The Kindness of Strangers

by Salka Viertel

  •

  Shortly before Christmas I ran into Nelly Mann. She was laughing and joking and we made a date for lunch, but next morning she cancelled it. A few days later Katja Mann telephoned to say that Nelly had died. She had broken a probation for drunken driving and in her panic about appearing in court, she put an end to her constant tussle with the police, her struggle with a language she could never learn, her fear of aging, and her losing battle with liquor.

  She was to be buried at the peaceful Woodland Cemetery, which we so often passed driving on Pico Boulevard.

  The December sun was warm and pleasant. Nobody was there when I arrived; the earth mound at the freshly-dug grave was covered with an artificial lawn, such as they use on movie sets. On one side were six chairs and I sat down and waited. After a while a limousine-like hearse swung noiselessly and swiftly toward the grave. Two men took down the coffin, put it on a wheeled contraption, scattered a few gladioli on the top and placed it over the width of the grave. Then they stepped back and I could hear them quietly talking about baseball. Nelly in her coffin and I, sitting opposite her, waited patiently. Slowly the funeral guests began to gather. Thomas and Katja Mann, the Feuchtwangers, Helli Brecht, Ludwig Marcuse, Liesl Frank and I; also Toni Spuhler, who had befriended and helped Nelly in her personal and domestic troubles. The last to arrive was Heinrich Mann, large, heavy, stooped by grief. After a long pause the undertaker, a solemn young man, looked at his watch. There was still another ten minutes until the appointed hour and if anyone wanted to say a few words . . . Vehemently Heinrich Mann shook his head and the young man stepped back. After another moment of indecision he cleared his throat, took out a prayer book and with a reproachful look at us all began to read “The Lord is my shepherd.” He read fast and without punctuation. When he had finished, we got up and waited for the coffin to be lowered into the grave. But such realistic and distressing things do not take place at a Hollywood funeral: to become dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the dead wait until the mourners have discreetly withdrawn.

  The solemn young man shook the widower’s hand and left. With a tearing, muffled sob, Heinrich Mann turned, and covering his ravaged face with his handkerchief, stumbled away. It was gruesome. Katja ran after him, took his arm and led him to her car.

  “They should have had a priest,” said my mother when I told her about the funeral. “That’s what religion is for. It gives funerals more dignity.”

  “Dearest, dearest Berthold,” I wrote. “Nelly’s death was the last, sad event of this depressing year. The new one must be better. I wish you, Liesel, Edward, Margaret and Hans, my big Hans who is now with you, a very happy Christmas. I embrace you all in endless love. The cigarettes, which I bought on the black market, are a reluctantly-given present and against my conviction, but if they make you happy. . . .”

  39

  THE WAR YEARS WERE TELLING on my mother. After the liberation of Sambor there was no response to our attempts of communication. We both had bad premonitions, but to each other we pretended that common sense had persuaded Dusko to flee with the retreating Russians. The other, humble working people like Hania, her son Adam, and Viktoria, were not Jews, and to some extent protected by their Ukrainian nationality. It was impossible to conceal from Mama the pictures of the concentration camps, which appeared in newspapers and Life magazine. On such days she stayed in her room and I would find her in her chair by the window, her elbow on the armrest, and her eyes covered with her hand. An open book was always in her lap. When I approached she would look up and say: “I am only resting my eyes.” She was reading Albertine Disparue, and she insisted that it fascinated her. Having taken it at random from the bookshelf she refused to start with Swann’s Way. “It is too late for me to go through the whole of Proust.”

  She liked to keep me company when I was cooking and she chopped and peeled whatever was necessary. This always brought back memories of Polish and Russian recipes, Papa’s likes and dislikes and Niania’s wise old sayings—Niania had been dead for many years—but Mama remembered them well and they were as apropos in California as they had been at Wychylowka. After a while we would cease talking and plunge into our separate gloom. The evening broadcasts of the Southern California Gas Company were a blessing. We listened devotedly to music. She was touchingly grateful for the least bit of attention, especially if shown by her grandsons. It was difficult for her to follow a general conversation and she refused to wear a hearing aid, but when Edward arrived to spend his summer vacation with us she immediately was rejuvenated and even her hearing improved. Edward was now recognized in America as a master performer of contemporary music, his reputation as an outstanding teacher was established, and in summer pupils followed him even to California. Mama was proud but not completely satisfied. Her musicality, this first, great source of artistic experience in our youth, did not readily appreciate the twelve-tone system. She understood Mahler and Debussy. Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Webern depressed her. She liked the Gurre Lieder, The Transfigured Night, some pieces of Pierrot Lunaire; for the rest, she confessed: “It’s hard to understand.” She considered it a handicap to his career that Edward had chosen to be the prophet of this Messiah.

