Hedy's Folly Page 2

  She had that day and one more to make good. The film then in production was called Geld auf der Strasse (Money in the Streets). There was a minor part for a girl in a nightclub scene. “I applied for it and right away I got it,” Hedy recalled. In this account, for an American magazine, she translates her starting salary as “five dollars a day.”

  Then she had to tell her parents that she was dropping out of school at sixteen to become a professional actress. As she remembered the negotiation in 1938:

  Well, it was not too bad. They were bewildered a little but not very surprised. They were never surprised at anything I did. And besides, I had been talking movies for so long that they were really prepared for this. My dear father finally laughed and said, “You have been an actress ever since you were a baby!” So my parents did not try to prevent me. They were willing to give me this great wish of my heart.

  She recalled it differently later in life. She had persuaded the director, Georg Jacoby, to give her the part. Her parents, she wrote, “were much more difficult to persuade than [Jacoby], because it meant my dropping school. But at last they agreed. My father had never forbidden his little princess anything, and besides, he reasoned that I would soon enough quit of my own accord and go back to school.”

  When Geld auf der Strasse wrapped, a better role followed as a secretary in Sturm im Wasserglas (Storm in a Water Glass), another Jacoby project. Then Reinhardt cast her in The Weaker Sex. “Reinhardt made me read, meet people, attend plays.” She followed him back to Vienna when he restaged the play there. “Yes, we have no bananas.”

  “When you dance with her,” George Weller remembered, “as I did every night for about three months, she is a trifle stiff to the touch. Reedlike, that’s what Hedy Kiesler is, sweet and reedlike, and when she wants to talk to you she doesn’t lean over your shoulder and arch herself out behind like a debutante.… She leans back from you [and] takes a good look in your eyes and a firm grip on your name before she will allow herself to say a word.”

  Weller was present when Reinhardt gave Hedy her lifelong byname, a christening later claimed by the Hollywood studio head Louis B. Mayer:

  It was at the rehearsal of a cafe scene in a comedy, and the Regisseur [that is, the director] was Reinhardt. There were Viennese newspapermen watching. Suddenly the Herr Professor, a man not given to superlatives, turned to the reporters and mildly pronounced these words: “Hedy Kiesler is the most beautiful girl in the world.” Instantly the reporters put it down. In five minutes the Herr Professor’s sentence, utter and absolute, had been telephoned to the newspapers of the [city center], to be dispatched by press services to other newspapers, other capitals, countries, continents.

  The Weaker Sex played in Vienna for one month, from 8 May to 8 June 1931. “Almost before we knew it,” Weller recalled, “another play was in rehearsal.” Hollywood was buying up European actors as it rapidly expanded film production, a trend that would accelerate after 1933 when the Nazis took power in Germany and then in Austria, and Jews saw their civil rights stripped away. The play, Film und Liebe (Film and Love), satirized the earlier, commercial phase of the exodus. Weller won the role of “a brash Hollywood director who thought … that Central European talent could be seduced by American gold into immigrating to California.” The female lead as Weller remembered it called for a character “who simply recoiled at the sight of a Hollywood contract,” which would have been a stretch for Hedy. In any case the director offered her a smaller role.

  She rejected it. “I’ve never been satisfied,” she explained. “I’ve no sooner done one thing than I am seething inside me to do another thing. And so, almost as soon as I was inside a studio I wanted to be acting in a studio. And as soon as I was acting in a studio, I wanted to be starring in a studio. I wanted to be famous.” Her stage roles had been limited and her reviews mixed. Weller thought she simply “decided for herself … that she wanted no more stage.”

