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The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
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89/99
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About This Book
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.
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Reviews
"performs an act of spiritual as well as cultural resurrection ..."
"While she always denied rumors of an affair with her friend the screen legend Greta Garbo, Viertel did have a long extramarital liaison--just one aspect of a multifaceted, heroic and outrageously neglected life to which Rifkind does munificent justice ..."
"Viertel is, in short, a terrific subject for a biography, and the veteran book reviewer Donna Rifkind has done well to focus her first full-length effort on this fascinating if little-known personality."
"Rifkind argues strenuously for Salka's significance in shaping the motion-picture industry...But it's a stretch to call Salka a filmmaker: she seems to have been mainly a screenwriter and consultant, although it's hard to tell, since some of her work was uncredited ..."
"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."
"Rifkind has penned a perceptive, exhaustively researched contribution to social and film history."
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