When Mandl heard about it, he forbade his wife to visit the theatre and even ordered her not to leave the house.
Prince Starhemberg, Austria’s iron man, was seen frequently in Hedi’s company until her husband was reported to have told him:
“If this keeps up, our friendship ends here.”
The headline told the rest of the story: “‘Ecstasy’ Star to Quit Rich Mate for Stage.”
Hedy and Mandl had filed a mutual divorce action in Vienna, the story reported. They were not expected to wait for a trial, however, “but would go to Riga, Latvia, the Reno of Europe,” for a quickie divorce.
Hedy had not even waited for a quickie divorce, however. By the time the story appeared, she had already escaped to London and was on her way to the United States. The role in The Women at the Josefstadt may have been a ruse. Or Hedy may have realized that she could not remain in Austria with its intensifying anti-Semitism and have taken the first opportunity to leave, as so many other Jewish or anti-Nazi actors and directors were doing—among them Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Anatole Litvak, Marlene Dietrich, Conrad Veidt, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, and Walter Slezak. She did not drug her maid, nor did she leave with merely the clothes on her back. She was both smarter and more practical than that:
I cannot tell even now how I managed to make my escape. I cannot give the names of the one or two who helped me. Such a revelation would not help them now. But I am sure that not in any motion picture would an escape scene be more dramatic. It was at night that I began my packing. My husband and I had another bitter quarrel and he had gone off to one of his hunting lodges. And I had known, as somehow we do know these things, that this was our last quarrel. I knew that the time had come, that the hour had struck, as they say in novels, that this time I would succeed….
I packed my jewels and such furs and clothes as I could take with me. I think I had about two large trunks and two small ones and three suitcases. I had to take as many of my jewels and furs as I could manage to carry with me because I could not, of course, take much money out of the country with me. Very little money, indeed. I knew that I was burning all of my bridges behind me. I was leaving my home. I was leaving my mother and my friends. You do not blame me, I am sure. I was leaving security. But so much stronger than anything else was my wish to come to Hollywood that I had no fear and—I did it.
I managed to leave Vienna that night, veiled and incognito and with all the trappings of a melodrama mystery. And I went straight through to London.
In London, whether fortuitously or by design, Hedy met Louis B. Mayer, fifty-three years old that year, the head of MGM Studios and the highest-paid executive in the United States. Mayer had sailed to Europe some weeks earlier to take the waters at Carlsbad, to inspect the new studios north of London in which MGM had recently invested, and to find writers who could turn out original stories for an American market that went to the movies faithfully twice a week or more.
“At a small evening party,” Hedy recalled in 1938, “I did meet Mr. Mayer. We talked a little that night and that was all. He did not speak to me about pictures, nor did I talk to him about what I was doing and where I was going. But I knew very well that Mr. Mayer was the one who would, if he could, help me to take the last step on my long journey to Hollywood.”
She told a less demure story later, in her ghostwritten book Ecstasy and Me, which drew on many hours of interviews and dictation. An American agent, she said, Bob Ritchie, called her in her London hotel room and offered to introduce her to Mayer. She didn’t know who he was. Ritchie enlightened her. They went to see him. “I saw Ecstasy,” he told her, waving an unlit cigar. “Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood. Never. A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatregoers. You’re lovely, but I have the family point of view. I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around a screen.” And yet, Hedy adds, “he was giving me close-up inspections from every angle.” After more discussion, Mayer offered her a minimal contract: six months at $125 a week if she paid her own way to America. Hedy was confident enough to reject the offer and walk out.
At this point the two versions of the story more or less converge. Hedy wanted a contract with MGM, but she wanted better terms. She therefore had to find a way to impress Louis B. Mayer. He and his wife were sailing home on the Normandie, the fast, elegant French ocean liner that was at the time the largest ship in the world, 1,028 feet long and 117 feet wide—more than three city blocks long, that is, and half a block wide—with a service speed of twenty-nine knots, decorated beautifully in contemporary Art Deco.
Hedy bought a ticket. When the Normandie sailed on 25 September she was aboard with what she had managed to remove from Austria of her worldly goods. And “on board ship as, frankly, I had hoped, we became friendly, Mr. and Mrs. Mayer and I.” Hedy in the meantime, in her words, “became the center of attention for all the young males aboard, and was able to parade them back and forth past Mr. Mayer.” That, and several more meetings and discussions, did the trick: Mayer offered her $500 a week—about $8,000 today—on a seven-year contract “with the usual escalators of $250. All predicated on her agreement to cooperate in taking English lessons and also dependent on her agreement to change her name.”
In 1938, Hedy said that Margaret Mayer, Louis’s wife, invented her stage name, Hedy Lamarr. “We all agreed,” Hedy recalled, “that Hedy Kiesler was not good for the theatre marquees. It was not a name that could be readily pronounced. And so one evening at dinner Mrs. Mayer announced to us, ‘I have thought of a name for you, Hedy. What about Hedy Lamarr?’ And Hedy Lamarr it was—and is.”
The Viennese screenwriter Walter Reisch, a recent hire, was also on board the Normandie on that late-September voyage. (So were the William Bullitts, whom Hedy did not yet know, the French actress Danielle Darrieux, the English actress Greer Garson, and many other notables.) Reisch’s story of Hedy’s renaming is earthier than Hedy’s and more detailed:
[Mayer] didn’t like Kiesler, because that sounded too German to him, and Germany at that time had fallen into deep discredit all over the world; and he couldn’t use Mandl because the husband would create difficulties. So they tried to figure out what to do about her name: Every afternoon they held story conferences around the Ping-Pong table on the “A” deck of the Normandie with [Mayer’s assistants Howard] Strickling, [Benny] Thau, and all the others, trying to decide how to go about introducing the young beauty to the members of the New York press who would infallibly arrive on the boat.
Now earlier, one of Hollywood’s most famous motion picture stars, one of the most beautiful girls in Hollywood—well under thirty—had died. Her name was Barbara La Marr. Somehow that name was the property of MGM. Louis B. Mayer, not superstitious at all, picked that name and said, “We are going to replace death with life.” And he coined the name Hedy Lamarr. She had no idea that she was getting the name of a dead motion-picture star. When we arrived at Ellis Island, a girl more beautiful than any ever seen in America, by the name of Hedy Lamarr, came down the gangplank: not anybody’s daughter, not anybody’s sister or relative… a star was born.
Barbara La Marr’s death was more than simply the tragedy of a beautiful woman dying young. The actress had in fact been a Mayer favorite whom he had touted as “the most beautiful girl in the world.” She had been a heroin addict, and she had died of tuberculosis and nephritis at twenty-nine. If Margaret Mayer had indeed introduced Hedy Kiesler to her new name, a name borrowed from a dead actress who had been a favorite of her husband, a well-known philanderer, was she delivering a blessing or a curse?