The Kindness of Strangers Read online

  SALKA VIERTEL (1889–1978) was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city in present-day Ukraine, where her father was the first Jewish mayor. In her youth she had a successful career onstage, marrying the director Berthold Viertel in 1918. The couple had three sons before moving to Los Angeles in 1928, when Berthold was asked to write a screenplay for F. W. Murnau. That winter, Salka met Greta Garbo. The two would become close friends, with Viertel appearing alongside Garbo in Anna Christie (1930) and co-writing a number of the actor’s 1930s films, including Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935). Viertel was active in the European Film Fund, which was designed to provide European artists with Hollywood jobs and American visas during the war years, and she and Berthold hosted star-studded salons at their house in Santa Monica. They divorced in 1947, and Berthold returned to Vienna. She remained in California until pressure from the FBI over her associations with alleged communists led her to return to Europe. She died in Switzerland.

  LAWRENCE WESCHLER, the grandson of the émigré composer Ernst Toch, is a former staff writer at The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Among his books are Vermeer in Bosnia, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, and Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. His biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks will be published in 2019.

  DONNA RIFKIND is a book critic whose reviews appear in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other publications. Her biography of Salka Viertel is forthcoming in 2020.

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  SALKA VIERTEL

  Introduction by

  LAWRENCE WESCHLER

  Afterword by

  DONNA RIFKIND

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1969 by Salka Viertel

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Lawrence Weschler

  Afterword copyright © 2019 by Donna Rifkind

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Grete Stern, Dream No. 18, Café Concert, 1948; © Estate of Grete Stern; courtesy Galería Jorge Mara–La Ruche

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Viertel, Salka, author.

  Title: The kindness of strangers / by Salka Viertel ; introduction by Lawrence Weschler.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018019340| ISBN 9781681372747 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681372754 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Viertel, Salka. | Screenwriters—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts. |

  BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PN2287.V47 A3 2019 | DDC 812/.52 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019340

  ISBN 978-1-68137-275-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  Afterword

  INTRODUCTION

  NOWADAYS THE TITLE reads not only as tepid and banal but as distinctly unrepresentative of the ensuing narrative’s principal themes and contours. In fairness, when the onetime Austro-Hungarian actress and subsequently Hollywood scenarist Salka Viertel first began auditioning the phrase “the kindness of strangers” for the title of her memoir in progress, back in the mid-1950s, as her forthcoming biographer Donna Rifkind has pointed out, the words were not nearly as hackneyed as they are today. (The sensational play A Streetcar Named Desire, from which they sprang, was only a few years old, having premiered in 1947; the film had only been released in 1951; and the primary chestnut to have emerged from the latter was Stanley’s bloodcurdling scream of “Stella! Stellllaaaa!” and not so much Blanche’s breathy Southern belle protestations of having always relied on the kindness of strangers.) Salka’s husband, the internationally acclaimed theater director Berthold Viertel, had been translating their friend Tennessee Williams’s plays for some years already and staging them all over Europe, and perhaps Salka savored the nod in the young playwright’s direction. Such selfless generosity, indeed such kindness on her own part, would have been just like her.

  But set aside the book’s title and turn, instead, to the text, which gleams with a canny freshness from its first mischievous sentences:

  Long, long ago, when I was very young, a gypsy woman said to me that I would escape heartbreak and misfortune as long as I lived close to water. I know that it is rather trite to begin a story with prophecies, especially when they are made by gypsies, but luckily this prediction did not come true.

  That first sly upending of readerly expectations anticipates all the other upendings that will come to characterize our protagonist’s life course, but at this early stage of the narrative, she only goes on to admit that “It was utterly irrelevant as far as the happiness or misery in my life was concerned, how near or how distant I might be to a body of water.” Still, she concedes how often her own “inner storms would subside when I looked at the crested waves of the Pacific or listened to the murmur of an Alpine brook,” and that in addition the gypsy’s mention of water “evoked the landscape of my childhood and the house near the river, where I lived and grew up.”

  And thus by the end of that first paragraph, we arrive, by way of a gracefully commodious vicus of recirculation, at Sambor, the small town by the banks of the Dniester River (only just emerging “young and wild” from the Carpathian mountains to the immediate west) in Polish, though at the time Austro-Hungarian, Galicia (and, actually, since the Second World War on the far western edge of the Soviet and subsequently independent Ukraine), where Salka was born in 1889, the eldest of the four children of Auguste and Josef Steuermann, a barrister who, following the turn of the twentieth century, began serving as this polyglot and marvelously jumbled town’s first Jewish mayor, as he would for decades to come.

  The Steuermann progeny would prove prodigiously accomplished in the years ahead. In addition to Salka, there came, in order, Rose, an eminent actress in her own right in pre– and post–First World War Austrian and German theaters, who would marry the immensely successful theater man Josef Gielen, fleeing with him to South America during the Hitler years though returning to Europe for further successes at the end of the Second World War (their son, Michael, going on to prove one of the most prominent Austrian avant-garde composers and conductors during the fifties and sixties); Edward, a pianist and celebrated acolyte of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, who among many other sterling accomplishments, both in Europe and America, would shepherd and premiere the master’s Pierrot lunaire; and finally Zygmunt (universally known as “Dusko”), the runt of the litter, who went on, improbably, to interwar stardom as a professional soccer player.

