Hedy's Folly (11 page)

From his new Walterwerke (Walter Works) in Kiel, Walter proposed to the German naval command a two-thousand-horsepower hydrogen-peroxide-driven
four-man mini-sub designed for underwater speeds of up to thirty knots. With support from Captain Karl Dönitz, already an influential submarine flotilla commander, naval command encouraged Walter’s project, which would be awarded a construction contract in 1939. By late 1936, Walter had achieved
one thousand
kilograms of thrust in a hydrogen-peroxide-fueled turbine. A four-thousand-horsepower system followed not long after.

While exploring development of his new submarine, a potentially devastating weapon, Walter also describes working on missile engines and assisted-takeoff devices (ATOs, temporarily adding thrust, enable aircraft to take off from shorter runways or boost heavily loaded aircraft into the air) for the German air force, the Luftwaffe:

The first flight with a liquid propellant took place in February 1937, with 100-kg thrust. Later in that year and during 1938, a great number of flight tests were made with ATO’s at 300 to 500-kg thrust with land and sea planes.… All of these were mono-fuel devices working with 80 percent hydrogen peroxide. A number of unguided missiles were tested, among them a midget prototype of the V-2 [rocket] which climbed up to 18-kilometer height and broke through the sound barrier. Rocket-propelled depth charges were thrown over 200-meter distances, and sea mines, dropped from an airplane, were decelerated so that they fell gently into the sea. During the summer of 1939, the first airplane took off (Heinkel 178) propelled solely by a controllable rocket. The first torpedoes were launched just at the outbreak of the war. In this case, the propulsion engine was used with a dual fuel system [of] kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.

In addition, and most relevant to Hedy’s eventual purposes, Walter and his staff were involved with developing methods of remote control for their torpedoes. They would also have been aware of work at the German Aviation Research Institute in Berlin Adlershof on radio-controlled anti-ship glide bombs, because at least one of the glide bombs under development, the
Henschel Hs 293A, used hydrogen peroxide for propulsion.

The German navy’s work on torpedo control had begun in 1935, early enough for Hedy to have heard about it. Radio control of submarine torpedoes was difficult—radio signals don’t travel far through seawater—and most German specialists favored wire guidance, the torpedo paying out a thin insulated wire behind it as it left the submarine that connected it electrically to a human controller guiding its path. But the anti-ship glide bombs under development for delivery by plane were radio controlled. Furthermore, they used a system of frequency selection that might have offered Hedy one piece of the puzzle of how to prevent a radio-control signal from being jammed.

The radio-control system that the Germans used on their Fritz X and Henschel Hs 293 glide bombs, an American guided-missile expert writes, featured a transmitter that “
could operate on any of 18 pre-launch selectable frequencies, spaced 100 KHz apart, between 48 and 50 MHz. This capability was designed into the system to enable coordinated simultaneous mass attacks by formations of bombers and allowed up to 18 missiles to be separately controlled at
one time. It also helped to negate the effects of any enemy electronic jamming directed at the guidance system.”

So the German system did not move the transmission around among radio frequencies to avoid a jamming signal; it merely assigned the communications between each bomber and its single glide bomb to one of eighteen different radio frequencies, allowing each plane to control its own bomb without radio interference from other bombers, which had similarly been assigned different exclusive frequencies spaced one hundred kilohertz apart in the frequency band between forty-eight and fifty megahertz. Since each bomber-missile pair communicated on only one frequency, the enemy could still jam the signal, but he might need a few minutes to figure out which of eighteen different frequencies he had to jam to confuse a particular bomb heading his way.

Hedy Kiesler Mandl met Hellmuth Walter in December 1936. The occasion was the annual Christmas gala at the Hirtenberger factory in Hirtenberg, Austria. “
He was very interesting,” she told an interviewer late in life of her meeting with Walter. “As we had dinner, he was talking about his remote-controlled, wakeless torpedo.” The torpedo in question was wire guided and hydrogen peroxide powered; the steam that drove the torpedo that resulted from H
₂
O
₂
decomposition quickly dissipated in seawater, leaving no telltale wake, another advantage of the system. The torpedo had other problems, it seemed, related to the relatively small volume of fuel it could carry.

All this knowledge of developing German military technology
was Hedy’s capital as she prepared herself to leave Fritz Mandl and Austria and find her way to Hollywood. She spoke of it later as protective, as information she could use or did use to persuade Mandl to allow her to leave him, but wasn’t it just as likely to be dangerous for her to know? Or did she count on the chauvinism of the German military men with whom she socialized—standing still and looking stupid—to protect her?

Hedy told various tales of how she freed herself from Fritz Mandl. She would have had reason to lie about their breakup. She had already been stigmatized for her appearance in
Ecstasy
—the film had been publicly censored in the United States. Divorce was a scandal in 1930s America; elaborating a story of brutal confinement and clever escape might avoid further stigma.

In the most elaborate version Hedy told, she picked out one of her housemaids who closely resembled her in height, weight, and coloring, befriended the maid, studied the maid’s manner until she was confident she could imitate it, drugged her one day by putting sleeping pills in her coffee, dressed in her uniform and slipped out of the house, raced for the train to Paris, filed for a French divorce on the sardonic ground of desertion, and raced on to London to put herself beyond Mandl’s grasp. The story is so Bluebeardian that it may well have been an invention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity department.

Hedy came closest to telling the truth about her breakup
with Fritz Mandl in a 1938 as-told- to interview. Even there she left out the backstory, which can be at least partly reconstructed from contemporary newspaper reports and later documents.

After attending the Christmas gala at her husband’s factory in Hirtenberg, Hedy spent the winter season at St. Moritz, the fashionable Swiss ski resort where the 1928 Winter Olympics had been held. Her husband did not accompany her. His work may have kept him away—he was already busy sequestering assets in Switzerland and investing in Argentina—or he and Hedy may have separated after one of their escalating series of battles. “
I felt more and more,” she said in 1938, “every day now, every hour, that I must escape
or be strangled to death
by luxury, by a vain attempt to find happiness.”

Part of that vain attempt at St. Moritz was apparently a brief affair with the writer Erich Maria Remarque, famous for his World War I novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
and a man like her father, tall, older, handsome, and confident. Remarque spent two months, January and February 1937, vacationing at St. Moritz, his biographer reports, summarizing his experience afterward in a diary entry.
“ ‘Went walking to begin with; afterwards mostly sat in the bar,’ his diary records.… Then follows a selective list of the people he associated with [including the writers Louis Bromfield and Georges Simenon, the Hollywood stars Kay Francis and Eleanor Boardman, and the film directors Leni Riefenstahl and William Wyler].… Casually infiltrated into the list is
the single name Hedy, the only person not fully identified or attributed with an explanatory word or two. Remarque’s discretion betrays as much as it conceals the degree of intimacy between them.”

Remarque’s new novel,
Three Comrades
, had begun serialization in
Good Housekeeping
magazine in January and would be published in May. The novelist’s previous works had been burned in Germany in the notorious Nazi-sponsored book burning in 1933, however, and Remarque himself was persona non grata there. It’s easy to see what he and Hedy had in common—including, as she would make clear in America, contempt for the Nazis.

A key requirement for a successful transformation of personal identity is a mentor or model to guide the novice over the treacherous crevasse that separates the old identity from the new. Given what followed in Hedy’s life that crucial year, Remarque probably filled that role for her. He himself had already transitioned successfully from war-weary soldier to best-selling novelist. He had gone into exile from his homeland as well, driven there by the gathering power of fascism.

Whatever happened between the German novelist and the Austrian film star at St. Moritz, Hedy returned to Vienna sometime that late winter or spring determined to renew her career as an actress. Fritz Mandl was equally determined that she should not. He failed to anticipate that Hedy might appeal to his political partner and close friend Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg. A report in New York’s
Sunday News
on 19 September 1937 describes what followed:

Hedi is expected to appear at the Josefstadt Theatre in Clare Boothe’s play, “The Women,” which is about to be produced in German.

PALLY WITH STARHEMBERG

Although the invitation to play a leading role came from Director Horch, it is common knowledge here that Hedi arranged the request, presumably through Prince Starhemberg, her husband’s closest friend.

When Mandl heard about it, he forbade his wife to visit the theatre and even ordered her not to leave the house.

Prince Starhemberg, Austria’s iron man, was seen frequently in Hedi’s company until her husband was reported to have told him:

“If this keeps up, our friendship ends here.”

The headline told the rest of the story: “ ‘Ecstasy’ Star to Quit Rich Mate for Stage.”

Hedy and Mandl had filed a mutual divorce action in Vienna, the story reported. They were not expected to wait for a trial, however, “but would go to Riga, Latvia, the Reno of Europe,” for a quickie divorce.

Hedy had not even waited for a quickie divorce, however. By the time the story appeared, she had already escaped to London and was on her way to the United States. The role in
The Women
at the Josefstadt may have been a ruse. Or
Hedy may have realized that she could not remain in Austria with its intensifying anti-Semitism and have taken the first opportunity to leave, as so many other Jewish or anti-Nazi actors and directors were doing—among them Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Anatole Litvak, Marlene Dietrich, Conrad Veidt, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Walter Slezak. She did not drug her maid, nor did she leave with merely the clothes on her back. She was both smarter and more practical than that:

I cannot tell even now how I managed to make my escape. I cannot give the names of the one or two who helped me. Such a revelation would not help
them
now. But I am sure that not in any motion picture would an escape scene be more dramatic. It was at night that I began my packing. My husband and I had another bitter quarrel and he had gone off to one of his hunting lodges. And I had known, as somehow we do know these things,
that this was our last quarrel
. I knew that the time had come, that the hour had struck, as they say in novels, that this time I would succeed.…

I packed my jewels and such furs and clothes as I could take with me. I think I had about two large trunks and two small ones and three suitcases. I had to take as many of my jewels and furs as I could manage to carry with me because I could not, of course, take much money out of the country with me. Very little money,
indeed. I knew that I was burning all of my bridges behind me. I was leaving my home. I was leaving my mother and my friends. You do not blame me, I am sure. I was leaving security. But so much stronger than anything else was my wish to come to Hollywood that I had no fear and—I did it.

I managed to leave Vienna that night, veiled and incognito and with all the trappings of a melodrama mystery. And I went straight through to London.

In London, whether fortuitously or by design, Hedy met Louis B. Mayer, fifty-three years old that year, the head of MGM Studios and the highest-paid executive in the United States. Mayer had sailed to Europe some weeks earlier to take the waters at Carlsbad, to inspect the new studios north of London in which MGM had recently invested, and to find writers who could turn out original stories for an American market that went to the movies faithfully twice a week or more.

“
At a small evening party,” Hedy recalled in 1938, “I did meet Mr. Mayer. We talked a little that night and that was all. He did not speak to me about pictures, nor did I talk to him about what I was doing and where I was going. But I knew very well that Mr. Mayer was the one who would, if he could, help me to take the last step on my long journey to Hollywood.”

She told a less demure story later, in her ghostwritten book
Ecstasy and Me
, which drew on many hours of interviews and dictation. An American agent, she said, Bob Ritchie, called her in her London hotel room and offered to introduce her to Mayer. She didn’t know who he was. Ritchie enlightened her. They went to see him. “
I saw
Ecstasy
,” he told her, waving an unlit cigar. “Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood. Never. A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatregoers. You’re lovely, but I have the family point of view. I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around a screen.” And yet, Hedy adds, “he was giving me close-up inspections from every angle.” After more discussion, Mayer offered her a minimal contract: six months at $125 a week if she paid her own way to America. Hedy was confident enough to reject the offer and walk out.