The Kindness of Strangers

by Salka Viertel

  The huge, gray mansion which John Huston had rented was crowded with guests. Peter embraced me, and introduced the very lovely Bettina, a lost soul among the hunters, writers, John’s assistants and secretaries. The occasion for the gathering was Tim Durant’s marriage to an American divorcée, which had been planned to take place during the meet, with everyone on horse-back. It had to be postponed, because a few days before a woman had been killed riding to hounds and there were six weeks of mourning. Ricky, Huston’s beautiful wife, was an emphatically gracious hostess, while he divided his day between horses and working on a screenplay with Peter. In spite of the mourning, everyone was very cheerful.

  I liked Bettina: she was, as Jigee had written, “utterly adorable.” She told me that she had been trying for weeks, with the help of a dictionary, to read Peter’s novel, The Canyon. Peter looked well, his book White Hunter, Black Heart, had just appeared and although the fascinating hero was modeled on John Huston, it had not disturbed their friendship. He had arranged with Irwin Shaw, who was in Klosters, that I surprise Jigee on New Year’s Eve at a party in the Chesa Grischuna. There was not enough time left to visit Hans in London, but he was expecting me later, on my way back to the States, when we would spend more time together. So, on December 30 I flew from Dublin to Paris to embrace the Achards and Pozners. Then, the next morning, I boarded the train to Klosters.

  During the two days in Dublin I had hardly slept, and the brief hours in Paris were exhausting. The transition from America to Ireland had been too abrupt, too sudden. Dublin was as Joyce had described it—or did I imagine that? I promised myself to explore it the next time I went there. Meanwhile, the train was carrying me to Klosters, which I could hardly find on the map, and it seemed to take the longest time. My heart was pounding and I had a steady humming in my ears. The windows were covered with frost, the countryside invisible. All the compartments were packed with people in ski-pants and parkas, and from Basle on, the German sounded so foreign that I could not understand a word. It was like a traumatic recurrence of my Gastspiel in Zurich, when in the thick fog I could not find the theater.

  It was dark when I changed into the Klosters/Davos train, which was so crowded that I had to stand between two broad-shouldered skiers, and every time the train took a curve I bumped into one of them. They did not seem to mind. Everyone was elated because it had been snowing for a week. The train stopped often, and at each station more skiers got on. One of the men I had been leaning on pointed to a just vacated seat, and I was starting toward it when a lady, who had overheard me mention that I was getting off at Klosters, said that Klosters was the next stop and the train would halt for only three minutes. I extricated myself from the embrace of the two skiers, who helped me to find my suitcases and I got off into the coldest, purest air, which cut my breath. Hundreds of people were on the platform but no porter in sight. Then I heard a scream: “Salka, Salka!” and Jigee in ski-pants and a black anorak pushed through the crowd and crying and laughing, we clung to each other. The next minute, Irwin Shaw, suntanned, bursting with vitality and more dear than ever, embraced me. He had told Jigee that some of his friends were arriving and suggested she go with him to the station. As she was utterly unaware of who was coming, the surprise worked even better than planned.

  Of course, the first thing I wanted was to see Christine. But Jigee insisted that my first hours in Klosters belonged to her. “Once you have seen Christine we will all cease to exist.” She refused to take me home. Vicky had gone to a party with school-friends and we could talk undisturbed at the Hotel Chesa Grischuna. We walked there in the starlit winter night, the snow crunching under our feet. I had not seen such a night and so much snow since my childhood.

  Irwin left. We would see him and Marian later at the New Year’s party in the Chesa. I realized that the Chesa was the center of Klosters’s social activities. Jigee only permitted me to wash my face and hands, but would not let me change. We sat down in a corner of the empty restaurant. It was in the Swiss style, paneled with carved wood, elegant and comfortable. The owner, Mrs. Guler, a young, handsome woman, said that there was no room in the hotel, but invited me to spend the night in her own place. Peter had informed her about my coming and she had reserved a room for me in the Hotel Weisskreuz, only a few steps from the Chesa, but it would not be free until the next day.

