165 Mabery Road
Santa Monica, CA, USA

Salka and Berthold Viertel House

The Salka and Berthold Viertel House at 165 North Mabery Road in Santa Monica, California, was the home of the Austrian screenwriter Salka Viertel and her husband Bertold from 1933 to 1944.


Meeting place

Alongside Lion Feuchtwanger's Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, the Viertels' house became a meeting place for the German intellectual emigre community and members of the Exilliteratur in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s.

Salka and her husband Berthold Viertel moved from Germany to Los Angeles with their three children in 1928. The couple had founded the Die Truppe theatre group in 1923, and facing financial difficulties, Berthold accepted a job to write for the couple's filmmaker friend F. W. Murnau.

Prior to their acquiring of the Mabury Road house, the Viertels had lived on Fairfax Avenue. The initial rent of the house was $900 for the first three months, then $150 after. Salka eventually purchased the house for $7,500 in 1933, its cheap price was as a result of a depressed property market in the wake of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.[2] Salka's salons took place on a Sunday afternoon; guests included the writers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the filmmaker F. W. Murnau and physicist Albert Einstein. The book Jewish Women and Their Salons called Viertel's gatherings "An outpost of Mitteleuropa, with its conversational tone and home-cooked meals". Non German speaking emigre guests included the British writer Aldous Huxley, actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. The English playwright and writer Christopher Isherwood lived above the Viertel's garage with his "rough trade lover" William Caskey from 1945 to 1947 before their travels in South America.

On August 1, 1943 several exiles gathered at the Viertel's house to draft a statement in support of the National Committee for a Free Germany that had been formed in Russia. A statement was eventually agreed after several hours discussion, though according to Brecht's diary, Thomas Mann later withdrew his support from it as he feared it being seen as a "stab in the back" by the Allied forces fighting Germany due to the intense patriotism of its wording.

Salka was added to an FBI Watch List in 1942, and added to an index of Communists by the American government in 1951 in the midst of the Red Scare. The Viertels divorced in 1944, Berthold moved back to Europe in 1949 and in 1953, a passport application by Salka to visit him was denied as a result of her alleged Communist sympathies. Salka eventually moved to Switzerland to live with her son, Peter, and his wife Deborah Kerr.

The Swedish actress Greta Garbo was a frequent guest and first met her lover Mercedes de Acosta at a party at the house. Salka Viertel's emigre years in California were documented in her 1969 memoir The Kindness of Strangers.

In May 2015 the house was put up for sale for $4.595 million, it was the first time the house had been for sale since the 1970s.

“Sundays at Salka’s”—Salka Viertel’s Los Angeles Salon as a Space of Music

“Sundays at Salka’s”—Salka Viertel’s Los Angeles Salon as a Space of Music - see full article in the link.

Photo 1: 165 Mabery Road (1930s); by courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Sammlung Franz Glück, ZPH 1443
Photo 2: Salka Viertel at the Brecht family home in Santa Monica (1945/46), photograph by Ruth Berlau; Akademie der Künste Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Fotoarchiv 08/130 © by Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann.
Photo 3: The garden of 165 Mabery Road (1930/40s); by courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Sammlung Franz Glück, ZPH 1443
Photo 4: From left to right: Dita Parlo, Berthold Viertel, Arnold Schönberg, Thomas Viertel, Heinrich George, and Salka Viertel in the garden of 165 Mabery Road (early 1930s); by courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Sammlung Franz Glück, ZPH 1443

