The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Donna Rifkind does exactly this in her examination of Salka Viertel, a figure mostly unknown to the general public but whose life is a winding line from prewar Vienna to the coast of California at the dawn of Hollywood. Before boarding the train in New York for Los Angeles, they ran into Max Reinhardt, the theater giant then directing a play on Broadway. Rifkind sees the worldly yet unassuming Viertel as at once an extraordinary character and a telling representative of something larger than herself. One of her most successful roles was Marthy in the German version of Anna Christie, which she took over at the request of Garbo [2] (it was originally intended for Marie Dressler).

That last, from a letter Kurt Weill wrote to his wife Lotte Lenya, may be the most excusable, for distraught refugees were brittle, often depressed, and prone to lashing out at friends and benefactors.

Composer Franz Waxman met director James Whale through her and wrote his first Hollywood soundtrack for Whale. At the same time that Viertel was writing Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935) for Garbo, she was hosting Sunday afternoon gatherings for European émigrés at her Santa Monica home. Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood; Erin Hill’s Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production; Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Emily D. In Santa Monica, she made it her mission to provide a refuge for them in her own home and to absorb them into her social and professional network, all to help them survive in a wholly unfamiliar new world. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines.

You would not discover that it was Nelly Mann who more or less carried her seventy-year-old husband Heinrich Mann over the Pyrenees in the stifling heat of an early October day in 1940 as they tried to evade capture and certain arrest. It is more often in the imaginative literature about Hollywood and the 1930s exiles, rather than in the histories, that women play prominent roles and emerge as fully fleshed characters: Anna Trautwein in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Paris Gazette , for example; or Erich Maria Remarque’s heroines in Shadows in Paradise and The Night in Lisbon ; and Salka herself, who appears in fictional form in Joseph Kanon’s Stardust , Elizabeth Frank’s Cheat and Charmer, Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover , Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, Irwin Shaw’s short story “Instrument of Salvation,” and, fleetingly, in the film The Way We Were . The Viertels initially lived on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, before renting a house at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica, California.

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