Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr Read online

  The Kieslers lived at 2b Osterleitengasse, in one of six apartments in a four-storey stucco building located on a narrow street in a fashionable area of Vienna. Hedy’s father would affectionately nickname her Hedylendelein and Princess Hedy. Her mother called her Hedl. When she learned to talk, Hedy could not pronounce Hedwig, and so she would say “Hedy” (pronounced “hay-dee.”) It became her first name.

  The family soon moved to a modest yet luxurious home, a nine-room apartment in the hills on Peter Jordan Strasse in the residential area of Vienna (now part of Währing), the 19th District. From birth the young Hedy would want for little, except possibly the attention of her parents. She was surrounded by adults—a parlor maid, a cook, and a nurse. But her socially mobile parents were seldom home in the evenings, instead enjoying the opera, theatre, and Vienna nightlife.

  Hedy would later relate that as a child she suffered from nightmares. “When I was four years old I remember them. The most horrible, horrible nightmares.” In these nightmares, she would try to have “tea parties” for her dolls. But when she would pour the hot water into their mouths, their plastic doll faces would become soft and begin to melt. Ugliness terrified the little girl. “Nightmares of things so shapeless I could not say of what horror they were made but only that they were horrible,” she continued. “I can so well remember nights when Mother and Father were out, and I was in bed, cozy and safe in my room. But it would be dark. And I would doze and at once I would see faces, enormous ugly faces and enormous black or purple hands coming for me. I would scream and the nurse would come running. She would pet me and pat me and tuck me in again and tell me that I had eaten too many pastries for dinner. But I knew that was not so.”4

  Hedy always recalled her father lovingly. “I remember him as a kindly man who wouldn’t deny me anything,” she recounted years later. “The memory of him will always be beautiful.”5 Emil also had a sense of humor. “He was very farsighted,” she would tell a journalist, “and I remember he had to hold a letter or paper at a distance in order to read it. ‘Oh, I can see all right,’ he’d say, ‘only my arms are too short!’”6

  Emil would encourage physical activity and take his daughter on long walks in the Vienna woods, a place she always held dear. Sometimes she went with her parents on their travels outside Austria. They would take her on sojourns to Lake Geneva, to the opera in Rome, and on walks in the “English countryside, the Irish lake district, the Swiss Alps, and the Paris Boulevards.” Hedy’s father liked to play make-believe with her. Hedy would remark years later, “My mother was not so imaginative, but she did not mind that I tore up the library to act out Hansel and Gretel.”7

  About her daughter, Hedy’s mother told Silver Screen magazine in 1942, “She has always had everything. She never had to long for anything. First there was her father who, of course, adored her, and was very proud of her. He gave her all the comforts, pretty clothes, a fine home, parties, schools, sports. He looked always for the sports for her, and music…. We had a good life together.”8

  Hedy recalled that as a child she would study her mother. “When I was tiny I loved to watch her dress her hair, use her scents and powders, try on this gown and that until she had found the one which suited her mood for the evening,” Hedy told a writer many years later. “So early on I learned the value of pretty things…to love the feel of soft fabrics against me; delicate laces, lush velvets, and fine linens. I loved always to have my rooms dainty around me, with flowers in them, smelling sweet. People called me ‘a fastidious little thing.’”9

  “I watch her and I’m afraid,” Emil Kiesler once told his wife, worried that Hedy’s spoiled behavior might cause her harm.10 Realizing that her child possessed an uncanny beauty even at an early age, Trude stressed that the family not flatter Hedy. Instead, she insisted that Hedy be allowed to enjoy the simple things in life in an attempt to ground her. During the spring the family took their suppers outside under the shade trees. Hedy was allowed to have a dog and was assigned chores around the house, including caring for the family’s birdcage.

  As was customary in European society, Gertrud Kiesler started preparing her daughter for marriage before Hedy had started school. Trude would enroll her in ballet and piano lessons, which ingrained a love of music that Hedy sustained for the rest of her life. A governess by the name of Nicolette, or Nixy as Hedy called her, taught her German, French, and Italian. Nixy would become the one constantly present adult whom Hedy could rely on for advice and security during her childhood.