Abstract
The salon of Austrian-Polish actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel (1889–1978) at 165 Mabery Road in Los Angeles was from the 1930s to the 1950s a central place for networking, an artistic experimental laboratory and catalyst for creative processes, a “haven for the homeless” (“Hafen der Heimatlosen,” according to Berthold Viertel), and a space for informal conviviality for both artists and intellectuals who had fled Europe during the 1930s/40s and leading figures in the Hollywood film industry. It was a place where Max Reinhardt and Else Heim, Charlie and Oona Chaplin, Arnold and Gertrud Schoenberg, Maria and Aldous Huxley, Louise and Hanns Eisler, Helene Weigel, Ruth Berlau and Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Katia Mann, Heinrich and Nelly Mann, and Gretel and Theodor W. Adorno met with actors and directors like Johnny Weissmüller, Greta Garbo, Irving Thalberg, George Cukor, Tallulah Bankhead, and Ernst Lubitsch.
This article will analyze Salka Viertel’s salon as a space of (music-)cultural translation. The analysis will present her role as a cultural broker between two supposedly foreign cultural circles—the film world of Hollywood and the artists and intellectuals who fled Europe—and give examples of successful cultural translation as well as examples which point to “the fragilities and differences in translational dynamics” (Doris Bachmann-Medick).
Prologue
Salka Viertel is, as you know, the sister of Eduard Steuermann and in a very big position here in the film industry, script writer for Garbo at MGM, very famous and influential and something of a social focal point for Hollywood intellectuals.[1]
[1] This quote is from a letter by Theodor W. Adorno to his parents living in New York in 1942. He and his wife Gretel had arrived in Los Angeles shortly before, where they met numerous old acquaintances and companions who, like them, had to flee their European homeland for political, ethnic, or religious reasons during the Nazi dictatorship and Second World War. Private correspondence from the so-called émigré community like this letter by Adorno,[2] semi-public archival sources, and secret intelligence files testify to the central position of Austrian-Polish actress and screenplay writer Salka Viertel (1889–1978) as well as the importance and prominence of her Sunday salon gatherings. Salon and salonnière acted as a kind of anchor as well as a connector within various networks, for example between the émigré community and the Hollywood film industry: “Every well known individual arriving in Hollywood eventually finds himself or herself in the living room of SALKA VIERTEL.”[3] All the same, Viertel’s position as well as her work is usually marginalized in the numerous popular exile publications or autobiographies (both accessible to the broader public) of her famous guests. For example, the close contact the Brecht and Viertel families maintained with each other, including almost daily visits, only becomes clear when one looks at FBI files.[4] Notably, in his Arbeitsjournal (work journal), which was seemingly kept like a diary and was later published, Bertolt Brecht never mentions his collaboration with Salka Viertel on the (unrealized) film script Silent Witness, which probably took place around 1944 to early 1945.[5] Since Brecht documented his collaboration with Salka Viertel’s son Hans as well as with her husband Berthold in his work journal, the marginalization of Salka is possibly gender-related. However, the omission of her salon in the (self-)historiographies of the émigré community seems to be related more to the non- or pre-institutional status of this creative laboratory. Salons were protected spaces where informal artistic, as well as political and personal exchange, could take place.[6] The lack of any mention of this space in popular publications hence does not diminish its actual importance but rather shows that these in-between spaces have long been marginalized in official historiography

The Santa Monica House Where Greta Garbo, Albert Einstein, and Aldous Huxley All Hung Out

Between the World Wars, dozens of Europe's finest intellectuals, musicians, writers, artists, and theater types fled their home countries and ended up eventually on the Westside of Los Angeles. Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Greta Garbo, Peter Lorre, Rudolph Schindler, and many others all came to try out sunshine and the studio system. The émigrés had a few favorite gathering spots: Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger's house in Pacific Palisades (the Villa Aurora), which is now an artists' residence run by a German group, and Salka Viertel's house in Santa Monica, which has just come up for sale for the first time since the 1970s.

Salka Viertel, originally from Austria-Hungary, was an actress; her husband, Berthold Viertel, was a writer and director. In 1923, they formed the Expressionist theater group Die Truppe, which, like so many Expressionist theater groups, ended up "artistically successful yet financially challenged," according to an excerpt from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation published on the Jewish Women's Archive. And so in 1928, they moved with their three sons to Los Angeles, where Berthold had been hired to write for Salka's old theater buddy FW Murnau.

The Viertels lived first on Fairfax Avenue, then moved to this house in Santa Monica, where rent was $900 for the first three months, then $150 after, according to the book Exiles in Hollywood. In 1933, Salka bought the house for $7,500, "after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake temporarily depressed the housing market." (She had Berthold's permission, but apparently his genius kept him from being too involved in the family day to day.)

While he wrote and/or directed films including Four Devils and The Man from Yesterday, she had minor success as an actress. In 1929, Salka met Garbo at a party at Lubitsch's house and they immediately became great friends (they were also allegedly lovers); Garbo encouraged Salka to try out screenwriting and she ended up writing several films for Garbo, including Queen Christina.

Meanwhile, Salka held Sunday afternoon salons with guests including Mann and his brother Heinrich, Brecht, Schoenberg, Murnau, Albert Einstein on a visit to Caltech, and others. Jewish Women and Their Salons calls them "An outpost of Mitteleuropa, with its conversational tone and home-cooked meals." She let Christopher Isherwood live in the garage apartment with his lover, hosted Aldous Huxley frequently, and was a major force behind the European Film Fund, which helped get Jewish writers and artists out of Europe during the 1930s and '40s.

But pretty soon America became inhospitable to the émigrés too, with the rise of anti-Communism. In 1942, Salka was put an FBI Watch List; in 1951, she was added to the Communist Index. In 1943, she lost her job as a screenwriter at MGM (an increasingly reclusive Garbo turned down roles in her films), and in 1944 her marriage ended. Berthold returned to Europe. In 1953, Salka's application for a passport to visit him was denied. She did eventually leave Los Angeles, to live with her son, the writer Peter Viertel, and his wife Deborah Kerr in Switzerland. She died there in 1978.

Her famous refuge of a house, built in 1926 and now "tastefully remodeled by Lewin Wertheimer," is up for sale for $4.595 million. Her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, is out of print, but is, according to all sources, essential history of LA's interwar émigré scene.