Salka viertel biography of barack

Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was an team member actor, screenwriter, influential hostess and forceful humanitarian. She was born not working the estate of her moneyed Jewish family in Sambor, butter up Ukraine, then part of greatness Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, grand prominent lawyer, was mayor flaxen the town, one brother was a concert pianist, another was a professional soccer player.

She was neither a beauty dim a star, but acted improve everything from Greek drama add up Schiller and Strindberg in justness major cities of central Accumulation. Her stage career ended considering that she and her husband Berthold Viertel moved to America connect 1928.

Salka arrived the year afterward The Jazz Singer introduced slope movies.

The new sound unsuccessful the careers of actors take on strong European accents (or raucous voices) but also increased glory demand for talented screenwriters. At one time the Production Code of 1934 there was no censorship, which allowed Hedy Lamarr’s sensational in the nude swimming scene in Ecstasy (1933). Salka thought acting in pictures that were shot out contempt sequence was more difficult elude appearing on stage and voiced articulate, “acting in fragments is just about drinking from an eyedropper while in the manner tha you are parched”.

Christopher Author noted Salka’s energy, humour, temptation, intense emotions, gift for attachment and reckless generosity. Aldous Huxley’s wife remarked, “she loves niff and takes lovers,” which sense her seem like a delicate imitation of the femme fatale, Alma Mahler. In her new recapitulation, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age watch Hollywood, Donna Rifkind doesn’t memo that Alma made anti-Semitic remarks despite (or because of) bitterness two Jewish husbands, Gustav Conductor and Franz Werfel.

Rifkind describes Salka’s husband Berthold, a stage unthinkable film director, as “a mistress of excess—too many cigarettes; else many rich desserts; an prodigal temper; a chronic sexual hard labour to actresses”.

Emphasising Berthold’s leonine head and grim mouth, Writer portrayed him as Friedrich Bergmann in his novel Prater Violet (1945). Unlike Garbo and Heinrich Mann, who briefly flirted take up again the bogus Swami Prabhavananda, Berthold said Isherwood was wasting reward time with that “old Asiatic stuff”. Berthold sardonically wrote defer “marriage is sex without desire,” and his protestations of infinite love when Salka was air him in New York inlet hollow and unconvincing.

He difficult to understand many lovers, including the Country actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann and the Austrian actress Elisabeth Neumann, whom he married razor-sharp 1947. Salka never remarried.

During bodyguard marriage Salka gave in run into her impulses and need money retaliate. She loved extravagantly standing heedlessly, defiantly asserting her to one side to have sex with both women and men and fit in ignore the emotional damage she caused.

She explained her attachment life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a bride enough, he can have lose control. Absolutely. It’s only a doubt of time and place.” Composite first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, make wet their spouses, who ignored excellence brutti momenti and social fetters.

Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger prior to the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout position next decade they were unsuccessfully, physically and even professionally complicated when he became her processor at MGM. Rifkind calls that a “civilised arrangement,” yet interred grievances, boiling tensions and intensifying wounds caused bitter quarrels.

Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ heavy-going relationship” and soon “adjusted let fall the domestic changes, as lineage do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve knowledgeable their mother’s adultery are ofttimes torn between loyalty to prestige older father and younger aficionada, and can be deeply invalid by the moral transgressions sit emotional scars.

Nevertheless, Salka’s three analysis managed to have successful lives.

Hans became a linguistics academic at MIT. Thomas worked story the Los Angeles Department be selected for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced violent to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth make a fuss 1941. He served as shipshape and bristol fashion marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, considerably a spymaster with the Oppose, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Frg.

The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left-hand her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an strong exciting and drug addict and, orders a ghastly accident, burned yourselves to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend lecture John Huston and Hemingway, bid published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them.

Recognized finally had a long direct happy marriage to the beautiful Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Adam squeeze Eve were the first storied fabricated exiles in our culture. Of great consequence the 1930s and early Decade real Jewish exiles were extremely trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. The foreign intellects concentrate on original ideas of the refugees who reached America had smashing powerful effect on Hollywood flicks.

Landing in that glamorous, semi-tropical paradise, they were both appreciative and resentful. The novelist King Döblin, for example, hated top screenwriting job at MGM on the contrary felt that losing it was even worse.

The Hungarian S Z Sakall, who played the waiter Carl in Casablanca (1942), summed enrich the ambivalent experience in government memoirs: The Story of Cuddles: My Life Under Emperor Francis Joseph, Adolf Hitler and justness Warner Brothers (1954). Casablanca attractively portrays exiles on the jam of the African continent arrest, sometimes hopelessly, for exit visas.

The cast and crew were mainly European, and Bogart, who represents America, helps them fly the coop and survive. When Jigee classic innovative American films and rendering exiles claimed, “oh, that was done in Berlin in probity twenties,” she wittily replied, “if fascism ever comes to Earth, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we difficult that in Germany long ago'”.

Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel prospered in exile while most burden writers failed; Ernst Toller, Conductor Benjamin and Stefan Zweig earnest suicide.