  That summer Clara Silvers, a very lovely girl with black hair and dark eyes, was a frequent guest in our house. She was Edward’s pupil and one did not have to be a keen observer to notice that she and Edward were in love. But as he was thirty years older, Edward fought hard against his feelings. Clara’s devotion, her love and understanding for his artistic struggle were victorious. All of us, Mama, Berthold, Rose in far away Argentina, and I, received her lovingly into the circle which had always bound us so intensely together. Edward’s second marriage brightened Mama’s last years.

  When Berthold and I said farewell at the Los Angeles station, when arm in arm with me he wanted to challenge the world, we did not know that it was to be the last time we would be together. Letters, telegrams, telephone calls continued, but trips across the continent were too costly. All Berthold and Liesel could afford in summer were a few weeks in the country, somewhere in the East, while I was tied to the house by lack of money and taking care of Mama. And so another year went by, a year in which I found that detours, although leading to a desired goal, can become too long and too arduous. I had been scrubbing, washing, ironing, cooking, digging and weeding, while a book was emerging slowly but clearly from dreams and memories. It was like brushing away cobwebs in an unused cupboard. But when, exhausted from physical work, I sat down at my desk, I felt as if thick gray ashes were choking a smoldering log. Why didn’t I let the house go dirty, neglect the garden, the dogs? I could not. It was Niania’s heritage, her tidy peasant mind that had a firm grip on me and made me loathe disintegration. I wrote to Berthold:

  I woke up this morning and looked at the ocean. It was leaden gray, the whole canyon shrouded in fog. I went downstairs to make breakfast; then the telephone rang and Else Reinhardt said in a choked voice: “Have you heard? Roosevelt is dead.” My knees gave way, just like when we had the earthquake.

  I am sure you also are terribly sad. I know we are winning the war and I know Roosevelt’s death will not affect its outcome, but it is as if one had suffered a great personal loss.

  Dear Berthold, you must not reproach me when I do not write often. Fatigue—I could call it “combat fatigue”—prevents me. My letters would be depressing, but I know Mama writes for me. She is well and my “paying guest,” Ruth Berlau, who moved into the room next to the garage, amuses her.

  Ruth Berlau was Brecht’s friend and secretary. She was young and attractive and her faulty German, with a Danish accent, made everything she said original and funny. Brecht was working with Charles Laughton on his Galileo; Laughton translating it into English and completely hypnotized by the author. He carried the manuscript under his arm to read aloud at the slightest provocation. Only, when Brecht was around he confined himself to Shakespeare or the Bible.

  Helli Brecht and I went on shopping expeditions. M
y brave little convertible did not use much gasoline and we would drive downtown to the Grand Central Market. There, for ten or twelve dollars, we could buy food for a whole week. The Grand Central Market was, and I assume still is, enormous, interracial, multilingual, unbearably crowded, cheap and fascinating. At the stalls previously owned by Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos now stood behind mounds of fruit and vegetables. If only one could send some of it to Europe.

  Peter was now a lieutenant in the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Service) in Germany. He described in his letters the misery and the terrible destruction: and of course, no one had ever been a Nazi. The fierceness of the hopeless “last stand” contradicted this. The Russians were in Berlin. The well-known streets were now a bloody, senseless battlefield. But to prevent one from having pity for the German people, new concentration camps and Gestapo murders with their infernal gruesomeness were discovered. When finally Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves in the bunker, a British newspaper quoted Shakespeare: “The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.” Still, the day was not ours and bloody dogs were still on the loose.

