In 1936, the Austrian Association of Cinema Producers declared a ban on hiring Jewish performers or talent. Mandl began moving his assets out of Austria in anticipation of a German takeover. Hedy made her own plans. During the time Mandl and Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg were business partners, Hedy was apparently having an affair with von Starhemberg's younger brother, Ferdinand, and on Friday, 13 November 1936, the twosome fled Mandl's mansion and boarded a train to Budapest. Hedy had heard there were theater opportunities there and planned to visit the home of a childhood friend. “When the train pulled into the Budapest station, there was my husband waiting. His face was a grey mask of fury.”29 Elsewhere, it was rumored that Hedy was seeing not Ferdinand but Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg himself.
Her next attempt to escape, according to her autobiography, involved the connivance of the English Colonel Righter. A hurried conversation persuaded the nervous military man to promise his help but in an underhanded double-cross, Mandl revealed to Hedy the recording equipment he installed to eavesdrop on her conversations; worse again, he told her that Righter was on his payroll.
By now it seemed the talk of Vienna was of Hedy and Mandl's marital problems. Her acting aspirations first sparked the flame, but Hedy's public appearances with Count Max Hardegg, the gossip of Viennese society for weeks, probably further aggravated their struggles.30 Eventually, in early 1937, Hedy, disguised as one of her maids, whom she had hired for her look-alike qualities, fled Mandl:
Early that Thursday morning, I put three sleeping pills in Laura's coffee, packed her suitcase, left her some money, dressed in my maid's costume with the collar turned up and sneaked out the servants entrance.
I had the keys to Laura's battered car, and I reached the railway unchallenged…The platform was deserted when I bought my ticket and started a twelve-minute wait. Like a novice spy, I imagined the stationmaster was scrutinizing me. And there was a telephone by his elbow. Somehow I managed to turn my back on him, and my studied casualness until the train did arrive and I did board it were not wasted on me in a later motion picture with Paul Henreid (The Conspirators).31
Although this story stretches credibility, it may be true, at least to the extent that Hedy did escape Mandl, who was, by all accounts an intimidating, controlling husband. She escaped with just a few items of clothing and a bag of jewels. These jewels were her insurance, the kind that would withstand the economic consequences of war. They remained in their paper bag, by her side, in her home of the moment. All Mandl's wives, according to his daughter, Puppe, received jewels; and it was the only thing they could take away with them.32 Occasionally, Hedy's jewels were stolen, or maybe “stolen”; only at the end of her life did they finally disappear, this time apparently for good.
Both in her own account of her 1937 escape and in the version she gave Christopher Young, Hedy said that soon after she left Mandl, her mother wired her with the news of her father's death, which intensified her heartbreak. This is a curious mistake, since, as was noted, Emil Kiesler died in early 1935.
According to Young, Hedy appealed to the Holy Rota in Rome for an annulment of her marriage to Mandl. Her request was denied, and she traveled to Nevada to obtain a divorce.33 Hedy, however, claimed she obtained a divorce in Paris. It seems likely that Mandl had his marriage to Hedy annulled in 1938 on racial grounds.34 They may even have discussed divorce before that; one rumor claimed they were planning to travel to Riga (the Reno of Europe) for a quick dissolution of their marriage.35
According to the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, a “full Jew” was a person with three Jewish grandparents. Those with less were designated as ”Mischlinge” and fell into one of two categories: first degree equaled two Jewish grandparents; and second degree equaled one Jewish grandparent. Mandl was only too aware that he was of “tainted” stock: “Because I only have two grandparents who are of pure Aryan stock, this question is of the utmost importance to me. Perhaps Cardinal [Innitzer] could also be of some help since he was always well disposed towards me and a good word from him in important places would be very influential.”36
Motivated, like his good friend Cardinal Innitzer, by a desire to keep all parties happy, Mandl was less interested in conforming to Nazi decrees than in protecting his financial interests, in this case his salary from the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, which was now in full production, gearing up happily for war. An annulment from the marriage with Hedy, a full-blooded Jew, was—not to put too fine a point on it—worth RM 2,000 monthly to Mandl.37
In 1953, Mandl's third wife, Herta Schneider, charged Mandl with bigamy on the grounds that he never divorced Hedy. In pursuit of her share of Mandl's Argentinean assets (which she valued at £2,600,000), Schneider had filed for divorce, charging among other things that Mandl had dragged her around their luxury apartment by the hair. Mandl counter-claimed that they were never really married, as he had never properly divorced Hedy. According to his solicitors, Mandl had obtained a divorce from Hedy in Texas but the Vatican had refused to recognize it. He married Schneider in 1939, subsequently obtained a Mexican divorce from her, and then married Gloria Vinelli in Mexico City in 1951.38
The story of Hedy's escape from Mandl followed her throughout her life. Its overtones of privilege and melodrama set it apart from other accounts of Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied territories. Most of all, her story eliminated the uncomfortable fact of her Jewishness, an aspect of her identity that she never again mentioned. This may also account for her neglect in the many studies of Jewish émigrés to Hollywood, rendering her a more lightweight character in a narrative focused on persecution and its consequences. What should be remembered is that her Jewish identity would have surfaced had she stayed in Austria. It is nearly certain too, given the pattern of her life, that she would not have stayed with Mandl, whose political activities she loathed and who could not have controlled her in the way he wanted.
Mandl in turn fled Vienna as Hitler annexed the arms factories. With the suspicion that he might be Jewish hanging over him, the businessman escaped along with his father, his sister, and Herta Schneider to Argentina. Before he left, Mandl sealed a deal with the Nazis allowing him to keep his non-Austrian holdings. In return he allegedly carried Nazi funds belonging to Göring, Ribbentrop, and other high-ranking party members to invest in Argentina. As his former wife built her reputation in Hollywood, so he built his, financing Juan Perón's successful electoral campaign and developing a local arms program. It seems that he and Hedy kept in touch over the years, though nothing suggests that they ever again met face to face.
Many years later again, in 1979, Manuel Puig opened his science fiction novel Pubis Angelical with a woman dying in a Mexican hospital. As her life slips away, she becomes not herself but her two shadows, one a Viennese actress who marries a weapons maker prior to World War II and later moves to Hollywood; and the other, “W2I8,” a sexual conscript in an alternative present. Puig makes his actress a tragic heroine. Locked in a fortress by her billionaire husband, whose fortune comes from making arms for the Nazis, she eventually escapes disguised as one of the doubles her jealous husband has planted around his island home. Nothing goes well in this story centered on the theme that men will inevitably betray women. Only the actress's alter ego, the sex slave, triumphs, and then only because she realizes that forcing men to change is futile—it is far better for women to believe in themselves than to become an object of male desire. There is no evidence that Hedy Mandl, by then Hedy Lamarr, ever read Puig's book. She might have found his conclusion simplistic.
5
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World
SWITZERLAND WAS REGARDED by many German and Austrian refugees as a station on their way to France until 1938, when it introduced measures prohibiting Jews from crossing its borders. The better-heeled refugees, whose numbers now included Hedwig Kiesler, chose to spend the winter of 1936–1937 in St. Moritz before heading to Paris. The Swiss resort was a flurry of cocktails, parties,