Alma Mahler-Werfel & New York

1940 - 1964
The Czech-born, Austrian-Jewish writer Franz Werfel marries Alma Mahler in 1929. The Werfels flee Vienna in 1938 for France when Austria fell to the German army. In 1940, the Werfels along with Heinrich Mann and his nephew Golo Mann flee by foot over the rugged Pyrenees to Spain, ultimately leaving Europe for the United States on board the Nea Hellas, the last regular ship from Lissabon.

1940
13th of October: Arrival in New York. (”The landing in New York Harbour was as grandiose an experience as ever. At last we set foot on soil that was really free. If I had not felt embarrassed before the others. I should have kissed the American earth.”) In emigration Alma takes refuge at the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park, together with her third husband Franz Werfel, holding a salon in her suite before going to California. There the Werfels lived in the Hollywood hills at 6900 Los Tilos Road between December 1940 and June 1942. In September they moved to 610 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills.
Werfel wrote poetry and plays but is best known for his novels. Among these are ”The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” (1933) and ”Embezzled Heaven” (1939). While in Southern California, Werfel completed his novel ”The Song of Bernadette” (1941) thereby fulfilling his vow made in 1940 in Lourdes for a safe escape. This novel was made later into the film ”The Song of Bernadette”, starring Jennifer Jones who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1943 for her performance. Werfel also wrote his final play, ”Jacobowsky and the Colonel” (1944; filmed in Hollywood with Danny Kaye and Curd Jürgens), while in Southern California. Werfel's ability to work in the film industry made him one of the few financially successful émigrés.

1945
Franz Werfel dies in Los Angeles during the summer of 1945 and is buried in Rosendale Cemetary. His body was later exhumed and returned to Vienna for reburial.

1946
Alma Mahler-Werfel becomes an American citizen. On the occasion of her
seventieth birthday, on August 31 1949, Alma is given a birthday book at her
home in Pacific Palisades, California. The bound volume contains
seventy-seven letters from significant representatives of European and
American cultural and intellectual history.
www.libraries.psu.edu/crsweb/speccol/mahlerwerfel/alma/index.htm
In the early 1950s Alma moves to New York, hoping to leave painful memories
behind in Los Angeles.

1952-1964
In 1952 Alma retires to New York to an apartment in Manhattan (120 East 73d Street), where she stays to spend the last years of her life. (”Several times before, I had given my soul a holiday and fled to that city of light.”) There she exposes all the trophies she had collected throughout her life. Paintings of Oskar Kokoschka, scores of Gustav Mahler, and manuscripts of Franz Werfel. (” I live on the third floor of my old house in New York, in two rooms. These two rooms, if one looks carefully, hold all my life. One bespeaks the power of words, the other that of music. ‘I have two firms to administer’, I say when I am asked why I keep so busy at my age.”) Like a fallen monarch in exile Alma holds court, communicating with celebrities including Thomas Mann, Benjamin Britten (he dedicated the ”Nocturne for tenor and small orchestra” to Alma), Erich Maria Remarque, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Igor Strawinsky.
In 1960 Alma finishes her famous autobiography "And the Bridge is Love". (”My life was beautiful. God allowed me to know some masterpieces of our time before they left the hands of their creators. And if I was permitted to hold for an instant your stirrups, my glorious knights, my life was justified and blessed. Everything, I feel, is simultaneous. Time does not pass. My father’s death is as alive in me as Gustav Mahler’s or Franz Werfel’s. There is to me no past apart from the present, but, as the poet has written, ‘there is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love’!”)
In 1962 Alma attends rehearsals of Gustav Mahler's 8th symphony under the direction of Leonard Bernstein in New York. She lives to witness the resurrection of Mahler's compositions, which are then initiated by Leonard Bernstein, and whose recordings are also used as a soundtrack in "Alma".
On December 11th 1964, Alma dies in her apartment in Manhattan, where she had spent the last decade of her life. In the 85 years of her life, Alma Mahler–Werfel experienced two World Wars and changes in civilization as had never previously occurred.

A malicious obituary was given to her by American songwriter Tom Lehrer:
"The loveliest girl in Vienna was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna, you‘d never be free of her spell.
Her lovers were many and varied from the day she begun her beguine
there were three famous ones whom she married, and god knows how many between!
Alma, tell us: all modern women are jealous,
which of your magical wands got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?"

The New York Times, Sunday, December 13, 1964

Alma M. Werfel: Widow of writer Franz Werfel. She was also married to Mahler and Gropius
Mrs. Alma Mahler Werfel, widow of the writer Franz Werfel and earlier of the composer Gustav Mahler, died Friday in her apartment at 120 East 73d Street. Her age was 85. She had also been married to Walter Gropius, the architect.
Mrs. Werfel, who was once described as "The most beautiful girl in Vienna," recalled in her autobiography that she had always been attracted to genius. She noted that she had once confided to her first husband, Mahler, that what she really loved in a man were his achievements. "The greater the achievements," she told the great German composer, "the more I love him." And genius also seemed to have been attracted to Mrs. Werfel.
The former Alma Schindler, the daughter of Emil J. Schindler, a landscape painter in Austria, she grew up in Vienna surrounded by art and artists. Her intellect, which was nurtured by her brilliant father, complimented her beauty.
She was a 21-year-old music student in 1902 when she met Mahler, who was 41 years old and director of the Court Opera House. He had already made his mark in the music world.
After a short courtship they were married. Alma traveled with her husband on conducting tours in Europe and the United States. They had two daughters, but only one, Anna, survived. She became a sculptor.
While still married to the composer, she met Walter Gropius, then a little known architect. She described him in her diary as an "extraordinarily handsome German," and added that the night of their first meeting wore into sunrise. "There remained no doubt," she wrote, "that Walter Gropius was in love with me and expected me to love him."
Mahler found out about their affair, brought the architect to their home and asked Alma to make a choice. She chose to remain with the compooser, but Gropius continued to write love letters to her. She said in her book "And the Bridge is Love," published in 1958, that Mahler read Gropius's correspondence and "wrote beautiful poems about it."
Mahler died in 1911 and his widow returned to Vienna to live with her parents. One day her father told her of "a poor starving genius" who painted. Later he brought Oskar Kokoschka home to paint her picture. She wrote that after he had finished sketching her he stood up, embraced her and walked out. He then started sending love letters and they became lovers. The affair lasted three years until Kokoschka joined the German Army. Shortly afterward Alma began corresponding with Gropius, who had become successful, and they were married in August 1915. They had a daughter, Manon, who died in her teens.
While still married to Gropius she met Franz Werfel and had a son by him. The child died in infancy. Gropius and Alma finally agreed to divorce in 1918. She then moved in with Werfel, and they were married in July, 1929.

She also wrote in her diary that she was pursued by other geniuses. The following was dated 1926 and referred to a conversation she had with Gerhart Hauptmann, the German drammatist and poet: " 'It's a pity,'he said to me, 'that the two of us don't have a child together. That would have been something You, you my great love....' " 'In another life,' he once told me, 'we two must be lovers. I make my reservation now.' "His wife heard it. 'I'm sure Alma will be booked up there too.' she said flippantly. "He and I only smiled...." She also wrote that other great men who were in love with her were Dr. Paul Kammerer, the biologist, and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist and conductor who later married Mark Twain's daughter.
Werfel and Alma fled Nazi Germany in the late nineteen-thirties. Their experiences prompting Franz to write "The Song of Bernadette" and "Jacobowsky and the Colonel." They came to the United States in 1940 and settled in California, where Werfel died in 1945. She moved to New York in 1952.
Besides "And the Bridge is Love," Mrs. Werfel wrote "Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters."

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