  “My parents did not know any actors,” Hedy would recall years later. “They did not (often) take me to theatres, but mostly to concerts and to operas. There were never any theatrical people in our home.”11 The Kieslers were prominent in Vienna society and would often entertain the city’s elite as well as businessmen, local politicians, and even occasionally royalty. But they were not impossibly wealthy. As Oleg Cassini, one of Hedy’s suitors, would later recall, “Hedy, of course, was not born with a gold spoon in her mouth, although it must have been sterling silver.”12

  Hedy’s first memories were of her father telling her stories. “He’d unfold his hand, as if it were a book, look at his palm and begin his story,” she told a columnist. “He would stop to explain something to me, then say: ‘Where was I?’ and hunt through his open hand to find his place. I was enchanted.”13 She would recall her father reading to her by the fireplace in the library or while tucking her in bed at night, always licking his index finger and thumb before turning the pages of a book. These books likely included Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Johanna Spyri’s Heidi; Max und Moritz, a book in cartoons and verse; and the strange Struwwelpeter, which dealt with cruel and gruesome punishment bestowed on naughty young people. Like most children in Austria and Germany, Hedy was mesmerized by these stories of princesses and monsters, sentiment and horror, magic and superstition.

  “The mind of every German child is crammed with music, and song, legends, folklore and fairy stories, a carnival of the tawdry and the epic, freaks and fairies, wolves and Easter bunnies, the savage and the saccharine,” wrote Angela Lambert in her biography of Adolf Hitler’s mistress and wife, Eva Braun, a contemporary of Hedy.14 “They are first met in the nursery, through haunting melodies and verses whose underlying theme is often violence. The forest, swirling with fog and darkness, populated by wolves, dwarves, witches and satanic figures all looking for small children to waylay—these provide a wonderful insight to the German soul and justify dwelling on them at some length.”

  Hedy remembered once when she was three that her father became cross with her. “[I] put on a pretty new hair ribbon which I thought would please him, but it seems he hated bows and he got very angry,” she wrote in Look magazine.15 “I ran like mad and he chased me and hit me. I could never forget this.” She would often run away from home, but only for a few hours. These were the first of many attempted escapes she would make during her lifetime.

  Emil told his daughter that if she learned languages and was active in sports, then everything else in life would fall into place. And he would also spend hours patiently explaining to his daughter how things worked, “from printing presses to streetcars,” fostering her inquisitive mind.16

  At age five she began to read. Hedy would devour movie magazines and pretend she was an actress, “like [her] favorites, Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, and Alice White.”17 And she would often practice her dramatics. “I had a little stage under my father’s desk where I would act out fairy tales,” she wrote. “When someone would come into the room they would think my mind was really wandering. I was always talking to myself.”18

  Once Trude promised Hedy that if she was good, Hedy would be rewarded with a nice present, a visit to a theatre. “I saw a stage play for the first time,” Hedy later recalled. “I was thrilled and speechless. I don’t remember the play, its title or anything about it. But I never forgot the first general impression.”19 After that experience, she eagerly took part in school plays and in musical festi
vals.

  Hedy’s favorite playmate was a doll with curly blond hair she named Beccacine. “My pet things were dolls…I loved being with them,” Hedy once told a magazine journalist.20 In Hedy’s solitary youth, often spent playacting, Beccacine became her companion and a fellow thespian. “One day my uncle made fun of me and said, ‘Hedy, it’s only a doll. Don’t be so serious,’” she recalled. “I hated him after that because [the doll] was my only child.”21 Hedy cherished Beccacine and carried it “all over the world” with her well into adulthood.22

  When she was of age, Hedy was enrolled into private elementary school. “Those school days,” she told the writer Gene Ringgold in 1965, “were happy ones. I was both foolish and fanciful and fascinated by the cinema…I vowed to everyone that someday I would be a star.”23 Hedy was always dreaming. And she longed to escape into the world of movies. “As a little child, she would dress up in my clothes and in her father’s suits and hats,” her mother said, and continued: “When she came home from the movies she would act everything she saw there.”24

