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THE UNCONCERNED SUNBATHERS on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown, 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 to the barbershop, stopping to flirt with the endearing “young talent”—all these familiar scenes were a nerve-racking contrast to the war horror I constantly imagined. It did not help to tell myself that at least the bombings had ceased; what was life under Soviet rule like? The silence exasperated me. I also heard nothing from Vienna. All I knew was that my brother-in-law was staging operas in Buenos Aires; but had it been possible for Rose and the children to join him? I did not dare to cable her. Berthold had had reports that the German pogroms were nothing compared to the barbarism of the Austrian Nazis.
“Years of the Devil,” my secretary Etta had written on the folder which contained the tragic letters from Austria, Prague and France. How well I remember the evening after the Molotov report came out, when Bertolt Brecht and a friend, Ruth Berlau, were sitting by the fireplace in my home and I said how guilty I felt because I had been spared. Next morning I found under my door a poem Brecht had written:
Ich weiss natürlich: einzig durch Glück
Habe ich so viele Freunde überlebt. Aber heute Nacht im Traum
Hörte ich diese Freunde von mir sagen: “Die Stärkeren überleben”
Und ich hasste mich.
It seemed inconceivable that with their many connections, with British and American friends (influential politicians and foreign correspondents), Camil and Irma Hoffmann, these two kindest and gentlest people, had to die in Auschwitz. Camil’s last letter, in his precise, neat handwriting, thanked me for an affidavit I had got for his son Jan, and concluded: “We are staying here in Prague in an old house, having renounced a vacation trip because of the rainy summer. We cannot complain of boredom: thanks to the ‘world theater’ there is no lack of distraction.”
Later I was told that while they were interned in Theresienstadt the Nazis, giving in to international pressure, offered to release Camil but not Irma. He rejected the perfidious offer and they were both shipped to Auschwitz.
Walter Hasenclever committed suicide in France, Ernst Toiler in New York. Berthold had seen him three days before he killed himself:
We had lunch together and he seemed so depressed that I hesitated to leave him. He told me about his insomnia and his utter hopelessness. I also had the impression that he needed money, but he denied it and now I read in the papers that he has left a substantial bank account. He was uncertain if he should go to England or stay in New York, and it was obvious that it was impossible for him to make any decision whatsoever. Nevertheless, I thought that he would conquer this depression. He showed such warmth towards me that I felt he had become more concerned for others and that in many ways he was beginning to find his true self. However, he no longer had the strength. In spite of his numerous contacts he was utterly alone and in spite of all his desperate activity people had lost confidence in him. One cannot stop thinking: if only he had not done it! But who can judge. . . .
This autumn of tears and anxiety brought also an unexpected joy. I had been reproaching Peter for spending more time on the tennis court than at his studies and one day he retorted. “How long can you support me?” I said: “Until you have a profession.”
“All right, let’s make a deal,” he said. “If I get a job I won’t have to study! if I don’t, I’ll go back to school.”
“It’s a deal.”
Weeks went by and there was no indication whatever that Peter was looking for a job or playing less tennis, and I was confident that he would be enrolling at U.C.L.A. the next summer. Then, one evening, he appeared in tennis shorts, a racquet in his hand, and nonchalantly dropped a letter into my lap. It was from Harcourt and Brace, and said: “Dear Mr. Viertel: We are happy to inform you that your novel The Canyon has been accepted by us for publication.” What’s more, they offered him an advance. I was defeated.
The Canyon appeared in 1940, and critics unanimously expressed great hopes for the nineteen-year-old author. The book described a group of adventurous youngsters and adults, inhabitants of the Santa Monica Canyon, as it was when we first moved there. It was dedicated to “the foreign family up the street and to Anne.” I never asked who Anne was.
