CH9801 07 Book Review 121..131

BOOK REVIEWS Donna Rifkind. The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. New York: Other Press, 2020. 550 pp. Hardcover $30.00. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-pdf/98/1/121/455345/ch.2021.98.1.121.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 The purpose of Donna Rifkind’s new book is triple-pronged. First and foremost, it seeks to finally give actress, screenwriter, salonnie`re, and memoirist Salka Viertel (1889–1978) the full credit she deserves. Viertel was a key figure in classical-era Hollywood (ca. 1930– 1960), as well as a major source of support for the many refugee artists and intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany (265). Secondly, The Sun and Her Stars redresses the historical record of gender imbalance that has marginalized not only Viertel but legions of women, “often below the line and unglorified,” who “were nonetheless vital to the success of the studio system” and who, in some cases such as Viertel’s, “wielded genuine influence if not actual power” (4). Finally, and most ambitiously, Rifkind argues for the relevance of Viertel’s tireless activism on behalf of the victims of the Third Reich to the current nativist, anti-immigrant climate in the United States: “The questions Salka asked herself about one’s responsibility in the face of bigotry and exclusion are the same questions we’re asking today” (9). These questions indeed reverberate throughout The Sun and Her Stars. But it is the first of Rifkind’s planks—that of granting Viertel her rightful place as a creative force in Hollywood, while also acknowledging her Santa Monica home as a crucial refuge for Hitler’s exiles and her industry contacts as an invaluable resource for them—that she develops most deeply. Which is more than enough to engross, inform, and entertain the reader of this insightful and beautifully written biography—only the second, and the first in English, about this remarkable woman.1 Salka Viertel, herself a Galician Jewish immigrant who arrived in America in 1928, was by no means an unknown quantity in Hollywood, nor has her role as host to the cream of Europe’s refugee community been ignored. Her own well-received memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (1969), elaborates on her screenwriting career and on her days as the grand dame of the salonnie`res. A stream of subsequent academic and popular texts at least pays homage to Viertel’s Mabery Road home as a prominent meeting ground and clearing house for the emigr´ e´ elite. Yet earlier scholarship contains glaring flaws of commission and omission, which Rifkind both identifies and rectifies. “During her lifetime and after,” Rifkind explains, Salka Viertel was “both maligned and dismissed” and “is remembered, if California History, Vol. 98, Number 1, pp. 121–131, ISSN 0162-2897, electronic ISSN 2327-1485. © 2021 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/ reprintspermissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.1.121. CALIFORNIA HISTORY 121 at all, for inviting people to parties on Sunday afternoons” (6–7). Her memoir, meanwhile, has largely been scoured for juicy tidbits about her A-list guests, or for dirt about her alleged lesbian affair with Greta Garbo. The Sunday afternoon luminaries, however, were more than fleeting acquaintances of Viertel’s. Most were longtime colleagues and friends, and others would become so. As for the Garbo affair, Rifkind gives it short, if somewhat contradictory, shrift. She waits till midway through to bring it up at all, then simply states that the “truth about Salka’s and Garbo’s intimate bond is not available and may never be” (119). Yet toward the end she seems to tip her hand, recounting a claim from one of Salka’s house guests that “on many afternoons Salka and Garbo spent many hours alone in the master bedroom, with Salka’s German shepherd Prinz guarding the closed door” (341). Viertel’s involvement with Garbo Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-pdf/98/1/121/455345/ch.2021.98.1.121.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 in general, however, forms one of the book’s major through lines. Viertel was one of the Swedish actress’s closest friends and confidants, a screenwriter on most of her sound-era films, and “the bridge between Garbo and the studio” (117). With or without romantic attachment or sexual consummation, Rifkind concludes, theirs was “the most important relationship either of them would ever have in Hollywood” (78). But Rifkind is no prude. Where there is more conclusive evidence to support them, she is by no means averse to discussing Salka’s various dalliances, capped by a long-term extramarital affair with the twenty-two-years-younger Gottfried Reinhardt, a movie producer and the son of famed Austrian theater impresario Max Reinhardt. Although this is far from all she has to say about him, Rifkin also covers the amours, short- and long-term, of