In early 1933, Hedy was actively looking for more roles. That year, the popular Viennese actor Willi Forst was preparing to direct his first film, Unfinished Symphony (Leiseflehen meine Liedef), which was about the love affair between Franz Schubert and Countess Esterhazy. Walter Reisch was working on the script and their first choice for the plum role of the Hungarian Countess Esterhazy was the young Hedy Kiesler. Also on board was the renowned costume designer Gerdago, known as the Edith Head of Austrian Film. Hans Jaray was confirmed to play Schubert, and Luise Ullrich, who had starred in Max Ophüls’ Liebelei, was cast as the innocent object of Schubert's attentions.2 There was one problem, however: Forst and Reisch joined forces to tell the producer, “Pretty is not enough. She has to sing Schubert songs. She was not trained for singing and she cannot sing Schubert songs. We have to take Martha Eggerth.”3Eggerth had a minor film career but was better known for her beautiful singing voice. Hedy was replaced.
The film was shot from March through May 1933 and Hedy dropped into the studio one day to visit the filmmakers. She was very sorry, Eggerth remembered, not to have played in the film.4 Symphony was a monumental success across Europe and catapulted Eggerth into stardom overnight; her career in musicals lasted until the war, when she and her husband, Jan Kiepura, fled to America. Both resumed their careers in America, with their main triumphs now on Broadway.
If Hedy was disappointed not to play in Symphony, another opportunity shortly came her way. In autumn of 1932, the forthcoming production of Sissy in the Theater an der Wien was all the talk in Viennese theatrical circles. Sissy was based on the courtship between the young Emperor Franz Josef and Elizabeth (nicknamed Sissy), the favorite daughter of Bavaria's Duke Max, and had been composed by the violinist Franz Kreisler. He badly needed the income—a recent $10,000 win at the tables in Monte Carlo barely saved him from selling his collection of rare books and manuscripts. Relying on sentimental songs he knew would strike a chord with his audience, Kreisler recycled his well-worn violin tunes from earlier operettas and added in two new numbers: “Wine Is My Weakness” and “With Eyes Like Thine, Tis Sin to Weep.”
To play the title role was the dream of any young star, and it was no surprise when Paula Wessely was chosen to play the latest incarnation of Sissy. The operetta premiered on 23 December 1932 in time for the Christmas season, with Paula Wessely as Sissy and Hans Jaray as Franz Joseph. Reviewers and audiences were enchanted and management of the chronically impoverished theater anticipated a long and lucrative run. In early January, it was announced that Rose Stradner would take over the role of Sissy from Paula Wessely, who would soon move on to a new role elsewhere.5
In early 1933, for a short period Hedy was the understudy for Paula; unexpectedly the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Hedy had been announced as the successor to Paula Wessely for the role of the Countess Elisabeth in Sissy.6 Rose Stradner had since been contracted to take over the part of Fanny in the comedy Fanny playing at the Raimund Theater; only when she had completed this contract could she play Sissy.
An announcement was placed in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung on 20 January confirming that Hedy Kiesler would replace Paula Wessely. Once again her portrait appeared in Die Buhne, this time in profile with a cigarette delicately placed on her lips and photographed by Edith Glogau.
In the end, Paula Wessely played Sissy until March 1933, when she was replaced by Rose Stradner. The director, Hubert Marischka, also pressed her to reschedule her holiday so she could stay on in the role. Then, before she began her second month as Sissy, the director abruptly informed Rose Stradner that her contract would be terminated and Hedy Kiesler would now play Sissy. Rose Stradner was outraged and demanded compensation for breach of contract. On 23 March, Hedy nonetheless replaced her. Hedy's performance was greeted with enthusiasm:
She looks wonderful, tender and really attractive. And she performs with real charm too: simply without affectation, talking and singing with the high voice of a child in which from time to time the echo of a Wessely accent is detectable. In short, a delightful Sissy, without the stardom and pomp of a sophisticate, but with easy, childlike tones.7
Playing Sissy confirmed Hedy as a rising star in Vienna's film and theater world; the role was the most cherished part to which any young performer could aspire. It was also curiously portentous—the real-life Sissy (Elizabeth of Bavaria) had enjoyed a charmed childhood before an accidental meeting with Franz Joseph I led to her capturing the heart of the older man. He insisted on marrying her, and so she became, at age sixteen, Empress of Austria. Beautiful and rebellious, she soon found her position meant she could no longer behave as she wished; it also put her on a collision course with her mother-in-law, who controlled the upbringing of her grandchildren, ensuring that Sissy seldom saw them. The young empress took to traveling the world, seemingly in search of a cure for her many illnesses, often in the company of lovers. Much later, her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, was to die with his lover in the May-erling tragedy, and she herself was assassinated at the age of sixty. The tale of the beautiful royal captive has always charmed the Viennese, and in 1955 it made a star of Romy Schneider who, when she was even younger than Hedy, debuted in a trilogy of enormously popular Sissy films directed by Ernst Marischka.
If her casting as Sissy made the young Hedy Kiesler's reputation, it also had another, more sinister outcome. Through her newfound fame, she met her notorious first husband, Fritz Mandl, Joe May's cousin.
The Mandl family was Jewish and originally came from Hungary. Like the Kieslers, they were wealthy and socially well connected. Ferdinand Mandl converted to Catholicism to marry Fritz's mother, a family maid, Maria Mohr, from Graz. Fritz was born in 1900, though it took ten years for his father to convert and marry Maria. Fritz Mandl was therefore raised as a Catholic and beneath a shadow cast by his birth; the latter possibly prompting his lifetime spent seeking the acceptance of high society.8 Mandl was to become one of the most successful businessmen of his generation, known variously as “Austria's Munitions King” and the “Merchant of Death.” The Mandl family munitions business flourished during the First World War, with those employed in their factory, the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, rising from five hundred to two thousand before World War I and climbing to more than four thousand during the war. The factory went bankrupt after the defeat of the Hapsburg Empire, and Alexander Mandl lost control of the business. In the late 1920s, Fritz Mandl negotiated a shrewd loan from a bank that enabled him to return the factory to family ownership. Mandl's own political interests were to the far right, though this did not prevent him from equipping both sides in the Spanish Civil War. Democracy, he once said, “is a luxury that might be borne, perhaps in prosperous periods.”9
A man of medium height, Mandl was an impeccable dresser, with an eye for fine clothes and good food. The Mandl family had a long-standing interest in film production. Joe May, as previously noted, was Fritz's cousin. Leo Mandl, Joe May's nephew, was the director of Messter-Film GmbH and the director-general of Sascha Film in Vienna; in December 1922 Leo Mandl took over the operation of May Film. Fritz Mandl enjoyed rubbing shoulders with those in the film and theater world, and being seen in the company of beautiful women. He particularly had an eye for actresses.
He was notorious for his treatment of women. His first wife was the performer Hella Strauss, who later sued him for $80,000 in back alimony. Next, he had an affair with Eva May, Mia and Joe May's daughter. She had started acting at age sixteen, had married three times, each time to a film director (Martin Liebenau [ErikLund], Lothar Mendes, and Manfred Noa), and starred in a string of German films. Her chaotic personal life led to a break with her father, and she was evidently desperately unstable. Hedy claims Eva committed suicide as a result of her relationship with Mandl; however, although Eva commited suicide in 1924, shooting herself with a revolver as she had done so often onscreen, this was not her first attempt.10 What Hedy did not mention was that Eva May was also Fritz Mandl's second cousin. Long after his marriage with Hedy had ended and he was living in Argentina, Mandl offered his third wife a divorce settlement of just 800