After the war broke out, more Europeans moved into the Canyon. One of them was Christopher Isherwood, boyishly handsome, blue-eyed and, as Berthold had described him, with a great sense of humor. We saw a lot of each other as we also had friends in common: the Huxleys, Iris Tree, John Houseman, Klaus and Erika Mann. MGM signed him up to write screenplays, which he seemed to enjoy for a while. As the war went on he left to work with the Quakers. I felt that, at that time, he was going through great emotional strain.
Andrew, a thirteen-year-old refugee, son of Leonhard Frank (author of Karl und Anna and Die Räuberbande), joined our household. His parents were divorced. The mother, Lena, was in the East, struggling for a new existence, and until she could achieve it I offered to take care of Andrew. He was Tommy’s age and extremely intelligent and lovable. Then Berthold’s niece Susan, his sister Helene’s daughter, arrived with an eight-month-old son. Her husband, St. John Mann, was an officer in the British Navy. As his duties took him far away from England, she and the baby came to stay with me. Of course Etta worried about the permanent overdrawing of my bank account, but admitted that there was nothing else we could do.
Ninotchka was in full production. Lubitsch came to my office every day, telling me what scenes they had shot and how wonderful Garbo was. And he maintained that considering his bitterness about the Stalin-Hitler pact, the film was not anti-Soviet. Piled up on my desk were novels and plays which the story department thought “excellent Garbo material.”
I don’t remember what provoked Gottfried and Sam Hoffenstein to urge me to take an agent, but they were convinced that Paul Kohner would represent my interests better than myself. I had known Paul since our early days in Hollywood when he was a producer at Universal, and as our large household urgently demanded a greater income I said that I would be glad to have him as my agent. Paul agreed that I was underpaid: six hundred and fifty dollars a week was peanuts and I deserved twice as much. I was sending hundreds of dollars to Europe as well as large sums which, from time to time, unknown people with Jewish names, in Sweden or Switzerland, requested for my mother. It was impossible to investigate these demands; I refused to risk my mother’s safety because someone might be taking advantage of me. (Later I found out that Mama and Dusko had received only a fraction of what I had sent.) Also Christmas was approaching and there was a long list of people I had to remember.
On the day Kohner was supposed to discuss my contract with Eddie Mannix I came home just as the telephone rang, and picked up the receiver. Steeling himself to firmness, the story editor informed me that he was taking me off the payroll. I remember that I said “thank you,” although I still don’t know why. Then he hung up.
As soon as I recovered from the shock, I phoned Kohner. He was flabbergasted. He said that Mannix had angrily refused to raise my salary, but that he should also fire me was quite unexpected. Gottfried came and reported that Mannix was furious that I had let an agent “barge in between us.” After all, for seven years MGM had voluntarily increased my weekly check.
“She should see if Kohner can get her a better job,” he shouted.
Bernie phoned and advised me to apologize to Mannix, but I refused. It was my right to be represented by an agent. Paul Kohner took up the challenge and said he would get me a job in another studio. It would take some time, as Christmas was so near. I had to be brave and optimistic. Roosevelt’s reelection to a third term, with Henry Wallace as Vice President, was a comforting victory. For the first time in my life I voted and took an “active part in democratic procedure.” M
y now twenty-one-year-old Hans, although pleased that Roosevelt had won, had voted for the Socialist Norman Thomas.
The work at the Reinhardt studio had taken Hans away from politics, but the murder of Trotsky in Mexico brought him, and me also subsequently, in contact with the young Trotskyites again. At first it appeared that Trotsky was only dangerously wounded and his adherents tried sending a famous Los Angeles brain surgeon to Mexico. They needed money and asked me if I could help. As I was already unable to pay my own expenses I thought of Ernst Lubitsch and Edward G. Robinson. Lubitsch had never said “no” when I asked him for money, and Robinson, who knew Trotsky personally from a visit to Mexico, had told me repeatedly how impressed he had been with the old man. Ernst gave me a hundred dollars in cash, Robinson a check for a hundred and fifty, made out in my name, and I added a hundred myself. But Trotsky died that same day and the distressed young people begged me to send the money to his widow. I am mentioning all this not because I want to give the impression of having been close to a historical event, but because my natural and human action was to have unforeseen consequences later, in the McCarthy era.
