Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr Read online

  FOR

  M.P.W

  M.E.W and M.E.W

  Contents

  Foreword by Robert Osborne

  Introduction

  1. Austria

  2. Reinhardt

  3. Ecstasy

  4. Mandl

  5. Hollywood

  6. Stardom

  7. Glamour

  8. Discovery

  9. Career

  10. Actress

  11. Battle

  12. Marriage

  13. Independence

  14. Producer

  15. Delilah

  16. Paramount

  17. Adrift

  18. Italy

  19. Television

  20. Purgatory

  21. Scandal

  22. Seclusion

  23. Legacy

  24. Epilogue

  Appendix

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Index

  Foreword

  Regarding Hedy Lamarr

  Hedy Lamarr came into my life—unexpectedly, that’s for sure—one day in the early 1960s. From the minute she greeted me at her front door, I also knew she was a True Original. Hanging prominently on a wall behind her was the ugliest painting I’d ever seen, a wild mix of grays, blacks, and blues, liberally doused with what looked like sand amid colors that seemed to swirl like water circling a drain. I must have blanched, which she interpreted as dumbfounded approval of what I was looking at on that wall. “I painted it,” she said with great pride. “I call it ‘Umbilical Cord.’” I ask you: Who wouldn’t adore an amateur artist who chose as a subject not apples, boats, or trees, but an umbilical cord? I suspected we would become great friends, and we did.

  From that moment on we spent a great deal of time together. What surprised me most about Hedy is that she was nothing like the glamorous, mysterious image she projected on screen. She dressed simply. Loved to kick off the shoes. Liked simple foods. Laughed often. Adored charade parties, although game playing was definitely not her strong suit. She liked to do simple things. Picnics. Walks on the beach. Riding bicycles.

  Many of the most memorable times I had in Hollywood during my early years there were connected to Hedy, good and bad. Her arrest and trial: bad. A birthday party she gave for me soon afterward: good. The pain on her face when people seemed surprised that at the age of forty-seven she didn’t look exactly as she did at twenty-four: bad. The way the old M-G-M guard was always there for support whenever trouble loomed: good.

  The Hedy Lamarr I knew was a blithe spirit, a woman with enormous energy, curiosity, intelligence, and sweetness. If there is any tinge of tragedy connected to her it comes from the fact that, having been blessed with probably the most beautiful face that ever stood in front of a movie camera, this was the only thing people were interested in. Mention her name, and no one ever said, “How is she?” or “Is she well? Is she happy?” It was always, “How does she look?” Hers was, no question, the face of faces, but there was so much more to her than that. Indeed, I feel very privileged to have known her.

  —Robert Osborne, primetime host,

  Turner Classic Movies television network

  She Walks in Beauty

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Which waves in every raven tress,

  Or softly lightens o’er her face;

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!

  —LORD BYRON

  Introduction

  It is said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. When the young Viennese film actress Hedy Kiesler landed on American shores, she was already heralded as “the most beautiful girl in the world.” Later, her Hollywood studio boss, Louis B. Mayer, and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity mill perpetuated that image. To Depression-weary movie audiences, she was the most beautiful and most glamorous new film actress of the era.

  Few American filmgoers in 1937 would associate the young European actress who cavorted nude in the outdoors and unabashedly simulated sexual passion in facial close-ups in the controversial 1933 picture Ecstasy with M-G-M’s new star. Most Americans never saw that Czechoslovakian film. What they did see (and in droves) was Hedy’s first American picture, Algiers. And as a result, a fresh, new screen favorite—mysterious and alluring—was born.

