arrived in Vienna in April 1931 to hold auditions for his forthcoming production of Edouard Bourdet's comedy The Weaker Sex. Meanwhile, he was pitching a last-ditch battle to prevent his acting school, the Reinhardt Seminar, from folding. A man for whom there was never enough time, Reinhardt shuttled between the two sets of demands, arranging private financing for the acting school and auditioning a queue of aspiring actors whose hearts’ desire was to work for Herr Professor. Playing for Reinhardt, as everyone knew, could make an actor's name, and unfilled parts were few as many of the leading roles had been taken by cast members from the Berlin production. To no one's surprise, Reinhardt regular Paula Wessely was soon named, but in early May he unexpectedly announced that the role of the First American would go to the hitherto unknown Hedy Kiesler. The part was small but “nett” (nice).9Overjoyed as Hedy must have been, there was more good news to come.
Another minor cast member was the future Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist George Weller. According to Weller, it was during the rehearsal of a café scene with Hedy that Herr Professor turned to a group of reporters who were hanging around the set and said, “Hedy Kiesler is the most beautiful girl in the world.” Word soon swept through the acting community. By October 1931, the trade paper Lichtbildbühne was quoting Reinhardt on the extraordinary beauty of Hedy Kiesler, a description soon to be echoed by Louis B. Mayer. Praise such as this was not awarded lightly; all Hedy Kiesler had to do now was learn how to act.
Reinhardt apparently instructed Weller to teach Hedy some appropriate American songs. Hedy's idol, Weller soon discovered, was the American tennis player Helen Wills; otherwise, her familiarity with American culture was limited to renditions of “Yes Sir, That's My Baby” (she sang the title only for all lines regardless of length), “Yes! We Have No Bananas” (she hummed the melody), and “Sonny Boy” (she sang all the words and knew the melody). These and other exercises in Americanization took place in a small room backstage.10
The Weaker Sex ran at the Theater in der Josefstadt from 8 May to 8 June 1931 and received enthusiastic reviews, with critics opining that this was now as much or even more a Max Reinhardt play than the original by Edouard Bourdet. Hedy attracted no critical notices but it was a thrilling start, particularly in a city that valued its theaters infinitely more than its film productions and valued Max Reinhardt most of all.
Playing in the Theater in der Josefstadt also offered Hedy the opportunity to spend time with its sometime-manager, Otto Preminger, and his friend Sam Spiegel. According to Franz Antel (Hedy's childhood neighbor), Antel made the introductions. In his memoir, Antel recalls when, as a young man moving up in the 1930s film business, he learned that Sam Spiegel was in town. Knowing that Spiegel had a taste for pretty young women, Antel introduced first himself, and then a number of handpicked Viennese beauties. Of these, the most stunning was Hedy Kiesler, a school friend of his friend Melly Frankfurter. Spiegel was instantly smitten and asked her out to dinner and dancing and, Antel discreetly murmurs, whatever usually follows. Spiegel owned a large Ford coupé and competed with Preminger for the young woman's attentions. The rising producer would take her out to the Döblinger Bad and the Femina.11
Working with Reinhardt was to open doors for the rising star as it did for so many other aspiring young actors of her generation. Being a Reinhardt actor was an effective calling card and anyone who could claim an association, particularly those who later emigrated to Hollywood, did. In August 1931, Hedy packed her bags and left for Berlin.
She was not alone in making this journey; many others in the Austrian film industry also followed the promise of money and opportunity to the capital of German-language filmmaking. The transition from silent cinema to talkies was under way, and the conventional German accent was considered too harsh by many. Audiences were reportedly roaring with laughter as previously silent stars opened their mouths and produced streams of sibilants and double consonants. The softer intonations of Southern Germany and Austria were more agreeable, and demand for actors from these regions grew, especially for the romantic roles. Hedy was also literally not alone; she traveled with Alfred (Fred) Döderlein, who was also en route from Vienna to Berlin and with whom she was having a brief affair.
Berlin was a magnet for the artistic community of the day. One of its adopted sons was Christopher Isherwood, whose account of the capital's decadence was immortalized onstage and then film with Cabaret, an adaptation of his Berlin Stories. Another vivid chronicler was Otto Friedrich. In Before the Deluge, he depicts Berlin in the decades between world wars as its population first saw the economy crumble beneath inflation and unemployment and then soar on the back of financial speculation; political instability was the order of the day, and militarism the first resort of the ruling classes. This was a city where hunger and artistic brilliance were bedfellows and all shades of sexual expression were on parade. The twenties were not the Golden Years for everyone, Friedrich reminds us, yet the names of the people, places, and events most associated with the Berlin of that time have retained a magical ring: “Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker, the grandiose productions of Max Reinhardt's ‘Theatre of the 5,000,’ three opera companies running simultaneously under Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Erich Kleiber, the opening night of Wozzeck and The Threepenny Opera.”12 Albert Einstein moved to Berlin, as did W. H. Auden and Isherwood; Vladimir Nabokov gave tennis lessons to the wealthy as their children raced their new motorcars along the recently constructed speedway. “Berlin's nightclubs were the most uninhibited in Europe; its booted and umbrella-waving street-walkers the most bizarre,” Friedrich continues. “Above all, Berlin in the 1920s represented a state of mind, a sense of freedom and exhilaration. And because it was so utterly destroyed after a flowering of less than fifteen years, it has become a kind of mythical city, a lost paradise.”13 No wonder, then, that Hedy should be drawn to this pulsating Center City.
By most accounts, Hedy moved to Berlin to study under Max Reinhardt; however, the Deutsches Theater archive has no record of her attendance in either Reinhardt's courses or in his Berlin productions. Certainly, she would have kept up with Reinhardt in Berlin; in fact, Hedy went to work with another great theater name of the day, Alexis Granowsky.
Through Granowsky, Hedy would encounter a circle of Russian émigrés whose political leanings were far to the left. Leo Lania describes Granowsky as “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met: a character out of a Russian novel.”14 He had been born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Riga and lived a life of privilege before the First World War, studying and traveling in Europe and mastering several languages. The Russian Revolution “made him a beggar,” according to Lania, “but poverty impressed him as little as wealth.” A close friend of Chagall and Mayakovsky and Maxim Gorky and his wife, in Russia Granowsky had been at the center of a coterie of Jewish and Soviet intellectuals. His Jewish Academic Theatre of Moscow (GOSET) became the sensation of Moscow and “the Bolsheviks overwhelmed him with honours, which in those years of civil war often had to take the place of bread, or even coal to heat his theatre…. The Soviet Government even let him keep his valuable library and his rare collection of erotic prints.”15 After a performance at GOSET, this group of intellectuals would retire to the Gorkys’ Moscow apartment and argue about art, politics, and theater through the night.
Granowsky's first film, Jewish Happiness, was produced for Sovkino in 1925, but it was in theater that he flourished. When Freud saw his stage production of Night in the Old Market in Vienna, he said he was “deeply moved.”16 By the 1930s, however, the advent of a more hard-line approach to the arts in the Soviet Union forced Granowsky to flee the country. “He thought himself a Western European—by culture and upbringing. But he was a Russian. This contradiction was his ruin.”17 After a few productions at the Reinhardt Theatre in Berlin, Granowsky turned to filmmaking, making his German debut with The Trunks of Mr. O. F. (Die KofferDesHerrnO.F).
Lania, himself a Russian Jew, journalist, and writer, who had been brought up in Vienna and had long been a Communist, wrote the script for Granowsky. He too was working with Reinhardt at the time,
