Ruth Philippine Marton

Ruth Marton was born as Ruth Philippine Meuhsam on February 25, 1912 in Berlin, to Kurt and Alice Mühsam neé Freymark. As a child Ruth was heavily exposed through her parents’ activities to film, theater, art and music. She planned on becoming an actress after graduating from the Fürstin Bismarck-Schule in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1931. She went on to study acting and passed the exam of the Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühnen-Angehörigen (the Union of German Stage Members) and the Deutschen Bühnenvereins (the German Theater Association) in 1933. Although she passed the exam, she was not allowed to perform in Germany. Her first acting role was in Strasbourg, France, playing Phoebe in a German version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Wie Es Euch Gefaellt). After a short time spent in London Ruth Marton went to Vienna, where she took smaller parts and even worked as a clothing designer. It was in Vienna that she became a close friend of the writer and poet Alexander Lernet-Holenia, who created a part for her in a play at the Volkstheater, the short-lived Die Frau des Potiphar (Potiphar’s Wife), in spite of the objections of the theater’s superintendent, Rolf Jahn.

In 1937 Ruth Marton visited friends in Hollywood after having been convinced by Lernet-Holenia and Jahn to leave Vienna in 1936, and hoped to remain there only for a short visit. However, after Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 she decided to stay. With little training and experience, Ruth Marton’s most valuable asset was her fluency in three languages. She worked as a translator, reader in French or German for individuals or motion picture companies, researcher, secretary, salesperson, and a fashion model. At the same time she became acquainted with the social life in Hollywood and attended parties thrown by European refugee writers, actors, and film artists, thereby getting to know well-known Americans as well. It was at one of these parties where she first met Erich Maria Remarque in 1939. They became close and lifelong friends until his death in 1970. Allegedly, it was through Remarque’s assistance that Ruth Marton managed to bring her sister and mother to the US in 1940.

While working in a boutique in Beverly Hills, Ruth Marton wrote her first short story, Letter to a Girlfriend. Encouraged by her friend John Huston, the film director, she continued writing and started her first novel, Last Night of All, as well as several short stories. With the moral and financial support of John Huston’s father Walter, Ruth Marton was able to quit her regular job and concentrate on writing. John and Walter Huston were among her closest friends, and even after the death of John Huston in 1980, Ruth Marton continued to keep in touch with his children Anjelica, Tony, and Danny Huston.

After the United States entered into World War II in 1941, Ruth Marton joined the war effort by making bandages and gauze pads for the Red Cross. By special permission she was awarded the Red Cross pin for her work despite being Austrian. Once her novel Last Night of All was finished, Ruth Marton worked with a literary agent, Jacques Chambrun, but they were unable to find a publisher for it. On Erich Maria Remarque’s advice she continued writing. On May 26, 1944, she became a citizen of the United States and officially changed her name to Ruth Marton, originally her stage name that she first used during her London stay and then later in Vienna.

John Huston provided Ruth Marton with an idea for a short film story that materialized in Salto Mortale . This piece was read by numerous producers and eventually led to Ruth Marton’s first paid writing assignment, as a collaborator on a film idea. In 1946 she ended up in the hospital primarily from exhaustion from pursuing both writing and regular work at the same time. After her release she decided not to write again until she could be paid for it, a promise she kept for the next 15 years

In 1949 Ruth Marton was hired by film director Max Ophuls as an assistant and translator for his film The Restless Moment , based on the novel The Blank Wall and starring James Mason and Joan Bennett, and she also assisted with the production. Upon completion of the film Ruth Marton took her first vacation to Europe since 1937, where she remained for the next five months. After her return she moved to New York where she would live for the rest of her life. In 1951 Ruth Marton worked as a script writer for the 15-minute "Lilli Palmer TV Show."

By the mid-1950s Ruth Marton worked as an editorial scout for several European publishing houses, including the German S. Fischer Verlag, the French Librairie Stock, the Italian Aldo Garzanti Editore, and several Scandinavian houses until her resignation because of illness after about six years. Around this time period, Ruth Marton received monetary restitution from Germany for the loss of her work as an actress as well as inheritance and restitution money concerning property her family had owned, and she used this money to support herself while writing her next novel The Divorcees . This story succeeded in being published in the 1960s. Despite having been written in English, it appeared published only in translation abroad in German, Danish, Norwegian, and Italian. The Divorcees was intended as the first part of a trilogy, but the sequels The Female / The Mousetrap and The Shattered Mask remained in manuscript. Her memoir first called Cat of Many Lives, and later renamed Lost and Found, is also available only in manuscript. The parts of the memoir that were related to Ruth Marton’s friendship with Erich Maria Remarque were later adopted into another memoir book My Friend Boni that was translated and published as Mein Freund Boni in Germany in 1993.

Ruth Marton died in 1999 in New York.