  Berlin was the center of filmmaking, and to Berlin she returned that August 1931, looking for work. She found it with the Russian émigré director Alexis Granowsky, who cast her as the mayor’s daughter in a comedy, Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. (The Trunks of Mr. O.F.). The cast included her rising Austrian contemporary Peter Lorre in his fourth film role. When Trunks wrapped, in mid-October, Sascha-Film obligingly offered her the female lead in another comedy to be shot in Berlin, Man braucht kein Geld (One Needs No Money), opposite Heinz Rühmann, a German film star. Hedy turned seventeen midway through the November production. Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. premiered in Berlin on 2 December. Man braucht kein Geld followed in Vienna on 22 December. “Excellent work by a cast of familiar German actors,” the New York Times would praise Man braucht kein Geld on its New York opening the following fall, “reinforced by Hedy Kiesler, a charming Austrian girl.” It was her first American notice.

  Then a truly starring role came to hand. The Czech director Gustav Machatý found Hedy in Berlin and offered her the lead in a Czechoslovakian film, Ekstase (Ecstasy), a love story. She was thrilled. “When I had this opportunity to star in [the film],” she recalled, “it was the biggest opportunity I had had. I was mad for this chance, of course.” Shooting was scheduled for July 1932. To fill the intervening months, she replaced one of the four actors in Noël Coward’s comedy Private Lives at the Komödie Theatre.

  Whether or not Hedy’s parents read the script of Ekstase isn’t clear from the remaining record. Since she was still a minor, however, they did try to protect her:

  I could not go, my father said, unless my mother went too. But I did not want my mother to go.… I was young enough to want to be on my own. What kind of a baby, what kind of an amateur would they think me, I said, if I had to have my mother along to take care of me! Besides, I felt embarrassed when my mother was in the studio, was on the sets watching me. I felt stiff and self-conscious then. I could not feel free and grownup like that. I finally prevailed upon my father to allow me to go with the members of the company. There could be no harm in this.

  Eventually, she revealed another reason she had insisted on traveling unaccompanied: “I went to Prague because I was in love with somebody.” She wanted no chaperoning mother to interfere.

  Hedy’s performance as Eva in Ekstase would both promote and plague her professional career. Although the film includes a brief nude scene, it’s guileless rather than salacious. A young wife, Eva, languishes in an unconsummated marriage to a fussy middle-aged man. Frustrated, she leaves him. Out riding one morning, enjoying her new freedom, she stops to swim in a woodland pond, parking her summer playsuit on the back of her unsaddled mare. While she’s swimming, her mare runs away, attracted to a stallion in the next pasture. Adam, a handsome engineer on a road construction crew, stripped to the waist and a-sweat, catches the runaway and goes looking for its rider. He finds Eva hiding behind a bush and tosses her playsuit to her. Dressed, disdainfully retrieving her horse, she trips and sprains her ankle. He splints it, necessarily handling her leg, and she slaps him for his familiarity. Back home, she realizes she’s drawn to him, struggles with her feelings, finally looks him up in his construction cabin and initiates a night of passion. Afterward the lovers happily plan another night together at a hotel.

  The next day they go into town separately to avoid scandal. Adam catches a ride unknowingly with Eva’s husband, Emile, who recognizes as his estranged wife’s a necklace Adam is fondling. Both men check into the same hotel. The engineer hires musicians to serenade Eva as they drink champagne and dance on the hotel terrace. Emile in his room overhead hears the music and agonizes. There’s a shot. The hotel staff crowds around the door to Emile’s room. Adam breaks in: Emile has killed himself, his fussy pince-nez lying broken on the floor. Adam and Eva go to the station to wait for the next train to Berlin. He falls asleep. She decides to return home and leaves him sleeping—their night of passion was a deliverance but not an obligation.

  In this simple and largely pantomimed story, only three brief scenes challenge what would oth
erwise be at most a PG-13 rating today: a glimpse of Eva’s breasts as she swims nude, a long shot of her running nude through the woods, and a gauzy close-up of her face in passion during the couple’s night of lovemaking. Not nudity but blatant Freudian symbolism communicates the film’s sexual themes: a jackhammer drilling, a bee pollinating a flower, a stallion rearing and snorting before servicing a mare off camera. More challenging than nudity or symbolism to the sexual canons of the day, in America in particular, was the story itself, which reversed the prevailing Victorian paternalism. Eva falls for Adam, seeks him out, seduces him, takes her pleasure, and drops him when she’s done, while Emile, when he realizes he isn’t vital enough for her, obligingly shoots himself. Had the film been released in the 1960s instead of the 1930s, it might have been hailed as feminist.