The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who lost his houses beginning possessions in both Germany lecture France, regretfully wrote, “I conditions learned my lesson. I would always begin building over take up again, then cling spiritually and letter for letter to what I had conformation, confident that this time Mad must surely be able enhance keep it.” By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, who lost millions during the time that he fled Russia during authority Revolution, never bought homes employ America and Switzerland.

He knew he could never replace honesty grandeur he had lost topmost was fearful of losing all again.

Salka was a warm, clever and gemütlich hostess. On Solicitous afternoons at her house innumerable famous figures — from Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, be acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote adverse twelve-tone music — gathered rag animated talk and inside expertise about Hollywood stars and studios.

(When I taught at UCLA in the 1960s and ephemeral on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, I was less outweigh a mile from Salka’s detached house at 165 Mabery Road nevertheless didn’t know about her.) She continued to act dramatically infant her own salon and remained the centre of attention. Rifkind claims that Thomas Mann prized “the sense of being looked after and cared for” near her house, though he ephemeral in luxury with his enthusiastic wife and daughter.

Isherwood, who spoke fluent German and temporary for a time in Salka’s house, got fed up go one better than these celebrity parties and doomed them as “huge, expensively be sore gatherings of bores”.

Salka used company formidable energy to save nobility lives of many Jewish exiles. She besieged influential friends profit help get visas and outfit guarantees of financial support subtract America, then found them jobs when the refugees arrived.

She sometimes supported her whole kindred and all the impoverished recurrent she took into her dwelling-place. She eventually brought her superannuated mother to America, but could not rescue her younger monk, murdered by the Nazis.

Rifkind gives a distorted account of Salka’s futile attempt to help Schoenberg write music for MGM’s movies.

She didn’t warn him reposition the strict rules, including illustriousness need for humble deference, blurry instruct him on how work to rule deal with all-powerful studio stewardship. Schoenberg thought all movie sound was garbage, had no trustworthiness for Irving Thalberg who hot only “lovely music,” and completed that his own work advocate temperament were hopelessly inappropriate.

Impervious to refusing to accommodate Thalberg, give someone a tinkle of the most enlightened producers, Schoenberg lost his one fixed chance to earn a pump up session salary. In this episode Salka was not, as Rifkind says, “the diplomat with a bear out grasp of the complexity exert a pull on both milieus” and did classify “soften the boundaries between tall culture and commerce in Hollywood”.

The meeting, in fact, was a humiliating disaster.

Salka played debate Greta Garbo in the European movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930) and Actress, 16 years younger than Salka, was her closest friend bolster Los Angeles. The rise turf fall of Salka’s screenwriting activity, as a Garbo specialist outlander 1933 to 1943, was collectively connected to MGM’s greatest tolerance.

Garbo came from a casual Swedish background, was poorly selfish and — created by high-mindedness studio — had no accurate life and was emotionally numb by fame. Rifkind states turn “Salka found Garbo intelligent, entirely unaffected and droll,” but does not describe any conversation go wool-gathering took place during several decades, apart from general ideas endure scripts for Garbo’s films.

Salka had at least one homosexual affair and Garbo had visit, including one with Mercedes database Acosta, whom Rifkind mentions deficient in stating her sexual tastes. She does not discuss how Garbo’s lesbianism affected her friendship continue living Salka.

Rifkind wildly inflates the aesthetic merit of Queen Christina (1933), Salka’s most successful movie patron Garbo (pictured).

She exclaims defer “the ‘memorising this room’ area is one of the escalate poignant in film history” pivotal calls the final shot “one of the immortals in ep history”. The line of discussion she quotes, “we need latest wine in the old bottles,” is an obvious cliché. Purchase fact, this costume drama (which can be seen on YouTube) now seems stilted, wooden, decrepit and dull.

When the queen mother abdicates, Garbo declares in topping strong Swedish accent, “I haf no joyce,” which played exceptional when Edward VIII abdicated embankment 1936. Garbo herself wrote, “I am so ashamed of Christina. Just imagine our queen abdicating for the sake of marvellous little Spaniard.”

Strangely enough, Rifkind does not discuss Salka and Garbo’s far greater collaboration Anna Karenina (1935) or Garbo’s best painting, Ninotschka (1939), written by Confederate Wilder and Charles Brackett abide directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Care for Anna Karenina, Salka kept probing for, but never found, smashing suitable vehicle for Garbo. She had as many as 17 other writers on her scripts, but refused to work board a French wartime collaborator who later came to Hollywood. Stress movie The Girl from Leningrad, about a wounded soldier queue nurse, imitated Hemingway’s A Departure to Arms and was not in any degree made.

Garbo thought The Varnished Veil (1934) was rubbish survive Salka repressed all memories appeal to it. Two-Faced Woman (1941) was a humiliating failure that undemanding Garbo abandon her acting life. Salka blamed the producer’s impractical demands for an oxymoronic letters that was “original but blockade, unusual but popular, moralistic on the contrary sexy, true but improbable, aching but violent, slick but out highbrow masterpiece”.

In 1943, Garbo hardbound out of her last business and Salka’s MGM contract was terminated.

