The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

by Donna Rifkind

The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll.

Hollywood was created by its "others"; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European �migr�s who had fled from Hitler--such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg--along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born.

Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She combined great worldliness with great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Film, Biography, Memoir, World War II, Media Tie In

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2020

About the author

Donna Rifkind is a book critic whose reviews appear in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other publications. Her biography of Salka Viertel is forthcoming from Other Press in the Fall of 2019.

Reviews

[Mallory]

I am so grateful that I was able to receive this book from Other Press for review. I had no idea who Salka Viertel was before reading this book, and now I cannot imagine the Golden Age of Hollywood without thinking about Viertel and her unwavering support and influence. Donna Rifkind's prose is as elegant and sentimental as Salka Viertel was, and the love she has for her subject is palpable and immense. It will always be a joy to consume a detailed account of a woman whose life and influence was squandered and suppressed by a male-dominated history, and this biography of Salka Viertel is no exception.

[Tori McDiarmid · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful book about a real heroine. This was my first “memoire”, which is why it took a little longer to read. It was beautifully written with intricate and specific detail.
4/5

[Larry Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading about Olde Hollywood. The bibliography in this book is wonderful, but I'm not sure if I can spend the money to collect all of the titles. It's a worthy goal IMO.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is completely apt for this biography of a woman most people have never heard of, yet who influenced the silver screen while saving hundreds if not thousands of lives by raising money or by personally sponsoring Jews so they could obtain rare visas to come to America. She was one of a handful of film influencers for a period of time that has been dubbed the Golden Age — the time from the end of silent movies until the McCarthy era in the late 40s.

Salka Viertel sourced material, worked on treatments and wrote and re-wrote scripts that featured good friend (and at times foe) Greta Garbo as well as others in the 30s and 40s. She recommended writers, cinematographers, musicians, actors, and directors to heads of movie studios.

Yet, Viertel was not born into Hollywood royalty. She, along with hundreds of other German, Polish and Austrian Jewish artists and intelligentsia, was a refugee from Nazi Europe. Viertel was in many ways the center of their universe, holding Sunday salons at her house in Santa Monica, supporting them with money and/or getting them contracts at Hollywood studios. While credited with a handful of screenwriting credits, it appears that her skill was put to use in many scripts that went uncredited.

The book starts off slowly and with too much sentimentality, which was perhaps derived from Viertel's own letters or the author's own assessment of a life well lived and then well forgotten. And if you're not knowledgeable about the Who's Who of German intelligentsia (Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht are probably the most well known, but there are dozens of others and Viertel was on a first name basis with seemingly all of them), you'll be a bit lost amid the name dropping. However, learning about the famous men — it was usually men who had the fame and reverence — was interesting in and of itself. Also, the author offers well-researched context for the historical events surrounding the time period along with stories about how once revered, well-to-do, employed figures, now refugees, struggled to have food to eat, let alone a desk to create at.

It's clear that Viertel was a force and led a group of intellectuals on the Pacific Coast who are immortalized in print and screen. This reminded me of another group, one on the East Coast: the Algonquin Round Table — again, another woman at the center of a historical world.

[James A. Feldman · Rating 2 out of 5]

WARNING: I have just started the book, and will update this review later. It seems as if it will be an interesting book about an interesting person at an interesting time. But readers should be aware that this may not be a a straightforward biography. The first chapter is written as an interior monologue of Salka Viertel as she sits sits in her apartment in Switzerland on a particular day in January 1963. While the author did have access to Viertel's diary, and I have not of course looked at the diary itself, it is difficult to believe that the author possibly could have known in this detail exactly what Viertel was thinking on that particular day at that particular time. The book has extensive endnotes, but few or none of the internal mental processes the author relates are endnoted. I like reading fiction a lot, but it is very distracting to read nonfiction where I have to constantly think about whether a given passage -- especially a passage about internal mental processes at a particular time and place -- are true, false, or merely informed guesses by the biographer. The second chapter seems to have much less of this, so perhaps it is just a strange first chapter. But still, this is troubling in a book that purports to be nonfiction.

[Afterwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, well-written and can't put it down.
The first chapter is a little weird as it's novelistic from Salka Viertel's point of view but it was fine.
Mainly about the golden age of Hollywood and how the emigre film community coped with the war and the growing terror of Hitler. Fascinating

[Julie Failla Earhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t often read biographies, unless they are exceptionally well-written and often in the genre of narrative nonfiction. However, I am always eager to hear the tales of Old Hollywood, that time from the 1930s and ‘40s. I don’t recall ever hearing of Salka Viertel. She wrote five of Greta Garbo’s movies (including “Anna Karenina” and “Queen Christina”) and was her BFF. Fascinating woman. This is a well-researched story of one of the forgotten people who worked hard, made movie magic, yet never received an Oscar.

I loved reading about the salons that she would host in her Santa Monica on Sunday afternoons, the variety of people who would show up and the conversations about everything under the sun.

The first two lines in the introduction hooked me: “The look, the sound, and the speech of Hollywood’s Golden Age did not originate in Hollywood. Much of it came from Europe, through the workd of successive waves of immigrants during the first half of the twentieth century.” Viertel was under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937.

