‘Castle by the Sea’ Became a Haven for Intellectuals
Novelist Thomas Mann called it “truly a castle by the sea.” Bertolt Brecht was a regular visitor. Aldous Huxley dropped in now and then. Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton and Charlie Chaplin all put up their feet to enjoy its seaside splendor.
Villa Aurora, a 14-room Spanish Colonial mansion above Sunset Boulevard, overlooks Santa Monica Bay -- and has played an important role in Los Angeles’ intellectual history.
The place was built in the prosperous 1920s as a model home to sell property. But during and after World War II, it became a kind of clubhouse for artists and intellectuals who had fled the Nazis and made their way here. Their artistic contributions were diverse, but their politics were epitomized by a defaced portrait of Hitler that still hangs in the villa’s office: The canvas is pockmarked by darts hurled by some of Germany’s greatest minds.
The former home of writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, is a city landmark and a cultural monument to German exiles. Keeping the exiles’ spirit of cultural interchange alive, the home was reborn a decade ago as a retreat for European writers, composers, filmmakers and visual artists, a place owned and supported primarily by the German government.
The 6,700-square-foot house was built in 1927 on an isolated hillside called Miramar Estates as a “Los Angeles Times demonstration home,” a joint venture with Miramar Estates’ developers. It featured the latest technology, including an ultra-modern electric refrigerator, dishwasher, automatic garage doors and a pipe organ. Architect and landscape engineer Mark Daniels, famous for the Bel-Air Bay Club and the Hotel Bel-Air, modeled it on a castle in Seville, Spain.
But Pacific Palisades was the “exurb” of its era; few people wanted to live so far from downtown. Then the Depression hit, and the expensive lots went unsold. A developer’s family lived there for a time, but it proved too remote. Even the caretaker abandoned the house.
It sat empty until 1943, when the Feuchtwangers bought the property. Because of its location, poor condition and the wartime gas shortage, the house sold for the bargain price of $9,000 -- about $95,000 in today’s dollars.
The Feuchtwangers, who were Jewish, met in Munich about 1909. Lion mocked Marta’s raven hair, teasing that he liked only blonds. She was intrigued by the wan features and Bohemian lifestyle of the impoverished theater critic and poet. They married in 1912 after she became pregnant, she told The Times in 1981, but their only child -- a girl -- died in infancy.
They honeymooned in Monte Carlo, where Lion lost what little money he had earned writing, and they spent the next nine months wandering through Europe, sleeping outdoors.
The Feuchtwangers returned to Germany in 1914. They were touring the United States when Hitler came to power in 1933; instead of returning home, they took refuge in France. Lion was sentenced to death in absentia for his anti-Hitler books.
On the French Riviera, they were joined by novelist Franz Werfel and his unconventional Catholic wife, Alma, who had been widowed by composer-conductor Gustav Mahler and had later married architect Walter Gropius.
Also joining the Feuchtwangers were Mann, the Nobel laureate novelist, and his wife, Katja. After the Germans invaded France in 1940, a U.S. government “underground railroad” escorted the couples over the Pyrenees on foot and brought them to the U.S.
“The Emergency Rescue Committee established by [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt was interested in refugees of prominence and accomplishments,” wrote historian Kevin Starr in “The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s.”
By the time the three authors -- Feuchtwanger, Werfel and Mann -- arrived in Los Angeles in 1941, a sizable German community was already in place.
The following year, Werfel’s book “The Song of Bernadette” was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Jennifer Jones. He was inspired to write it during his escape, when he drank from the spring at Lourdes, France. He vowed that if he reached the U.S., he would tell the story of Bernadette Soubirous, who reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858 and was canonized in 1933.
Most people still found Pacific Palisades too remote for their tastes, but Lion Feuchtwanger sought solitude for his writing and loved the Mediterranean setting. His home was known as Villa Aurora, named after the goddess of dawn. It soon housed his library of 32,000 reference and rare books.
The intellectual gatherings at the villa reflected the Feuchtwangers’ love of social life: stimulating conversation, readings, parlor games and gossip.
High-spirited luminaries such as Charles Laughton, who spoke no German, and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who spoke little English, collaborated on projects and crafted an enduring friendship. Marlene Dietrich supposedly turned hausfrau, putting on an apron and dishing up hearty German fare.
“Most movie stars preferred to be around English-speaking people so they could practice speaking English and get better acting parts,” said Cornelius Schnauber, a USC professor who is director of the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. “Most of the readings [at the villa] were in German.”
Villa Aurora brought together Christians and Jews, conservatives and liberals, who shared a bond of tolerance, a new language in a new country and the same “enemy alien” curfew laws.
“During the war, they were watched over by the FBI,” said Claudia Gordon, director of the cultural center. “Federal agents interrogated household staff and neighbors about any suspicious activities.”
A few prickly German emigres were unhappy with the Southland and its “most inferior” population. Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg -- creator of the atonal 12-tone method of writing music -- believed that the U.S. never recognized his worth. When he was asked to write the score for the film “The Good Earth” in 1936, he demanded $50,000. The studio refused.
Conflict and jealousy were inevitable in such a small circle. Mann and Schoenberg were friends until Mann’s 1947 novel “Doctor Faustus” depicted the Faustus of legend as a high-strung composer and inventor of atonalism. Mann healed their rift, but when the book didn’t do as well as he had expected, his American profile began to decline. He and his wife returned to Europe in 1952.
Gordon said the artists’ attitude was summed up by an old joke “about two dachshunds walking in Santa Monica.... One assures the other that ‘it’s true, I’m a dachshund, but in the old country I was a St. Bernard.’ ”
Lion Feuchtwanger lived at the villa until his death in 1958. There, he turned out some of his most important works, including the novel “Goya,” based on the life of the Spanish painter. On a scrap of paper encased in glass at the villa, Feuchtwanger wrote: “I am a German writer. My heart beats Jewish. It’s my thoughts that belong to the world.”
After her husband’s death, Marta spent hundreds of hours recording memories for the oral history archives at UCLA. She was honored by the Federal Republic of Germany and the city of Los Angeles on her 75th birthday, and in 1980 she received an honorary doctorate of humane letters at USC.
After her death in 1987, at age 96, the house and rare books went to USC. Friends of Villa Aurora, a Berlin-based organization, bought the house in 1990 for $1.9 million. Twenty-two thousand volumes are still there -- and one very old bottle of sherry, left behind in a cupboard.
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Villa Aurora, www.villa-aurora.org, is open for tours by appointment only. It is sponsoring a symposium about remarkable Jewish women at the Skirball Cultural Center, scheduled for May 1 at 2 p.m., in conjunction with “Driven into Paradise: L.A.’s European Jewish Emigres of the 1930s and 1940s,” an exhibition that runs through May 8.