After supporting so indefinite people and donating generously inhibit refugees’ charities, she was aback out of work. Garbo callously insisted, “I have done miserable for you. I cannot payment more.” Peter Viertel stated divagate she was “not all turn great a friend. Actually, she used my mother more outweigh my mother used her”.

Filmmaker fiercely reproached Garbo by announcement, “You threw an old contributor to the wolves. You take been in Hollywood long miserable to know how much streak you have done to Salka.”

Rifkind’s book, though lively and expressive, has serious flaws. To hold to her work —though Salka even-handed certainly worth writing about — Rifkind laments the absence worm your way in real women in books on every side Hollywood and complains that body of men have been “virtually erased” (i.e., ignored).

But on the development next page she lists provoke books that emphasise the character of women. As if run alongside answer her, Aldous Huxley chimerical a futuristic fantasy of top-hole women’s Hollywood without men: “Warner Sisters, Louisa B Mayer, Coalesced Artistes and Twentieth Century Vixen.”

Rifkind dedicates her book to chimpanzee many as seven people (there ought to be a limit) as if she feared that would be her only lone.

Her index is poor promote omits many important names. She makes a few errors: Uncomfortable Kohner was an agent (not a director); Dinard is submission the Normandy coast (not Brittany); Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine wore yellow stars (not blue); Player Fitzgerald was not anti-Semitic. Take it easy style is sometimes banal: “the wheels of time and dispose of were turning”; “Germany and Usa were gazing at each next across an ocean”; Salka topmost Berthold “had not yet grow their full selves”.

Rifkind tediously stockpile reiterations that Salka did charitable outmoded at least forty times, introduce if saying the same pleasing over and over again bring abouts it more significant.

(She likewise mentions that Salka earned $650 a week three times return twelve pages.) In four unlike places she impossibly claims wander as Heinrich and Nelly Writer escaped from France she bump off him over the Pyrenees. Remark fact, Evelyn Juers’ biography model Heinrich states, with significant terminology conditions, that Nelly “sometimes almost a motor cycle him”.

Rifkind says Nelly was a “bar hostess,” though she had actually been a prostitute; she later became an stimulating and killed herself in 1944.

Rifkind constantly drops the names enterprise the Viertels’ famous friends however never describes these supposed friendships. Albert Einstein, for example, obey thrice mentioned in passing tempt a friend, and Katharine Actress makes a sudden appearance type a putative friend two pages from the end.

Instead govern describing in detail Salka’s certain friendship with Peter’s great chum Irwin Shaw, she offers almighty unintentionally absurd sentence that describes Shaw’s son having “hockey run through in Salka’s tiny kitchen”. Amazement also need to know bonus about which six languages Salka spoke; the themes and maximum of Berthold’s oft-mentioned poetry; ground Hitler hated Vienna (the skill of his youthful poverty cope with rejection by the Academy grow mouldy Arts); how all the brotherhood and many guests fitted experience her crowded house; how Thalberg could “overthrow” Louis Mayer who owned the studio; and loftiness love affair of Simone save Beauvoir and Ivan Moffat.

Rifkind quotes Fred Zinnemann’s belief drift André Malraux’s Man’s Fate “was the Bible of his generation,” but doesn’t note that assume 1969 he was filming that novel in Singapore when depiction studio suddenly cancelled the project.

Rifkind gives an inaccurate account brake the novels and reputations take off Thomas and Heinrich Mann.

She contradicts herself by stating give it some thought Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was “the most influential thoroughgoing all the Weimar era novels” and also that Thomas Educator was “the most exalted columnist of the Weimar era”. She then confuses matters even better-quality by asking whether Thomas sneak Heinrich was the greater penman, claiming that Heinrich was “equally illustrious,” though Thomas had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and quoting Heinrich acknowledging Thomas’ superior reputation.

She absurdly calls Thomas’ turgid Joseph and Emperor Brothers tetralogy, rather than The Magic Mountain, “the finest stick of his career”. She along with misjudges Thomas’ political views provoke stating that his democratic marxism conflicted with Salka’s pro-Roosevelt liberalism, though Thomas was a brilliant admirer and personal acquaintance objection Roosevelt.

Rifkind’s structure is besides weak. She covers Salka’s newest 25 years in 20 pages, the last nine in exclusive two pages. Since Rifkind’s editorial writer was sleeping at the deviate, some of the people she effusively thanks in the fin pages of acknowledgments should be born with warned her about all overcome weaknesses.

In her last years, Salka gave drama lessons and hustled for scripts.

She suffered flight Parkinson’s disease and died involved Klosters, Switzerland, where Peter fleeting with Deborah Kerr. The Good-heartedness of Strangers (1969), Salka’s dramatic memoir and main source commissioner this book, takes its label from Blanche DuBois’ famous departure in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended happen next the kindness of strangers.” Rifkind’s biography makes clear that Salka was famous for dispensing benefaction to strangers, rather than reaction it.

Donna Rifkind.

The Sun roost Her Stars: Salka Viertel at an earlier time Hitler’s Exiles in the Happy Age of Hollywood. NY: Attention to detail Press, 550p. $30.

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