  Certainly Ekstase embodied the new spirit of personal freedom which Zweig observed of that time and place. “The world began to take itself more youthfully,” he writes, “and, in contrast to the world of my parents, was proud of being young.… To be young and fresh, and to get rid of pompous dignity, was the watchword of the day. The women threw off the corsets which had confined their breasts, and abjured parasols and veils since they no longer feared air and sunshine. They shortened their skirts so that they could use their legs freely at tennis, and were no longer bashful about displaying them if they were pretty ones. Fashions became more natural; men wore breeches, women dared to ride astride, and people no longer covered up and hid themselves from one another.”

  Ekstase illustrates these changes both in situation and in costume. It also dramatizes the corresponding changes in values that Zweig observed:

  This health and self-confidence of the generation that succeeded mine won for itself freedom in modes and manners as well. For the first time girls were seen without governesses on excursions with their young friends, or participating in sports in frank, self-assured comradeship; they were no longer timid or prudish, they knew what they wanted and what they did not want. Freed from the anxious control of their parents, earning their own livelihood as secretaries or office workers, they seized the right to live their own lives. Prostitution, the only love institution which the old world sanctioned, declined markedly, for because of this newer and healthier freedom all manner of false modesty had become old-fashioned. In the swimming-places the wooden fences which had inexorably separated the women’s section from the men’s were torn down, and men and women were no longer ashamed to show how they were built. More freedom, more frankness, more spontaneity had been regained in these ten years [after the turn of the century] than in the previous hundred years.

  As if confirming Zweig’s insight, Hedy announced during the production of Ekstase that she had been offered a Hollywood contract and had turned it down. “I don’t want to become the slave of film,” she told an Austrian magazine grandly, “but rather want to make films or take breaks when I feel like it.”

  After filming Ekstase, she returned to Vienna. In November she celebrated her eighteenth birthday. She was ill with influenza and lost weight, enhancing her already striking beauty. When she recovered, she nearly won the role of Caroline Esterhazy, the young Hungarian countess whom Franz Schubert tutored and loved, in the film Unfinished Symphony. She was reluctantly passed over because the role required someone who could sing Schubert art songs and she was not a trained singer.

  Ekstase premiered in Prague on 20 January 1933. At that distance it was relatively painless. A month later, its Vienna premiere simultaneously in four theaters drew large crowds—more than seventy thousand tickets sold in its first two weeks. Hedy prepared her parents for the experience by warning them that the film was “artistic,” but nothing prepared them for seeing their daughter nude or apparently having sex. “I wanted to run and hide,” she remembered. “My father solved the predicament. He simply rose and said grimly, ‘We will go.’ I gathered my belongings in one grab. My mother seemed angry, but somehow reluctant to walk out. Nevertheless, walk out we did.”

  “My mother and father suffered about it,” Hedy acknowledged. “My father suffered even more than my mother, I think. It was the hurt look in his eyes that made me realize to the full how silly and ill-advised I had been.” They were told, she said, that they should “do something” about it, “that I was a minor and that the company had no right to ask such a thing of me.… But my father felt, and rightly, that to make a fuss about it would only attract more publicity to it.” She made him understand, she said, how when you’re young you’re “apt to do foolish things in an effort to appear experienced and of the world. And so, because they loved me very dearly, they did not speak of it any more.”

