The exile Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles on 21 July 1941, and was taken by friends to a small house in Hollywood found for him by the director William Dieterle and his wife. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane had recently premiered in New York, on 1 May. On his previous short visit to the United States, in connection with the New York opening of his play The Mother in 1935, Brecht had met the composer Marc Blitzstein through Hanns Eisler, who was teaching at the New School for Social Research. Blitzstein had played one of his new songs to Brecht and Brecht had advised Blitzstein to go ahead and write a full-scale opera. The result was Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, which was dedicated to Brecht and directed on stage by Orson Welles. A decade later, in 1946, Brecht saw Welles’s production of Cole Porter’s Around the World in Boston and went backstage afterwards to announce that, ‘This is the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre. This is wonderful. This is what theatre should be.’ Subsequently Brecht tried to persuade Welles to direct his own new play, Galileo. Welles was keen to do it but negotiations broke down over the role of Mike Todd, with whom Welles had become involved as his producer. Instead, it was Joseph Losey who directed Galileo.

In 1935 Joseph Losey visited Finland (where he stayed with Hella Wuolijoki, who later collaborated with Brecht on Herr Puntila and His Man Matti) before continuing on to Moscow. There he attended some of Eisenstein’s classes and rehearsals directed by Vakhtangov, Meyerhold and Okhlopkov, whose techniques of staging Losey adapted for his own Living Newspaper productions after he returned to the United States. In Moscow, Losey also met Brecht. Within a year they were to cross paths again, this time in New York. After his return from Russia, Losey worked for John Houseman—later to become the producer of Citizen Kane—and the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem, where Welles later directed his notorious black Macbeth. From Harlem, Losey was summoned downtown to work with the new Living Newspaper theatre unit, which he inaugurated with his production of Triple-A Plowed Under, both avant-garde and politically committed. ‘It was approaching a movie technique’, Losey later recalled. ‘Parts of the stage on different levels were picked up by spots—like film cuts . . . The music consisted of a large orchestra with only trombones and percussion; the rest were all fire sirens and sounds . . . It was a plastic set entirely moulded by light.’ Attempts to ban the production failed and, after enduring riots and sabotage, it went forward under police protection. Brecht was excited by the Living Newspaper and discussed his theatrical ideas with Losey round at his apartment—or rather the apartment of his wife, the fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, who also worked with the Living Newspaper as costume designer. In a later interview with the New York Times, Losey reminisced about the Living Newspaper, noting that, ‘This was Brechtian theatre . . . but I didn’t know it at the time. Brecht saw it and adored it. And in spite of his austerity in matters of colour, his preference for white light and neutral colours, he particularly appreciated the passage where I dressed my workers in fuchsia and rose.’

Joseph Losey had already met Charles Laughton; during a visit to London he struck up friendships with the impresario, Gilbert Miller, the actor Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester. As a result he got the job as stage manager for Payment Deferred, when it transferred to New York later that year. This was a run-of-the-mill shocker in which Laughton gave, by all accounts, an extraordinary performance as a guilt-ridden murderer. It was just before the opening of this play that Laughton had confessed his homosexuality to a theatre friend who turned out to be a policeman in mufti and found himself arrested on a vice charge. His relationship with Elsa Lanchester deteriorated for a while and she either became involved with Losey (his version) or might have become involved but didn’t because he came down with the mumps (her version). At all events, he took her around Harlem jazz clubs and other murky dives—‘very stuffy, dark basements, smoky and eerie and very sickly sweet’. Laughton first met Brecht some years later, in 1944, at Salka Viertel’s house at 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica. Salka Viertel was famous as the confidante and virtually the personal screenwriter of Greta Garbo, from Queen Christina on. She had begun her career as an actress in the old Hapsburg Empire and it was in Vienna that she met and married the stage director and poet, Berthold Viertel. Together they became leading lights in the Berlin theatre world, until in 1928 Berthold Viertel was invited to Hollywood by his old associate, F. W. Murnau, to write the screenplay for Murnau’s second American film, The Four Devils. However, he soon returned to Europe, to Germany, then to England, where he made Little Friend for Alexander Korda, then back to Santa Monica. There is an unforgettable portrait of him as the director Friedrich Bergmann in Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Prater Violet, Isherwood’s best piece of writing, I think—‘Bergmann jerked to his feet with startling suddenness, like Punch in a show. “A tragic Punch”, I said to myself. I couldn’t help smiling as we shook hands, because our introduction seemed so superfluous. There are meetings which are more like recognitions—this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential. I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.’

