At one of her famous Hollywood parties, Salka Viertel introduced a Berlin refugee friend, Franz Waxman, to British expatriate director James Whale. “My God! I’ve been looking all over the world for you!” Whale exclaimed. He’d heard some of Waxman’s cinema music and thought the German would be the ideal composer for the score to his next film, The Bride of Frankenstein.
Waxman got the job and thanks to Viertel’s hospitality, it was the beginning of a long American career. He wrote music for 144 films, winning Oscars for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun.
As Donna Rifkind emphasizes in The Sun and her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, in the movie industry, “talent counts for 25 percent and connections for 75.” Viertel was the connection for many people, the midwife of many projects; the nexus was the Sunday afternoon salons at her Santa Monica seaside home. People came for her Central European baking and cooking and to converse outside the studio confines. Guests on a typical Sunday might include Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, Arnold Schoenberg and Oscar Levant. Author Christopher Isherwood lived in the apartment over the garage.
Rifkind had two missions in writing The Sun and her Stars. The most obvious was to rescue Vertel’s reputation from decades of catty remarks by belligerent memoirists and careless chroniclers. She was dismissed as an artistic and intellectual poseur, punching above her weight on the strength of her friendship with Greta Garbo. Recent film historians such as Noah Isenberg have begun to draw a more accurate picture and Rifkind fills in their accounts.
Viertel and her husband Berthold were part of the Vienna-Berlin creative axis that led the way in theater, cinema, literature and visual art in the early 20th century. They followed their friend, director F.W. Murnau, to Hollywood in the late 1920s. Berthold retained the shadow of German Expressionism while directing films for Fox and Paramount. Salka found work as a screenwriter, part of the team behind Garbo’s memorable Queen Christina.
She may have leveraged her friendship with the Swedish star but Rifkind shows that Salka contributed to several productions at a high level. The author’s other thesis—hard to argue against—is that women were much more prevalent in Golden Age Hollywood than formerly acknowledged. They filled the ranks of every department in every studio though were seldom found in the big jobs of directing and producing, the areas of most concern to film historians.
More vital than Viertel’s screenwriting was her role in bringing refugees to the U.S., particularly artists fleeing the rise of Hitler and the expansion of Nazi Germany. She had been able to navigate the obstacle course of American immigration laws with the help of an attorney; sharing the knowledge she gained, Viertel saved many lives. Although never an observant Jew, Viertel, Rifkind argues, exemplified the Jewish heritage of hospitality, especially to strangers.
Viertel’s reputation declined along with her career. After World War II she was unable to find work in Hollywood, both because of Garbo’s withdrawal from movies and because of anti-Communist paranoia. She considered herself a New Deal Democrat but her association with refugee leftists put her on the “gray list” of not officially banned from the studios but not welcome either. Rifkind’s beautifully written account will hopefully elevate Viertel to the niche she deserves in film history and illuminate a fascinating chapter in American culture.
Screenwriter Salka Viertel saved many refugees from Nazi Germany.