An immigrant from in what today is in western Ukraine, Viertel came with her parents to America in 1928. The plan was to stay for four years, but Hitler’s rise caused them to stay. Viertel was under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937.

In some places the story was dry and hard to follow because of all the names I did not know. But when I did recognize such names as Charlie Cahplin and Garbo, my interest was piqued.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I finished this book, and honestly I can’t recall a single antedote or passage, but I enjoyed learning about this woman. “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

[BosGuy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind is a biography about the extraordinary but little known life of the Jewish, Austrian actress turned Hollywood screenwriter, Salka Viertel, who moved from Europe to southern California in the late 1920s. If you are fascinated by the Golden Age of Hollywood, you’ll find Rifkind’s detailed account of Viertel’s life and those around her fascinating to read.

The biography also details the personal trials and triumphs of Salka who earned a commanding salary and the respect of studio executives, producers and directors at a time when few women were respected in the male-dominated industry. Rifkind also touches upon the blacklisting that impacted Salka and many other Europeans in the decade that followed WWII because of their political sympathies and foreign accents which made them tagets of McCarthy and those on the HUAAC.

The book was a fascinating read from a pop culture, political and historical perspective, and I’m glad I read about this rather extraordinary woman. Through her efforts she saved the lives of many fleeing from Europe to escape fascism and rubbed elbows with some of the biggest stars and deal-makers in Hollywood’s Golden Age. If you are fascinated by or liked the Oscar-nominated film, Mank, add this to your reading list.

My full review is on my blog at: https://bosguy.com/2021/04/20/book-re...

[J. Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE SUN AND HER STARS by Donna Rifkind is a fine introduction to the world of European exiles in Los Angeles during WWII. At the heart of the book is Salka Viertel, herself a refugee from Hitler's war. An actress in Europe, she became a story editor and screenwriter for major studios in Hollywood, meanwhile managing a home at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica with three active sons and a cast of dozens of exiles from Brecht to Mann who showed up for her at-home Sundays. Her husband, Berthold, was a director for both theater and movies, and was often away on location. Salka Viertel is a much underrated artist in her own right, and Rifkind's book helps to correct that.

Her life was unfortuately too typical for European Jews--born in Galicia, later, Poland, she lost everything with the advent of the Nazis, but was finally able to save her aged mother, bringing her to the US. Those who gathered around her table on Sundays found a salon atmosphere--though Thomas Mann seemed to appreciate Salka's flourless chococlate cake more than the chinwagging. Rikind does a good job of providing mini-biographies of the many notables who gathered at Mabery Road, but never loses sight of her true protagonist--Salka Viertel and her undying optimism.

A good book to read in turbulent times such as ours.

[LillyBooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm perhaps a horrible person and I enjoyed the wrong parts of this book for the wrong reasons. I enjoyed the autobiographical components that dealt directly with Viertel's life and her work as a screenwriter in Hollywood during the 1930's and 1940's. I found the movie lot intrigue and the stories behind some famous films interesting, and I admired the ways Viertel dealt with the repeated degradation of women in that industry at that time.

However, this is, as promised, primarily a book about her humanitarian work, namely in helping Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany obtain visas and then welcoming them into Los Angles and sometimes even her home. It's heart-breaking work, and Viertel deserved someone to tell the story of her generosity. So I'm very pleased this book exists. But I found the stories tragically similar and repeatable. Each was as sad and as desperate, and then as grateful, as the last. I think each of the those refugees deserved to have their story told. I just found it repetitive reading and then I found myself skimming over large sections in order to get back to Viertel's day job as a screen writer. A worthy book on an important subject, but just too depressing for me after awhile.

[Tami Morse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Salka Viertel sounds like she was a lovely person to know. Unfortunately, she wasn't that interesting to read about. She was a warm and welcoming hostess to the European emigres fleeing the rise of Hitler and the violence that he incited, with a gift for making friends, and bringing people together, but these qualities don't make for compelling reading. Despite Donna Rifkind's praise of her work in the studios, Salka Viertel never comes across as more than a mediocre screenwriter, and the parties at her home never really come alive. The book starts off with an off-key attempt to follow Viertel's stream of thought in her old age, which was not convincing or interesting. The book picks up more when it moves to a third person narrative. It becomes most interesting about halfway through, when the focus shifts away from Viertel's life and focuses more on the nail-biting and sometimes dramatic escapes from Europe of some of her eventual guests. The Sun and Her Stars was worth reading, because of the historical perspective and the view of the inner workings of Hollywood during its Golden Age -- especially the women who did so much of the work with so little credit. Still, it had many dull spots and it wasn't always easy to keep reading.

