In the summer there was swimming in the river and family outings to the lakes surrounding Vienna. In all seasons, they hiked in the mountains, and her father liked to row. Throughout her life, Hedy was to retain her love of water and of swimming; later in America, she dreamed of the fresh air of the Wienerwald and the freedom of the outdoors.
She later said that being an only child spurred her to become an actress. She used the space below her father's desk as her first stage, performing fairy tales for an invisible audience. As a small child, she liked to dress up in her mother's clothes and her father's suits and hats. When she came home from the cinema, she would act out all the parts she had just seen. “Grandfather was perhaps the only one who ever encouraged me,” she remembered with some acerbity. “He could play the piano and to his music I danced. It was awkward my dancing. But he said he thought it was beautiful. The rest of the family gave me little encouragement.”5
References to her parents as unloving abound in Hedy's interviews, yet at the same time, she always looked back on her early years in Döbling with intense nostalgia, as a time of security in what was to become a life ruled by uncertainty.
• • •
Gertrude Kiesler was a small, dark-haired woman whose personality may have run on the cold side. Hedy believed that her mother had really wanted a boy and this was why she would never tell her that she was attractive or let her look in a mirror. Frau Kiesler's version of this story tallies in detail but varies in motivation. She wanted, she said, to ensure that her daughter did not come to rely on her beauty but would instead develop other skills, and not be spoiled: “When she was dressed for a party, and looked very lovely, I would say ‘You look very well.’ When she did something clever I would tell her ‘You did all right.’ But I underemphasized praise and flattery, hoping in this way, to balance the scales for her.”6One shouldn't be too surprised by the comments of Hedy's mother; they reflect common theories of parenting in her day. Later, Hedy would respond to her own children's needs in a disconcertingly similar manner.
In any case, Frau Kiesler did not always manage to control her unruly daughter, even less so how other people reacted to her. A besotted schoolteacher, when told to allow her no special favors, replied that, “When she walks towards me, and looks at me, I can do nothing.”7
When she was twelve, Hedy's grandmother, Rosa Lichtwitz, died. Taking advantage of her mother's temporary distraction, she entered a beauty contest. With the winnings, she bought her first fur coat. We may imagine what Trude Kiesler's response to this frivolity was.
Still it was Frau Kiesler who was responsible for introducing Hedy to the wonders of the stage. “One day,” Hedy remembered, “mother promised me a nice present if I were good. The present was a visit, my first, to the theatre. I saw a stage play for the first time. I was thrilled and speechless. I don't remember the play, its title or anything about it. But I never forgot the general impression. School held but one interest from then on. I took part in school plays and festivals. My first big part came in Hansel and Gretel.” The first film she saw that had the same effect on her was Fritz Lang's Metropolis, released when she was thirteen.8
Along with theater, Hedy developed an early interest in young men, one too that was to accompany her throughout life. Her first true love was a boy who has survived in the telling only as Hans. When she was not quite sixteen, he gave her her first kiss in the Vienna Woods; he was, she remembered, the director of a chain of shoe factories.9 In another interview, many years later, she said he was twenty-five years old and already seeing a girlfriend of hers. One day, when she was supposed to be at a piano lesson, she ran off to the cemetery to try to resolve her loyalties to her friend or to Hans. When she returned home, she found that everyone had become hysterical looking for her. Eventually, she and her girlfriend sat down and said, “This can't go on”; they instructed Hans to choose between them. He chose Hedy: “I was in heaven. We had secret meetings, it was all so exciting and romantic. Once, though, my father caught me coming home late—it must have been nine-thirty. He scared me and then I think he hit me, in my face.”10
Another friend of Hedy's from her Döbling days was Franz Antel, later to become a film director. All the young men in the area fell in love with Hedy, he remembered, but she only had eyes for the rising Austrian actor, Wolf Albach-Retty (later to become the father of Romy Schneider), who was eight years her senior and kept her for himself. He was a good-looking young man and liked to flirt with the other teenagers. Hedy too was beautiful, with a strong personality, and they made a striking young couple.11
Hedy's early childhood may have been protected but it was not without adventure and trauma—according to Ecstasy and Me, her early experiences included attracting the attention of a flasher, being raped, and becoming the focus of attention of, first, a lesbian cook and then a lesbian family friend. She herself had a teenage lesbian experience while at finishing school in Switzerland.12
Perhaps more reliably, her mother recalled later that
steadfast as she is within, she is also a chameleon. She changes with the people she is with. Superficially, she changes, and for the time. As when she had her first beau, at home in Vienna. She must then have been twelve. This was a very learned boy, an intellectual. Suddenly Hedy was the best in the school! She was not a bad pupil, our Hedl, but she was not the best. All at once, she was the best! All at once, her nose was all the time in a book, a big heavy book! I only wish it could have lasted longer, that one!13
A later beau was a very intense Russian boy, filled with the new idealism of his native land. When Hedy was told to apologize to her father for a misdemeanor, she announced that, “I will say the words, but—[my] thoughts are free.” Frau Kiesler blamed the Russian.14
Despite the temporary influence of the intellectual boyfriend, Hedy was easily distracted from her studies. When she was in Switzerland, she realized that she was in danger of missing a beauty contest in Vienna. She persuaded a friend to cable the school in her parents’ names and request that she be allowed to return home.
She said later that although she had always wanted to be an actress, she took up designing and went to design classes to occupy the “waiting time” before acting.15 Ironically, designing and inventing would eventually become as much a part of her legacy as acting. That, however, was far in the future. For the time being, she learned her European languages, how to cook and sew, and with her neighbor's child, Hancy Weiler, dreamed of fame on the stage.
According to Christopher Young's account of her life, around this time Hedy met Franz von Hochstetten on an Alpine hiking trip and they became engaged.16 Becoming engaged seems to have been a particularly delightful pleasure for the young Hedy, and one probably doesn't need to linger too long on the unfortunate von Hochstetten, for whom a worse fate was in store.
2
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
HEDY NOW SIGNED UP for acting classes with Professor Arndt in Vienna.1According to Ecstasy and Me and several interviews that she gave, Hedy forged a handwritten note to the school from her mother and slipped off one day to Austria's largest film studio, Sascha Film Studios, where she talked herself into a job as a script clerk. While there she overheard the assistant director say he would be interviewing actresses the next day to play a secretary. Hedy seized the opportunity: “Between scenes I went to the make-up table of one of the actresses and put on lipstick, eyebrow pencil and powder. I combed out my hair which I always have liked to wear long and free and went back on to the set. Going to the assistant director, I said boldly, ‘I want to play the part of the secretary.’ ”2 According to Ecstasy and Me, her boldness landed her a small part in her first film: Alexis Granowsky's Storm in a Water Glass (Die Blumenfrau von Lindenau/Sturm im Wasserglas). That assertion, however, was mistaken, as Storm was directed by Georgjacoby in 1931, and Hedy's first film was actually Jacoby's Gold on the Street (Geld aufder Strasse), which was released by Sascha Film in 1930.