In addition, and most relevant to Hedy’s eventual purposes, Walter and his staff were involved with developing methods of remote control for their torpedoes. They would also have been aware of work at the German Aviation Research Institute in Berlin Adlershof on radio-controlled anti-ship glide bombs, because at least one of the glide bombs under development, the Henschel Hs 293A, used hydrogen peroxide for propulsion.
The German navy’s work on torpedo control had begun in 1935, early enough for Hedy to have heard about it. Radio control of submarine torpedoes was difficult—radio signals don’t travel far through seawater—and most German specialists favored wire guidance, the torpedo paying out a thin insulated wire behind it as it left the submarine that connected it electrically to a human controller guiding its path. But the anti-ship glide bombs under development for delivery by plane were radio controlled. Furthermore, they used a system of frequency selection that might have offered Hedy one piece of the puzzle of how to prevent a radio-control signal from being jammed.
The radio-control system that the Germans used on their Fritz X and Henschel Hs 293 glide bombs, an American guided-missile expert writes, featured a transmitter that “could operate on any of 18 pre-launch selectable frequencies, spaced 100 KHz apart, between 48 and 50 MHz. This capability was designed into the system to enable coordinated simultaneous mass attacks by formations of bombers and allowed up to 18 missiles to be separately controlled at one time. It also helped to negate the effects of any enemy electronic jamming directed at the guidance system.”
So the German system did not move the transmission around among radio frequencies to avoid a jamming signal; it merely assigned the communications between each bomber and its single glide bomb to one of eighteen different radio frequencies, allowing each plane to control its own bomb without radio interference from other bombers, which had similarly been assigned different exclusive frequencies spaced one hundred kilohertz apart in the frequency band between forty-eight and fifty megahertz. Since each bomber-missile pair communicated on only one frequency, the enemy could still jam the signal, but he might need a few minutes to figure out which of eighteen different frequencies he had to jam to confuse a particular bomb heading his way.
Hedy Kiesler Mandl met Hellmuth Walter in December 1936. The occasion was the annual Christmas gala at the Hirtenberger factory in Hirtenberg, Austria. “He was very interesting,” she told an interviewer late in life of her meeting with Walter. “As we had dinner, he was talking about his remote-controlled, wakeless torpedo.” The torpedo in question was wire guided and hydrogen peroxide powered; the steam that drove the torpedo that resulted from H2O2 decomposition quickly dissipated in seawater, leaving no telltale wake, another advantage of the system. The torpedo had other problems, it seemed, related to the relatively small volume of fuel it could carry.
All this knowledge of developing German military technology was Hedy’s capital as she prepared herself to leave Fritz Mandl and Austria and find her way to Hollywood. She spoke of it later as protective, as information she could use or did use to persuade Mandl to allow her to leave him, but wasn’t it just as likely to be dangerous for her to know? Or did she count on the chauvinism of the German military men with whom she socialized—standing still and looking stupid—to protect her?
Hedy told various tales of how she freed herself from Fritz Mandl. She would have had reason to lie about their breakup. She had already been stigmatized for her appearance in Ecstasy—the film had been publicly censored in the United States. Divorce was a scandal in 1930s America; elaborating a story of brutal confinement and clever escape might avoid further stigma.
In the most elaborate version Hedy told, she picked out one of her housemaids who closely resembled her in height, weight, and coloring, befriended the maid, studied the maid’s manner until she was confident she could imitate it, drugged her one day by putting sleeping pills in her coffee, dressed in her uniform and slipped out of the house, raced for the train to Paris, filed for a French divorce on the sardonic ground of desertion, and raced on to London to put herself beyond Mandl’s grasp. The story is so Bluebeardian that it may well have been an invention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity department.
Hedy came closest to telling the truth about her breakup with Fritz Mandl in a 1938 as-told- to interview. Even there she left out the backstory, which can be at least partly reconstructed from contemporary newspaper reports and later documents.
After attending the Christmas gala at her husband’s factory in Hirtenberg, Hedy spent the winter season at St. Moritz, the fashionable Swiss ski resort where the 1928 Winter Olympics had been held. Her husband did not accompany her. His work may have kept him away—he was already busy sequestering assets in Switzerland and investing in Argentina—or he and Hedy may have separated after one of their escalating series of battles. “I felt more and more,” she said in 1938, “every day now, every hour, that I must escape or be strangled to death by luxury, by a vain attempt to find happiness.”
Part of that vain attempt at St. Moritz was apparently a brief affair with the writer Erich Maria Remarque, famous for his World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front and a man like her father, tall, older, handsome, and confident. Remarque spent two months, January and February 1937, vacationing at St. Moritz, his biographer reports, summarizing his experience afterward in a diary entry. “‘Went walking to begin with; afterwards mostly sat in the bar,’ his diary records…. Then follows a selective list of the people he associated with [including the writers Louis Bromfield and Georges Simenon, the Hollywood stars Kay Francis and Eleanor Boardman, and the film directors Leni Riefenstahl and William Wyler]…. Casually infiltrated into the list is the single name Hedy, the only person not fully identified or attributed with an explanatory word or two. Remarque’s discretion betrays as much as it conceals the degree of intimacy between them.”
Remarque’s new novel, Three Comrades, had begun serialization in Good Housekeeping magazine in January and would be published in May. The novelist’s previous works had been burned in Germany in the notorious Nazi-sponsored book burning in 1933, however, and Remarque himself was persona non grata there. It’s easy to see what he and Hedy had in common—including, as she would make clear in America, contempt for the Nazis.
A key requirement for a successful transformation of personal identity is a mentor or model to guide the novice over the treacherous crevasse that separates the old identity from the new. Given what followed in Hedy’s life that crucial year, Remarque probably filled that role for her. He himself had already transitioned successfully from war-weary soldier to best-selling novelist. He had gone into exile from his homeland as well, driven there by the gathering power of fascism.
Whatever happened between the German novelist and the Austrian film star at St. Moritz, Hedy returned to Vienna sometime that late winter or spring determined to renew her career as an actress. Fritz Mandl was equally determined that she should not. He failed to anticipate that Hedy might appeal to his political partner and close friend Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg. A report in New York’s Sunday News on 19 September 1937 describes what followed:
Hedi is expected to appear at the Josefstadt Theatre in Clare Boothe’s play, “The Women,” which is about to be produced in German.
Although the invitation to play a leading role came from Director Horch, it is common knowledge here that Hedi arranged the request, presumably through Prince Starhemberg, her husband’s closest friend.