  The first third or so of Salka’s book unfurls across pre-Hitlerian Europe, from an improbably idyllic evocation of her Galician home and family life (not yet particularly marked by intimations of virulent anti-Semitism), through accounts of her own headstrong determination, in the face of parental resistance, to pursue a career in the theater and her early successes in that regard (under the name Salome Steuermann) across the regional capitals of late-imperial Austro-Hungary before the outbreak of th
e First World War. She then goes on to vividly render the desolations of the war itself, especially on the home front—a horrific period to some degree leavened for Salka by her courtship and 1918 marriage to the vividly charismatic poet and director Berthold Viertel—and following that, the couple’s triumphant sweep through the various centers of postwar Weimar-era Austrian and German cultural ferment.

  Salka displays an exceptional talent for conjuring highly visual, almost cinematic scenes in her accounts of those early years—thus, for example, from when she was a young aspiring actress in Vienna:

  Returning from the theater through the brightly lit Kaerntnerstrasse with its elegant shopwindows, noisy traffic and hurrying crowds, I would cross the Graben and plunge suddenly into the darkness of a deserted, cobbled gasse which had not changed in four hundred years. As in all Viennese houses, doors were locked at night. I had to ring the bell and wait until the Hausmeister emerged from his squalid basement lodging, shuffling and coughing, to take his Charon’s toll of ten Kreuzer and hand me a tiny candle. My weird shadow darkening the walls, I ran as fast as I could up the endless stone steps of the spiral staircase, praying that the candle would last to the fourth floor.*

  No less impressive is Salka’s flair for rendering character (Berthold’s close friend and idol Karl Kraus, her own early mentor Max Reinhardt) and incident (notably, a close call on the casting couch, which, alas, reads nowadays as disconcertingly pertinent), all of which she feathers into an eventful bohemian narrative that somehow makes room for the charms of early motherhood, with the arrival of the couple’s three sons, Hans, Peter, and Thomas.

  •

  For many readers, however, it may only be with the couple’s arrival in America (and in Hollywood in particular) that the singular fascination of Salka’s narrative really ramps up. Strictly speaking, the Viertels were not part of the Hitlerian émigré tide with which they would come to be so distinctively associated. They’d already arrived in Hollywood in 1928, part of an earlier surge of distinguished European theater and film folk that greeted the arrival of sound in the movies. It was thought that such distinguished European theatrical eminences—the likes of Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, William Dieterle, and, yes, Berthold Viertel himself—might help guide silent actors into the new aural era. For that matter, in those early years, Hollywood studios regularly experimented with making foreign versions of their local successes.

  Indeed, it was in the course of one such effort, MGM’s German-language remake of their hit rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, starring (in both versions) the luminous Greta Garbo in her first spoken roles, that Salka’s friendship with the young star really blossomed: Brought on to play the role of the prostitute Marthy opposite the glamorous lead, Salka was in addition assigned the task of coaching the ravishing Swede’s German elocution.

  Salka’s once vital career as a lead theatrical actress wilted precipitously in her transplanted California environs (she was deemed too old and not beautiful enough, and never really took to the chopped-up pace of film acting, which got to feeling, as she writes, “like drinking from an eyedropper”). Nevertheless, she segued effortlessly into a reader, reviewer, scout, and presently developer and co-writer of original scripts for MGM. And she worked especially closely with Garbo, beginning with the 1933 production of Queen Christina, the Rouben Mamoulian–directed vehicle in which Garbo starred opposite John Gilbert as the headstrong, tomboyish, somewhat gender-fluid (as we might now characterize matters) new queen of Sweden. In one of Salka’s frequently jaw-dropping asides, she notes that she and Garbo had preferred a newly arrived rookie thespian from London, one Laurence Olivier, for the part of the queen’s paramour, but his acting chops were not deemed up to snuff by the all-knowing studio brass.

  Berthold by contrast had a more difficult time adapting to the Hollywood studio system, especially after the eminence of his Continental career. He and Salka had originally envisioned a professional sojourn of just a few years in California, but owing to the deteriorating political conditions back home, they kept extending their stay, until by 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, they became de facto émigrés after all. Still, although they had established an idyllic if modest new homestead on Mabery Road, overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica, Berthold grew increasingly restless. He launched out on ever more extended theatrical ventures to New York and Paris and London—the latter being where he teamed up with scenarist Christopher Isherwood for a 1934 film version of Little Friend, the story of a young girl’s reckoning with her parents’ divorce. That production, staffed by all manner of suddenly fleeing émigrés, would years later prove the basis for Isherwood’s short memoiristic novel Prater Violet, in which the Englishman described the film’s director, in his relations with the supervising studio, as “a lion molested by fleas.”

