The Woman in Black by Erik Tarloff

Author:Erik Tarloff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2019-03-13T20:19:53+00:00

Gerhard Fuchs (musician)

I met Chance Hardwick at a party at, let me see, I think it was the Prices’. Vincent and Mary’s. Yes, definitely at the Prices’. Vincent, you see, was one of those rare Hollywood people who didn’t restrict their society to other show business people. This was very refreshing to me and Frieda. And unusual in this town. There were always plenty of movie stars present, too, of course, many in the way of show business royalty, they were willing to rub shoulders with us commoners if it was under the Price aegis, but it was at least possible at those parties to talk about things other than grosses and studio deals and who had been cast in what. Vincent enjoyed a mix of people—he had, I think, a life subdivided into many distinct compartments, if you catch my gist—and his interest in culture was genuine and serious. Mary’s also. So one found painters, of course—Vincent was an art historian with basically a professional level of expertise, as you probably know—and writers, by which I mean novelists and playwrights and even poets from time to time, not merely screenwriters, although in those days Hollywood screenwriters were a far more erudite group than you’d find today. And musicians like myself, and professors from UCLA, and so forth. Those were lively—you say frolicsome?—they were frolicsome parties.

Lots of Europeans in those days too. We were everywhere during the war years, and remained a presence in the decade after. Many people don’t realize that Los Angeles was something of a mecca for refugees who were fleeing Hitler or the Bolsheviks. They think of it as LaLa Land, but that is a very incomplete picture of the city, at least during that particular period. I arrived in ’38, in the nick of time as you might say. And for a while…well, as a cultural capital, it could give Paris or London serious competition. Rachmaninoff lived in Beverly Hills—died there too, in point of fact—and Stravinsky’s house was just off the Sunset Strip on Wetherly Drive, and Schoenberg, whom I’d known rather well in Vienna, was in Pacific Palisades. Rubinstein was here, Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Thomas Mann, Brecht, the Werfels, Wilder, Garbo, not to mention almost every extra and bit player in Casablanca. [laughs] Even Eisenstein was here early on, a bit before my time unfortunately. I believe I would have enjoyed speaking with him. And he should have stayed, of course. Those who went back to the Soviet Union, from wherever they’d emigrated to, often ended up regretting the decision. Those who went back to Germany too, at least to the DDR. I never learned how Brecht felt about his repatriation, but of course he was escaping McCarthyism by then, he was fleeing from rather than returning to.

Plus there were all the Brits. Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, James Mason. If foreigners constituted a Hollywood colony, the Brits, typically, were a colony within that colony. Englishmen simply adored it here. Couldn’t get enough of the sun and the flesh.

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