Read Online City of Nets by Otto Friedrich - Free Book Online

poured in.” Charles Glenn, who wrote a Hollywood column for the People’s Daily World, recalled that Browder suddenly couldn’t be found. “The known Reds were in hiding,” he said, “afraid to stick their heads out of doors because the Old Country Jews, the ones who had fled Hitler, would have torn them apart.” They soon reappeared, of course, but with a difference. “Before the pact,” recalled the writer Philip Dunne, “every other word out of Biberman’s mouth spoke of collective security. All of a sudden he added the modifying phrase, ‘collective security for peace, not war.’ ”
    Not everyone thought in purely ideological terms. The day after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Louella Parsons wrote in her column for August 25: “With war imminent, Hollywood yesterday realized how many of its important stars are still in Europe. Tyrone Power and Annabella . . . Charles Boyer . . . Robert Montgomery . . . Maureen O’Sullivan . . . Bob Hope.” Hope and his wife, Dolores, had just arrived in Paris and were scheduled to return to New York on the Queen Mary in mid-September, but when they heard rumors that the ship’s August 30 sailing might be its last voyage as a civilian vessel, they scrambled back across the English Channel to get aboard.
    In France itself, Arthur Rubinstein was spending the season at Deauville with his young children when he noticed that all his neighbors suddenly began leaving, and the streets of the resort were deserted. In the south, though, the rich gathered as usual to watch the fireworks explode in the sky at the annual charity ball for the Petits Lits Blancs at the Palm Beach Casino in Cannes. It was the last day of August, the last day of peace before Hitler invaded Poland. Pola Negri, the star of Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Du Barry, who had spent all too much of the 1930’s making films in Berlin, recalled later that she was drinking champagne and watching the fireworks at the Cannes casino when a sudden gust of wind sent a dance program flying across the lawn, and the nearby trees began to shudder and sway. “We scurried for shelter,” she said, “catching muddied silver heels in spattered silken hems, trampling bruised and battered flowers. Trellised walls crumbled around us, and what had been a rich spectacle was quickly transformed into a pathetic ruin.”
    â€œThe blackouts made Paris fantastically beautiful . . .” said Salka Viertel, the Polish actress who wrote several of Greta Garbo’s notable films of the 1930’s. “With Alfred and Lisl Polgar I walked through the Palais Royal flooded with moonlight. We were overcome by a great nostalgia. . . .” M-G-M had sent Mrs. Viertel to France that summer to plan the script of Madame Curie, a project for which Scott Fitzgerald had produced one of his last scripts and then been fired again. She had hoped also to visit her mother in Poland, but now M-G-M insisted that she return to Hollywood and even applied some pressure to find her a small cabin on the Île de France, sailing from Le Havre on September 1. From the port, Mrs. Viertel tried to send her mother an explanatory cable. “ Pologne? ” the cable clerk asked. “ Les Allemands sont en Pologne, Madame. C’est la guerre. ” She clambered aboard the Île de France, and the lifeboat drills now acquired an ominous significance. “I put on my life jacket and went to my assigned place,” she recalled, “where . . . I was welcomed by Gregor Piatigorsky, the cello virtuoso, who, with his wife and small child, was returning to California. In the same lifeboat would be Nathan Milstein, the famous violinist, and his American wife. . . .”
    Aboard the Queen Mary, by now at sea, the news bulletins caused a certain amount of panic. Dolores Hope awakened her husband to tell him that France and