  The respected film critic Parker Tyler once commented about Lamarr’s beauty, “Miss Lamarr doesn’t have to say ‘Yes,’ all she has to do is yawn…. In her perfect will-lessness, Miss Lamarr is, indeed, identified metaphysically with her mesmeric midnight captor, the loving male.”1

  “Of all the glamour queens, surely none was more glamorous than Hedy Lamarr,” wrote the social historian Diane Negra. “She seemed the definition of the word. Of all the stars of the forties and early fifties, she was probably the most classically beautiful, with those huge, marbly eyes, the porcelain skin, the dreamy little smile, and the exotic voice that was an artful combination of Old Vienna and the MGM speech school.”2

  Rechristened Hedy Lamarr, and early on a particular favorite of Metro boss Mayer, beginning in 1937 and up to the early 1950s the breathtakingly exotic actress was meticulously coiffed, gorgeously gowned, and exquisitely photographed in one major film after another, costarring opposite almost Hollywood’s all of M-G-M’s most important leading men.

  However, Metro and Mayer did not know exactly what to do with Lamarr. The late British film historian John Kobal wrote:

  During her years at MGM, the challenge, the opportunity her mesmerizing appearance offered as a catalyst—if not for art at least for compelling drama—was continually fumbled. Confronted by a priceless object, everybody wanted her, but having got her they were at a loss to know what to do next, which may have been why the powers at MGM kept casting her as a kept woman, repeating her first successful role until inspiration might strike.3

  It never did.

  In her first American film, Algiers (1938), Lamarr created a national sensation. Billie Melba Fuller, the author’s mother, recalled that in March 1939, when she was fourteen years old, she was seated in a darkened movie theatre in Ottawa, Illinois, to see the latest picture of her favorite star, Charles Boyer. Like other moviegoers, she was there to also witness Hedy Lamarr’s Hollywood screen debut. Billie would never forget the reaction of the audience to the “unknown” actress’s very first entrance in the film. Hedy Lamarr is photographed at a distance at the start of the scene, approaching the camera in shadow and profile. Suddenly, when she is about to walk off the screen, Lamarr turns her face toward the camera in a stunning close-up.

  “One could feel the audience’s anticipation of seeing her face for the first time,” Billie said recently. “It was palpable. Sitting there in the dark, when the shadowed image of Hedy Lamarr suddenly turns her face full to the camera, the impact was audible. Everyone gasped. That’s the only time in my whole life I have ever heard an audience do that at the first sight of an actress in a movie. Hedy Lamarr’s beauty literally took one’s breath away!”4

  In Algiers a new kind of love goddess emerged in film. Usually portraying a vamp, but surprisingly also playing a variety of roles most actresses would never attempt, Lamarr was perpetually typecast as dangerously tempting yet unattainable. Her best film role was in 1941’s H.M. Pulham, Esq. But it would be as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 hit Samson and Delilah that she will arguably be remembered in motion pictures.

  It is almost inconceivable today to comprehend the public and private role o
f women of her era. In the 1940s, when an attractive actress appeared on the screen, she was little more than set decoration. Nothing was expected of her; only her appearance mattered. (Certainly such female film powerhouses as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were often filmed attractively. But they were never successfully promoted as appearing “beautiful.”) It was the physical glamour that brought Lamarr to international attention and fame.

  But in Hedy’s personal life that same allure brought disillusionment and heartbreak. By her own admission, her many lovers and numerous husbands were mesmerized and trapped by the image and not by the intelligent, sensitive, and romantic individual who struggled within. Lamarr’s beauty was also her burden, and from it she would never escape.

  Hedy Lamarr once commented, “My face has been my misfortune…a mask I cannot remove: I must live with it. I curse it.”5 Yet she also ambitiously bought into its appeal. She was smart in that respect. Even as a child Hedy realized what her visual attributes could achieve for her. But when her physical and professional image began to fade, she was adrift in a world of harsh reality. For Lamarr was indeed a product of her time and environment. Pampered and spoiled as an only child of an affluent family, raised in posh Viennese society, Hedy used her keen mind and remarkable appearance to her advantage, and she exhibited undeniable ambition.

