“Mandl also sold arms to Bolivia during the Chaco War,” the historian writes—a brutal war fought from 1932 to 1935 between Bolivia and Paraguay—and reportedly armed both sides in the Spanish Civil War that began in July 1936. And despite his support of the Austrian nationalist Heimwehr, Mandl sold munitions and munitions development services to Nazi Germany during these years as well.
Mandl revealed at least some of his business activities to his wife. “He would often ask my advice about matters of importance,” Hedy recalled. “I think he asked me not only because he had, though he would not ever admit it, a respect for my judgment, but also because he knew that I was never afraid to tell him the truth. And a man in his position cannot often be sure that people will tell him the truth.”
He was not always happy with Hedy’s response, however:
Sometimes he would get flaming angry at me for speaking the truth to him. Once we had one of our most terrible battles because I told him that I couldn’t bear his power—I couldn’t bear it that he could buy everyone and everything. I told him that there were things he couldn’t buy, had he ever thought of that… that there are things no one can buy, devotion and loyalty and love—yes, and love, I said. And some day, I warned him, he would find this out and on that day he would be lonely and without friends. He was in a rage with me. But just the same he always came back to me for my opinion.
Hedy’s opinion of business matters was evidently the only opinion Mandl welcomed from his wife. “Soon I knew that as in my own house I had nothing to say, so in my own life I had nothing to say either. And as I, too, am an autocrat, disaster was inevitable.” The dining room of the Mandls’ house was hung with Gobelin tapestries, the windows glazed with antique stained glass. The “huge, long table” that ran down the center of the room seated twenty-four, and Mandl had bought himself what he called “a nice Christmas present” one year of a solid-gold table service. Hedy remembered the long table covered thick one dinner-party evening with blue violets, “and in these blue violets were scattered lots and lots of orchids so that it was all a deep rich blue and with those golden dishes, it looked but fantastic.”
In the midst of such lavish abundance, Hedy said, “we entertained and were entertained by diplomats and men of high political position, makers and breakers of dynasties, financiers who manipulate the stock exchanges of the world.” Mussolini was a guest, Austrian and German generals and admirals, but not Hitler: the Nazis classified Mandl as a Jew—“the Jew, Mandl,” Joseph Goebbels would call him contemptuously in a 1937 speech. Hedy was reduced to a graceful automaton by the protocol of such events, by her husband’s expectations of her, and by her own indifference as well. “I did not do more than smile when I should smile and look grave when I should look grave. I was not interested enough in these things to play an active part in them.”
She was not deaf, however. She listened to what was said. She was far more intelligent than her husband and his guests gave her credit for. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she would famously say. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She did, but she listened and learned.
She and her powerful husband were not always unhappy. “There were times when we had fun together,” she said. “There were times when we were good friends…. There were times when we went on hunting trips together, the two of us alone. We would sit for long hours concealed behind a camouflage waiting for our quarry. There were long hours of solitude and silence which, I think, we shared happily.”
But Mandl was an insecure and jealous man. He assigned someone among their servants to listen in to Hedy’s phone calls. If she spoke the word “picture,” he was livid, even if she only happened to be discussing something to hang on the wall. “He was always afraid that I would try to go back to the stage,” she said, “back to pictures. At such times he would always taunt me with Ecstasy, hurl reproaches and cruelties at me.” When they dined out, he brooded in constant surveillance. “My husband would sit there smoking and watching me, watching me and not speaking at all except to say now and then, ‘Who are you looking at? Who is there at that table where you are looking?’ Things like that. At first I tried always to explain, to laugh at him for being so foolish about nothing. But then, after a time, I did not try to explain at all. It was useless.”
Early in 1935, everything changed for Hedy. She had already made two attempts to escape, she would claim, “but both times I was caught and brought back. And I was watched and guarded more closely than ever.” What changed was her father, the person to whom she had always been closest. “One night we were all at dinner at one of our hunting lodges where we were spending a holiday,” she said. “In the middle of dinner my father rose from the table and asked to be excused. His face was white, his eyes were strange, and I felt a sickness at my heart. I felt that something must be wrong with him, very wrong.”
The next day Emil Kiesler seemed better. He denied that anything was wrong with him. “But still he did not seem to ever be quite himself again after that night,” Hedy said. “He looked tired and he gave up many of the sports at which he had always excelled. He worried me and every day I went to my parents’ apartment to see him.”
Then one day it was too late:
I was out driving with a woman friend of mine. We drove finally to the apartment house where my parents lived. My mother, I knew, was out. My father was out, too, I thought, it being early in the afternoon, not more than two o’clock. Well, I would wait for a while and then go up. And so we sat in the car and talked, my friend and I. We must have sat there talking for half an hour…. At last I happened to glance up at the windows of my parents’ apartment. And it was as if some icy hand had caught my heart. I think I knew right then.
“Look,” I said, “the shades are all drawn! Why should they have the shades drawn at two o’clock in the afternoon?”
I jumped out of the car as if I were shot and rushed up the stairs. I opened the door of the apartment, realizing that it was strange I did not have to ring or knock or use my key. A strange man met me in the hall. I saw other strangers there, one or two neighbors standing about…. The strange man said to me, “Are you the daughter?” I said that I was. And then he told me that my father had passed away twenty minutes ago.
So while I had been sitting outside in that car, while I had been talking of little nothings, while I had been so near him, my father was dying, alone.
Emil Kiesler died of a massive heart attack. An attack of angina with its severe pain had driven him from the dinner table when Hedy had first realized that he was ill. In the family apartment, after his body was removed, she found a cigarette box on which he had scrawled—“in his last agony,” she thought—“Please, Hedy, take good care of Mother.”
She grieved for a year. “I wore black, nothing but black. I couldn’t face any colors. I couldn’t see a mirror. I couldn’t face people. Wherever I went I could see my father as I had seen him last. And during all this time—I must say this—my husband was very kind to me, very helpful to us all.” After a year she recognized that it was time to cease grieving. “It was not fair to my mother…. It was not fair to my father. He would have disliked such grief.”