  As it happens, my own grandfather, the eminent Weimar-era Austrian modernist composer Ernst Toch, provided the score for that London production—a way station on his own eventual progress to Hollywood. There, owing to the perceived spikiness of his compositional style, he was typecast as a specialist in chase scenes (Shirley Temple’s sleigh ride in Heidi) and horror effects (the Hallelujah Chorus in Charles Laughton’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Only after the war did he manage to wrest himself free of the studio shackles and start composing once again in his own voice (even attaining a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiographical 1955 Third Symphony, with its motto from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, “Indeed I am a wanderer, a pilgrim on this earth, but can you say that you are anything more?”), though the fame and following of his European past would now elude him. And he would often entertain visitors to his home with a melancholy joke about the two dachshunds who meet on the palisade overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica: “Here it’s true I’m a dachshund,” the one admits to the other, “but in the old country I was a Saint Bernard.”

  The west side of Los Angeles was rife with erstwhile Saint Bernards in those days,† and Salka regales her readers with countless representative tales of fish decidedly out of water, to vary the metaphor slightly—Sergei Eisenstein, for instance (though he had come to Hollywood and signed a yearlong contract at Paramount for reasons somewhat different from those of his German and Austrian counterparts). Salka, who through much of that time served as the Russian master’s closest local support and confidant, begins her account of that bollixed year with a typically priceless sentence: “As soon as Eisenstein arrived, Upton Sinclair, who had most impressive friends, gave a picnic lunch for him at the ranch of Mr. Gillette, the razorblade millionaire.” From there she goes on to detail the story of how Sinclair’s wife mobilized a group of idle Pasadena millionaire wives to sponsor Eisenstein’s filming expedition to Mexico, with patrons and director soon falling out catastrophically. Before long the whole project went down in flames, leaving a heartbroken Eisenstein to return to his Stalinist homeland. Salka likewise tells stories of Arnold Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg at ludicrous cross-purposes over a possible score for the latter’s production of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and of Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas and the author back in Germany of massive historical novels as well as the tale upon which the Emil Jannings–Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel had been based) and Bertolt Brecht (arguably the greatest playwright of his era)—all of them utterly squandered by a studio system that had no idea what to do with them.

  Most accounts of such calamities characterize them as instances of the philistine provincialism of the coarse American rubes who headed the Hollywood studios. (Salka herself does so some of the time.) The reality, though, was somewhat more nuanced and complex, for many of the studio heads were immigrants themselves, Eastern European shtetl Jews from the immediately prior generation who’d been looked down upon (as hugely inconvenient embarrassments) by their haute-bourgeois, high-culture, assimilated Jewish cousins in Vienna and Berlin and Munich and therefore hurried along to Amsterdam and Bremen and Hamburg and onward to New York as quickly as possible. O
nce in Hollywood, these fiercely ambitious Eastern European Jews set about fashioning and veritably inventing the American Dream. The late arrival of those once supercilious Western and Central European Jews set the stage for a certain degree of class-cultural revenge.

  Still, many in Hollywood, with Salka and Berthold among the leading figures, did raise vast sums to bring leading European cultural luminaries, desperate in their flight from Hitler, to Hollywood, going on to help secure many of them at least temporary employ in the studios. And Salka made of her home on Mabery Road the site of weekly Sunday-afternoon salon-like gatherings (featuring her exceptional cooking), where the likes of the Manns (both sets), Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, the Schoenbergs, the Stravinskys, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, Otto Klemperer’s clan, the Max Reinhardts, Bertolt Brecht and his women, and countless other such Saint Bernards (including, I suspect, my grandparents) would rub shoulders with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Johnny Weissmuller, Greta Garbo, Edward G. Robinson, and other Hollywood figures (as well as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, the latter of whom had taken up residence in the garage apartment behind the main house). Many of Salka’s best yarns revolve around these gatherings on the rim of the Pacific—including one in particular about a seventieth birthday party for Heinrich Mann at which, before the meal could be served, his brother Thomas rose up and pulled a long, many-paged peroration in honor of his brother out of his suit pocket and proceeded somberly to declaim it (as the roast overcooked in the kitchen), whereupon Heinrich responded by rising up in thanks, pulling a similarly hefty peroration in honor of Thomas out of his own suit pocket, and soberly going on to read it in its entirety.

  Salka’s account of those terrible years—“years of the devil,” in the words of her secretary—is hardly limited, however, to the fate of the grand and famous; she is just as attentive to the lives of the more modestly anonymous: onetime doctors and lawyers, for example, who were forced to take up employment as chauffeurs and housemaids (she notes how, what with the sudden transfer of local blacks into the wartime ship- and plane-building industries, these domestic fields had recently opened up), or for that matter, such regular everyday Americans as the sweet lady over at the Santa Monica office of Western Union with whom she became friends in the course of trying to keep tabs on her world-wandering husband and the far-flung members of her own family, some still stranded behind enemy lines.