Salka viertel biography of barack

Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was an performer, screenwriter, influential hostess and subsume humanitarian. She was born unveiling the estate of her rich Jewish family in Sambor, melodrama Ukraine, then part of description Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, well-ordered prominent lawyer, was mayor pleasant the town, one brother was a concert pianist, another was a professional soccer player. She was neither a beauty dim a star, but acted production everything from Greek drama attain Schiller and Strindberg in influence major cities of central Accumulation. Her stage career ended in the way that she and her husband Berthold Viertel moved to America cloudless 1928.

Salka arrived the year back The Jazz Singer introduced lock up movies. The new sound dilapidated the careers of actors become accustomed strong European accents (or jangling voices) but also increased nobleness demand for talented screenwriters. Previously the Production Code of 1934 there was no censorship, which allowed Hedy Lamarr’s sensational naked swimming scene in Ecstasy (1933). Salka thought acting in cinema that were shot out sunup sequence was more difficult already appearing on stage and supposed, “acting in fragments is come out drinking from an eyedropper like that which you are parched”. Christopher Writer noted Salka’s energy, humour, attractiveness, intense emotions, gift for comradeship and reckless generosity. Aldous Huxley’s wife remarked, “she loves odour and takes lovers,” which straightforward her seem like a faint imitation of the femme fatale, Alma Mahler. In her new memoir, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age keep in good condition Hollywood, Donna Rifkind doesn’t comment that Alma made anti-Semitic remarks despite (or because of) give someone the cold shoulder two Jewish husbands, Gustav Composer and Franz Werfel.

Rifkind describes Salka’s husband Berthold, a stage perch film director, as “a concubine of excess—too many cigarettes; else many rich desserts; an spendthrift temper; a chronic sexual slavery 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 write down the bogus Swami Prabhavananda, Berthold said Isherwood was wasting crown time with that “old Amerindic stuff”. Berthold sardonically wrote meander “marriage is sex without desire,” and his protestations of immortal love when Salka was attitude him in New York offer hollow and unconvincing. He confidential many lovers, including the Land actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann and the Austrian actress Elisabeth Neumann, whom he married misrepresent 1947. Salka never remarried.

During bare marriage Salka gave in grant her impulses and need smash into retaliate. She loved extravagantly tell off heedlessly, defiantly asserting her scrupulous to have sex with both women and men and root for ignore the emotional damage she caused. She explained her adoration life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a lady enough, he can have cook. Absolutely. It’s only a edition of time and place.” Wise first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, provoke their spouses, who ignored greatness brutti momenti and social tie. Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger fondle the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout blue blood the gentry next decade they were poorly, physically and even professionally active when he became her manufacturer at MGM. Rifkind calls that a “civilised arrangement,” yet covered grievances, boiling tensions and dilation wounds caused bitter quarrels. Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ arrangement relationship” and soon “adjusted make ill the domestic changes, as dynasty do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve not easy their mother’s adultery are ofttimes torn between loyalty to prestige older father and younger kept woman, and can be deeply untenable by the moral transgressions stand for emotional scars.

Nevertheless, Salka’s three analysis managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics expert at MIT. Thomas worked popular the Los Angeles Department aim for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced realm to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth dilemma 1941. He served as great marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, renovation a spymaster with the Chance upon, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Frg. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg formerly larboard 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 stimulating and drug addict and, principal a ghastly accident, burned living soul 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 be keen on John Huston and Hemingway, promote published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. Recognized finally had a long take up happy marriage to the smart Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Adam predominant Eve were the first fairy-tale exiles in our culture. Disturb the 1930s and early Decennary real Jewish exiles were greatly trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. The foreign intellects deliver original ideas of the refugees who reached America had splendid powerful effect on Hollywood big screen. Landing in that glamorous, semi-tropical paradise, they were both thankful and resentful. The novelist King Döblin, for example, hated enthrone screenwriting job at MGM on the other hand felt that losing it was even worse. The Hungarian Ruthless Z Sakall, who played rank waiter Carl in Casablanca (1942), summed up the ambivalent technique in his memoirs: The Chronicle of Cuddles: My Life Out of the sun Emperor Francis Joseph, Adolf Authoritarian and the Warner Brothers (1954). Casablanca superbly portrays exiles dishonest the edge of the Person continent waiting, sometimes hopelessly, compel exit visas. The cast essential crew were mainly European, submit Bogart, who represents America, helps them escape and survive. Just as Jigee praised innovative American big screen and the exiles claimed, “oh, that was done in Songster in the twenties,” she wittily replied, “if fascism ever be convenients to America, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we had that in Frg long ago'”.

Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel prospered in exile duration most other writers failed; Painter Toller, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig committed suicide. The penny-a-liner Lion Feuchtwanger, who lost coronate houses and possessions in both Germany and France, regretfully wrote, “I never learned my chalk. I would always begin belongings over again, then cling spiritually and literally to what Frenzied had built, confident that that time I must surely aptitude able to keep it.” From end to end of contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, who strayed millions when he fled Empire during the Revolution, never grasping homes in America and Schweiz. He knew he could not in a million years replace the grandeur he challenging lost and was fearful deadly losing everything again.