  Yet surprisingly always, until the day she died, Hedy Lamarr remained a simple Austrian girl, full of romantic ideals and dreams. In reality she was a very normal human being.

  Throughout her life she experienced episodes of unimaginable drama and intrigue, some of which touched upon moments of historical significance. She was always in pursuit of her destiny. She lived in the present, and yet in some ways she was always attempting to escape her past.

  Not satisfied with the facts of her life, and certainly not with the religious and political background she inherited, the M-G-M publicity machine embellished and rewrote Lamarr’s biography to such an extent that even she began to believe its mythology. In her often-questionable, ghostwritten “autobiography,” Ecstasy and Me (1966), Lamarr’s life story was never truthfully examined or fully realized. When Ecstasy and Me was published it caused yet another sensation. The consequences of this fiction haunted her for the rest of her life—a cloak of exaggerations and inaccuracies that sadly became the “truth.” Mystery can be damning.

  In the mid-1940s, with the world at war, by necessity the role of women in society changed considerably from what it had been. By the end of World War II the exotically mysterious Hedy Lamarr, the image she represented, was passé in motion pictures. In her movies, her lilting Viennese accent undermined an acute acting ability that was never totally exploited on film. Indeed, in her early American pictures, when she was still learning English, she often did not even know what she was saying and consequently recited her lines phonetically.

  To filmgoers and critics of that era Hedy Lamarr was considered little more than an exquisite mannequin, not much of an actress, and void of innate intelligence or depth of emotion. In hindsight, her film work begs for reevaluation. In a vast array of surprisingly varied characterizations, there is poignancy and understanding behind her eyes, even if her accent clouds the dialogue. And more important, she was box office; reviews of her work were for the most part positive.

  Yet the goddess image distanced Lamarr from personal and professional fulfillment. Louis B. Mayer quickly lost interest in her when her films, though turning profits, did not make back the massive amounts of money he had invested in her. And Mayer failed to offer her appropriate roles and to properly promote her. He simply did not have a clue exactly what to do with this woman. The studio chief was more familiar with how to turn a midwestern shopgirl, Joan Crawford for instance, into a glamorous imitation blue blood for the screen. Rarely was he able to create a motion picture star out of a genuine aristocrat. Hedy intimidated Mayer. For Mayer and a couple of her husbands, there remained a question as to who Hedy Lamarr really was. What was behind that astounding, seemingly unattainable image? And what was the real truth about the life she lived?

  Hedy Lamarr led many lives. As an only child she was Princess Hedy, or Hedylendelein, so called by her parents. Early on she evolved into Hedwig Kiesler—artist (perhaps her most real persona), an up-and-coming young actress. Living a pampered and posh life in Vienna and Salzburg in the early 1930s as Madame Mandl, Hedy possessed wealth and status, all the while encircled by political intrigue and ominous danger. She finally made an escape to freedom in 1937. Arriving in Hollywood with a new name, she became Hedy Lamarr, international film star, and was set to uphold the moniker of “the most beautiful girl in the world,” given to her by the legendary theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt.

  Sadly, her life became cluttered with drama and literally dozens of distasteful lawsuits, all making for nasty tabloid headlines. Her very name was effectively made into a joke as a result of Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy film, Blazing Saddles. Then, quite unexpectedly, after the world had largely forgotten and lost sight of Hedy Lamarr, a light shone at the end of the tunnel.

  In a startling announcement made just three years before her death in 2000, Hedy Lamarr was awarded an acknowledgment of her true legacy as an inventor of great technological consequence.

  No other film star has led such an existence. There were certainly better movie actresses. There were certainly more impressive film careers. Yet Lamarr was unique. She possessed not only that rare quality heralded as glamour but also a brilliant, creative, and sometimes self-destructive mind. Yet she was also a simple, romantic Viennese girl. Hedy Lamarr was a complicated woman born of an era when the circumstances that gave birth to the actress also helped to destroy the woman.

