Читать книгу Hedy Lamarr - Ruth Barton - Страница 13

THE SUCCESS and notoriety of Ecstasy opened doors for the young star; although for the moment those were to be stage doors. Interviewed during the shooting of Ecstasy, Hedy was firm: she did not want a Hollywood career. “I don't want to become a slave to cinema,” Hedy said. “I want to film when I feel like it, and to take a break when I don't. I'll probably go back to Berlin.”¹ Any mention of a contract with Paramount and a trip to Hollywood with her mother vanished as unexpectedly as they had appeared. What she did not then know was that she had left Berlin and the Weimar film industry for good.

As the German film industry increasingly fell under Nazi control, a brief window of opportunity opened for studios in Vienna. Over the long winter of 1932, nothing had been filmed. By summer, the Filmhof Café was filled with the same faces that had so recently gathered in Berlin's Romanische Café. Six companies were filming simultaneously in The Sascha Film Studios, and anyone from the opera world willing to work in a light operetta, set in Vienna, and featuring sweet young Viennese girls, could name their price.

According to Christopher Young's account of Hedy's life and her autobiography, during this period her fiancé, Franz von Hochstetten, pleaded with her to marry him and when she refused, he committed suicide. Soon afterward, Hedy met Count Blucher von Wahlstatt and they announced their engagement. This too ended quickly. If true, the engagement must have ended around December 1932. It's difficult to pinpoint where and how the many rumors surrounding Hedy started, particularly when you find them repeated in Ecstasy and Me. From a young age, she seems to have reveled in the company of adoring men, many of them older. She also seems to have held little regard for the bonds of marriage, but beginning in her teens, evidently enjoyed the idea of marrying. As she grew older, she slipped in and out of a fantasy world, emerging from it only to utter often garbled pronouncements. For the moment, however, she stood squarely in reality; yet she was determined, sure of her talent, and of the power she had over people. She did not hesitate to use that power to her advantage.

In early 1933, Hedy was actively looking for more roles. That year, the popular Viennese actor Willi Forst was preparing to direct his first film, Unfinished Symphony (Leiseflehen meine Liedef), which was about the love affair between Franz Schubert and Countess Esterhazy. Walter Reisch was working on the script and their first choice for the plum role of the Hungarian Countess Esterhazy was the young Hedy Kiesler. Also on board was the renowned costume designer Gerdago, known as the Edith Head of Austrian Film. Hans Jaray was confirmed to play Schubert, and Luise Ullrich, who had starred in Max Ophüls’ Liebelei, was cast as the innocent object of Schubert's attentions.² There was one problem, however: Forst and Reisch joined forces to tell the producer, “Pretty is not enough. She has to sing Schubert songs. She was not trained for singing and she cannot sing Schubert songs. We have to take Martha Eggerth.”³Eggerth had a minor film career but was better known for her beautiful singing voice. Hedy was replaced.

The film was shot from March through May 1933 and Hedy dropped into the studio one day to visit the filmmakers. She was very sorry, Eggerth remembered, not to have played in the film.⁴ Symphony was a monumental success across Europe and catapulted Eggerth into stardom overnight; her career in musicals lasted until the war, when she and her husband, Jan Kiepura, fled to America. Both resumed their careers in America, with their main triumphs now on Broadway.

If Hedy was disappointed not to play in Symphony, another opportunity shortly came her way. In autumn of 1932, the forthcoming production of Sissy in the Theater an der Wien was all the talk in Viennese theatrical circles. Sissy was based on the courtship between the young Emperor Franz Josef and Elizabeth (nicknamed Sissy), the favorite daughter of Bavaria's Duke Max, and had been composed by the violinist Franz Kreisler. He badly needed the income—a recent $10,000 win at the tables in Monte Carlo barely saved him from selling his collection of rare books and manuscripts. Relying on sentimental songs he knew would strike a chord with his audience, Kreisler recycled his well-worn violin tunes from earlier operettas and added in two new numbers: “Wine Is My Weakness” and “With Eyes Like Thine, Tis Sin to Weep.”

To play the title role was the dream of any young star, and it was no surprise when Paula Wessely was chosen to play the latest incarnation of Sissy. The operetta premiered on 23 December 1932 in time for the Christmas season, with Paula Wessely as Sissy and Hans Jaray as Franz Joseph. Reviewers and audiences were enchanted and management of the chronically impoverished theater anticipated a long and lucrative run. In early January, it was announced that Rose Stradner would take over the role of Sissy from Paula Wessely, who would soon move on to a new role elsewhere.⁵

In early 1933, for a short period Hedy was the understudy for Paula; unexpectedly the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Hedy had been announced as the successor to Paula Wessely for the role of the Countess Elisabeth in Sissy.6 Rose Stradner had since been contracted to take over the part of Fanny in the comedy Fanny playing at the Raimund Theater; only when she had completed this contract could she play Sissy.

An announcement was placed in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung on 20 January confirming that Hedy Kiesler would replace Paula Wessely. Once again her portrait appeared in Die Buhne, this time in profile with a cigarette delicately placed on her lips and photographed by Edith Glogau.

In the end, Paula Wessely played Sissy until March 1933, when she was replaced by Rose Stradner. The director, Hubert Marischka, also pressed her to reschedule her holiday so she could stay on in the role. Then, before she began her second month as Sissy, the director abruptly informed Rose Stradner that her contract would be terminated and Hedy Kiesler would now play Sissy. Rose Stradner was outraged and demanded compensation for breach of contract. On 23 March, Hedy nonetheless replaced her. Hedy's performance was greeted with enthusiasm:

She looks wonderful, tender and really attractive. And she performs with real charm too: simply without affectation, talking and singing with the high voice of a child in which from time to time the echo of a Wessely accent is detectable. In short, a delightful Sissy, without the stardom and pomp of a sophisticate, but with easy, childlike tones.⁷

Playing Sissy confirmed Hedy as a rising star in Vienna's film and theater world; the role was the most cherished part to which any young performer could aspire. It was also curiously portentous—the real-life Sissy (Elizabeth of Bavaria) had enjoyed a charmed childhood before an accidental meeting with Franz Joseph I led to her capturing the heart of the older man. He insisted on marrying her, and so she became, at age sixteen, Empress of Austria. Beautiful and rebellious, she soon found her position meant she could no longer behave as she wished; it also put her on a collision course with her mother-in-law, who controlled the upbringing of her grandchildren, ensuring that Sissy seldom saw them. The young empress took to traveling the world, seemingly in search of a cure for her many illnesses, often in the company of lovers. Much later, her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, was to die with his lover in the May-erling tragedy, and she herself was assassinated at the age of sixty. The tale of the beautiful royal captive has always charmed the Viennese, and in 1955 it made a star of Romy Schneider who, when she was even younger than Hedy, debuted in a trilogy of enormously popular Sissy films directed by Ernst Marischka.

If her casting as Sissy made the young Hedy Kiesler's reputation, it also had another, more sinister outcome. Through her newfound fame, she met her notorious first husband, Fritz Mandl, Joe May's cousin.

The Mandl family was Jewish and originally came from Hungary. Like the Kieslers, they were wealthy and socially well connected. Ferdinand Mandl converted to Catholicism to marry Fritz's mother, a family maid, Maria Mohr, from Graz. Fritz was born in 1900, though it took ten years for his father to convert and marry Maria. Fritz Mandl was therefore raised as a Catholic and beneath a shadow cast by his birth; the latter possibly prompting his lifetime spent seeking the acceptance of high society.⁸ Mandl was to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, known variously as “Austria's Munitions King” and the “Merchant of Death.” The Mandl family munitions business flourished during the First World War, with those employed in their factory, the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, rising from five hundred to two thousand before World War I and climbing to more than four thousand during the war. The factory went bankrupt after the defeat of the Hapsburg Empire, and Alexander Mandl lost control of the business. In the late 1920s, Fritz Mandl negotiated a shrewd loan from a bank that enabled him to return the factory to family ownership. Mandl's own political interests were to the far right, though this did not prevent him from equipping both sides in the Spanish Civil War. Democracy, he once said, “is a luxury that might be borne, perhaps in prosperous periods.”⁹

A man of medium height, Mandl was an impeccable dresser, with an eye for fine clothes and good food. The Mandl family had a long-standing interest in film production. Joe May, as previously noted, was Fritz's cousin. Leo Mandl, Joe May's nephew, was the director of Messter-Film GmbH and the director-general of Sascha Film in Vienna; in December 1922 Leo Mandl took over the operation of May Film. Fritz Mandl enjoyed rubbing shoulders with those in the film and theater world, and being seen in the company of beautiful women. He particularly had an eye for actresses.

He was notorious for his treatment of women. His first wife was the performer Hella Strauss, who later sued him for $80,000 in back alimony. Next, he had an affair with Eva May, Mia and Joe May's daughter. She had started acting at age sixteen, had married three times, each time to a film director (Martin Liebenau [ErikLund], Lothar Mendes, and Manfred Noa), and starred in a string of German films. Her chaotic personal life led to a break with her father, and she was evidently desperately unstable. Hedy claims Eva committed suicide as a result of her relationship with Mandl; however, although Eva commited suicide in 1924, shooting herself with a revolver as she had done so often onscreen, this was not her first attempt.¹⁰ What Hedy did not mention was that Eva May was also Fritz Mandl's second cousin. Long after his marriage with Hedy had ended and he was living in Argentina, Mandl offered his third wife a divorce settlement of just 800 pesos a month to support her and their children. His fourth wife charged him with assault.

Fritz Mandl was capable of both extraordinary generosity and perverse immorality; for instance, Mandl rescued Hugo Marton, his private banker, from a prison camp after the AnschluB; later Mandl had an affair with Marton's wife. He gave handsomely to the Red Cross, bribed numerous officials, and looked after his staff well. As Marie-Theres Arnbom has written, to this day Mandl is remembered in Hirtenberg for paying his workers a rate well above the national average. For the Austrian working class at large, however, he was the personification of fascism, the fat cat capitalist who armed the Heimwehr to keep down the workers.¹¹ His attempts to disavow his Jewish heritage were not taken at face value; commenting on his background, his politics, and his insistence that he had been educated with the Piarist Fathers, one journalist wrote of this “man of small to medium height, son of good Jewish parents,” that his activities only proved that “when a Jew is stupid, then he really is stupid.”¹²

As befitting a man with social ambitions, and one with considerable wealth, acquiring a trophy bride was imperative. Throughout 1933, Mandl diligently pursued Hedy. One night after Hedy's appearance as the lead in Sissy, Mandl showed up backstage and presented her with his card. Next, according to Hedy, he appealed to her parents for their support in his marriage plans. Wealthy and influential as the Kieslers were, they seem to have been won over by Mandl. So too was Hedy—in May 1933, the couple announced their engagement. It was also announced that the future Mrs. Mandl would end her career. “I am so happy about my engagement,” she told the press, “that I am unable to be sad about my departure from the stage. It has been made so easy for me to give up my lifelong ambitions to be successful in the theater. I was a little sad to say good-bye to all this but I am really optimistic about the future and am really happy.”¹³ On 16 May, she gave her last performance as Sissy and the next day left for Paris. It was presumed she would return at the end of June for her wedding.

On 10 August 1933, the couple married in Vienna's baroque Karls-kirche. Sometime prior, Hedy had converted to Roman Catholicism and Fritz Mandl to the Reform Church. The wedding party lunched at the Grand Hotel and the couple departed for Venice that evening, to honeymoon at the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido. “We spent many golden, glamorous weeks at the Lido,” Hedy recalled a few years later, “dining, dancing, swimming, gliding along the Venetian canals in our own gondola, watching the Lido crowd disport itself.”¹⁴ Mr. and Mrs. Mandl were only two among many famous names vacationing in Venice that summer, but Fritz Mandl ensured that he and his young bride kept their distance from the celebrity set; and so they moved on, through Europe's most elegant resorts, to Capri, Lake Como, Biarritz, Cannes, Nice, and Paris, with Mandl always jealously guarding Hedy from others’ attentions.