  She left us, and Jigee and I began our marathon talk, constantly interrupted by laughter and tears. Things we could not say in our letters poured out without restraint. I could not help noticing that she had made a certain image of herself, which was quite at odds with reality. She was full of contradictions but insisted upon her consistency. She had written me that she lived in Klosters because she loved skiing, but it came out that she hardly ever went on the slopes because she could not stand the cold. But this was unimportant. She could not accept that Peter, who had passionately loved her, had fallen in love with someone else. It was useless to remind her that she herself had not been immune from falling in love. She only felt her own suffering and refused to admit having ever inflicted it upon others. But Peter was very generous toward her and she wanted his friendship. She knew that the right solution for her was to go back to the States and start a new life, but she had no intention of doing so.

  The restaurant had filled with people in evening clothes, and in our pullovers, and with our tearful eyes, we looked quite out of place. Marian and Irwin, Anatol Litvak, Robert Capa, Jigee’s British friend Colette Harrison, embraced me. Chic people from Hollywood and New York greeted me, but everything was unreal and scrambled, like in a kaleidoscope. At midnight, the lights went off, then on again, and the old year was gone. Jigee and I were crying again. She lifted her glass: “To Vicky and Christine and to Peter, Hans and Tommy.” Then Irwin and Marian clicked glasses with us, also Capa, with surprising tenderness. By then my reactions became more and more automatic and when Doris Guler finally came and offered to take me home, I clung to her like a drowning man to a lifebelt.

  •

  The white glare outside the window woke me. I was lying in a spotlessly white bed in a charming bedroom in a completely silent house. I looked out of the window; everything was covered with snow, huge mounds of snow, and not a soul to be seen. It was eight. I took a bath, dressed and went out. As I passed the Chesa Grischuna I saw that it was open and went in to get breakfast. I wanted to kill time until I could see Christine. Jigee had told me that she would be up at nine. The Chesa was spic and span and no one could have guessed that a large crowd had been dancing there until the early morning hours. Four sedate, pipe-smoking Swiss sat at a table, drinking red wine and playing cards. I had my cup of coffee and a croissant, then asked a pretty waitress in a Grisons costume if she knew how I could get to Frau Viertel’s house. I had noticed that Jigee was very popular at the Chesa. The waitress described the way: I only had to cross the bridge over the river and walk to the last house at the end of the village, before the road turned uphill.

  It was a perfect winter morning—almost too perfect, too much like a picture postcard. The sky incredibly clear and blue, the high mountains surrounding the valley not threatening at all, and everything white, white, dazzlingly white, the branches of the firs bending under the loads of snow. A river flowed through the valley which, to the east, was closed by the Silvretta glacier, transparent and glittering like a huge bluish crystal. Scattered on both sides of the river were chalets and farmhouses, neat and well-kept, many old ones weather-beaten but stately.

  I passed the Hotel Weisskreuz, where my luggage was just being unloaded, then the Silvretta Hotel, from which American skiers were loudly emerging, and continued through the village street. From the stables on the ground floor of the old wooden houses came steaming warmth and the smell of cows; I heard their low mooing. Then I saw the house where Jigee lived. I could hardly breathe and felt like crying. “It’s the altitude,” I told myself.

  The house was old, 1773 was engraved over its door, and Jigee’s apartment, “Ferienwohnung
” they called it, was on the ground floor. In front of the house was a child’s sleigh with a blanket, ready to go for a ride. The door was open and I went in. I found myself in a dark hall. After a while I discerned a big tile stove in which a good fire was burning. I could hear whispering behind a door, which I approached on tiptoe and opened. In a spacious kitchen, warm and light, a beautiful young woman was sitting at a large table eating her breakfast, while a very small, delicate creature, in a dirndl dress and white apron, was pulling a toy wagon with a teddybear in it. She trod loudly on the floor with her sturdy shoes and the young woman was shooshing her. She stood still when she saw me. I called: “Christine!” She came toward me slowly, stopping now and then, smiling with her blue eyes, which had Berthold’s dark lashes. Her hair was light blond, like Peter’s when he was her age. I picked her up and held her while she looked me over very seriously, touched my white hair cautiously, then, with gleeful laughter, buried both hands in it. A tidal wave of tenderness and love engulfed my incorrigible heart.

