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 pesos a month to support her and their children. His fourth wife 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