[Kitty Galore · Rating 5 out of 5]

With many thanks to Other Press for their ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This is the second book in as many weeks that I have read from this publisher and have thoroughly enjoyed both of them ("The Heart by Marc Petijean). This one detailed the life of Salka Viertel with particular emphasis upon her movie making career and her humanitarian efforts during WWII. The history of women and their achievements has long been buried under gender bias and has only recently come to the forefront as we come to know and admire those females who accomplished great things but whose stories were nearly lost. One of them was Salka Viertel who during her many decades in the U.S. became involved in movie scriptwriting while at the same time befriending and championing Jewish and non-Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe during Hitler's reign of terror and genocide. It is a tale of a woman whose heart and home became a respite for many of the world's great composers, actors, and writers.

[Joe Rodeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting bio of the woman whose claim to fame was mainly being a super agent/career manager for Greta Garbo while becoming an influential screenwriter and project developer. She typifies the mostly Jewish immigrants who fled continental Europe and landed in Hollywood during the rise of Hitler.

Challenging, thought provoking history. Sample: "As the National Socialists created their own system of legal inferiority for non-Gentiles, they also admired America's classification of residents of the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines as 'non-citizen nationals.' They looked to America's Jim Crow laws which decreed marriage between whites and Negroes illegal."

I mostly enjoyed the Hollywood history and film study of the hits and the flops. To nitpick: too many names even film buffs won't recognize.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful biography!

I enjoy entertainment bios, especially of the 1920s to 1950s. So I came across the name Salka Viertel many times. She was always presented as a side character, and the mention was usually slightly contemptuous. I knew she was an immigrant from Germany or Austria or somewhere like that, and I thought of her as a wannabe, a hanger-on.

Not so! I love this book for the enjoyable way it explained her contributions to movie scripts and friendships. She was the big essential for so many fleeing the Nazis who ended up in Hollywood.

Salka Viertel was a big-hearted, genuine woman. She had the gift of friendship. She was also a gifted actress and writer. And cook.

The book flows, it's a good read. It is well researched and balanced. Nice photos.

[Trent · Rating 5 out of 5]

When one reads serious books about Hollywood in its Golden Era, Salka Viertel's name almost always comes up. I never knew that much about her, until now when this wonderful biography came out. She was an exile from Nazism, was a great friend of Garbo, and once she and her husband Berthold settled in Santa Monica she was a great hostess and comfort to the community of European exiles in the late 1930s and 1940s. This book demonstrates how she got things done, both fighting for the integrity of scripts like Queen Christina and tirelessly trying to get more refugees into the US, especially after the fall of France. Highly recommended!

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before I read the press release for “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood” by Donna Rifkind (Other Press), I’d never heard of Salka Viertel. While I knew that many Jewish and non-Jewish refugees who were actors, writers and directors worked in Hollywood or New York, her name was completely unfamiliar. Yet, Viertel not only wrote successful treatments and screenplays, but turned her California home into a European-style salon – creating a safe and comfortable place for those who felt rootless in a country far different from their own.
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic....

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biography of Salka Viertel, a 40s German immigrant who settled in Hollywood. There she became a screenwriter, closely tied to many of Greta Garbo's projects. She also ran salons for other European immigrants and likeminded others, which served as solace as well as an indispensable source of networking opportunities for many. The author's prose doesn't shine, but she provides a welcome window into a lost world of Hollywood intelligentsia, and makes a convincing case for the importance of the immigrant community to shaping the history of American film.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best pieces of non-fiction I have ever read. I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE THAT LIKES DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY (different subject, same type of approach). Amazingly comprehensive and reads like a novel. I am blown away that Donna Rifkind is a first time biographer, because this is absolutely stellar.

[Elaine Booth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Renaissance woman

I found this account of Salka Viertel's life fascinating. It makes me wonder how many women were so talented and eclectic and completely overlooked. I never heard much about Salka Viertel except in Hollywood related memoirs and celebrity biographies from that era.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always wanted to know more about Salka Viertel, screenwriter for Garbo and a kind of "den mother" to many of the German exiles (in philosophy, movies and arts) from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This book seems fairly well researched, but the writing is drab; the author fails to bring Viertel to life on the page. I trudged through it because of the topic, but I wish it had been better.

[Mrs Hadson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the movie Hollywood needs to make. Salka Viertel was a riveting and multi faceted person who seems to have had a devastating impact on the make up of Hollywood. Weimar republic art, music, philosophy, cinema, dance, refugees and cake all served up in a living room in Santa Monica.
This was great read.

[Stuart Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Introduction reads to me as though Viertel was writing a memoir instead of Rifkind writing a biography and I somehow found this very off-putting. I could not get into this at all.

[Bob Luxenberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry mom but not well written.

[Michelle Abramson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It’s a thoroughly researched book about a potentially fascinating woman. Unfortunately, I found it overly academic.

[Jan Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit difficult for me, but fascinating and worth the time.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book, and an intimate look at a truly remarkable woman. Highly recommend.

[JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful and informative about not only Salka Viertel, but at the time and environment. Appreciate that her part in saving people and her role in Hollywood was told!

[Jill Muscat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone interested in Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s. Viertel, herself a European born Jew, was a screenwriter who provided essential help and jobs for refugees and hosted famous parties every Sunday at her home in Santa Monica. She was indomitable, heroic, generous, whip-smart and definitely worth reading about.