Listen free for 30 days
-
The Sun and Her Stars
- Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood
- Narrated by: Heather Henderson
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for £17.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
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 II.
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 united great worldliness and 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.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Sun and Her Stars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Anonymous
- 23-01-22
The Sun and Her Stars
An exquisitely written and researched biography that brilliantly weaves together a complex history. Rifkind masterfully depicts the cultural collision between Old Europe and Hollywood. A must read for anyone who wants to get a sense of Southern California's history, landscape, and the influence exiles had in shaping them. Alas, the narrator does not do Rifkind's work justice--while her narration is comprehensible, her repeated mispronunciation of foreign and English words is extremely grating. Someone reading this type of book should know that it's Porgy, NOT Porgie in Porgy & Bess! Covering a diverse, cultivated set of people, The Sun and Her Stars deserves a more culturally literate narrator. Well worth listening to, but the superb narrator of Viertel's memoirs, "The Kindness of Strangers," shows what a shame this flat narration is. Hers is wonderful companion to this book--she deftly captures the foreign accents and better reveals the cultural differences between Hollywood and Europe.