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 émigrés 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.
About the Author
Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Book Review. She has also been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Industry Reviews
"Rifkind sees the worldly yet unassuming Viertel as at once an extraordinary character and a telling representative of something larger than herself. She's right to...A labor of love and careful research...startling and powerful...[Rifkind's] generosity of spirit and attention to detail suit a book about this 'mother of exiles, ' who was always welcoming outsiders in."
New York Times Book Review
"Moving...brilliant...[Rifkind] performs an act of spiritual as well as cultural resurrection...Like the multitudes who came to 165 Mabery Road, you'll be glad you met [Salka Viertel]."
Wall Street Journal
"Rifkind regularly takes issue with previous cultural historians who have denigrated Salka's importance as a screenwriter...Rifkind writes engagingly and often passionately...[Salka's] had been a remarkable life and she had been blessed with extraordinary friends, as Donna Rifkind again shows us."
Washington Post
"Rifkind makes a passionate case for rescuing her subject from anonymity...[She] has done an enormous service in spotlighting the life of Salka Viertel: not only by telling a story that deserves to be better known, but also by implicitly making the case for more such books." Harper's
"Among mid-twentieth-century America's most influential women, Salka Viertel finally gets her due in Donna Rifkind's marvelous, knowledgeable The Sun and Her Stars."
Boston Herald
"An immersive biography...Chock-full of scandalous affairs and wartime atmosphere, this sparkling account brings overdue attention to a woman who helped make Hollywood's golden age possible."
Publishers Weekly
