Hedy's Folly (3 page)

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 otherwise 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 after 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:

I began to feel attracted by the brain of the man, by his tremendous power, by his charm which, when he wished, could be as powerful as his brain. I love strength. I
love
it. I think that all women love strength in a man.…

Then, suddenly, he was the most beautiful—no, I mean the most attractive—man in the world to me.

And I knew that I was in love with him, madly in love with him.

We became engaged as soon as I knew this and I was terribly happy. I was in love. I was happy. I was proud. I was proud of him. I was proud of myself. I was proud of his brilliance and strength and power.…

He had the most amazing brain.… There was nothing he did not know. There was not a question I, or anyone else, could ask him that he could not answer. Ask him a formula in chemistry and he would give it to you. Ask him about the habits of wild animals, how
glass is made, what about the laws of gravitation—politics, of course, since he was so powerful a figure in world politics and—well, “I don’t know” was not in him. He knew
everything
.

So, then, he seemed to have everything, Fritz Mandl.

So, then, he had Hedwig Kiesler as well.

Hedy left the cast of
Sissy
at the end of July 1933 to prepare for her wedding. She remembered the 10 August event as “
small and quiet.… I wanted it to be quiet,” she explained. “He was so well known. And I, too, was known. I did not want a carnival made of what belonged to him and to me alone.” But the setting for this small and quiet wedding was Vienna’s majestic eighteenth-century Baroque Karlskirche with its elongated dome and spiraled double columns, its extensive frescoes and marble-and-gold-leafed sanctuary flooded with light. Who was in attendance? Her mother and father? Friends from the theater? She doesn’t say. And Mandl? Hedy was a trophy wife. Wouldn’t he have wanted to present her to Vienna?

However many attended the wedding, the newlyweds went off afterward to the Lido, the fashionable barrier island that divides the lagoon of Venice from the sea, to honeymoon. “
Almost at once,” Hedy realized, “I found that I was no longer Hedy Kiesler, an individual. But I was only the wife of Fritz Mandl.” Around this time Mandl is remembered to have said: “
Democracy is a luxury that might be borne,
perhaps, in prosperous periods.” One of the first things her new husband did, Hedy said, was “
try to track down and buy up every print of
Ekstase
. He spent a fortune trying to buy up that picture so that no print of it could ever be seen again. It was an obsession with him.”
Time
would report Mandl spent “
nearly $300,000” snapping up prints of the film, which of course multiplied like rabbits. Eventually, he gave up, but Hedy lamented that “
it became one of the sore spots of our married life. Every time we would have an argument, no matter what about, he would, of course, bring that picture up to me. He would never let me forget it.”

Nor would Mandl permit her to follow her career:

I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. When I was first married I did not think I would care. I thought, being so madly in love, that I could be content just as his wife. I soon found out that I could not be content anywhere but on the stage or screen. Perhaps if I had had children, perhaps if I had had something to
do
—but I was like a doll in a beautiful, jeweled case. I was watched and guarded and followed night and day. I could not go anywhere, not even to lunch with a woman friend, without being watched.