Isherwood and Auden were frequent guests at Salka Viertel’s salon. Both had lived in Berlin and Brecht listed them both as prospective members of his projected ‘Diderot Society’, along with their collaborator Rupert Doone, his own collaborator Slatan Dudow (director of Kuhle Wampe), Eisenstein, Okhlopkov, Piscator and others who all ended up, like Brecht, living in la—Hanns Eisler, Mordechai Gorelik, Jean Renoir. It was to be a corresponding society, through which workers in the performing arts could ‘organize the mutual exchange of problems and experiences’. Interestingly, it brought together—or would have—figures from both theatre and cinema, seen as involved in a common project. Elsewhere, Brecht linked Auden and Isherwood with Marc Blitzstein as exponents of the theatre that he most wanted to encourage. In America, however, their relationship became somewhat strained. Isherwood had become a Vedantist and Auden an Episcopalian. Nonetheless, Auden did work closely with Brecht on an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi for the producer-director Paul Czinner. It all ended badly, as did another collaboration with Czinner on a film story which, Brecht claimed, was stolen by Billy Wilder, thus giving rise to the poem, Shame:

When I was robbed in Los Angeles, the city
Of merchandisable dreams, I noticed
How I kept the theft, performed
By a refugee like me, a reader
Of all my poems,
Secret, as though I feared
My shame might become known,
Let’s say, in the animal world.

The peak of Isherwood’s screenwriting career was Rage in Heaven, an Ingrid Bergman vehicle, made by mgm. Soon afterwards, it was brought to a shuddering halt when his ‘semi-pacifist’ picture, The Hour Before Dawn was cancelled by Paramount in 1942. Long afterwards, at the beginning of the Sixties, Isherwood began a collaboration with the dying Charles Laughton, a play about Socrates, a project which echoes Brecht’s collaboration with Laughton on Galileo in an uncanny way. Isherwood was one of the pall-bearers at Laughton’s Forest Lawn funeral, along with Otto Preminger and Jean Renoir, with whom Laughton worked on Advise and Consent and This Land Is Mine respectively. Renoir was especially close to Laughton. Indeed, Laughton owned The Judgment of Paris, a vast painting by Renoir’s father and served as a witness at Renoir’s wedding.

Brecht chose to work with Laughton because he admired his style of acting, which he had seen exemplified in his British pictures of the 1930s. Their collaboration on Galileo was the high-point of his sojourn in the Southland. In the audience at the opening night in Los Angeles were Charles Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Billy Wilder, Lewis Milestone, Frank Lloyd Wright and Igor Stravinsky, as well as a number of great stars—Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Quinn, Olivia de Havilland, John Garfield and several others. It was the chicken-eating sequence in Korda’s The Private Life of Henry viii that had impressed Brecht—a film which came out in 1933, the year before his friend Léo Lania had told Brecht that there was a good chance of their selling a script to Korda, news which set them both scribbling away on a possible bio-pic based on the life of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who rid the world of puerperal fever. Lania had worked with Brecht shortly before as co-writer on the doomed first draft screenplay for the Threepenny Opera film. Nothing came of the Korda idea, of course, except, perhaps, the chance exposure that led Brecht to Laughton’s door high on the Pacific Palisades. Laughton, however, was unhappy with the final outcome of their joint endeavours. To Eric Bentley, he wrote, ‘I also feel that the actors as a whole failed this great man miserably in our production of Galileo. The demands he makes on actors are much the same as the demands that Shakespeare made on actors in the Elizabethan days. This is pretty strong and you could never print this, but I believe there is Shakespeare, and then Brecht. To this end I have started a Shakespearean group, training a bunch of American actors and actresses in the business of verse speaking and prose speaking . . . I am doing this solely with the aim of getting a company together that can play Brecht’s plays. I want to see Galileo really performed, and Circle of Chalk and Mother Courage, and the rest of them. I am devoting all my spare energies to that end.’ Sadly it never came to pass.