  The war in the Pacific went on and the U.S. Draft Boards were recruiting and reclassifying. When the 4F’s appeared for new physical examinations Hans came home and announced: “Mother, they’ve taken me!” He said that he had presented himself without his hearing aid and had been declared fit. I had never seen him so happy. However, at the induction center he could not manage without his helpful device. For a while no one paid attention to it; some of the soldiers thought that it was a new kind of walkie-talkie, until one day his lieutenant stopped him, exclaiming: “Man, what are you doing in the army?” and sent him to the commander. Later Hans, in his reserved manner, repeated to me the dialogue he had with the benevolent superior, in which he punctiliously tried not to appear “a flag-waving idiot.” He insisted that he wanted to serve, mentioned his good knowledge of German and his fair one of French and was immediately assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (C.I.C.), which urgently needed bilingual men. He was sent East for his training and a few weeks later shipped to Germany. Needless to say, he was excited. As correspondence with German citizens was still forbidden, I had asked him to take a letter to our dear old Louise Wenzel and mail it abroad. I knew she had been bombed out and I had been thinking of her with great concern.

  Shortly after Hans left, Brecht drove up one morning in his battered Ford and said that it was utterly ridiculous to have financial worries, when he and I could put our brains together and invent a saleable film story. I was very flattered that he considered my brain good enough to be “put together” with his, but he was not joking; he suggested that we work two hours a day and write a strictly commercial story. We were to commit ourselves to abide by the rules and respect Hollywood taboos which, after my years at MGM, I thoroughly knew. “Why shouldn’t we be able to do as well as any Hollywood hack?” he asked.

  “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.”

  Brecht bit into his cigar and assured me that we could write our story in such a way that they would not notice what a highbrow masterpiece it was. But we had to proceed scientifically, soberly and objectively. I felt that his suggestion was prompted by his desire to help me and to cheer me up, and I was very moved.

  The first thing we promised each other was never to consider anything from an ideological or “artistic” viewpoint. We had to be shrewd and invent situations and characters for the Hollywood market. We must begin with a survey of stars who needed “vehicles.” Everyone was writing war stories and there was not much material for women stars, so it had to be “a woman’s story.” Garbo was out of the question; she was too special. We had to think of a simple, humorous, warm, ordinary personality (he thought Gene Kelly had these qualities, but he was not a woman star)—Barbara Stanwyck? Myrna Loy? Well, we had to have the story first, then worry about casting. Whatever ideas we tried, whatever subject we broached, we always came back to the war, and finally our main character emerged as a heroine of the French Resistance. All I remember now is that her husband was a prisoner of war in Germany and returned after France was liberated. But before leaving Paris a vengeful SS officer had shaved the young woman’s head to make her appear as a “collaboratrice.” This was the premise and the main conflict of the story. Brecht insisted that for the larger part of the film the actress playing the role remain hairless. I pleaded that at least she wear a scarf and reminded him of our pact, but his only concession was that at the beginning we see her brushing her long hair. The more we discussed it the more stubborn Brecht became about the clean-shaven scalp of the leading lady, and soon I also got used to it, comforted by the thought that as the film went on the hair would grow at least half an inch.

  In due course we discarded our basic agreement. We found that we needed the advice of someone who knew France and the French better than we, and I suggested Vladimir Pozner. Brecht was pleased to enlarge our “unit” and we both agreed to share our future riches with Volodja, evenly dividing by three the impressive sum we expected to get. He liked our story and every morning at ten we met in my house, working until one p.m. We nominated Frieda, the dachshund Jigee had left with me, as our producer.

  Frieda was fourteen years old, very fat and moody. She hated and tyrannized over my two big dogs, Sherry and Prinz, who, awed by her authoritarian manner and sharp bark, withdrew at the mere sight of her. She barely tolerated the members of my family, but adored Brecht. In the morning she waited for him and when she heard his car, she quickly took her place on the living room couch. Approximately every half hour she would jump down, waddle over to Brecht, sit up on her hind legs and look at him expressively. Obligingly, he would rise from his chair, escort her to the glass door leading to the garden and open it for her with a deep bow. Then, after a pee on my poor lawn, she returned, scratched at the door and Brecht would get up, cross the room with his light, swift steps and again with exquisite politeness hold the door for her to come in. Neither I nor Volodja were permitted to interfere with this ritual. In her wicked flirtatiousness Frieda interminably prolonged her entrance, exploiting to the hilt Brecht’s attention. I even noticed that she often went out for no other reason than to observe him through the glass door. He was indignant when in protest against her constant exits and entrances I locked her in my room.