  In 2000, the film historian Jeanine Basinger said about Hedy Lamarr, “She herself created her own legend…. She was the last of a movie star type in which we never really knew what her story is.”6

  This is the life story of Hedy Lamarr.

  1

  Austria

  To understand the life of Hedy Lamarr, it is important to understand the world in which she was born. Austria is the heartland of Europe. Vienna, Austria’s capital, was and still is its largest city, located at the northeast end of the Alps and on the right bank of the Danube River. The city has for centuries been renowned for its museums; theatre and opera; the Romanesque architecture of the Ruprechtskirche and the baroque architecture of the Karlskirche; cuisine of schnitzel, pastries, and goulash; and a rich heritage of music, from Tyrolean bands and gypsy Schrammelmusik to the stirring strains of Mozart and the lilting waltzes of Strauss.

  At the end of the gilded age, the belle époque, Vienna in 1913 was the grandest city in all of Austria, its population numbering over two million. In Europe at the turn of the last century, Vienna was the magnet to which those seeking better economic and cultural lives were drawn. On April 13, 1913, The New York Times dedicated a full page to the metropolis, entitled “The Gayest City in Europe—Not Paris, but Vienna.” It is a colorful homage by the American music critic and correspondent James Huneker, who wrote lovingly of Vienna as “the gayest city I have ever lived in…,” one where city life “is not feverish as in the French Capital, but natural and continuous…. The Viennese man is an optimist. He regards life not so steadily, or as a whole, but as a gay fragment. Clouds gather, the storm breaks, then the rain stops and the sun floats once more into the blue.”1

  Vienna’s thousands of European exiles before World War I, many of them disenfranchised Jews, adopted all things German, from its culture (the music of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, for example) to its economic structure and its language. The integration of the country was important to its society. By 1900, the expression “Jewish intelligence” was well known in Vienna, causing the writer Hermann Bahr to joke that any aristocrat “who is a little bit smart or has some kind of talent, is immediately considered a Jew; they have no other explanation for it.”2

  This world of gayety, peace, and tranquility was forever chang
ed when, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was brutally assassinated. This singular event effectively ignited World War I. Fighting began on August 4, when German troops, allied with Austria-Hungary, invaded Belgium. The Russian leaders saw the war as advantageous, while the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, found the war inevitable.

  But Vienna…it still danced. As war clouds loomed on the horizon, the city was enchanted with its music, arts, and financial security. In 1914 Vienna, life was good. Into this world was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on Sunday, November 9, 1914.

  Her parents came from humble birth. Emil Kiesler was born into a Jewish family in L’viv (Lemberg), in the West Ukraine on December 27, 1876. As a young man, Emil was extremely handsome, tall (six feet four), had blue-gray eyes, and was athletically inclined. He loved sports, especially skiing and rowing. Kiesler was also an intelligent and ambitious man who, after completing his education in Russia, sought his future and fortune in banking in Vienna around 1900. Emil became the manager of the Kreditanstalt Bankverein, a leading bank in the city. Though a strict and sometimes stern boss, he was respected and admired by his fellow employees.

  In October 1913, in honor of his forthcoming marriage, his colleagues gave Emil a silver cigarette case with his signature engraved on the outside. Inside, each bank employee had etched his own name. For his bride Emil chose an attractive and vivacious Jewish-born Hungarian girl. She was a practicing Christian, having converted to Catholicism. In Austria, this marriage was considered “mixed,” religiously. But this was quite common in Vienna and presented no social taboo at the time.3

  Her name was Gertrud, called Trude, and she was born to Karl and Rosa Lichtwitz in Budapest, Hungary, on February 3, 1897. She was a bright and attractive girl with blue eyes, her hair fair and slightly russet. The lively young woman married Emil when still in her teens. Within months of their marriage, Trude was pregnant. Giving up her dreams of a promising career as a concert pianist, she would instill a love of music and the arts in her only child.