Friedrich “Fritz” Mandl was a heavyweight, thirty-three years old and the third-richest man in Austria. His wealth had originated in a family-owned ammunition factory in Hirtenberg, a small town about twenty-five miles southwest of Vienna, which had begun making rifle cartridges for the armies of Europe soon after their invention in America during the Civil War. Mandl’s father, Alexander, had hired him to rebuild the Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik in the aftermath of its nearly complete destruction by arson during labor troubles in 1920, and in 1924 he became general manager. By the time Mandl began courting Hedy, a historian writes, “he had negotiated agreements with arms manufacturers in France, Germany, and Italy, and controlled arms plants in Poland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands.”
Having failed to win Hedy’s attention with notes and flowers, Mandl called her mother at home. “He introduced himself,” Hedy said, “and then he asked my mother if he might come to our house to meet me. My mother did not know how to say ‘no’ to what was, after all, a legitimate request.” Trude Kiesler mentioned a day, and Mandl turned up hat in hand.
He was not a tall man; in photographs he appears to be no taller than Hedy, who was five feet seven. His head was large, his face fleshy, his body stocky and apparently powerful. Time would describe him at this point in his life as “a young viveur who gambled for high stakes, and kept fancy apartments.” He was half-Jewish; his Jewish father, Alexander, had fallen in love with a family chambermaid who was Catholic and had converted to her faith and married her after Fritz was born. By all accounts Fritz was a womanizer and an arriviste, already once divorced. He was also a canny and ruthless businessman. “He was so powerful,” Hedy said, “so influential, so rich, that always he had been able to arrange everything in his life just as he wished it…. The afternoon he first came I was, I am afraid, very rude to him…. It was the first clash of our wills. There were to be many.”
If Mandl had not been smitten before, Hedy’s disdain beguiled him. The courtship began:
He asked me to go to dinner with him that night. But I would not go. He then telephoned to me every day, many times a day, and asked me to dine, to dance, after the theatre. At first I would not go. He would come again and again to my house, which was the only place where I would receive him. And every night he would be in the theatre. And every night and in the daytimes he would send great baskets and boxes of flowers.
When he came to my house he talked to me about hunting, which he loves and which I also love. He told me about his munitions factory. He explained how his father had built the factory but how when he, Fritz, was nineteen years old, the factory burned to the ground and much of the fortune was wiped out and how he had had to build it all up again, the factory and the fortune too. So that he had really made the fortune himself. This gave me a different idea of him from the one I had had. This was not inherited power. This was the stuff of power itself. I liked that.
Hedy’s model of a man was her father, but if her father was a frigate, Mandl was a battleship:
I began to feel attracted by the brain of the man, by his tremendous power, by his charm which, when he wished, could be as powerful as his brain. I love strength. I love it. I think that all women love strength in a man….
Then, suddenly, he was the most beautiful—no, I mean the most attractive—man in the world to me.
And I knew that I was in love with him, madly in love with him.
We became engaged as soon as I knew this and I was terribly happy. I was in love. I was happy. I was proud. I was proud of him. I was proud of myself. I was proud of his brilliance and strength and power….
He had the most amazing brain…. There was nothing he did not know. There was not a question I, or anyone else, could ask him that he could not answer. Ask him a formula in chemistry and he would give it to you. Ask him about the habits of wild animals, how glass is made, what about the laws of gravitation—politics, of course, since he was so powerful a figure in world politics and—well, “I don’t know” was not in him. He knew everything.
So, then, he seemed to have everything, Fritz Mandl.
So, then, he had Hedwig Kiesler as well.
Hedy left the cast of Sissy at the end of July 1933 to prepare for her wedding. She remembered the 10 August event as “small and quiet…. I wanted it to be quiet,” she explained. “He was so well known. And I, too, was known. I did not want a carnival made of what belonged to him and to me alone.” But the setting for this small and quiet wedding was Vienna’s majestic eighteenth-century Baroque Karlskirche with its elongated dome and spiraled double columns, its extensive frescoes and marble-and-gold-leafed sanctuary flooded with light. Who was in attendance? Her mother and father? Friends from the theater? She doesn’t say. And Mandl? Hedy was a trophy wife. Wouldn’t he have wanted to present her to Vienna?
However many attended the wedding, the newlyweds went off afterward to the Lido, the fashionable barrier island that divides the lagoon of Venice from the sea, to honeymoon. “Almost at once,” Hedy realized, “I found that I was no longer Hedy Kiesler, an individual. But I was only the wife of Fritz Mandl.” Around this time Mandl is remembered to have said: “Democracy is a luxury that might be borne, perhaps, in prosperous periods.” One of the first things her new husband did, Hedy said, was “try to track down and buy up every print of Ekstase. He spent a fortune trying to buy up that picture so that no print of it could ever be seen again. It was an obsession with him.” Time would report Mandl spent “nearly $300,000” snapping up prints of the film, which of course multiplied like rabbits. Eventually, he gave up, but Hedy lamented that “it became one of the sore spots of our married life. Every time we would have an argument, no matter what about, he would, of course, bring that picture up to me. He would never let me forget it.”
Nor would Mandl permit her to follow her career:
I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife. When I was first married I did not think I would care. I thought, being so madly in love, that I could be content just as his wife. I soon found out that I could not be content anywhere but on the stage or screen. Perhaps if I had had children, perhaps if I had had something to do—but I was like a doll in a beautiful, jeweled case. I was watched and guarded and followed night and day. I could not go anywhere, not even to lunch with a woman friend, without being watched.
My husband bought a town house that was like a palace. Every piece in it was antique and priceless. We had also three hunting lodges. We had cars and planes and a yacht. We had many, many servants. I had furs and jewels and gowns beyond any girl’s wildest dreams of luxury….
[But] in my houses I had nothing to say. Not about anything…. He ordered the house and everything in it…. He was the absolute monarch in his own world. He was the absolute monarch in his marriage…. I was like a guest living in my own house. I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.
As Frau Hedwig Kiesler Mandl turned nineteen that November 1933, she found herself locked into what she would call a “prison of gold.” Marriage to Fritz Mandl had seemed to be another kind of stardom, a stardom of the real world, radiant with power, but in its pursuit she had entered unsuspectingly into a golden prison. The question now was, how could she bear to live there? And if she couldn’t, how on earth could she get out?