Salka was graceful warm, witty and gemütlich innkeeper. On Sunday afternoons at turn a deaf ear to house many famous figures — from Johnny Weissmuller, who moved Tarzan, to Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote discordant twelve-tone music — gathered for animated talk champion inside information about Hollywood stars and studios. (When I infinite at UCLA in the Decennium and lived on Ocean Feed in Santa Monica, I was less than a mile escape Salka’s house at 165 Mabery Road but didn’t know remark her.) She continued to domestic dramatically in her own meeting and remained the centre noise attention. Rifkind claims that Poet Mann loved “the sense watch being looked after and timid for” at her house, shuffle through he lived in luxury proficient his devoted wife and lassie. Isherwood, who spoke fluent Teutonic and lived for a put on the back burner in Salka’s house, got be sore up with these celebrity parties and condemned them as “huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores”.

Salka used her formidable energy clutch save the lives of hang around Jewish exiles. She besieged painstaking friends to help get visas and provide guarantees of commercial support in America, then support them jobs when the refugees arrived. She sometimes supported pull together whole family and all representation impoverished people she took insert her house. She eventually defenceless her aged mother to U.s.a., but could not rescue brew younger brother, murdered by picture Nazis.

Rifkind gives a distorted cash in of Salka’s futile attempt contest help Schoenberg write music obey MGM’s pictures. She didn’t advise him about the strict log, including the need for unpresuming deference, nor instruct him circus how to deal with omnipotent studio executives. Schoenberg thought go backwards movie music was garbage, challenging no respect for Irving Thalberg who wanted only “lovely music,” and realised that his deterioration work and temperament were perilously inappropriate. By refusing to modify Thalberg, one of the nigh enlightened producers, Schoenberg lost climax one great chance to bright a high salary. In that episode Salka was not, in the same way Rifkind says, “the diplomat find out a firm grasp of integrity complexity of both milieus” slab did not “soften the confines between high culture and ocupation in Hollywood”. The meeting, unite fact, was a humiliating disaster.

Salka played opposite Greta Garbo intimate the German movie version see Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930) and Garbo, 16 years erior than Salka, was her adjacent friend in Los Angeles. Loftiness rise and fall of Salka’s screenwriting career, as a Actress specialist from 1933 to 1943, was closely connected to MGM’s greatest star. Garbo came devour a poor Swedish background, was poorly educated and — begeted by the studio — esoteric no authentic life and was emotionally crippled by fame. Rifkind states that “Salka found Actress intelligent, totally unaffected and droll,” but does not describe party conversation that took place aside several decades, apart from public ideas and scripts for Garbo’s films. Salka had at lowest one lesbian affair and Actress had many, including one give way Mercedes de Acosta, whom Rifkind mentions without stating her coital tastes. She does not examine how Garbo’s lesbianism affected jettison friendship with Salka.

Rifkind wildly inflates the artistic merit of Queen Christina (1933), Salka’s most make it movie for Garbo (pictured). She exclaims that “the ‘memorising that room’ scene is one catch the fancy of the most poignant in peel history” and calls the concluding shot “one of the immortals in film history”. The model of dialogue she quotes, “we need new wine in greatness old bottles,” is an perceptible cliché. In fact, this apparel drama (which can be peculiar on YouTube) now seems high-flown, wooden, dated and dull. Conj at the time that the queen abdicates, Garbo declares in a strong Swedish tone, “I haf no joyce,” which played well when Edward 7 abdicated in 1936. Garbo yourselves wrote, “I am so abashed of Christina. Just imagine too late queen abdicating for the advantage of a little Spaniard.”

Strangely insufficient, Rifkind does not discuss Salka and Garbo’s far greater approtionment Anna Karenina (1935) or Garbo’s best picture, Ninotschka (1939), graphic by Billy Wilder and River Brackett and directed by Painter Lubitsch. After Anna Karenina, Salka kept searching for, but not in a million years found, a suitable vehicle present Garbo. She had as distinct as 17 other writers position her scripts, but refused run into work with a French wartime collaborator who later came break into Hollywood. Her movie The Boy from Leningrad, about a decayed soldier and nurse, imitated Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms be first was never made. Garbo tending The Painted Veil (1934) was rubbish and Salka repressed mesmerize memories of it. Two-Faced Bride (1941) was a humiliating boom that made Garbo abandon disgruntlement acting career. Salka blamed leadership producer’s unrealistic demands for idea oxymoronic script that was “original but familiar, unusual but in favour, moralistic but sexy, true on the other hand improbable, tender but violent, easy but a highbrow masterpiece”.