• • •

Once back in Vienna, in early January 1934, Mandl installed his wife in the Mandl mansion, a ten-room apartment at 15 Schwarzenbergplatz near Vienna's famed Ring Boulevard. With marriage came a massive estate that included the renowned Mandl hunting castle, the Villa Fegenberg, near Schwartau. Hedy now had maids, jewels, and wanted for nothing. She had every luxury, she later commented, except freedom.¹⁵ She began to wear black and to dress more conservatively to rein in her personality. Still she was guaranteed to attract attention wherever she went.

Shortly after their marriage, Mandl apparently arranged for a private screening of his wife's latest film. Furious with what he saw, he ordered every print and negative of Ecstasy bought and destroyed, an edict that simply sent more prints into circulation and increased the film's notoriety. Indeed, it seems that Machaty was more than happy to sell his prints to Mandl, knowing that enough existed to make the eradication of Ecstasy impossible.¹⁶ Although this story was widely circulated and repeated throughout Hedy's life, Mandl later stated that it was all just a publicity stunt dreamed up to promote the film.¹⁷ It does seem odd that he arranged for the film to be destroyed well after it had completed its Viennese run, and there are no reports in the trade press of his alleged campaign. True or false, the myth enhanced Ecstasy's currency as forbidden fruit, as may have been intended.

With work out of the question for now, Hedy soon became bored. Mandl may not have literally locked her inside his castle, as she and others later claimed, but by moving his young bride into the Villa Fegenberg where she had only staff for company week after week, he effectively kept her away from temptation. Horse riding passed the time as did swimming in a pool fed by natural springs, but there was little else to do other than wear the expensive clothes Mandl chose for her. Her husband would appear late at night and on weekends with his guests. One day, she later told Farley Granger, “she decided to entertain herself by taking all sixteen toilet seats from the house out on to the lawn that swept down to the lake to paint them in the sun. As she was beginning the last one, she spotted a long line of black Mercedes limos in the distance coming up the long drive to the house. Her husband had not bothered to call her to warn her that he was bringing important guests for the weekend.”¹⁸ Berta Kaiser, then a fourteen-year-old kitchen maid at the Villa Fegenberg, remembered that Mandl himself would come to the kitchen to oversee the preparations for the evening's entertainment, never Hedy, who was too young to know about such matters. She was just there to be beautiful. Still, the staff was fond of her and awed by her looks and fine clothing. The couple, Berta Kaiser also noticed, slept in separate bedrooms.¹⁹

Soon Hedy realized that Mandl deliberately kept her short of cash and assured her that she could shop on credit when she wished. Determined to outwit him, she went shopping with a vengeance, buying up thousands of schillings worth of clothes, furs, evening gowns, and coats. According to Hedy,

My program of buying went on for weeks and, during it, I became a new person. I was gayer, happier, and at the same time (imbued with this new secret purpose) more amenable to my husband's wishes…All of which led him, far from suspecting my true design, to do that which I had hoped he would do, namely give me an allowance of my own. “Hedy,” he said, “your purchases are staggering even to a man of wealth. I will not have this go on. I shall therefore stop your credit and give you cash for your needs. This allowance is not comparable to your extravagance; but it must from now on, suffice.”

I had won!²⁰

In her autobiography, Hedy relates another incident that she claims occurred soon after she married Mandl. Finding herself unsupervised one afternoon, she slipped out of their mansion and into a crowd of shoppers. Soon she spotted Mandl behind her on an escalator. She rode to the bottom and hurried out a side exit, finding herself in a familiar part of town; nearby, she remembered, there was a notorious peephole club. Pushing enough money for the fee and a large tip in the surprised attendant's hand, she slipped into the club and headed upstairs to join the afternoon regulars in the booths. In front of her eyes, a formally dressed man and two nude women were forming a “sandwich” tableau on a round bed draped in red velvet. Behind her, Hedy heard Mandl's voice and guessed that his tip would be more generous than hers. She quickly exited the booth, and, like Alice, found herself on the other side of the glass, now transformed from voyeur to spectacle. Before Mandl could climb the stairs, a young man walked in and started to undress. Surprised that Hedy was not performing her part, he wondered if this was her first time, while musing that she looked familiar. As Ecstasy had been showing all around town, this could well have been so. Hedy began to undress and at that moment, Mandl banged on the door, demanding to know who the hell was in there. “What the hell do you care?” came the reply, “a broad and me.” Unable to believe that this might be his wife, Mandl apparently departed, leaving Hedy to enjoy “the strangest love-making any girl ever had” and to be tipped afterward in gratification.²¹

Did this happen? Not surprisingly, no one has since stepped up to confirm or deny the story. The incident is only one of a number in the book that describe how its author finds herself in a position where a stranger takes advantage of her and where she comes to enjoy the experience. It's a scenario that, in various forms, underpins many a Hollywood narrative: the heroine stands up to a forceful man who breaks down her resistance by seducing her. Maybe this and the other incidents did occur, or maybe the ghostwriters invented them (though this seems a risky creative decision), or maybe in later life Hedy's sexual fantasies usurped the reality of life with Mandl in a city on the brink of war, in an environment where to be Jewish was to be increasingly fearful.

In Schwartau, Hedy presided over a dinner table that accommodated writers such as Ödön von Horváth, and Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma. According to Hedy's autobiography, they also counted Sigmund Freud among their circle. If these names reflected Mandl's cultural interests, some of Mandl's other guests were more sinister. Certainly, they included Mussolini, but, according to Hedy, another diner was Adolf Hitler.²² It seems unlikely that Mandl would have entertained the German leader, even if Hitler were in Vienna at this time; later, Mandl actively moved against Hitler. Mussolini was another matter; he and Mandl shared many interests, not least a friendship with another well-known Austrian fascist, Count Ernst Riidiger von Starhemberg. Von Starhemberg was the owner of thousands of acres of land and some thirteen castles across Austria; in the 1923 Putsch, he fought for Hitler, whom he counted at that time as a personal friend. By the time Von Starhemberg met Mandl, however, he had run through the family fortune and needed the munitions baron's financial support to stay at the forefront of the politics of the day.

• • •

Mandl and von Starhemberg made a formidable pair. The latter was socially well connected; Mandl brought money and ruthless business acumen to the partnership. Their vision was clear: when democracy became unworkable, Mandl told an interviewer in 1933, then you need a strong pair of clean hands. These were Count von Starhemberg's, he pronounced confidently, a man who had supported his political ideals with his own fortune.²³ These ideals were now invested in a private militia, the Heimwehr, and in February 1934 the twosome deployed the Heimwehr to crush the socialist revolution in Vienna. Equipping the Heimwehr and aligning himself with von Starhemberg were characteristically immoral moves on the part of Mandl, not least because a considerable proportion of the Heimwehr's membership was motivated by anti-Semitism. Von Starhemberg himself was, like Mandl, quite immune to the finer points of ideology, on occasion inciting a crowd with Nazi-inspired slogans and, when it was more convenient, reassuring the foreign press that the Heimwehr completely rejected Nazi racial theories.²⁴ Mussolini bought weapons from Mandl at top rates to help finance his and von Starhemberg's activities, and for a time, as part of his strategy to strengthen Austria against Hitler, the Italian leader threw in his lot with the two Austrians.

This then was the company the young Hedy Mandl found herself keeping. It was at one of von Starhemberg's balls that a conversation took place that suggests there were more sinister reasons for her marriage to Mandl. According to Jewish-German writer Heinz Liepmann, it is based on an encounter with Hedy that took place on the night of 22 November 1934. By this stage Dolfuß had been assassinated and von Starhemberg was vice-chancellor and minister of State Security. The guests at the ball included Prince Nicholas of Greece, Madame Schiaperelli, Franz Werfel and Alma, Prince Gustav of Denmark, actress Nora Gregor (now von Starhemberg's lover), and General Malleaux of the French General staff. But the figure that caught Liepmann's gaze was that of a young woman whose beauty, heightened by the simplicity of her gown and the size of her diamond pin, outshone this display of wealth. This was Frau Mandl, dancing in the arms of her much-older husband, Fritz. Soon after he entered the ballroom, Liepmann observed Mandl leave with Count von Starhemberg and sensed a shudder of foreboding run through the collection of guests. What were these two men planning? Seizing his chance, Liepmann asked an acquaintance to introduce him to Hedy. “Let us sit down for a moment,” she suggested. “Only then did I notice,” Liepmann recalled, “that her soft alluring beauty was really intoxicating when enhanced by the vital charm of her eyes and her voice. She appeared sophisticated and na'ive at the same time—great international hostess and sweet Viennese girl.”²⁵ They talked about her father, whom Liepmann had known. He was a shrewd businessman, Liepmann remembered, tall, handsome, and always well dressed, with blue eyes and dark hair growing grey at the temples. Hedy sighed at the thought of “my poor old daddy,” but she was soon swept offby another admirer for a waltz. How could the repellent Mandl have won himself such a beautiful young bride, Liepmann wondered aloud to his friend Ödön von Horvath.

According to von Horvath, the Kieslers had found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy after the death of Hedy's father. Hedy and her mother attempted to win back some of their lost fortune on the stock exchange and, in doing so, lost the rest. Hedy then took a job as a stenographer but was much too pretty to work in an office, “You know what I mean,” von Horvath added suggestively. At last, through the intervention of an old family friend, Hedy was hired at Sascha Studios and it was there that Machaty discovered her. The accuracy of the report is questionable, given that Liepmann apparently believed Emil Kiesler had died a few years previously (Herr Kiesler died unexpectedly of a heart attack a year later in February 1935).

At this point, Horvath paused and both men listened as a detachment of Heimwehr militia passed by; a single light coming from above suggesting that Mandl and von Starhemberg were engaged in some menacing plot. “Why did she play in Ecstasy at all?” Liepmann wondered. Horvath shrugged. “I think she can hardly be blamed for it,” he answered. “The film itself is a very ambitious and purely artistic work and I think that nobody, least of all Hedy, had the faintest idea that the great public would regard it as a ‘naughty’ film.”

Sympathetic as he was to Hedy's suffering over the public reception of the film in the previous year, von Horvath suggested that she was foolish not to have kept a low profile after the scandal erupted. Instead, she took a part in Max Reinhardt's 1931 stage production of The Weaker Sex, cast most likely because of her notoriety as much as her acting.

Gripping Liepmann's arm, Horvath pointed to the figures of Mandl and von Starhemberg walking together arm in arm. Hedy left her dancing partner and walked over to Mandl. The band struck up a waltz and the munitions baron began to dance with his young wife. Liepmann watched him lean over and say something into her ear and observed how her eyes opened wide, apparently in horror. More political machinations were afoot.

There are perhaps too many inaccuracies in Liepmann's story to render it useful but certainly it is worth mulling over the similarities between the portrayal of the aging husband, unflattering as it was, in Ecstasy and Mandl's own stature and status. Nor should one dismiss the possibility that Hedy's very youthful marriage was sanctioned by her parents because of the financial security they felt it would bring her. Certainly, like Sissy, she may have felt trapped by the obnoxious Mandl and his wealth, age, and position.

In August 1934, Ecstasy was entered at the Second Venice Film Festival. The version enjoyed by festivalgoers was the one ending with Eva nursing her baby while Adam lost himself in work.²⁶ Because the festival still had no access to a suitable cinema, Ecstasy was screened, as were other entries, in the open air. As darkness fell, the audience took their seats in the garden of the Hotel Excelsior to watch Machaty's film. They were enchanted and saluted the ending with a standing ovation and calls of “Bravo!” It was the longest round of applause to greet any film at the festival. The next day on the Lido, all the talk was of Ecstasy. Should Eva have left her husband? Should they have stayed together to bring up their child? As Francesco Bono remarks, overnight the unknown Austrian Hedwig Kiesler was transformed into a diva. Dressed in the most elegant designs, she was seen around Venice with one arm linked to her husband (apparently now reconciled to his wife's scandalous performance) and the other arm linked to von Starhemberg, who was in town conducting business with Mussolini. One journalist was certain he spotted the young star throwing off her clothes and jumping naked into the sea.²⁷

