The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood by Donna Rifkind

Salka Viertel, born in a village in eastern Europe, lived from 1928 until 1960 in Los Angeles, 24 years of that time in a house at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica canyon. She and her husband had been theater people in Germany, surviving through the post-War years of creative and sexual liberation, staggering inflation, and rising political tension. When Berthold Viertel got a job offer to work on Hollywood pictures, Salka gave up her stage career to follow him on what they both thought would be a temporary stay. It soon turned into a longer stay and Salka needed work of her own. She found it as a screenwriter, first for several Greta Garbo pictures, who she had met at a party, later with others.

Meanwhile, she turned her home into a gathering place for the many exiles from Europe who were finding safety and work in Hollywood. Some friends they had known in Europe, others they would meet at the studios, or for the first time in their living room, as more and more arrived. She worked with both F. W. Murnau and Sergei Eisentein. Berthold Brecht and his wife lived on 26th street in Santa Monica. Thomas Mann and Katia Mann lived in Pacific Palisades. Heinrich Mann and his wife Nelly were there. Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler (Gropius) Werfel. Arnold Schoenberg. The British director James Whale met Franz Waxman at the Viertel’s and hired the composer to write the score for Bride of Frankenstein. For a time Christopher Isherwood and a boyfriend, Bill Caskey, lived at the Viertel’s in an apartment above the garage. The title character of Isherwood’s novel, Prater Violet, is based on Berthold Viertel.

I first learned about Salka Viertel reading Christopher Isherwood’s diaries from the time. That era in Santa Monica had always fascinated me. I grew up in Santa Monica myself, although most of the emigre artists had returned to Europe or died by the time I arrived as a child with my family in 1967. I always regretted that Christopher Isherwood lived until 1986 only a few miles from me and I never met him. Donna Rifkind’s biography of Salka is a valuable addition to the record. Her intent is to shine a light on a neglected player of the scene. But the fascination of the story continues to be with the major writers and musicians that surrounded Salka. Her own contributions as a screenwriter are fairly minor. She worked collaboratively with other writers as a studio employee. Only a half-dozen or so of the pictures she worked on were produced and she didn’t always receive screen credit.

But Rifkind makes a case that Salka’s contributions to the scene go beyond the art she produced directly herself: including the screenplays and the memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, that she published in 1969. Her greatest art may have been her skill in bringing people together, providing a place and an atmosphere where creativity and conversation and connections could happen. She gathered people locally, at her home, and more broadly in her work sponsoring refuges. For all of this she was unpaid, and little recognized. She complained later in life, in a letter to her husband, “The house is a sort of Shangrila for everyone who enters it, built on my enslavement” (p. 385). And again, “I don’t want to cook or wash for strangers again because I don’t have the strength any more. I would like to be alone and work for myself in peace… Oh, how I would like to have two hours without worrying about anybody” (p. 354). But I have to think that she also enjoyed that life, she did it so consistently, and perhaps the fault isn’t that she didn’t have time to produce more art of her own, but that the sort of art she did produce, hospitality, isn’t better recognized as the art form it is.

Still I have to confess; I’m one of those readers of Rifkind’s book that Salka Viertel complained about when she was having trouble getting her memoir published, “They don’t give a damn about the person who writes the book, they only want anecdotes of famous people.” (p. 408). Happily, though, Rifkind does give the anecdotes, many of them, and they are great. My favorite is the oft-told story of Irving Thalberg imagining that Schoenberg could write the score for the movie version of The Good Earth. Thalberg had the idea based on a recording he had heard of the lovely music of Schoenberg’s early string sextet, Verklarkte Nacht. In person, Schoenberg said, “I don’t write lovely music.” Salka arranged the meeting. Salka and Schoenberg’s wife, Gertrud, were in the room when the men negotiated. Schoenberg’s condition was that he have complete control of the movie’s sound, including the actor’s lines, which would be performed in Schoenberg’s style of sprechstimme a technique he had used in his 1912 composition, Pierrot Lunaire. Salka acted as a translator and performed a few lines of Pierrot Lunaire to give Thalberg a taste. Rifkind writes, “Thalberg shrugged, telling Salka that the studio had on hand some Chinese folk songs which the sound department was using to write some very lovely music” (p. 184).

A biography that begins with a friendship with Franz Kafka in Prague, crosses paths with great filmmakers, writers, and musicians in Los Angeles, and ends with friendships with Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles in Klosters, Switzerland, where Salka spent the last 18 years of her life, is an amazing story.

Salka sold the house in Santa Monica Canyon in 1954 to John Houseman and his wife but continued to live off and on in Los Angeles for the next 6 years. She rented an apartment on Veteran Avenue in Westwood. When she was away she sublet the apartment to a gay couple, Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olson on TV’s Superman, and Jim Bridges who later wrote and directed The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, and Urban Cowboy among other movies. The couple became her great friends. In 1973 she was back in LA for a visit. Jack and Jim took her to a party at her old house, now owned by John Houseman’s theater protege, Gordon Davison, who had founded the Mark Taper Forum in 1967 and was the Artistic Director of the Center Theater Group (The Music Center). Salka mentioned that the backyard garden had been replaced by a pool. The current photo of the address on google street view looks nothing like the picture in the book so at some point it appears the original house was demolished.

Salka Viertel died in 1978, in Klosters, Switzerland.