eyes and her voice. She appeared sophisticated and na'ive at the same time—great international hostess and sweet Viennese girl.”25 They talked about her father, whom Liepmann had known. He was a shrewd businessman, Liepmann remembered, tall, handsome, and always well dressed, with blue eyes and dark hair growing grey at the temples. Hedy sighed at the thought of “my poor old daddy,” but she was soon swept offby another admirer for a waltz. How could the repellent Mandl have won himself such a beautiful young bride, Liepmann wondered aloud to his friend Ödön von Horvath.
According to von Horvath, the Kieslers had found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy after the death of Hedy's father. Hedy and her mother attempted to win back some of their lost fortune on the stock exchange and, in doing so, lost the rest. Hedy then took a job as a stenographer but was much too pretty to work in an office, “You know what I mean,” von Horvath added suggestively. At last, through the intervention of an old family friend, Hedy was hired at Sascha Studios and it was there that Machaty discovered her. The accuracy of the report is questionable, given that Liepmann apparently believed Emil Kiesler had died a few years previously (Herr Kiesler died unexpectedly of a heart attack a year later in February 1935).
At this point, Horvath paused and both men listened as a detachment of Heimwehr militia passed by; a single light coming from above suggesting that Mandl and von Starhemberg were engaged in some menacing plot. “Why did she play in Ecstasy at all?” Liepmann wondered. Horvath shrugged. “I think she can hardly be blamed for it,” he answered. “The film itself is a very ambitious and purely artistic work and I think that nobody, least of all Hedy, had the faintest idea that the great public would regard it as a ‘naughty’ film.”
Sympathetic as he was to Hedy's suffering over the public reception of the film in the previous year, von Horvath suggested that she was foolish not to have kept a low profile after the scandal erupted. Instead, she took a part in Max Reinhardt's 1931 stage production of The Weaker Sex, cast most likely because of her notoriety as much as her acting.
Gripping Liepmann's arm, Horvath pointed to the figures of Mandl and von Starhemberg walking together arm in arm. Hedy left her dancing partner and walked over to Mandl. The band struck up a waltz and the munitions baron began to dance with his young wife. Liepmann watched him lean over and say something into her ear and observed how her eyes opened wide, apparently in horror. More political machinations were afoot.
There are perhaps too many inaccuracies in Liepmann's story to render it useful but certainly it is worth mulling over the similarities between the portrayal of the aging husband, unflattering as it was, in Ecstasy and Mandl's own stature and status. Nor should one dismiss the possibility that Hedy's very youthful marriage was sanctioned by her parents because of the financial security they felt it would bring her. Certainly, like Sissy, she may have felt trapped by the obnoxious Mandl and his wealth, age, and position.
In August 1934, Ecstasy was entered at the Second Venice Film Festival. The version enjoyed by festivalgoers was the one ending with Eva nursing her baby while Adam lost himself in work.26 Because the festival still had no access to a suitable cinema, Ecstasy was screened, as were other entries, in the open air. As darkness fell, the audience took their seats in the garden of the Hotel Excelsior to watch Machaty's film. They were enchanted and saluted the ending with a standing ovation and calls of “Bravo!” It was the longest round of applause to greet any film at the festival. The next day on the Lido, all the talk was of Ecstasy. Should Eva have left her husband? Should they have stayed together to bring up their child? As Francesco Bono remarks, overnight the unknown Austrian Hedwig Kiesler was transformed into a diva. Dressed in the most elegant designs, she was seen around Venice with one arm linked to her husband (apparently now reconciled to his wife's scandalous performance) and the other arm linked to von Starhemberg, who was in town conducting business with Mussolini. One journalist was certain he spotted the young star throwing off her clothes and jumping naked into the sea.27
Needless to say, controversy also followed the screening of Ecstasy, with the influential Catholic press outraged by its content. II Duce (Mussolini) demanded that a private screening of the work be held in his home at the Villa Torlonia. A print was flown to him in Rome where he is rumored to have gasped over Hedy's beauty, a signal that the film could continue to be shown. As Francesco Bono advises, these anecdotes should be taken with a pinch of salt; particularly in this case, as Hedy already knew Mussolini from his friendship with Mandl.28 Whether the Pope actually banned the film is again a moot point; in any case, this screening turned out to be the only opportunity Italian audiences had to see Ecstasy, which received no further commercial release. The Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film that year went to a rather different offering, Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, but Gustav Machaty won the Cup of the City of Venice as Best Director.
Tiring of life as a trophy bride, Hedy turned to her old mentor, Max Reinhardt. When Mandl, attending to business abroad, deposited her with some friends of his in St. Wolfgang, she persuaded them to drive her to Salzburg. There she met Reinhardt and they had a long talk. Reinhardt, however, could offer her nothing as long as Mandl was against her return to work.
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