Needless to say, controversy also followed the screening of Ecstasy, with the influential Catholic press outraged by its content. II Duce (Mussolini) demanded that a private screening of the work be held in his home at the Villa Torlonia. A print was flown to him in Rome where he is rumored to have gasped over Hedy's beauty, a signal that the film could continue to be shown. As Francesco Bono advises, these anecdotes should be taken with a pinch of salt; particularly in this case, as Hedy already knew Mussolini from his friendship with Mandl.²⁸ Whether the Pope actually banned the film is again a moot point; in any case, this screening turned out to be the only opportunity Italian audiences had to see Ecstasy, which received no further commercial release. The Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film that year went to a rather different offering, Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, but Gustav Machaty won the Cup of the City of Venice as Best Director.

Tiring of life as a trophy bride, Hedy turned to her old mentor, Max Reinhardt. When Mandl, attending to business abroad, deposited her with some friends of his in St. Wolfgang, she persuaded them to drive her to Salzburg. There she met Reinhardt and they had a long talk. Reinhardt, however, could offer her nothing as long as Mandl was against her return to work.

In 1936, the Austrian Association of Cinema Producers declared a ban on hiring Jewish performers or talent. Mandl began moving his assets out of Austria in anticipation of a German takeover. Hedy made her own plans. During the time Mandl and Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg were business partners, Hedy was apparently having an affair with von Starhemberg's younger brother, Ferdinand, and on Friday, 13 November 1936, the twosome fled Mandl's mansion and boarded a train to Budapest. Hedy had heard there were theater opportunities there and planned to visit the home of a childhood friend. “When the train pulled into the Budapest station, there was my husband waiting. His face was a grey mask of fury.”²⁹ Elsewhere, it was rumored that Hedy was seeing not Ferdinand but Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg himself.

Her next attempt to escape, according to her autobiography, involved the connivance of the English Colonel Righter. A hurried conversation persuaded the nervous military man to promise his help but in an underhanded double-cross, Mandl revealed to Hedy the recording equipment he installed to eavesdrop on her conversations; worse again, he told her that Righter was on his payroll.

By now it seemed the talk of Vienna was of Hedy and Mandl's marital problems. Her acting aspirations first sparked the flame, but Hedy's public appearances with Count Max Hardegg, the gossip of Viennese society for weeks, probably further aggravated their struggles.³⁰ Eventually, in early 1937, Hedy, disguised as one of her maids, whom she had hired for her look-alike qualities, fled Mandl:

Early that Thursday morning, I put three sleeping pills in Laura's coffee, packed her suitcase, left her some money, dressed in my maid's costume with the collar turned up and sneaked out the servants entrance.

I had the keys to Laura's battered car, and I reached the railway unchallenged…The platform was deserted when I bought my ticket and started a twelve-minute wait. Like a novice spy, I imagined the stationmaster was scrutinizing me. And there was a telephone by his elbow. Somehow I managed to turn my back on him, and my studied casualness until the train did arrive and I did board it were not wasted on me in a later motion picture with Paul Henreid (The Conspirators).31

Although this story stretches credibility, it may be true, at least to the extent that Hedy did escape Mandl, who was, by all accounts an intimidating, controlling husband. She escaped with just a few items of clothing and a bag of jewels. These jewels were her insurance, the kind that would withstand the economic consequences of war. They remained in their paper bag, by her side, in her home of the moment. All Mandl's wives, according to his daughter, Puppe, received jewels; and it was the only thing they could take away with them.³² Occasionally, Hedy's jewels were stolen, or maybe “stolen”; only at the end of her life did they finally disappear, this time apparently for good.

Both in her own account of her 1937 escape and in the version she gave Christopher Young, Hedy said that soon after she left Mandl, her mother wired her with the news of her father's death, which intensified her heartbreak. This is a curious mistake, since, as was noted, Emil Kiesler died in early 1935.

