How Refugees Influenced Hollywood

Salka Viertel was the highest-paid screenwriter at MGM during the 1930s. She was Greta Garbo’s lifelong best friend. And, thanks to the social gatherings that she hosted in her home on Mabery Road in Santa Monica Canyon, Charlie Chaplin likened her to “the great eighteenth-century hostess Madame de Staël.” And yet she has been almost ...