  We finished the outline and dictated the story to Tamara Comstock, a young friend of mine, an American, who was also the umpire and peace-maker when the three of us showed conflicting preferences in our English vocabulary. But it turned out a good story and we believed in it. Alas, no studio wanted to buy it and no star could be induced to shave her head.

  I have often been asked: “What kind of person was Brecht?” and I can only say: “He was a slight man, polite and considerate, who never uttered a banality. When he expressed an opinion, it was always as extraordinary and original as his poems, his prose, his plays.” His complete lack of pose was his most striking attribute, also his shrewd humor and, if there is such a thing, his elusive simplicity. In heated discussions he remained deceptively calm and polite, although he could be very sharp, sarcastic and impatient. Often he would smile his Chinese smile, but not laugh, I mean really laugh loud and heartily like, for example, his wife, whom he always spoke of as die Weigel.

  It is not easy to be a domestic slavey, but Helli never complained. Fifteen years later, in Paris, I saw her play Mother Courage with the Berliner Ensemble. The Sarah Bernhardt Theater was packed and after the last curtain the audience stood and cheered. When I went backstage Helli, in the dressing room of the great Sarah, was sitting in front of a huge gilded mirror, press photographers crowding around her clicking their cameras. The room was filled with French, German and English-speaking admirers and many who were curious to meet an actres
s “from behind the Iron Curtain.” She saw me, extricated herself from the crowd and embracing me, exclaimed: “I am glad you could see that I can do something else besides bake a Gugelhupf. . . .”

  Shortly before National Socialism collapsed, Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin and Berthold founded the Aurora Verlag in New York, which was to publish books for the hoped for “new Germany.”

  That year, 1945, was Berthold’s sixtieth birthday. Two actresses, Eleonora von Mendelssohn and Mady Christians, headed a committee, and for some technical reason decided to celebrate it two months before its actual date which was in June. Berthold’s report to me showed how pleased he was with the evening.

  Dearest Salka: You cannot imagine how happy you made me, with your letter, and Tommy with his poem. I wrote to Mama and have sent her the Austro-American Tribune with the review of the evening. Edward played beautifully, Eleonora read my poems, Polgar made a charming speech and did not forget to mention you, which moved me especially. Bassermann was simply marvelous, and a great event. Homolka read a scene from my play. Mady Christians as the “chairman” was so excited, as if this would be her most decisive première. Piscator painstakingly enumerated every play I have ever done on the stage. The list seemed endless and boring, but the audience was interested. At the end I had to speak and said that I consider this celebration a symbolic homage to all who are in exile and that today one should be twenty years old, not sixty. It’s a shame you were not there. I wish you could see all the letters and poems. Garbo came and was much noticed but not bothered. She called me afterwards and the next day we lunched together. Now she is on her way to California. You must have received the telegram Karin Michaelis, Ruth Berlau and I have sent you . . . The most heart-warming letters came from Thomas Mann, Dieterle, Einstein, Vicki Baum, Hanns Eisler, Feuchtwanger, Karin Michaelis, Renoir, Stiedry, Alfred Döblin, Ludwig Roth, Otto Zoff, Zuckmayer, Upton Sinclair and, of course, Heinrich Mann and Brecht; also from Kortner, although stressing the “differences.” Perhaps the dearest of all was Bruno Frank’s letter. His beautiful poem came too late to be included in the program. Next morning at breakfast Liesel and I wondered where to get the housekeeping money for the coming week. Please don’t be alarmed, there are all kinds of prospects. Also, don’t worry about the summer—we have taken a house in Vermont. I am too superstitious to speak about the things I am planning. Is it true that you may go to London to do Shaw’s St. Joan for Greta? Have you and Virginia any news from Peter? This letter goes on without paragraphs because of the joyous feeling you gave me with yours.