at the same time devouring the daily news—gangster wars, economic crises, etc., etc. If only I could write down in my journal, step by step, the parallel thoughts as they come . . . But then one should not make a film. . . .

  I am forty-six and have not much time left. My first book was called Die Spur (The Trace). This meant that I had perceived the trace of an ideal life, but merely the trace. . . . The second book was Die Bahn (The Road). I started to write it in Kolendziany, and finished it in Hellerau. The Road began when I met you. I became aware of it for the first time in my letters to you, which are now moldering in Prague, and it is named after the last poem in the volume:

  The Road

  Night rises over the clearing.

  As the sun descends

  The indifferent watchman
/>
  Calls my hour.

  What is alien cannot rescue me.

  Oh! Where to turn?

  Nowhere, but the place of choice. . .

  That bare center.

  Only a strict yes counts,

  The trial spins,

  The verdict is cast like lead!

  Who can hold what leaves him?

  Haste will soon flee the runner.

  He turns around

  And stands along the way

  On his crown-point the road.*

  No one understood this poem, no one could understand this grandiose, frightening feeling, that the Road before me is not stretched out horizontally anymore, but threatens vertically, from the firmament, the top of my head. The Road, which otherwise leads toward the future, points like an exclamation at my head.

  This feeling has not left me for ten years. I am still under the sword, the inexorable Yes. It is still not fulfilled. The nervous groping, the search, continue. I am perhaps less nervous now, but sad. Berlin, Die Truppe, Dusseldorf and Hollywood . . . everything has been merely an experiment. Only you are the absolute Yes in my whole life, the only Yes I have never revoked.

  I was always aware of the conflict between Berthold’s vocation as a writer and his obsession with the theater. “Ein strenges Ja,” but about this strict Yes he could not decide! It meant trading the immediate results, the tangible success, the spontaneous applause, for days and nights of lonely struggle with one’s own soul.

  We had now spent fourteen years together; the many storms in our lives had often forced us to a change of direction, unwanted company and financial insecurity. I rebelled often, but I never felt that I was sacrificing anything. Security was not important to me; I did not believe it existed. As long as we had our work and each other, nothing could happen to us. I was much too adventurous to be seriously disturbed by economics. I knew I could always provide for my children. I felt young and strong; it never occurred to me that forty meant middle-age. That Berthold, at forty-six, could say “I have not much time left” infuriated me. I wrote him that he had become infected with the American age-consciousness! But as the phases of his Rabbinical mysticism, Hinduism and Chassidism were alternated with excursions to Harlem and Tallulah’s parties, I suspected that he was merely escaping the boredom of his film.

  I would read his letters, then call the ruinous long distance—and what a long distance it was!—and implore him to give up films. I said I would gladly adapt myself to any kind of life, provided it would be good for the children. If he wanted to return to Berlin I was willing to go back. I reminded him of a time in Leipzig when he was spending Christmas with me, and Stefan Zweig suddenly came to see us. I was changing Hans’s diapers when I heard him urging Berthold to give up the theater and remain his true self, a poet and a writer. Then Zweig burst into my room and reproached me for dragging Berthold into an underworld, unworthy of his talent and literary mission. I got angry and said that Berthold had been infatuated with the theater before I met him, but that I would be delighted if he gave up directing because then we could always be together. That I should renounce my profession was absurd, for financial reasons also.

  Now, in 1931, it was no longer a question of a career, or where I would function best. The world was just as insecure as in 1919, and our responsibilities were staggering. The Nazis, defeated at the polls by a small majority, were nevertheless gaining power in Germany, and anti-semitism and racism were spreading. I did not want to uproot my sons and impair their free and happy childhood.

  The Depression was at its worst. Hitler’s hideous, demented voice carried across the Atlantic, but I believed in the future. Often on the road I gave a ride to hitchhikers from the East Coast or the Middle West, who had come to California because it was less cold and hungry than back home. Our housekeeper, Jessie, kept a big pot of soup on the stove for them, when they came to the door. It reminded me of Niania feeding the Russian prisoners of war. But I listened to Roosevelt’s election speeches and was sure that the misery would not last.

  •

  All children in the Western world, even Jewish or half-Jewish, want a Christmas tree. At Wychylowka we held Christmas twice: the regular one on December 24, and two weeks later another for our Ukrainian servants. Both were made unforgettable by my mother’s generosity and her agnostic sense of humor. I could not imagine depriving my sons of the joys of my own childhood.

  In spite of the Depression, Christmas in Hollywood was more glittering, more exuberant, more alcoholic and more commercial than ever. Along the boulevards the poinsettia fields were glowing red, the Christmas trees were lit outdoors and indoors and each department store had several Santas. During my years in California they multiplied to such an extent that even the youngest children ceased to pay attention to them.

