Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

was something that she commented on, over and again, particularly in later life.

      After writing this book, I remain compelled by Hedy Lamarr's complexity, her short career, its long aftermath, and her resonance for our contemporary lives. It is too easy to assume that she was simply a victim of male predators and rapacious studio moguls—even if, from time to time, she said she was. When I was considering how to deal with the endless tales of sexual misdemeanors that followed her through life and pursued her beyond the grave, one helpful colleague suggested I attach an appendix listing her lovers (alphabetical order? longevity? merit?) to this volume. In the end, some found their way into this story, others didn't.

      We cannot divide Hedy Lamarr's on-screen roles from her offscreen myth. I think she could, mostly, but played a game with Hollywood where she pretended that she could not. What draws me now to this Viennese actress is the question of how her star image became so bright and then so tarnished and then, once again, began to glimmer and beckon film historians, academics, and the public to its light. Waxwork sculptures do not come to life, but we can reanimate the spirits that inspired them with our interest. I hope that I can go some way toward achieving that.

      1

      A Childhood in Döbling

      HEDY LAMARR was born Hedwig Kiesler on 9 November 1914, in Vienna. Later, she added two middle names, Eva Maria, to her given name. Her father, Emil, from Lemberg (Lwów) in the West Ukraine, was manager of the Creditanstalt Bankverien.¹ Her mother was born Gertrude (Trude) Lichtwitz, to a sophisticated family in Budapest. Both her parents were Jewish and Hedy too was registered at birth as Jewish. The Kieslers lived on Osterleitengasse in Döbling in Vienna's fashionable 19th District. Later Hedy moved with her family to Peter-Jordan-StraBe, also in Döbling. There she lived on the top two floors of a house owned by a well-to-do tea merchant named Pekarek.

      Döbling, at the end of World War I, was an overwhelmingly Jewish area, and by the outbreak of World War II, had a population of around four thousand Jewish inhabitants and its own synagogue. Bounded by the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods), the architecture reflected the tastes of its settled, middle-class citizenry. Ludwig van Beethoven composed part of the Eroica Symphony in Döbling, and in the 1890s it was the summer home to the Strauss family. The actress Paula Wessely also hailed from the area, as did the scriptwriter Walter Reisch, both of whom would later work with Hedy.

      The Lichtwitz side of Hedy's family was well-connected and cultured; the Kieslers were less so, but Emil, who was sixteen years older than Trude, had brought to the marriage the benefits of a good job and solid prospects. Trude was just twenty when Hedy was born and elected to give up her ambitions to be a concert pianist when she had her first daughter and only child.

      With Trude's family background and Emil's salary, the Kieslers fitted in comfortably in Döbling. On the one hand, there was little to distinguish them from other well-connected non-Jewish families; on the other, with their dominance of the arts in particular, but also of banking and commerce, these families often intermarried and many worked and socialized together. These were the families, who, in fin de siecle Vienna, filled the theaters and concert halls, patronized the leading writers, musicians, and painters of the day, and accumulated the important art collections. These activities guaranteed them an entree into political circles, where artistic expression was more highly valued than ideological debate. In Vienna in particular, as Michael Rogin has argued, “the Haps-burg monarchy sustained itself by show. In keeping with the theatrical quality of political life in the empire, the Viennese theatre was more important than the parliament.”² Thus, Jewish artistic success became a guarantee of influence that extended far beyond the upper circle.

      Along with their cultural standing came a commitment to education and a sense of public duty to help those less privileged than themselves. Much of the Vienna so admired today was built with Jewish money; among those whose names were associated with its culture of design was Hedy's cousin Frederick Kiesler. Born in 1890 in Czernowitz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Kiesler made his name as an avant-garde theater designer, later qualifying as an architect in America. Standing less than five feet tall, he was an inspired writer and often described as a visionary designer; while Hedy was a child, Frederick was making his name with his concept of the “Space Stage” (a form of theater design influenced by the layout of a circus ring). By curious coincidence, it was Kiesler who arranged for the world premiere of the surrealist film Ballet Mecanique, directed by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger, in Vienna in September 1924, when Hedy was just ten years old. The composer of the film's music was George Antheil, whose life was to become so intertwined with Hedy's in Hollywood. In 1926, Frederick Kiesler and his wife moved from Vienna to New York, where they spent the rest of their lives. One of his first jobs in New York was to design the Film Guild Cinema on 52 West 8th Street for the avant-garde programmer Symon Gould. The cinema's program was mostly drawn from Soviet and European art-house films and one might guess that his little cousin's scandalous Ecstasy was part of its 1930s repertoire.³ Later, Kiesler became best known for his Shrine of the Book, a wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

      Hedy was a child of the First World War, an event with sweeping repercussions for the Jews of Vienna. The collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy and the inauguration of the First Republic saw the Viennese Jews, along with the old aristocracy, stripped of their wealth and influence. After the war, fuel shortages and a drastic lowering of living standards left Vienna more susceptible to the city's omnipresent anti-Semitism, and from the 1920s, the Viennese Jews were gradually becoming aware of a new, hostile atmosphere that infiltrated all aspects of society. No doubt the Kieslers felt the shock too, yet life for the young Hedy (pronounced “Hady”) was still protected and very traditional.

      The move to Peter-Jordan-StraBe brought the Kiesler family into the heart of Döbling's Cottage District. The term, borrowed from English, is misleading. These were substantial homes, designed and built in the period after 1872 when the architect Heinrich von Ferstel set up the Viennese Cottage Society. Their ambition was to create several streets of one- and two-family houses. No new houses would be built that deprived the existing cottage dwellers of a view, light, and the pleasure of fresh air. Each design could be different, but all had to conform to the overall ideal—solid, comfortable, airy houses built around enclosed family gardens. In time, the whole area became referred to as simply the Cottage. Leo Lania, the left-wing journalist and writer, described it as

      the cradle of Austrian literature, the cradle of the Viennese operetta. In the salons of its little villas, through whose windows the eye could sweep unhindered across gentle hills and the wooded approaches of the Kahlenberg as far as the green ribbon of the Danube, began and ended all those “affairs” of Viennese society which furnished Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr with their chief themes. This was the birthplace of the “sweet Viennese girl,” the “Merry Widow,” psychoanalysis, atonal music, and modern painting. From Sigmund Freud to Gustav Mahler, from Arnold Schoen-berg to Gustav Klimt—all the men who represented pre-war Viennese art, music, literature, intellectual life, and built its international fame, revolved around the Cottage, even if a few of them did not live there.⁴

      The house at 12 Peter-Jordan-StraBe had high ceilings and an ornate wooden veranda that led onto a well-planted garden. Couches draped with rugs and casual tables filled the rooms; floral curtains hung from the windows, shielding the furniture from the bright sunlight of the Viennese summer. The walls were covered with family portraits, the striped wallpaper reflecting the overall tone of an English country house. One of the rooms was dominated by Trude Kiesler's grand piano and there Hedy too learned to play. The family dachshund was, as Hedy entered her teenage years, running to fat.

      Even though Hedy never mentioned her Jewish origins in her autobiography or referred to them in interviews, she certainly moved within an artistic environment dominated by talented Jewish individuals. From Trude, Hedy inherited her taste for theater and the arts, and her cultural education came from her mother's side of the family. Her schooling, too, was enlightened; she attended the Döblinger Mädchenmittelschule, now the GRG XIX (a local girls' secondary school). The school, then housed in a private home in the Kriendlgasse, catered to the neighborhood's wealthy Jewish