Salka Viertel

Salka Viertel (June 15, 1889 – October 20, 1978) was an Austrian actress and Hollywood screenwriter. While under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937, Viertel co-wrote the scripts for many movies, particularly those starring her close friend Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935). She also played opposite Garbo in MGM's German-language version of Anna Christie (1930). Viertel was known as the "social connector" within the large European émigré community of artists who settled on the West Side of Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s.

Viertel was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city then in the province of Galicia, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today is in western Ukraine. Her father, Joseph Steuermann, was a lawyer and the first Jewish mayor of Sambor before antisemitism forced him to renounce his office. Her mother, Auguste (née Amster) Steuermann, taught the importance of hospitality, which Salka adopted during her years in exile in Santa Monica, California. Her siblings were Eduard, a composer and pianist; Zygmunt, a Polish national football player who perished in the Holocaust; and Rosa (1891–1972), married from 1922 until her death to the actor and director Josef Gielen.

After debuting as Salome Steuermann at the Pressburg Stadttheater (regional theater), Salka earned starring roles in Germany and Austria before and during World War I. In 1911, she acted briefly under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Following that, she accepted an offer in 1913 to go to Vienna and work in the Neue Wiener Bühne theater. There she met her husband, author and director Berthold Viertel, and they married in 1918. They raised three sons—Hans, Peter, and Thomas—before divorcing in 1947. In 1920, Salka went to the Hamburg theater where she got the part of Medea in the Greek tragedy. Her husband meanwhile was in Berlin much of the time, working for UFA, the major German film production company. He also co-founded the collective theater Die Truppe. The Viertels then moved to Düsseldorf when Berthold was appointed director of the city's renowned theater.

In 1928, at F.W. Murnau's instigation, the Viertel family emigrated to Hollywood when Berthold received a contract with Fox Film Corporation as a director and writer. Even though they left before the Nazis came to power, the Viertels were often linked with "Hitler's gift to America". That's how one biographer characterized the many artists throughout Europe who fled the continent seeking safe haven from political turmoil. Historian Thomas Saunders notes that, as with U.S. universities in the 1930s, the Hollywood studios could be very selective because "the list of émigrés reads almost as a who's who of Weimar production." Saunders ranks Berthold Viertel as "only marginally less significant" than other émigrés whom he considers "without peer."

Despite her stage successes in Germany and Austria, Salka struggled to obtain a foothold as a film actor. She agreed with Max Reinhardt (whom the Viertels encountered in New York on their way to Los Angeles) that she was "neither beautiful nor young enough" for a career in movies, which she was attempting to begin at age forty. One of her few prominent roles was as the prostitute Marthy in the German-language version of Anna Christie, which she took at the request of Greta Garbo. (Marie Dressler had played Marthy in the English-language version of the film.)

Salka Viertel first met Garbo in 1929 at a party at Ernst Lubitsch's home, and the two women became instant friends. Over the next couple of decades, Viertel was a mentor and confidante to the famous Swedish actress. It was Garbo who encouraged Viertel to write screenplays as an alternative to film acting. Although Viertel was hesitant at first, she went on to co-write scripts for several Garbo films such as Queen Christina (1933), The Painted Veil (1934), and Anna Karenina (1935). It was said, "the path to a Hollywood production with Garbo was through collaboration with Salka Viertel." But despite numerous attempts in the 1940s, Viertel was unable to develop an acceptable film project for Garbo, who remained in retirement. Likewise, Viertel's plans to co-author a "commercial" script with her fellow exile Bertolt Brecht never materialized.

The Viertels, members of the intelligentsia in Europe, moved to the United States in 1928 for a planned four-year period. They initially lived on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, before renting a house at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica, California. In 1932, during Hitler's ascendancy, they decided to stay in Santa Monica, where their sons grew up.

The Viertel home became the site of salons and meetings of the émigré community of European intellectuals along with Hollywood luminaries, particularly at Sunday night tea parties that Salka hosted. Her assortment of regular guests included not only Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Christopher Isherwood (who moved into Viertel's garage apartment with his boyfriend in 1946), Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, and Thomas Mann, but could range all the way from Arnold Schoenberg to Ava Gardner. Professor Ehrhard Bahr dubbed this cultural sanctuary of distinguished artists and intellectuals, many of them from German-speaking countries, "Weimar on the Pacific".