40 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
Pacific might never have existed with-
out her.
Viertel had been in L.A. since 1928,
when her husband, the director Berthold
Viertel, received a studio contract. Ernst
Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, and Erich von
Stroheim had already given Hollywood
a German accent. Salka had been an actor
on the German stage; she now turned to
screenwriting, collaborating frequently
with Garbo, one of her closest friends.
Bohemians rotated through her house.
(Christopher Isherwood lived for a while
in an apartment over the garage.) She
regularly threw parties, curating conver-
sations among a dazzling assortment of
guests—everyone from Schoenberg to
Ava Gardner—and then repairing to the
kitchen to prepare her much lauded Sa-
cher Torte. Rifkind reports that Thomas
Mann once showed up at the wedding
of strangers because he had heard that
Viertel’s torte would be served.
Rifkind persuasively argues that Viertel
was far more than a bon vivant: she had
a genius for fostering creative relation-
ships. Franz Waxman fell into a career
as a Hollywood composer after striking
up a conversation with the director James
Whale in Viertel’s living room. Brecht
and Charles Laughton first met there.
To be sure, not all of Viertel’s mediations
panned out. She facilitated a legendarily
unsuccessful meeting between Schoen-
berg and the studio head Irving Thal-
berg, who was seeking a composer for an
adaptation of Pearl Buck’s “The Good
Earth.” As Viertel relates in her memoir,
Schoenberg told Thalberg that he would
need complete creative control, and that
the actors would have to conform to
pitches and rhythms specified in his score.
That story is often cited for comic
effect, to illustrate the irreconcilability
of European values with those of Hol-
lywood. When Thalberg complimented
Schoenberg on his “lovely music”—one
of the composer’s less challenging scores
had recently been played on the radio—
Schoenberg snapped, “I don’t write lovely
music.” For Rifkind, the anecdote demon-
strates that Viertel was not a mere ob-
server in this social world but its mas-
ter of ceremonies: “She was the mutual
contact who first made it possible for
the composer and the producer to meet.
She was the diplomat with a firm grasp
of the complexities of both milieus.”
Even if Schoenberg wrote nothing for
Hollywood, his influence on film scor-
ing was immense.
The émigré community certainly
needed Viertel’s diplomacy. The strug-
gling authors resented the popular ones.
Misunderstandings arose between po-
litical refugees—those who had been
aligned with the left or had strongly
protested Nazism—and Jewish refu-
gees, whose political sympathies ranged
widely. The Austrians tended to band
together; the musicians spoke their own
language. The two opposing poles were
Brecht and Thomas Mann, who had
long disliked each other. Brecht sawMann as a grandiose narcissist with no
empathy for lesser spirits. Mann recoiled
from Brecht’s combativeness, although
when he read “Mother Courage and
Her Children” he was forced to admit
that “the beast has talent.”F
euchtwanger, Werfel, Döblin, and
Thomas and Heinrich Mann were
all mainstays at the Viertel salons. On
one occasion, they and dozens of oth-
ers gathered to celebrate Heinrich’s sev-
entieth birthday. The brothers rose in
turn, each pulling a sheaf of papers from
his coat pocket and reading an exhaus-
tive appreciation of the other’s work.
Afterward, Viertel told the writer Bruno
Frank how much the spectacle had
moved her. Frank responded, “They
write and read such ceremonial evalu-
ations of each other every ten years.”
The array of personalities was formi-
dable and eccentric. The Manns, scions
of an old North German merchant fam-
ily, were bourgeois to the core. Thomas
had “the reserved politeness of a diplo-
mat on official duty,” Viertel wrote; Hein-
rich, the “manners of a nineteenth-cen-
tury grand seigneur.” Feuchtwanger was
tan and fit, though he liked nothing
more than to withdraw into his vast li-
brary and burrow into rare books. Döblin,
of Pomeranian-Jewish background, had
a cutting wit, which was often directed
at Thomas Mann. Werfel, the son of
German-speaking Jews in Prague, was
the most politically conservative of the
group, prone to outbursts against the
Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, he was well
liked—a mystic in a crowd of skeptics.
All five novelists had been alert to
political danger in their work of the nine-
teen-twenties and early thirties. Feucht-
wanger’s breakthrough novel, “Jew Süss,”
contains harrowing evocations of anti-
Jewish violence in eighteenth-century
Germany; his “Success,” set in Munich
in the early twenties, caricatures Hitler
as a pompous thug. In Döblin’s “Berlin
Alexanderplatz,” the ex-convict Franz
Biberkopf supports himself, in part, by
selling the Nazi newspaper Völkischer
Beobachter. Thomas Mann’s novella
“Mario and the Magician” is a parable
of Fascist manipulation. Heinrich Mann
had been more farsighted than any of
them, as Thomas acknowledged in his
birthday speech at Viertel’s. Heinrich’s
“Der Untertan,” or “The Underling,”“Myra, if you really mean it about restructuring, let’s lose
the shepherd and keep the sheepdogs.”