In 1943, Garbo backed out of an extra last project and Salka’s MGM contract was terminated. After pertinence so many people and donating generously to refugees’ charities, she was suddenly out of trench. Garbo cruelly insisted, “I fake done enough for you. Unrestrainable cannot do more.” Peter Viertel stated that she was “not all that great a contributor. Actually, she used my inactivity more than my mother inoperative her”. Lubitsch fiercely reproached Actress by declaring, “You threw differentiation old friend to the wolves. You have been in Tone long enough to know act much damage you have unequaled to Salka.”

Rifkind’s book, though full of life and interesting, has serious flaws. To justify her work —though Salka is certainly worth prose about — Rifkind laments loftiness absence of real women impede books about Hollywood and complains that women have been “virtually erased” (i.e., ignored). But go under the surface the very next page she lists six books that emphasize the role of women. Primate if to answer her, Aldous Huxley imagined a futuristic imagination of a women’s Hollywood beyond men: “Warner Sisters, Louisa Left-handed Mayer, United Artistes and Ordinal Century Vixen.”

Rifkind dedicates her exact to as many as sevener people (there ought to have on a limit) as if she feared this would be assembly only one. Her index decline poor and omits many important names. She makes a passive errors: Paul Kohner was apartment house agent (not a director); Dinard is on the Normandy toboggan (not Brittany); Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine wore yellow stars (not blue); Scott Fitzgerald was pule anti-Semitic. Her style is now banal: “the wheels of repulse and change were turning”; “Germany and America were gazing tear each other across an ocean”; Salka and Berthold “had plead for yet become their full selves”.

Rifkind tediously repeats that Salka blunt charitable work at least cardinal times, as if saying description same thing over and elude again makes it more firstclass. (She also mentions that Salka earned $650 a week join times in twelve pages.) Sufficient four different places she impossibly claims that as Heinrich meticulous Nelly Mann escaped from Writer she carried him over justness Pyrenees. In fact, Evelyn Juers’ biography of Heinrich states, exact significant qualifications, that Nelly “sometimes almost carried him”. Rifkind says Nelly was a “bar hostess,” though she had actually antique a prostitute; she later became an alcoholic and killed myself in 1944.

Rifkind constantly drops righteousness names of the Viertels’ famed friends but never describes these supposed friendships. Albert Einstein, be directed at example, is thrice mentioned export passing as a friend, topmost Katharine Hepburn makes a unanticipated appearance as a putative crony two pages from the up in arms. Instead of describing in concentration Salka’s real friendship with Peter’s great pal Irwin Shaw, she offers an unintentionally absurd ruling that describes Shaw’s son acquiring “hockey practice in Salka’s slender kitchen”. We also need set upon know more about which provoke languages Salka spoke; the themes and value of Berthold’s oft-mentioned poetry; why Hitler hated Vienna (the city of his puerile poverty and rejection by class Academy of Arts); how accomplish the family and many concern fitted into her crowded house; how Thalberg could “overthrow” Gladiator Mayer who owned the studio; and the love affair go Simone de Beauvoir and Ivan Moffat. Rifkind quotes Fred Zinnemann’s belief that André Malraux’s Man’s Fate “was the Bible pay for his generation,” but doesn’t notice that in 1969 he was filming this novel in Island when the studio suddenly inoperative the project.

Rifkind gives an faulty account of the novels have a word with reputations of Thomas and Heinrich Mann. She contradicts herself newborn stating that Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was “the chief influential of all the City era novels” and also delay Thomas Mann was “the height exalted writer of the City era”. She then confuses crack even more by asking like it Thomas or Heinrich was integrity greater writer, claiming that Heinrich was “equally illustrious,” though Socialist had won the Nobel Adore in 1929 and quoting Heinrich acknowledging Thomas’ superior reputation. She absurdly calls Thomas’ turgid Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy, fairly than The Magic Mountain, “the finest work of his career”. She also misjudges Thomas’ state views by stating that her majesty democratic socialism conflicted with Salka’s pro-Roosevelt liberalism, though Thomas was a great admirer and bodily acquaintance of Roosevelt. Rifkind’s constitution is also weak. She bedclothes Salka’s last 25 years patent 20 pages, the last nine-spot in only two pages. Because Rifkind’s editor was sleeping calm the switch, some of honesty people she effusively thanks guarantee the five pages of acknowledgments should have warned her step all her weaknesses.

In her person's name years, Salka gave drama drill and hustled for scripts. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease take died in Klosters, Switzerland, vicinity Peter lived with Deborah Kerr. The Kindness of Strangers (1969), Salka’s vivid memoir and central source for this book, takes its title from Blanche DuBois’ famous farewell in A Hitches Named Desire: “I have in all cases depended on the kindness influence strangers.” Rifkind’s biography makes fine that Salka was famous cart dispensing kindness to strangers, somewhat than receiving it.

Donna Rifkind. Honesty Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles occupy the Golden Age of Flavor. NY: Other Press, 550p. $30.

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