Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr Read online

  Approaching the studio’s entrance that afternoon, Hedy gathered her courage, took a deep breath, and snuck onto the lot. Telling the employment manager of the studio she wanted a job as a script girl, the man asked her, “Have you had any experience?” As she wrote later, she confidently replied, “Yes. I have often watched script clerks at work.” Surprised by her remark, he laughed and said he’d give her a try. She was told to return the following day. “I had only ten hours in which to make good. Just two small days,” she continued. “But, you this always confident and I thought it was possible. People say that success requires a great deal of luck, and I agree. I was lucky that day…”43

  She reported for work at Sascha-Film Studio the following morning. “Once inside I kept my ears open,” she wrote. “As luck would have it, I overheard [the studio film] director Alexis Granowsky discuss the casting of a bit…. I applied for a reading—and was terrible. Only, Granowsky felt that I had just enough potential to be coached into this part in the silent film, for the sake of ‘development.’”44 She was rewarded that very day—with a bit as an extra donned in a couture black evening gown that featured her sitting at a table in a nightclub scene.

  At day’s end, Hedy returned home and explained to her parents that she was going to continue working at the film studio. “It meant persuading my parents,” Hedy would later write. “They were much more difficult to persuade…because it meant dropping school. But at last they agreed. My father…reasoned that I would soon enough quit on my own accord and go back to school.”45 The picture’s director, Georg Jacoby, who had noticed Hedy’s enthusiasm during the shooting of her one scene, kept her on as a script girl during the rest of the filming of Geld auf der Strasse (Money on the Street).

  The picture Geld auf der Strasse was filmed as a silent. On the merger of Sascha and Tobis studios, limited dialogue and a couple of songs, including “Lach mich nicht, weil ich Dir so true bin!” were added. The story told of a runaway bride, Dodo (Lydia Pollmann). She meets the amiable ne’er-do-well Peter Paul Lutz (Georg Alexander), who tells her that luck and wealth can be found lying in the street. The lovers eventually marry and become rich.

  A simple trifle of a film, its theme of optimism was common among many Austrian films of the day. But, nevertheless, Geld auf der Strasse is an important picture.46 It was Sascha-Tobis-Film’s first sound film. Its director, Jacoby, would later specialize in light, fluffy musicals throughout the Third Reich, most starring his wife, the popular Marika Rökk.

  The eighty-five-minute Geld auf der Strasse premiered on November 11, 1930, and was released in Germany on December 5, 1930. It became a minor success. Soon after its completion, Hedy was offered an actual role, that of a secretary, in the film Sturm im Wasserglas (Storm in a Water Glass), also known as Die Blumenfrau von Lindenau (The Flower Woman of Lindenau). Based on a play by Bruno Frank, it starred Hansi Niese and also featured Harald Paulsen and Renate Müller.47 Production began in late 1930 at the studio of Sascha-Tobis-Film.

  The picture’s plot dealt with the trials of a flower seller, Frau Vogel (Niese), who cannot make ends meet and is faced with losing her only companion, her dog. At the home of her alderman, Dr. Thoss (Paul Otto), who is running for mayor, she is sympathetically offered tea by his wife, Victoria (Müller), and a visiting newspaperman named Burdach (Paulsen). Dr. Thoss arrives home and tells Frau Vogel that the law will take its course, and he abruptly dismisses her. Burdach writes a story in the newspaper on Frau Vogel along with an interview with Dr. Thoss. The public is swayed by Frau Vogel’s plight and votes against Dr. Thoss’s bid for mayor. Victoria divorces Dr. Thoss after he has an affair with Lisa (Grete Maren). Burdach loses his job with the paper but marries Victoria. Frau Vogel’s dog is returned to her; she is awarded 1,600 deutsche marks; and subsequently she marries the local dogcatcher.

  Completed in early 1931, Sturm im Wasserglas was also directed by Georg Jacoby. Felix Salten, author of the children’s classic Bambi, wrote the film’s dialogue. It premiered on April 21, 1931, at the UFA–Theater Universum on Lehniner Plaza in Berlin. Sturm im Wasserglas was a popular hit in Europe. When it opened at the Little Carnegie Playhouse in New York on July 7, 1932, critics praised the film. Hedy Kiesler was not mentioned in any of the reviews, and she was discouraged that leading roles would not come her way.