Salka’s husband, writer and director Berthold Viertel. As for Salka’s novelist and screenwriter son Peter Viertel, the second of Salka’s three sons with Berthold, how could one fail to mention his trysts with Ava Gardner and Joan Fontaine, and an eventual marriage to Deborah Kerr. So here I am, falling into the same name-dropping trap that Rifkind laments in pre- vious discussions of Salka Viertel and her salon, whose guest list was indeed a Who’s Who of European and American cultural icons. Rifkind, while not ignoring that all-star lineup, devotes the bulk of The Sun and Her Stars to providing the personal and historical context that helped propel Salka’s deeply committed humanitarianism. Viertel was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish household by a mother who viewed the home “as refuge” (133) and “as the center of intense moral, civic, and cultural engagement” (69). She also hosted regular Sunday-afternoon salons to realize this ideal, and Salka carried on the family tradition in America. Rifkind is right not to focus solely on the atrocities committed by the Nazis, with which most people are familiar. Instead, she also details the less well known, but bitterly ironic, mistreatment in America that German and, most especially, German-Jewish emigr´ es´ faced before, during, and after World War II. Throughout the 1930s, fueled by the words and activities of several public figures, anti-Semitism was shockingly widespread among the general populace, and a nationwide pro-Nazi movement had a particularly strong foothold in Southern California. While not to be compared with the large-scale internment of the Japanese, during the war German and Italian nationals were required to register as enemy aliens, subjected to strict curfews, and warned by police not to speak in public in their native languages. In the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and 1950s, prominent 122 SPRING 2021 German emigr´ es´ were among those persecuted for their leftist political leanings. Salka herself, whom Rifkind identifies as “a vaguely socialist liberal” (379), faced FBI surveil- lance and interrogation as a “fellow traveler” for her friendships with the more radical refugees. Most absurdly, authorities accused her of “premature anti-fascist” (read: pro- communist) activities, such as having joined the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, cofounded by Warner Bros. Studios in 1936 when the United States was neutral and uncommitted in the looming European conflict (187–188). The postwar government-sponsored persecu- tion, along with the country’s generally antidemocratic mood, prompted an infuriated response from Viertel, one that Rifkind clearly means to resonate with the right-wing turn of the Trump era: “Fascism is here. I couldn’t give a damn about freedom of the press and thought in a world where lies and brutality are tolerated” (384). Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-pdf/98/1/121/455345/ch.2021.98.1.121.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 But reclamation, not damnation, is the overarching theme of The Sun and Her Stars.It leaves us with a portrait of a complex, multifaceted Lebensku¨nstler (artist of life) (91) who was one of legendary MGM producer Irving Thalberg’s “Scheherazades” (13), whose wonderful memoir itself was and remains a “House of Leaves” (414), but who was also “the anchor,” “the shelter,” “the chief ambassador,” and “the social glue for the exile community” (89, 265, 277, 426), and whose still-standing house on Mabery Road “built an intentional community that was as passionately committed to social support as the local ashrams” (399). No, Salka Viertel was not a prophet, a saint, or a swami, but as Donna Rifkind brilliantly conveys, she was one hell of a human being. Vincent Brook NOTE 1. Katharina Prager, “Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!”: Salka Viertel—Ein Leben in Theater und Film (Vienna: Braumu¨ller, 2007). Richard White. California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History. Photographs by Jesse Amble White. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020. 326 pp. Hardcover $45.00. California Exposures reads like a conversation with Richard White, the prizewinning historian of large parts of the history of the West, a conversation that draws upon photographs taken by White’s son, Jesse Amble White, and upon their rambles to take the photographs. At the outset, Richard White makes clear that he and Jesse White see photographs differently. Where the photographer sees a photograph as “an artifact of a moment,” the historian sees a photograph as leading to searches in archives and libraries to place the photograph not just in space but also in time: “A photographer composes a picture as a whole, but a historian fractures it, divides it into different elements that lead to different regions of the past” (137).

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