300 Part III: Emigration Years
her husband and her father. They all joined in private concerts together,
playing Bach, Beethoven and Debussy. Adorno expressed his regret
that he could not make music with his mother, ‘the passionate female
hippo’, as he affectionately called her. In another passage about music,
Adorno praised the clarinettist Benny Goodman, who was not just a
talented ‘swing musician’ but had also played good classical music in a
chamber ensemble.^124
Despite the wartime restrictions his letters express contentment
with his situation, as can be seen from a letter of September 1942 to
Horkheimer, who was in New York. He wrote that, since he could not
go to the cinema with him, he and Gretel could at least go with Maidon.
In Santa Monica in general, he went on, life was ‘very active and lively’,
‘which we thoroughly enjoy’.^125 He wrote to his parents in the same
month, expressing a similar satisfaction. He reported that, although he
and Gretel had only been there a short time, they had already become
fixtures of Hollywood society.^126 He had already met Thomas Mann,
who lived close to Horkheimer. He had met Greta Garbo in the house
of Salka and Berthold Viertel. She was ‘nice and pretty, even if no
great intellectual’, as he informed Horkheimer.^127 Did this meeting
over afternoon tea inspire Adorno to produce an aphorism? Under the
title of ‘L’Inutile beauté’, itself derived from Maupassant, he wrote:
‘Women of exceptional beauty are doomed to unhappiness.’^128 ‘Either
they shrewdly exchange beauty for success’, or else they bind them-
selves to the first comer, confident that they can choose someone else
at any time. ‘Just because they were once hors de concours they are
unsuccessful in competition, for which they now develop a mania. The
gesture of irresistibility remains when the reality has passed away; magic
perishes the moment it ceases merely to stand for hope and settles
for domesticity.’^129
For their part the Adornos frequently invited guests of their own.
They gave a large party in honour of Davidson Taylor, the director of
programming at CBS, and another in honour of the actor Alexander
Granach, who had worked under Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang^130 and
who read from his autobiography on this occasion. Hanns Eisler was
a frequent visitor, as were Lotte Lenja, Katia and Thomas Mann, and
Charlotte and Wilhelm Dieterle. Adorno was of course under no illusions
about the superficiality of social life: ‘That this self-fêting in no way
enriches life is manifest in the boredom of the cocktail parties, the
weekend invitations to the country, the golf, symbolic of the whole
sphere, the organization of the social round – privileges giving real
enjoyment to none, and serving only to conceal from the privileged
how much in the joyless whole they too are without the possibility of
pleasure.’^131 He told his parents that he was keeping his distance from
‘society’, since the social contacts were nothing like as interesting as the
philosophical work which was in the forefront of his mind. It follows
that the references in his letters to the ‘sacred text’ on which he was