Salka Who?

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As a kid in the 1960s, I was an old-movie nut. In that era before cable and videotape, the TV channels in New York, where I grew up, broadcast dozens of pictures daily, and some days I watched as many as four or five of them – and if I liked them, I’d rewatch them each time they came on again. By the time I was a teenager I was something of a budding expert on the Golden Age of Hollywood. But until recently I don’t think I’d ever heard the name of Salka Viertel.

I actually knew the name Viertel – because I’d read somewhere that Deborah Kerr, one of my favorite actresses, was married to a writer named Peter Viertel. What I didn’t know was that he was one of three sons of a woman who’d been a central figure in Hollywood’s Golden Age. I was alerted to her existence by the 2020 publication of Donna Rifkind’s The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, which I downloaded on Kindle, but never got around to reading. Then, in New York last month on a very brief business trip, I dropped into the Strand bookstore seeking something to read on the plane home. There I noticed a paperback tucked away on a lower shelf: a 2019 reprint of Salka Viertel’s own 1969 memoir, The Kindness of Strangers. I plucked it up at once. And I’m glad I did.

What a life! A non-observant Polish Jew, Salomea Sara (Salka) Steuermann was born in 1889 in the obscure Galician town of Sambor, where her father was mayor. His children might easily have lived and died in obscurity; instead, Edward became a prominent pianist (the first leading proponent of Schoenberg), Dusko became a soccer player whose name was known all over Europe, and Salka, who grew up speaking Polish, Ukrainian, German, and French, went on the stage, performing throughout central Europe – Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Hamburg, Dusseldorf.

When I first thumbed through Viertel’s book, I thought I’d be impatient to get through the early chapters and get on to her Hollywood years. On the contrary, it’s all fascinating stuff. Throughout most of the 1910s and 1920s – even through the ravages of World War I – Salka pursued a busy life on the boards and acquired an ever-enlarging social circle that included the legendary theatrical director Max Reinhardt, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the composer Anton von Webern, and F. W. Murnau, a minor actor who would go on to become a major film director. Along the way she married the writer and director Berthold Viertel, with whom she had three sons.

It was Berthold whose career took them, in 1927, to America. Twentieth-Century Fox offered him a job, and although Salka dreaded the idea of abandoning the European theater, she was loath to stand in his way. And so they shipped off to New York, where the only stage work they enjoyed was Porgy and Bess, and where they were underwhelmed by the first talkie, The Jazz Singer. Then they took the train to Los Angeles, a trip Salka would never forget:

Everything was fabulously exciting….We loved our Negro porter and the waiters in the dining car; we were delighted by our drawing-room compartment, fascinated by the landscape. New Mexico and Arizona, with the gorgeous reds and browns and the splurge of purple and ochre in the fantastic rock formations, awed us with their beauty….All day long we stared spellbound through our window.

In California, Salka fell in love with the beach at Santa Monica. Soon they were living there, and adding new names to their already formidable list of celebrity friends. The most important of them, as far as Salka’s film-colony future was concerned, was Greta Garbo. Salka and Tinseltown’s top star hit it off at once. The day after they met, Garbo initiated a habit of dropping in on Salka and taking long walks with her on the beach. It was Garbo who asked her: “Why don’t you write?” Thanks largely to Garbo, Salka, despite her then shaky English, did do a bit of acting, essaying a small part in MGM’s German-language version of Garbo’s Anna Christie. (Before subtitles and dubbing came along, the Hollywood studios routinely made foreign-language versions of some of their films.)

But more important was her decision to write a screenplay for Garbo about Queen Christina of Sweden, which became an MGM classic. Later she conceived and researched at length (a process that involved a long, busy trip back to Europe) a script for Garbo about Madame Curie – a movie that ended up starring Greer Garson. Over the years, although her European sensibility and feisty attitude toward studio executives kept complicating matters, Salka contributed to the scripts of several other pictures, many of them Garbo’s. The depth of their friendship was reflected in the fact that Garbo, when she filled out an official form declaring her interest in becoming a U.S. citizen in 1940, she listed Salka’s house as her home address.

Salka’s relationship with Garbo I understand. Her marriage, not so much. She and Berthold never stopped professing, in their long-distance correspondence, their mutual adoration. But they spent remarkably little time together. In their pre-America years, he was always directing plays in one city while she was acting in plays in another. After they moved to the U.S., he often found himself drawn back east to New York, and even to Europe, to work on various projects. During these long periods of separation, they both openly carried on extramarital affairs (for a long time, Salkas’s main side squeeze was her neighbor Oliver Garrett, one of several scenarists who contributed to Gone with the Wind), all the while repeatedly professing that these indiscretions didn’t put a dent in their undying love. Nor, they insisted, did the divorce that Berthold eventually asked for – and received – when he decided he wanted to marry his mistress. The whole thing sounds like a case of massive self-delusion on both parts. But hey, none of my business.

Meanwhile Salka was developing a reputation for welcoming to her home every Sunday a glittering gallery of guests, ranging from movie stars (Hedy Lamarr, Charlie Chaplin, Montgomery Clift) to authors (Thomas and Heinrich Mann, James Agee) to musicians (Oscar Levant, Dimitri Tiomkin, Otto Klemperer), many of them recent refugees from Europe. Rifkind perceptively notes that Salka’s role as a Hollywood hostess compensated, in a way, for the acting career she’d given up. But it wasn’t easy for her. While her sons quickly transformed into Americans – and not just Americans, but southern Californians, tanned and easygoing (in an entirely un-European way) and in love with swimming and surfing – she served as a bridge between the free and still peaceful U.S. and exiles from an increasingly Nazi-haunted Europe.