Worries and anxieties multiplied. In spite of the repeal of the embargo, Peter was sure that America would remain neutral and that he would never have a chance to fight the Nazis. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” Roosevelt promised American mothers. So Peter secretly tried to enlist in the Canadian RAF. He was rejected twice because his eyesight did not meet the requirements of the recruiting board. The third time he told me frankly that he was going to Vancouver and invited me to accompany him part of the way. It was June and we drove through the Yosemite Valley, along the Merced river swollen by hundreds of cascading waterfalls, its banks a jungle of fragrant wild lilac. This exuberant bloom could not dispell the visions of destruction and death into which my son was so eager to rush, just as life was offering him so much. I understood his decision but I did not want him to enlist in a “foreign” army; as a matter of fact, unheroic mother that I was, I did not want him to enlist in any army. I dreaded the thought of his being a pilot and my only hope was that my former housekeeper, Jessie’s husband, was on the recruiting board. War or peace, the world is rather small when you think of it. Peter came home, as the only job offered him was in the coast defense artillery for which he had no taste; and for the time being I could breathe again.
To better my financial situation I was contemplating all kinds of moves. My favorite plan was to forget about the movies or stage and to open a restaurant either in Santa Monica or in Beverly Hills, but preferably in the Canyon. My friends praised the food in my house extravagantly and I had great success as a cook, but even the generous Ernst Lubitsch refused to finance me, saying: “You’ll be feeding the whole town for nothing.”
I thought of a hotdog stand which according to my sons, would be a “gold mine,” or a goulash wagon on the beach; but all these plans provided only amusement at the dinner table and a lot of teasing from Gottfried, who prophesied that after a few weeks of punitive exile I would return, a prodigal daughter, to Eddie Mannix’s open arms. Looking back I don’t know whether it was lucky that Paul Kohner sold “my services” to Warner Brothers. For the moment it was a triumph and an enormous financial relief. Nevertheless in the long run the hotdog stand might have given us more permanent security. Anyway, I got an assignment which paid a thousand dollars a week. The mortgage on the house was taken care of, at least temporarily; and I could afford to raise the wages of the young refugee couple, Walter and Hedy Herlitschek, who kept house for us. (They changed their name to Herley as soon as they touched ground in the U.S.). Walter had been a salesman in a chic haberdashery shop in Vienna, Hedy a dressmaker; now she was a cook, Walter a “butler-chauffeur.” Without bewailing their prosperous past, the majority of refugees grabbed any kind of work to provide for their families and the old and sick they had to leave behind and for whom the gates of the promised land would never open. It was easier for the women to get jobs, and many supported their men and children by catering at parties, and introducing the Sachertorte and Apfelstrudel to American palates. They washed, cleaned and sewed. As the defense industries were absorbing more and more workers and giving greater opportunities to Negroes, the demand for “domestics” benefited the refugees.
In May, 1940, Berthold wrote from New York:
Dearest Salka: I am not reproaching you for not writing long letters, as I know how busy you are, but in times of great and small failures the ear becomes sensitive to voices which do not penetrate the distance. By “small failure” I mean our production of The Gray Farm. The great failure is the world tragedy which destroys so many and so much. It’s true that the ultimate decision has not fallen. Don’t be upset when I confess, only to you and to no one else, that the imminent conquest of Paris does not aggravate my diabetes so much as the bombings of London and Berlin. It is impossible for me to mourn empires and cathedrals. I mourn only the people, confused, misled and apostatical as the human race might be. If the entire so-called culture would become one huge heap of rubble and a new world, cleansed of the Nazi pest, would emerge, my days would end in complete happiness.