  Hedy’s parents began to encourage her to study her chosen craft, and she realized that she should take her career seriously. It was a wise move that would ultimately change her life, for now Hedy wanted to study in Berlin. Yet there were possibly other forces that influenced her decision to leave home, which was ultimately fraught with tragedy.

  While she was still attending school in Vienna in 1930, she went on a hiking trip in the Swiss Alps with her classmates and met a handsome young Austrian officer, Ritter Franz von Hochestetten, a nobleman and scion of a wealthy, prominent Bavarian family.48 The couple began seeing each other, and the sensitive young man pleaded with Hedy to marry him. They became engaged. But Hedy refused to relinquish her dreams of becoming a film actress. After a heated argument one evening, Hedy broke off the engagement, and, according to later accounts, the young man returned to his home and killed himself.49

  Devastated by this, Hedy concentrated her energies on her ambitions. Because of her work at Sascha-Tobis-Film and her association with Alexis Granowsky, Hedy petitioned the director for an introduction to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where she hoped to perform. She was determined to study drama with the already legendary theatrical producer Max Reinhardt at his school in Berlin. Gaining her parents’ financial support, she left for Germany. (She did not receive a graduating diploma from the academy in Vienna.)

  Arriving in Berlin during the fall of 1930 with the sole purpose of breaking into theater, Hedy soon realized that it would not be easy. Though she was enrolled in the energetic and competitive Max Reinhardt School, Hedy made no headway in achieving her dreams of stardom. “All German actors wanted to work for Reinhardt,” writes Scott Eyman in his biography of Ernst Lubitsch, “[w]hich meant that just getting an audition was extraordinarily difficult. For a young [person] whose only stage experience was in school plays, it was impossible.”50 But not entirely impossible for Hedy.

  She dutifully attended classes. Her two most influential instructors at the Reinhardt School were Professor Ernst Arndt and Dr. Stephan Hock. Hedy applied herself to her studies and was rewarded. Her two professors helped her gain entry into a rehearsal of a play Reinhardt was preparing to mount, the French dramatist Édouard Bourdet’s social satire, The Weaker Sex (Le sexe faible).

  Reinhardt’s protégé, the future film director Otto Preminger, recalls his first meeting with the young Hedy Kiesler. “One afternoon I was sitting in my office,” Preminger wrote in his autobiography, “[M]y secretary, Miss Holmann, brought in a girl with a letter of introduction from a friend of mine, the Hungarian playwright Geza Hereczeg. The girl told me shyly that her name was Hedwig Kiesler, that she was called Hedy, that she was seventeen and wanted to act. I took her downstairs to the stage to meet Reinhardt.”51 Dressed in a trench coat and carrying her schoolbooks, Hedy looked even younger than she actually was.

  Leading her by the arm, Preminger escorted Hedy down to the theatre auditorium, offered her an empty seat, and departed. Reinhardt was pacing back and forth across the stage, his hands clasped behind his back. Unfortunately for her, Reinhardt hated to have people watching his rehearsals. When he noticed Hedy sitting in the back of the theatre alone, he called her on the stage. “I just wanted to watch a rehearsal,” Hedy recalled telling him. “I watched one in Salzburg, and I watched The Dying Swan, and I would like to see you direct, if you don’t mind.”52 In 1933 she told a reporter what happened next: “‘My name is Reinhardt’ [he told me], and I answered, ‘And mine is Kiesler.’ ‘Do you speak English?’ he asked, and I answered in the affirmative. And I got a small part in Das schwächere Geschlecht.”53

  Taken with her obvious beauty and her fearless determination
, Reinhardt cast Hedy in the small role of “2nd American Girl” in Das schwächere Geschlecht (The Weaker Sex). Hedy opened and performed the role briefly in Berlin. Reinhardt then abruptly left Germany to stage the production in Vienna. Hedy was frustrated because she had such a small part. She would write home to her parents to let them know how happy she was to be working as an actress. But often she would suggest that she was lonely.