  Our boys were showered with gifts, from us, from our friends and from actors who had worked or wanted to work with Berthold. As usual we had a party on Christmas Eve for the “homeless,” but I had also asked our American friends, who celebrated on Christmas Day. Before we opened our presents I made a speech to the children, reminding them that Jesus was a Jew and had preached brotherhood and love of mankind. For that he had been persecuted and martyred. I was quite certain that I was the only one who was moved by my half-revolutionary, pan-religious address. My sons, Leo, Peter Garrett and the Spuhler children listened with politely controlled impatience, their eyes wandering to the heaps of beautifully wrapped packages. Much to Oliver’s discomfort, the tree was lit by wax candles, as I would not tolerate any electric bulbs. Oliver could not wait for them to burn down, so that he could switch on the safe “American lights.”

  After dinner Berthold called from New York and we all stood with our glasses around the telephone, singing “Jingle Bells” and wishing him a merry Christmas. Tommy was thrilled that Father was already in bed, while he was still up, playing with his toys.

  Right after Christmas the Garretts took their Peter to Yosemite, into the snow. My two big boys went with them but Tommy and I stayed at home. The rainy season had started; the days were short, dark and gloomy. Telegrams from Yosemite urged me to escape from the flooded Canyon to the “glorious, white, snow mountains.” I answered through Western Union, dictating into the telephone that I would not come, that the pouring rain fitted my deep depression. I went to bed and slept soundly until the ringing phone woke me. It was seven in the morning.

  “This is Western Union,” said a female voice. “I only wanted to tell you that the sun is shining. It’s such a lovely day! All night I worried about you, honey . . . your telegram sounded so sad.”

  Very moved, I thanked her. I was sorry—did sad telegrams always upset her so much?

  “Not always, honey,” she laughed, “but I loved that darling accent of yours.”

  Such was the beginning of my long friendship with the Santa Monica branch of the Western Union. For many, many years telegrams and cables, coming and going, were read or repeated to me by the gentle, drawling, nasal voice of my invisible friend. At the first sound of it I knew whether they were pleasant or sad. An intimate telegram she would read in a low, discreet voice, then add: “You want me to mail it to you, don’t you dear . . . ?” Often hurriedly, afraid to be caught by the superintendent, she wedged in her own troubles or her scarce pleasures. To her, in all those years, I never ceased to be young and persistently romantic. We never saw each other, although sometimes I went to the Western Union office hoping to find her there.

  * Translation by Thomas Viertel.

  26

  MY MOTHER KEPT US WELL INFORMED about all the events which occurred at Wychylowka and about everyone in the family. Her letters reflected her charm, her vitality, her impatient temper and irreverent humor; they informed us about Papa’s moods and professional worries in the new Poland, troubled by political dissent and a dismal economic situation. She was proud of Edward’s successes, regretting that he persisted in propagating Schoenberg’s music, for which she herself had only a limited a
ppreciation. The visits of Rose with her two children (Josef was now director of the Dresden State Theater) were the great summer joys; also Viktoria’s first communion and her progress in school. Mama mentioned lightly that a baby had been born to Hania, the pretty housekeeper, and gently indicated that the child was Dusko’s son. Dusko was playing for a famous Zionist soccer team, which took him to games all over Central Europe, and he was also winning many silver cups in tennis tournaments.

  The Polish Government was unifying the laws of the country which, from 1775 to 1918, had been divided between Russia, Germany and Austria. In spite of the endemic anti-semitism, my father was entrusted with the coordination of the liquor laws. He was eighty-one now.

  The nightmare of my childhood—my parents’ marital disagreements—had vanished in later years. Both had mellowed, and had acquired a sense of humor about their common failings. Even the difference in their ages seemed to be evenly balanced: Papa had retained his vigor and my mother had calmed down. He now liked to listen to music, especially Edward’s concerts, which they could hear on the radio. My mother wrote that he kept all my letters in his desk drawer and read them again and again. But clients were scarce, and finally my parents agreed to accept a monthly check from us. It was merely a feeble expression of our gratitude for their kindness, generosity and hospitality. The summers at Wychylowka had been our moral and physical regeneration.

  Without impresarios and publicity, Edward had become a well-known and respected pianist and teacher. His intransigent musicianship was attracting pupils of all nationalities. At that time he was the only outstanding interpreter of Schoenberg’s, Alban Berg’s and Anton von Webern’s piano compositions. His recitals of modern and classical music in Queens Hall, the Albert Hall and on the BBC were, to my parents’ delight, broadcast to Poland. Each month he taught a master class in Krakow and Lwow, which Mama rarely missed attending.