  AFTERWORD

  SALKA VIERTEL CHOSE to end her memoir at a hopeful moment, on New Year’s Day of 1954. With her habitual optimism she described a sunny morning in the Swiss resort town of Klosters, in which she first met her two-year-old granddaughter, Christine. Salka was then in her vigorous mid-sixties and ready to fall in love again. And fall she did, giving away her heart to the little girl who resembled both Salka’s middle son, Peter, and Salka herself. She confessed in her diary several years later that “without Christine I don’t know how I can live.”

  The following spring, unable to pay the mortgage on her beloved home in Santa Monica, Salka sold it to her old friend John Houseman. She never stopped regretting her surrender of the house, the “port of entry,” as she described it, through which so many of Hitler’s traumatized exiles had crossed to safety in America. Without a home Salka was as untethered as the thousands for whom she had cared. Her next seven years were given to itinerancy as she helped to raise her granddaughter, following Christine and Christine’s mother, Jigee Viertel, back to California, then to Manhattan in 1956, then back to California again in 1958.

  All the while Salka continued to hustle for television and screenwriting jobs in the States and abroad, venturing to Munich in early 1956 for story conferences. She earned credits on two more pictures, both European productions: Loves of Three Queens starring Hedy Lamarr (1954) and Prisoner of the Volga (1959).

  The money Salka earned was not enough to remain solvent, much less to provide for others as she had done during her Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer heyday. In the end it was her dwindling finances, combined with a family tragedy, that propelled her out of Los Angeles and toward her final exile in the Swiss Alps.

  The tragedy came on the heels of Peter’s failed marriage to Jigee. He had fallen in love with the British actress Deborah Kerr and pressured Jigee into a divorce. Heartbroken, and unable to combat an addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills, Jigee lapsed into near incapacitation. Late one night in mid-December 1959, in the bathroom of her rented house in Pacific Palisades, while fumbling to light a cigarette Jigee set her nylon nightgown on fire. Suffering massive burns, she lingered in the hospital for five weeks and died on February 1, 1960, at age forty-four.

  Immediately Peter arranged for eight-year-old Christine to join his and Kerr’s household in Klosters. Salka went along reluctantly, too deeply invested in Christine’s welfare to abandon her. She moved into a little apartment above a butcher shop, not far from the town center, and began to settle into a vastly new life. Almost as quickly, Christine was sent off to boarding school in England, returning only for brief holidays and dashing Salka’s hopes of influencing her granddaughter’s upbringing.

  But even in Alpine exile, Salka’s life over the next eighteen years was filled, as always, with visitors. Klosters came alive during the Christmas season, bringing old Hollywood friends and many movie stars who gathered at the town’s most charming hotel, the Chesa Grischuna. In the late summers Greta Garbo came for weeks at a time, staying in a nearby apartment and walking with Salka through the hills and meadows. Salka herself traveled extensively throughout Europe and several times back to the States, where she was delighted to meet two more grandchildren: Valérie, born in 1952 to Salka’s son Hans and his wife, Violette; and Andrew, born in 1973 to her son Tom and his wife, Ruth.

  In these years Salka also devoted herself to writing, tackling draft after draft of her memoir, which after many rejections was published in April 1969 by a perspicacious young editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston named Tom Wallace. She had hoped to produce a second volume and maybe even a novel, but over the next nine years her health declined as she bore the indignities of deafness and Parkinson’s disease. She died in Klosters on October 26, 1978, and was buried in the small cemetery behind the Protestant church. For years thereafter, Garbo continued to vacation in Klosters during the summers as an homage to her closest friend.

  In Salka’s eighty-nine years, she left behind no monuments. That is the privilege of men. Instead she left this magnificent record of a grand and global life, lived with drama, Zivilcourage, and compassion.

  —DONNA RIFKIND