  Berlin at this time was teeming with nightlife, glittering beer halls and watering holes such as the Café am Zoo. Hedy reveled in this nightlife, and she began dating again. Her new beau was Count Blücher von Wahlstatt, a descendant of a famous Prussian officer who had fought opposite Napoleon’s army. In 1931, not long after meeting each other, they announced their engagement. Wahlstatt too began suggesting that Hedy give up her fledgling acting career, and soon enough she broke off the engagement.

  Neither romance nor her career seemed to be working out. As she would do so many times in her life, Hedy chose to make a clean break of it. Torn between remaining in Berlin and continuing her studies, she chose to follow her famed director and her ambitions to Vienna, back to her family, back to her roots.

  2

  Reinhardt

  The theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt was born Max Goldmann in 1873 in the Austrian city of Baden, the son of poor Jewish parents. Raised in Vienna, he received his theatrical training at the Sulkowsky Theater in Matzleinsdorf. In 1893, he was hired as assistant director by the Stadtheater in Salzburg, and the following year he moved on to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Over the next several years, he successfully introduced a new style of dramatic acting that used a more simplified and naturalistic approach to performance than the declamatory style so prevalent in the nineteenth century.

  By 1905 Reinhardt managed the Kleines Theater (Small Theater) and Neues Theater (now the Berliner Ensemble) in Berlin, where he staged a spectacular production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Following World War I in 1920, along with Richard Strauss and the playwright Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Reinhardt revived the Salzburg Festival. The Salzburg Festival was begun in 1877 and discontinued in 1910. It was a five-week summer celebration of music and drama held annually in Salzburg, Austria, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

  Influenced strongly by the theatrical works of the playwright August Strindberg and by the operatic ideal of Richard Wagner, Reinhardt believed in theatre as spectacle, in the elaborate use of staging and set design to achieve dramatic impact with minimal stage effects. He taught his students that exceptional acting was the most important element of theatre and that the actor was only as good as his or her knowledge of all aspects of stagecraft. This maxim led to Reinhardt’s reputation as a master of stage direction.

  “When Reinhardt’s method of production worked, the play was the star; when it didn’t, Reinhardt was the star, one eminently worth watching,” wrote the biographer Scott Eyman.1 Reinhardt was called on in 1929 to establish a drama seminar in Vienna, which was initially taught at the Schönbrunner Schlosstheater, the imperial theatre in Schönbrunn Palace. It was called the Max Reinhardt Seminar, an academy for theatrical training.

  Hedy left her Berlin role in Das schwächere Geschlect in early 1931, determined to work with Reinhardt in the new staging of the play in Vienna. Welcomed warmly back by her family, Hedy set out to the Theater in der Josefstadt where Reinhardt was preparing the production. “The Herr Professor hardly seemed to remember giving her permission to withdraw from the Berlin company,” wrote the future Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist George Weller, who, as another young acting student in Reinhardt’s theatre company, was cast as “An American Man” in the Vienna production. “All [Reinhardt] said was, ‘Are you here, too, Fraulein Kiesler? Are you living with your family? All right, you can be the Americaness again.’”2

  Reinhardt loved his actors. And yet on at least one occasion with Hedy he was blunt. “He was a gentleman,” she told Eyman. However, “I remember one sentence. [My character] had been talking about my idea of luxury, to travel unimpeded but to wake up with the clothes and food and belongings of whatever country I happened to be in. And Reinhardt said, ‘Why don’t you try acting?’”3

  Before the Vienna premiere of Das schwächere Geschlect, Hedy returned to Sascha-Tobis-Film Studio and took a small role in Alexis Granowsky’s film Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. (The Trunks of Mr. O.F.), which began shooting in the summer of 1931. Called “a fairy tale for adults,” the story was about thirteen trunks owned by a Mr. O. F. that were mysteriously delivered to a small-town hotel in the fictitious town of Ostend. The hotel’s proprietor (Ludwig Stössel), thinking Mr. O. F. must be a wealthy man, has his hostelry renovated, and the shops along main street follow suit.4

  The editor of the local newspaper (Peter Lorre) suggests that Mr. O. F. is a millionaire planning to invest in the small town. After weeks of no appearance of Mr. O. F., the hotel owner substitutes someone to pretend he is Mr. O. F., and then puts this man under a doctor’s care. Suddenly the town experiences a boom and becomes a city. After a year, the hotelier’s ruse is discovered, but everyone has forgotten the mysterious Mr. O. F. when an international economic conference is held in the thriving city of Ostend.