Without a doubt, Salka loved America (even as she viewed the culture of Hollywood with an increasingly jaundiced eye). But reading her book, one is as puzzled about her politics as about her marriage. She regarded the Nazis with total contempt, but had friends whose Stalinism she accepted without question; in the years after World War II, when HUAC questioned some of these people about their loyalty to the Soviet Union, she viewed the congressmen’s anti-Communism as a distasteful prejudice. All her life, she refused to say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler. When Ernst Lubitsch told her he was quitting the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood because it was controlled by “Reds” and urged her to do the same, she laughed off his concern and stayed within the fold.

Nor was she bothered that her oldest son, Hans, was a Trotskyite. In fact, when Trotsky was shot in Mexico and it was not yet clear that he was dead, Salka solicited money to help him out. And even when the major studios, during the war, released outrageously pro-Soviet movies like Lillian Hellman’s North Star, Salka refused to acknowledge what later came to be recognized as undeniable: namely, that the Kremlin’s Hollywood minions had exercised a strong influence on the contents of many motion pictures. Her blithe attitude toward Communism eventually came back to bite her: when she applied for a passport in 1953, she was at first turned down because the State Department decided that she was, or had been, a Communist. After much legal wrangling, she ended up getting the passport and spending the rest of her life in Klosters, Switzerland, where Garbo visited her frequently until Salka’s death there in 1978.  

So fascinated was I by Viertel’s book  that I turned at once to Rifkind, who focuses on Salka’s years as a Hollywood hostess – a period that actually peaked after the years Salka emphasizes in her memoirs – while tucking in here and there, in the form of flashbacks, the juiciest bits of her pre-American life. Aside from drawing on Salka’s memoirs, Rifkind cites other books and archives as well as Salka’s letters and diaries, which provide information that Salka chose to omit from her book, and that in some cases significantly alters the narrative. For example, in her memoirs Salka seems proud of the speed with which her boys became Americanized, but in a letter to Berthold she laments the distance that this change has put between her and them: “The children are so strange to me in many ways. I love them more than my life, but after all they have been all these years in America…they see and feel so many things differently.”

At times, moreover, Rifkind departs at length from Salka’s own story to recount in arresting detail the journeys of various high-profile European refugees to freedom in America. Alma Werfel, for instance, lugged suitcases containing “the musical scores of her former husband Gustav Mahler, the original manuscript of Anton Bruckner’s third symphony, and the beginnings of Franz Werfel’s novel-in-progress about Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.” (Song of Bernadette would become a bestselling 1941 novel and a hit 1943 film.) Rifkind quotes Behrman as saying that refugees like this turned wartime Hollywood into “a kind of Athens….as crowded with artists as Renaissance Florence.”

Alas, Rifkind’s book is yet another reminder that while some European transplants (such as the English novelist Christopher Isherwood, who lived for a while over Salka’s garage) were thrilled with the sunshine and freedom of southern California, others looked down on a city that was designed for cars, on film studios whose executives (and products) they considered vulgar, and indeed on what they saw as the vulgarity of America itself. I’ve read a great deal about this topic before, but I never cease to be shocked by the ingratitude of these people who might have ended up in Auschwitz rather than at MGM or Warners. Still, after having wandered the streets of Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and other central European cities, I suppose I can understand their inability to deal with L.A., where I’ve spent, in total, about a year of my life, and where, I must confess, I’ve always had trouble getting serious work done because of the temptations of the swimming pools and the sun-drenched strands.

One of Rifkind’s goals is to rehabilitate the reputation of Viertel, whose contributions to the scripts she worked on have often been slighted. Another goal is to recognize the huge role Viertel played in helping people get out of Europe and resettle in California: not only did she dig into her own pockets (which were never terribly deep), she also prevailed upon wealthier friends and colleagues to kick in, and persuaded the likes of Dorothy Parker and Herman Mankiewicz to sponsor the desperate people she called her “protégés” by signing affidavits – that is, to guarantee to keep them financially afloat should they prove unable to support themselves. (As it turned out, none of Salka’s “protégés” ended up requiring such aid.) Salka gave of herself in other ways, too: for example, she lent support to the directors F.W. Murnau and Sergei Eisenstein when they became frustrated with the studio system and decided to go independent, and she met with Schoenberg and MGM executive Irving Thalberg in an effort to persuade the latter to hire the former to compose the score for The Good Earth.

Rifkind also provides additional details about the Anti-Nazi League: indeed, it was run by Communists. In a 1963 diary entry, Salka made an admission that is nowhere to be found in her memoir: namely, that she now recognized that she’d foolishly allowed the Communists in Hollywood to “use” her. “Only decades later,” writes Rifkind, “would she, who never joined a political party of any kind, understand how vulnerable her openheartedness had been to cynical manipulations.” I would go a bit further: Salka wasn’t just too openhearted; she was, quite simply, naive not to recognize that Stalin and Hitler were two sides of the same coin, and that being a loyal chum to people who’d sworn their fealty to Uncle Joe was no different than befriending a Nazi.

One passage in Rifkind’s book is more resonant now, a year after Hamas’s invasion of Israel, than it was when the book was published in 2020. Salka, notes Rifkind, was only one of many Hollywood Jews who, until Hitler came along, hadn’t been remotely devout – or, as Rifkind puts it, “had failed to take their heritage as seriously as Hitler did.” Rifkin quotes another such individual, Budd Schulberg, the novelist (What Makes Sammy Run?) whose father had been a founder of Paramount, as writing in his memoir that “all through my teens I considered myself un- or non-Jewish. It would take Adolf Hitler to bring me back to a sense of identification with the culture of my forebears.” How many American Jews have gone through a similar experience since October 7 of last year? To read about Salka Viertel and her “protégés” in the year 2024 is to be reminded that the kind of hate and horror from which she rescued them never goes away forever.