According to Young, Hedy appealed to the Holy Rota in Rome for an annulment of her marriage to Mandl. Her request was denied, and she traveled to Nevada to obtain a divorce.³³ Hedy, however, claimed she obtained a divorce in Paris. It seems likely that Mandl had his marriage to Hedy annulled in 1938 on racial grounds.³⁴ They may even have discussed divorce before that; one rumor claimed they were planning to travel to Riga (the Reno of Europe) for a quick dissolution of their marriage.³⁵

According to the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, a “full Jew” was a person with three Jewish grandparents. Those with less were designated as ”Mischlinge” and fell into one of two categories: first degree equaled two Jewish grandparents; and second degree equaled one Jewish grandparent. Mandl was only too aware that he was of “tainted” stock: “Because I only have two grandparents who are of pure Aryan stock, this question is of the utmost importance to me. Perhaps Cardinal [Innitzer] could also be of some help since he was always well disposed towards me and a good word from him in important places would be very influential.”³⁶

Motivated, like his good friend Cardinal Innitzer, by a desire to keep all parties happy, Mandl was less interested in conforming to Nazi decrees than in protecting his financial interests, in this case his salary from the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, which was now in full production, gearing up happily for war. An annulment from the marriage with Hedy, a full-blooded Jew, was—not to put too fine a point on it—worth RM 2,000 monthly to Mandl.³⁷

In 1953, Mandl's third wife, Herta Schneider, charged Mandl with bigamy on the grounds that he never divorced Hedy. In pursuit of her share of Mandl's Argentinean assets (which she valued at £2,600,000), Schneider had filed for divorce, charging among other things that Mandl had dragged her around their luxury apartment by the hair. Mandl counter-claimed that they were never really married, as he had never properly divorced Hedy. According to his solicitors, Mandl had obtained a divorce from Hedy in Texas but the Vatican had refused to recognize it. He married Schneider in 1939, subsequently obtained a Mexican divorce from her, and then married Gloria Vinelli in Mexico City in 1951.³⁸

The story of Hedy's escape from Mandl followed her throughout her life. Its overtones of privilege and melodrama set it apart from other accounts of Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied territories. Most of all, her story eliminated the uncomfortable fact of her Jewishness, an aspect of her identity that she never again mentioned. This may also account for her neglect in the many studies of Jewish émigrés to Hollywood, rendering her a more lightweight character in a narrative focused on persecution and its consequences. What should be remembered is that her Jewish identity would have surfaced had she stayed in Austria. It is nearly certain too, given the pattern of her life, that she would not have stayed with Mandl, whose political activities she loathed and who could not have controlled her in the way he wanted.

Mandl in turn fled Vienna as Hitler annexed the arms factories. With the suspicion that he might be Jewish hanging over him, the businessman escaped along with his father, his sister, and Herta Schneider to Argentina. Before he left, Mandl sealed a deal with the Nazis allowing him to keep his non-Austrian holdings. In return he allegedly carried Nazi funds belonging to Göring, Ribbentrop, and other high-ranking party members to invest in Argentina. As his former wife built her reputation in Hollywood, so he built his, financing Juan Perón's successful electoral campaign and developing a local arms program. It seems that he and Hedy kept in touch over the years, though nothing suggests that they ever again met face to face.

Many years later again, in 1979, Manuel Puig opened his science fiction novel Pubis Angelical with a woman dying in a Mexican hospital. As her life slips away, she becomes not herself but her two shadows, one a Viennese actress who marries a weapons maker prior to World War II and later moves to Hollywood; and the other, “W2I8,” a sexual conscript in an alternative present. Puig makes his actress a tragic heroine. Locked in a fortress by her billionaire husband, whose fortune comes from making arms for the Nazis, she eventually escapes disguised as one of the doubles her jealous husband has planted around his island home. Nothing goes well in this story centered on the theme that men will inevitably betray women. Only the actress's alter ego, the sex slave, triumphs, and then only because she realizes that forcing men to change is futile—it is far better for women to believe in themselves than to become an object of male desire. There is no evidence that Hedy Mandl, by then Hedy Lamarr, ever read Puig's book. She might have found his conclusion simplistic.