  The star of the picture was Peter Lorre, celebrated at the time for his performance in the 1930 film M, wherein he portrayed a child murderer. For a needed change of pace, Lorre was cast in this light comedy set with music. Also in the picture was Harald Paulsen, who had appeared in Sturm im Wasserglas. Hedy was cast in the small role of the mayor’s daughter, opposite Paulsen. In an even smaller role was the twenty-six-year-old actor Aribert Mog, who would fall in love with the young Hedy during the filming.

  Hedy performed in the picture during the day, and in the evening she would rehearse her stage role in Das schwächere Geschlecht. Filming concluded on Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. in October.

  The plot of the comedy Das schwächere Geschlect, Reinhardt’s first play staged in Vienna, is actually quite similar to that of another then-popular play, Grand Hotel. It tells an overlong tale of a clever Argentine matriarch who has raised her two sons to prey on rich women vacationing on the Riviera.

  “Within the play we were both playing at being Americans,” Weller recounted in a magazine piece. “Hedy had only the vaguest ideas of what the United States were, except that they were grouped around Hollywood.” The two young actors were each paid the humble amount of seven Austrian schillings a day. “We were supposed to be the stock figures of the tasteless, whooping North Americans, indispensable buffoons for the European stage which even then had little else that was safe to laugh at. We had several lines of sappy Snobismus.”5

  Reinhardt told the young Weller to teach Hedy some American songs. Immediately, Weller was criticized by Hedy for the way he danced. For her he danced much too fast. In Berlin she danced much slower with her partner, “a movie extra from Dusseldorf,” she proudly boasted. During rehearsals Hedy would softly whisper in Weller’s ear, “A little slower, please. We might dance right off the stage into the orchestra. The Herr Professor doesn’t expect us to be so much like American as that.”6

  Together Weller and Hedy studied American songs, Hedy writing down the English lyrics in notebooks. Like many Viennese of that day, Hedy loved the sentimental “Sonny Boy” made popular by Al Jolson in his 1928 film The Singing Fool, and she frequently took the opportunity to give her rendition. “In Act III there was a place where we Americans were supposed to break out in a ribald song, spoiling a tender Franco-Argentine marriage contract with our western animal spirits,” wrote Weller.7 “Every night, at this point in the drama, the Viennese public heard either ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’ or ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’ At matinees it had to be ‘Sonny Boy’…. When we told all those Viennese women to ‘nevah mind thuh gre-ey skies,’ even the other actors stood in the wings and listened to us. All Vienna, the old Austrian Vienna, loved ‘Sonny Boy.’”8

  When Das schwächere Geschlecht open
ed in mid-November, 1931, it enjoyed a modest run. However, Reinhardt was already in Budapest preparing to open the play there. He then returned to Vienna at the end of the month and offered Hedy a larger, more substantial role in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, his next production.

  A work Coward had written in just four days in Shanghai while he was recovering from the flu, Private Lives successfully premiered in London’s West End in 1930. Its two stars were its playwright Coward and the luminous Gertrude Lawrence. The plot revolves around just four characters, two couples: Amanda Prynne, on her second honeymoon with her new husband, the gullible Victor, and the insecure Sibyl Chase, on honeymoon with her new husband, Elyot.

  As the story opens it is discovered that Amanda and Elyot were once married, and it is only after the two couples check in to the same French hotel do they realize their respective rooms are side by side. Amanda and Elyot soon understand that, though they cannot live together, they cannot live without each other.

  Hedy was cast in the role of Sibyl. In the role of Amanda’s husband, Victor, was cast George Weller. Weller recalled an important moment that occurred during rehearsals of the play, a moment that would dramatically affect and define Hedy’s life and future career forever.

  “It was at a rehearsal of a café scene,” in which the couple danced, Weller recalled:

  There were Viennese newspapermen watching. Suddenly Herr Professor, a man not given to superlatives, turned to the reporters and succinctly 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 Innere Stadt, to be dispatched by press services to other newspapers, other capitals, countries, continents.9

  By the time the play opened, in January 1932, theatergoers were anxious to get a look at this girl.