Description
The little-identified tale of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in Thirties and 40s Hollywood created a shelter for a large number of well-known figures who had escaped the horrors of Global Struggle ll.
Hollywood was once created via its “others”; that may be, via ladies, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was once all 3 and so a lot more. She was once the screenwriter for 5 of Greta Garbo’s films and in addition her such a lot intimate loved one. At one element right through the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was once the perfect-paid creator on the MGM lot. In the meantime, at her space in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to ratings of Ecu émigrés who had fled from Hitler—akin to Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—in conjunction with each more or less Hollywood celebrity, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel’s front room (the one one on the town with comfy armchairs, stated one Hollywood insider), numerous cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships have been born.
Viertel blended a brand new-sooner than-her-time sensibility with the Antique-Global benefits of a classical Ecu training and fluency in 8 languages. She blended nice worldliness with nice heat. She was once a real bohemian with an advanced erotic existence, and on the related time a common mom determine. An important presence within the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is lengthy past due for her personal second within the highlight.