  Publicity scandals that feel like the end of the world usually aren’t. Fritz Kreisler, the violinist and composer, had written a musical comedy about what Time magazine would describe as “the courtship of the young Emperor Franz Josef and Elizabeth, 16-year-old, harum-scarum daughter of Bavaria’s Duke Max.” Elizabeth’s nickname was Sissy; she was, Time explained, “the favorite of her father who roved the forests with woodcutter friends, played the zither, behaved more like a peasant than a duke.” Sissy had opened in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien just at Christmas 1932; it would continue through hundreds of performances. Musical comedy didn’t require the classically trained singing voice that Schubert lieder did. Hedy understudied the role of Sissy beginning in early January 1933 and took over the lead in late March. “At first I felt reluctant about it,” she remembered. “I said to myself, ‘How will they accept me as the Austrian Queen after this ‘Ecstasy’? But the [theater] prevailed upon me and of course I really wanted to.” The audience welcomed her, as did a reviewer: “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 short, a delightful Sissy, without the stardom and pomp of a sophisticate, but with easy, childlike tones.”

  Flowers began to crowd Hedy’s dressing room that spring, tokens from a wealthy admirer. She wasn’t impressed. “From the first night Fritz Mandl saw me on the stage,” she recalled, “he tried, in every way, to get in touch with me. He sent me flowers, quantities of flowers. I sent them back to him.” Though she had never met him, Mandl was not unknown to her. “I had heard of him, of course, as who in Austria had not? I knew of his high position, his wealth, his connection with the foreign powers. The flowers he sent me seemed like a ‘command performance.’ I did not like that.”

  Friedrich “Fritz” Mandl was a heavyweight, thirty-three years old and the third-richest man in Austria. His wealth had originated in a family-owned ammunition factory in Hirtenberg, a small town about twenty-five miles southwest of Vienna, which had begun making rifle cartridges for the armies of Europe soon after their invention in America during the Civil War. Mandl’s father, Alexander, had hired him to rebuild the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik in the aftermath of its nearly complete destruction by arson during labor troubles in 1920, and in 1924 he became general manager. By the time Mandl began courting Hedy, a historian writes, “he had negotiated agreements with arms manufacturers in France, Germany, and Italy, and controlled arms plants in Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands.”

  Having failed to win Hedy’s attention with notes and flowers, Mandl called her mother at home. “He introduced himself,” Hedy said, “and then he asked my mother if he might come to our house to meet me. My mother did not know how to say ‘no’ to what was, after all, a legitimate request.” Trude Kiesler mentioned a day, and Mandl turned up hat in hand.

  He was not a tall man; in photographs he appears to be no taller than Hedy, who was five feet seven. His head was large, his face fleshy, his body stocky and apparently powerful. Time would describe him at this point in his life as “a young viveur who gambled for high stakes, and kept fancy apartments.” He was half-Jewish; his Jewish father, Alexander, had fallen in love with a family chambermaid who was Catholic and had converted to her faith and married her aft
er Fritz was born. By all accounts Fritz was a womanizer and an arriviste, already once divorced. He was also a canny and ruthless businessman. “He was so powerful,” Hedy said, “so influential, so rich, that always he had been able to arrange everything in his life just as he wished it.… The afternoon he first came I was, I am afraid, very rude to him.… It was the first clash of our wills. There were to be many.”

  If Mandl had not been smitten before, Hedy’s disdain beguiled him. The courtship began:

  He asked me to go to dinner with him that night. But I would not go. He then telephoned to me every day, many times a day, and asked me to dine, to dance, after the theatre. At first I would not go. He would come again and again to my house, which was the only place where I would receive him. And every night he would be in the theatre. And every night and in the daytimes he would send great baskets and boxes of flowers.

  When he came to my house he talked to me about hunting, which he loves and which I also love. He told me about his munitions factory. He explained how his father had built the factory but how when he, Fritz, was nineteen years old, the factory burned to the ground and much of the fortune was wiped out and how he had had to build it all up again, the factory and the fortune too. So that he had really made the fortune himself. This gave me a different idea of him from the one I had had. This was not inherited power. This was the stuff of power itself. I liked that.

  Hedy’s model of a man was her father, but if her father was a frigate, Mandl was a battleship: