Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

charged him with assault.

      Fritz Mandl was capable of both extraordinary generosity and perverse immorality; for instance, Mandl rescued Hugo Marton, his private banker, from a prison camp after the AnschluB; later Mandl had an affair with Marton's wife. He gave handsomely to the Red Cross, bribed numerous officials, and looked after his staff well. As Marie-Theres Arnbom has written, to this day Mandl is remembered in Hirtenberg for paying his workers a rate well above the national average. For the Austrian working class at large, however, he was the personification of fascism, the fat cat capitalist who armed the Heimwehr to keep down the workers.¹¹ His attempts to disavow his Jewish heritage were not taken at face value; commenting on his background, his politics, and his insistence that he had been educated with the Piarist Fathers, one journalist wrote of this “man of small to medium height, son of good Jewish parents,” that his activities only proved that “when a Jew is stupid, then he really is stupid.”¹²

      As befitting a man with social ambitions, and one with considerable wealth, acquiring a trophy bride was imperative. Throughout 1933, Mandl diligently pursued Hedy. One night after Hedy's appearance as the lead in Sissy, Mandl showed up backstage and presented her with his card. Next, according to Hedy, he appealed to her parents for their support in his marriage plans. Wealthy and influential as the Kieslers were, they seem to have been won over by Mandl. So too was Hedy—in May 1933, the couple announced their engagement. It was also announced that the future Mrs. Mandl would end her career. “I am so happy about my engagement,” she told the press, “that I am unable to be sad about my departure from the stage. It has been made so easy for me to give up my lifelong ambitions to be successful in the theater. I was a little sad to say good-bye to all this but I am really optimistic about the future and am really happy.”¹³ On 16 May, she gave her last performance as Sissy and the next day left for Paris. It was presumed she would return at the end of June for her wedding.

      On 10 August 1933, the couple married in Vienna's baroque Karls-kirche. Sometime prior, Hedy had converted to Roman Catholicism and Fritz Mandl to the Reform Church. The wedding party lunched at the Grand Hotel and the couple departed for Venice that evening, to honeymoon at the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido. “We spent many golden, glamorous weeks at the Lido,” Hedy recalled a few years later, “dining, dancing, swimming, gliding along the Venetian canals in our own gondola, watching the Lido crowd disport itself.”¹⁴ Mr. and Mrs. Mandl were only two among many famous names vacationing in Venice that summer, but Fritz Mandl ensured that he and his young bride kept their distance from the celebrity set; and so they moved on, through Europe's most elegant resorts, to Capri, Lake Como, Biarritz, Cannes, Nice, and Paris, with Mandl always jealously guarding Hedy from others’ attentions.

      • • •

      Once back in Vienna, in early January 1934, Mandl installed his wife in the Mandl mansion, a ten-room apartment at 15 Schwarzenbergplatz near Vienna's famed Ring Boulevard. With marriage came a massive estate that included the renowned Mandl hunting castle, the Villa Fegenberg, near Schwartau. Hedy now had maids, jewels, and wanted for nothing. She had every luxury, she later commented, except freedom.¹⁵ She began to wear black and to dress more conservatively to rein in her personality. Still she was guaranteed to attract attention wherever she went.

      Shortly after their marriage, Mandl apparently arranged for a private screening of his wife's latest film. Furious with what he saw, he ordered every print and negative of Ecstasy bought and destroyed, an edict that simply sent more prints into circulation and increased the film's notoriety. Indeed, it seems that Machaty was more than happy to sell his prints to Mandl, knowing that enough existed to make the eradication of Ecstasy impossible.¹⁶ Although this story was widely circulated and repeated throughout Hedy's life, Mandl later stated that it was all just a publicity stunt dreamed up to promote the film.¹⁷ It does seem odd that he arranged for the film to be destroyed well after it had completed its Viennese run, and there are no reports in the trade press of his alleged campaign. True or false, the myth enhanced Ecstasy's currency as forbidden fruit, as may have been intended.

      With work out of the question for now, Hedy soon became bored. Mandl may not have literally locked her inside his castle, as she and others later claimed, but by moving his young bride into the Villa Fegenberg where she had only staff for company week after week, he effectively kept her away from temptation. Horse riding passed the time as did swimming in a pool fed by natural springs, but there was little else to do other than wear the expensive clothes Mandl chose for her. Her husband would appear late at night and on weekends with his guests. One day, she later told Farley Granger, “she decided to entertain herself by taking all sixteen toilet seats from the house out on to the lawn that swept down to the lake to paint them in the sun. As she was beginning the last one, she spotted a long line of black Mercedes limos in the distance coming up the long drive to the house. Her husband had not bothered to call her to warn her that he was bringing important guests for the weekend.”¹⁸ Berta Kaiser, then a fourteen-year-old kitchen maid at the Villa Fegenberg, remembered that Mandl himself would come to the kitchen to oversee the preparations for the evening's entertainment, never Hedy, who was too young to know about such matters. She was just there to be beautiful. Still, the staff was fond of her and awed by her looks and fine clothing. The couple, Berta Kaiser also noticed, slept in separate bedrooms.¹⁹

      Soon Hedy realized that Mandl deliberately kept her short of cash and assured her that she could shop on credit when she wished. Determined to outwit him, she went shopping with a vengeance, buying up thousands of schillings worth of clothes, furs, evening gowns, and coats. According to Hedy,

      My program of buying went on for weeks and, during it, I became a new person. I was gayer, happier, and at the same time (imbued with this new secret purpose) more amenable to my husband's wishes…All of which led him, far from suspecting my true design, to do that which I had hoped he would do, namely give me an allowance of my own. “Hedy,” he said, “your purchases are staggering even to a man of wealth. I will not have this go on. I shall therefore stop your credit and give you cash for your needs. This allowance is not comparable to your extravagance; but it must from now on, suffice.”

      I had won!²⁰

      In her autobiography, Hedy relates another incident that she claims occurred soon after she married Mandl. Finding herself unsupervised one afternoon, she slipped out of their mansion and into a crowd of shoppers. Soon she spotted Mandl behind her on an escalator. She rode to the bottom and hurried out a side exit, finding herself in a familiar part of town; nearby, she remembered, there was a notorious peephole club. Pushing enough money for the fee and a large tip in the surprised attendant's hand, she slipped into the club and headed upstairs to join the afternoon regulars in the booths. In front of her eyes, a formally dressed man and two nude women were forming a “sandwich” tableau on a round bed draped in red velvet. Behind her, Hedy heard Mandl's voice and guessed that his tip would be more generous than hers. She quickly exited the booth, and, like Alice, found herself on the other side of the glass, now transformed from voyeur to spectacle. Before Mandl could climb the stairs, a young man walked in and started to undress. Surprised that Hedy was not performing her part, he wondered if this was her first time, while musing that she looked familiar. As Ecstasy had been showing all around town, this could well have been so. Hedy began to undress and at that moment, Mandl banged on the door, demanding to know who the hell was in there. “What the hell do you care?” came the reply, “a broad and me.” Unable to believe that this might be his wife, Mandl apparently departed, leaving Hedy to enjoy “the strangest love-making any girl ever had” and to be tipped afterward in gratification.²¹

      Did this happen? Not surprisingly, no one has since stepped up to confirm or deny the story. The incident is only one of a number in the book that describe how its author finds herself in a position where a stranger takes advantage of her and where she comes to enjoy the experience. It's a scenario that, in various forms, underpins many a Hollywood narrative: the heroine stands up to a forceful man who breaks down her resistance by seducing her. Maybe this and the other incidents did occur, or maybe the ghostwriters invented them (though this seems a risky creative decision), or maybe in later life Hedy's sexual fantasies usurped the reality of life with Mandl in a city on the brink of war, in an environment where to be Jewish was