I have not heard from C. From Helene only one letter. Have you any news from Mama? For the moment she seems safe. However, the final reckoning between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia will inexorably come. Perhaps some people, the poor like my old aunt Nelli, can be saved by their kindness, harmlessness and proletarian sanctity. Those are their three guardian angels. Also Helene belongs to those dear venerated souls, which nothing can defeat since they are poor, so poor that they have given up the last shred of Jewish bourgeois pretentiousness.
As for me: The Gray Farm will close in a week. Until now the audiences like it and are not influenced by the bad reviews. I see Edward often; it always purifies my soul. I miss Tommy.
And often I think of what Gottfried is going through in these tragic days of Hitler’s victories. Please give him my sympathy. It’s noon, and again the horrible Job’s messages: “The Germans are attacking in torrents of manpower.” “General Gamelin has issued an order to his soldiers that they must let themselves be killed on the spot.”
Can this onslaught be stopped or is all resistance, as far as the old world is concerned, ten years too late? Perhaps Europe must be given up, although the confrontation with Russia and the Slavic world is unavoidable. Will this happen in our lifetime? Everything will be decided with terrific speed in the next few years. Last news: the British are bombing Germany.
I embrace you and the sons.
Your,
Berthold.
In the late summer of 1940 a letter from my mother arrived, written on March 12th. She wrote in French and complained about lack of news from me, having only received my cables. She was well and had moved into a “petite maisonette” not too far from Wychylowka which had been “nationalized.” All five of them: Hania, little Adam, Viktoria, Dusko and Mama, shared one room and kitchen.
However, everything has a good side: Dusko has a job. The Soviets made him chief of the physical culture section and he has an office and a secretary. He works from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, and for an extra salary he also coaches the soccer team “Spartacus.” His Russian superiors appreciate him and in spite of all the horrors we went through, I am thankful that he has become a responsible human being. I have no words to describe Hania’s selflessness and sacrifice; she has been wonderful. She and Viktoria are employed in a cooperative. Adam goes to school. He is a dear boy and a very good pupil. Alas, I am over the age limit to apply for work, but am keeping busy in our little household. There is no anti-semitism and no discrimination, but there are many things about which I’d rather talk to you and Edward personally. The worst were the bombings. No one can imagine the horror of that. Write soon, my dearest children. How are the boys, Margret, Berthold? I have no radio, no newspapers—we are cut off completely . . . Perhaps one day I will see you, but when? Which ocean could I cr
oss? . . . [And then a sentence which made me laugh and cry:] Is the film about Marie Curie Sklodowska finished?
At last, the State Department notified me that Mama’s visa had been forwarded from Bucharest to the American Embassy in Moscow. I cabled her to apply for permission to leave Sambor. Letters always took two or three months. To my indescribable joy, Rose and her children, who had been in great danger in Vienna, were on a Greek steamer on their way to Buenos Aires, where Josef was waiting for them.
•
It was toward the end of my Warner Brothers assignment that my secretary excitedly announced a call from Mr. Mannix and his rasping voice shouted: “When are you coming back? Don’t you miss me? Have you finished your script?”
“I am finishing this week.”
“Well, come and see me. Don’t sign with anybody before we have a talk, but don’t send me Kohner!”
Paul Kohner was generous. He said he would not represent me if I returned to MGM, but that I should insist on the same salary I had at Warner Brothers. Determined to stand my ground I went to Mannix. He embraced me, said he loved me and that MGM was one big family to which we both belonged, and I needed no agent as long as he, Mannix, was taking care of me! I said that Mr. Kohner got me a very good job at a much higher salary. But Mannix explained that for the thousand dollars I had been earning at Warners, I would pay higher taxes, plus 10 percent to my agent, and would keep much less than the seven hundred and fifty he offered me. His mathematics were compelling. As I could neither add nor subtract as rapidly as he, I gave in. We embraced and kissed. Outside his office I realized that the seven fifty were by no means tax free. . . .
The Kindness of Strangers Page 33