  Hedy’s maternal grandfather, Karl Lichtwitz, supported her artistic merits. “Grandfather was perhaps the only one who ever encouraged me,” Hedy said in 1938. “He could play the piano, and to his music I danced. It was awkward, my dancing. But he said he thought it was beautiful. The rest of the family gave me little encouragement.”25

  At the end of school terms, Hedy could look forward to vacations at the family summer home in Salzburg. The Kieslers would also take weekend trips to the country lakes to ski, play tennis, and swim. During the winter they would enjoy such outdoor sports as snow skiing and ice-skating and indoor activities like dancing. “The winters we spent in Switzerland were the happiest in my life,” Hedy later said.26

  As a privileged child living in an insulated world, young Hedy always dressed properly in her blue school uniform and was instructed in her mother’s Catholic faith, most likely at Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, home of the famed Vienna Boys’ Choir.

  At the end of the war in 1918, Vienna remained largely untouched and much the same as it had been before 1914. After 1919, however, when the Hapsburg monarchy was ended with the signing of the Treaty of Saint Germaine and when the Republic of Austria was established, there followed two decades that saw the steady rise of political strife and poverty. Anti-Semitism was on the increase. The Kieslers’ anxieties for their daughter began to grow.

  By 1925, Hedy had developed into a lovely young girl with seductive green eyes and lush dark hair. Since she was a baby, people had remarked on her beauty. “People would flatter me,” Hedy would tell the columnist Gladys Hall in 1941. “In order to overcome that, my mother would tell me about everything I did that was just ‘all right,’ and no more than that. She meant well. She wanted me to be modest.”27

  Hedy was soon becoming a chameleon, willing to change herself to please others. When a boy she was once pursuing eventually took notice of her, she quickly dropped him. “I knew he was in love with me; yes, even when I was ten,” she once told a journalist. “I was at an age when I was dreaming of princes and warriors and heroes and such as I read about in books. And so I just took him for granted. And because I took him for granted, I think I lost something very precious and very real.”28

  Sometimes, though, her allure would have consequences. Years later, while undergoing analysis, Hedy dredged up a particular incident that occurred when she was fourteen years old. The laundryman her family employed in Vienna had at one time tried to rape her. A second time he succeeded, and, according to Hedy’s account, she broke a miniature ivory statue and struck him with it. She did not tell her parents what had happened. According to Hedy, her mother slapped her for not explaining to them why the expensive statue was broken. Hedy held this “pain-shame” memory within her.29 It would affect her whole life, though in her youth she told no one about the incident. She appeared outwardly a normal, ambitious teenage girl.

  During the summer of 1929, at her family’s vacation home in Salzburg, fourteen-year-old Hedy fell “in love” for the first time with a young man of twenty-five named Hans, the son of a wealthy family in Vienna, “a Russian boy, very intense about the new ideas and experiments of his country,” Hedy’s mother Trude told a journalist.30 Hans was dating Hedy’s best girlfriend and neighbor Hansi Weiler. As Hedy would remember, “when he saw me at a party, he started paying attention to me, too…I thought he was wonderful. I thought and thought about him in such an idealistic way.”31

  Confronted by both girls, Hedy and Hansi, and forced to choose, Hans made his choice. “It was a very tense moment. He chose me. I was in heaven,” Hedy said. “We had secret meetings, it was all so exciting and romantic, and I was a wiz at deceiving my parents. Once, though, my father caught me coming home late—it must have been nine-thirty.”32 Ever headstrong when it came to “love,” Hedy responded to her mother’s request that she go to her father and apologize by declaring, “I will apologize, I will say the words, but—the thoughts are free!”33

  That year, 1929, Hedy was sent to a private pension, a girls’ finishing school, in Lucerne, Switzerland. Here she would learn discipline and social graces. Students were required to wear black-and-white uniforms and to follow orders. “The rules were strict [and] we made our own beds, kept our own rooms neat and our own clothes in order. The discipline was rigid and good for me,” she told a Warner Bros. publicist in 1944.34 But at the time Hedy was miserable. She was not a poor student, but she was not interested in scholastics either. She would often run away, only to be found and brought, miserable, back to school.

  “The headmistress had a sour face and pulled her hair up so,” Hedy once demonstrated to a writer in 1938. “She liked rhubarb and so we had it every night for supper. I didn’t like the stuff and refused it. They told me I would get nothing else to eat unless I did. So I ran away.” Hedy had a friend in Vienna wire the school in her parents’ names to claim that she was needed home. Because the headmistress had guardianship of her money, Hedy booked third-class passage on a train to Vienna and departed with no money for food. There was a fire onboard on the night passage to Vienna, and Hedy claimed later that her legs were slightly burned.35

  Back in the security of her beloved Vienna home and attended to by her parents, Hedy proceeded to successfully convince them to end her schooling in Switzerland. “By now I was dreaming of being an actress,” she would write. “All my life I had loved to playact and pretend.”36 Hedy would spend hours in local cinemas and all her pocket money on movie magazines.

  And Hedy loved not only Hollywood but everything American. “There was a little music shop in Austria,” she would later tell a film-magazine writer. “Every day I used to go in there and ask, ‘Have you any new importations from America? Did any new stuff arrive today?’ I knew so much American music, the shop keeper called me the ‘Hot Austrian.’”37

  Like most teenage girls Hedy was self-conscious about her appearance. At age fourteen, Hedy felt she was overweight. Given this perception, and because she longed to crash the movie-studio gate at Sascha-Film and become a film actress, she took matters into her own hands. A girlfriend of hers at school gave Hedy a thyroid compound, which she enthusiastically took. In an accidental overdose of the stimulant, she suffered a serious seizure that weakened her heart.

  In early 1929, Hedy’s grandmother Rosa died, and Trude, in deep mourning for her mother, was not as watchful of Hedy as she would have been. Unattended, Hedy entered a beauty contest and won. “After that,” Trude later told a reporter,

  there could have been no stopping her. From that time on she made her own money, bought her first fur coat…. She always knew what she wanted. What she wanted was not, always, what we wanted for her. The stage for example. Her father did not want that for her, and later, I did not either. But she did not ask advice or, I must admit, permission. She did not need to, I suppose, because she always knew where she was going. And where she was going, from the beginning, was the stage.38

  H
er parents were against her becoming an actress, and so Hedy was enrolled in yet another school, the Doebling Academy in Vienna. At the academy she would study art and design, “to occupy my ‘waiting time’ before acting,” Hedy told Picturegoer magazine in 1941.39 Trude recalled: “At school in Vienna, I told the professor, ‘You have to be stern with her, show her no special favors.’ And he said, ‘When she walks towards me, and looks at me, I can do nothing.’”40

  On her way to school once, Hedy saw something she would never forget. “I had a long walk,” she told a journalist, “and I passed a beautiful villa. On this day, they were shooting moving pictures at the villa and I stood there watching. The people had on lovely white wigs and old-fashioned costumes. I could not take my eyes away.”41

  In Vienna parents were required to sign absentee slips for every hour their child missed at school. One day in early 1930, Hedy asked her mother to write her an excuse from school for one hour so that she could run an errand. “She did and I put a ‘0’ after the ‘1’ and gave it to my teacher,” Hedy later recalled. “‘This is for ten hours—two full days,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’ That was no lie. I did know. So, that afternoon after school I went to the Sascha Studios.”42

  Hedy would pass the Sascha-Film Studio, located in the 19th District, called Sievering, every day on her way to classes. Built in 1916, Sascha-Film was Vienna’s first film studio. Here was where such classic silent pictures as Sodom und Gomorrha (1922) and Die Sklavenkönigin (1924) were filmed. On August 23, 1930, G’schichten aus der Steiermark, Austria’s first sound film, was released by another film company. Later that same year, in order to also make sound films, Sascha joined with Tobis Studio, to create Sascha-Tobis-Film.