Stephen Shearer - Beautiful - The Life of Hedy Lamarr

This world of gayety, peace, and tranquility was forever changed when, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was brutally assassinated. This singular event effectively ignited World War I. Fighting began on August 4, when German troops, allied with Austria-Hungary, invaded Belgium. The Russian leaders saw the war as advantageous, while the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, found the war inevitable.

But Vienna… it still danced. As war clouds loomed on the horizon, the city was enchanted with its music, arts, and financial security. In 1914 Vienna, life was good. Into this world was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on Sunday, November 9, 1914.

Her parents came from humble birth. Emil Kiesler was born into a Jewish family in L’viv (Lemberg), in the West Ukraine on December 27, 1876. As a young man, Emil was extremely handsome, tall (six feet four), had blue-gray eyes, and was athletically inclined. He loved sports, especially skiing and rowing. Kiesler was also an intelligent and ambitious man who, after completing his education in Russia, sought his future and fortune in banking in Vienna around 1900. Emil became the manager of the Kreditanstalt Bankverein, a leading bank in the city. Though a strict and sometimes stern boss, he was respected and admired by his fellow employees.

In October 1913, in honor of his forthcoming marriage, his colleagues gave Emil a silver cigarette case with his signature engraved on the outside. Inside, each bank employee had etched his own name. For his bride Emil chose an attractive and vivacious Jewish-born Hungarian girl. She was a practicing Christian, having converted to Catholicism. In Austria, this marriage was considered “mixed,” religiously. But this was quite common in Vienna and presented no social taboo at the time. 3

Her name was Gertrud, called Trude, and she was born to Karl and Rosa Lichtwitz in Budapest, Hungary, on February 3, 1897. She was a bright and attractive girl with blue eyes, her hair fair and slightly russet. The lively young woman married Emil when still in her teens. Within months of their marriage, Trude was pregnant. Giving up her dreams of a promising career as a concert pianist, she would instill a love of music and the arts in her only child.

The Kieslers lived at 2b Osterleitengasse, in one of six apartments in a four-storey stucco building located on a narrow street in a fashionable area of Vienna. Hedy’s father would affectionately nickname her Hedylendelein and Princess Hedy. Her mother called her Hedl. When she learned to talk, Hedy could not pronounce Hedwig , and so she would say “Hedy” (pronounced “hay-dee.”) It became her first name.

The family soon moved to a modest yet luxurious home, a nine-room apartment in the hills on Peter Jordan Strasse in the residential area of Vienna (now part of Währing), the 19th District. From birth the young Hedy would want for little, except possibly the attention of her parents. She was surrounded by adults—a parlor maid, a cook, and a nurse. But her socially mobile parents were seldom home in the evenings, instead enjoying the opera, theatre, and Vienna nightlife.

Hedy would later relate that as a child she suffered from nightmares. “When I was four years old I remember them. The most horrible, horrible nightmares.” In these nightmares, she would try to have “tea parties” for her dolls. But when she would pour the hot water into their mouths, their plastic doll faces would become soft and begin to melt. Ugliness terrified the little girl. “Nightmares of things so shapeless I could not say of what horror they were made but only that they were horrible,” she continued. “I can so well remember nights when Mother and Father were out, and I was in bed, cozy and safe in my room. But it would be dark. And I would doze and at once I would see faces, enormous ugly faces and enormous black or purple hands coming for me. I would scream and the nurse would come running. She would pet me and pat me and tuck me in again and tell me that I had eaten too many pastries for dinner. But I knew that was not so.” 4

Hedy always recalled her father lovingly. “I remember him as a kindly man who wouldn’t deny me anything,” she recounted years later. “The memory of him will always be beautiful.” 5Emil also had a sense of humor. “He was very farsighted,” she would tell a journalist, “and I remember he had to hold a letter or paper at a distance in order to read it. ‘Oh, I can see all right,’ he’d say, ‘only my arms are too short!’” 6

Emil would encourage physical activity and take his daughter on long walks in the Vienna woods, a place she always held dear. Sometimes she went with her parents on their travels outside Austria. They would take her on sojourns to Lake Geneva, to the opera in Rome, and on walks in the “English countryside, the Irish lake district, the Swiss Alps, and the Paris Boulevards.” Hedy’s father liked to play make-believe with her. Hedy would remark years later, “My mother was not so imaginative, but she did not mind that I tore up the library to act out Hansel and Gretel .” 7

About her daughter, Hedy’s mother told Silver Screen magazine in 1942, “She has always had everything. She never had to long for anything. First there was her father who, of course, adored her, and was very proud of her. He gave her all the comforts, pretty clothes, a fine home, parties, schools, sports. He looked always for the sports for her, and music…. We had a good life together.” 8

Hedy recalled that as a child she would study her mother. “When I was tiny I loved to watch her dress her hair, use her scents and powders, try on this gown and that until she had found the one which suited her mood for the evening,” Hedy told a writer many years later. “So early on I learned the value of pretty things…to love the feel of soft fabrics against me; delicate laces, lush velvets, and fine linens. I loved always to have my rooms dainty around me, with flowers in them, smelling sweet. People called me ‘a fastidious little thing.’” 9

“I watch her and I’m afraid,” Emil Kiesler once told his wife, worried that Hedy’s spoiled behavior might cause her harm. 10Realizing that her child possessed an uncanny beauty even at an early age, Trude stressed that the family not flatter Hedy. Instead, she insisted that Hedy be allowed to enjoy the simple things in life in an attempt to ground her. During the spring the family took their suppers outside under the shade trees. Hedy was allowed to have a dog and was assigned chores around the house, including caring for the family’s birdcage.

As was customary in European society, Gertrud Kiesler started preparing her daughter for marriage before Hedy had started school. Trude would enroll her in ballet and piano lessons, which ingrained a love of music that Hedy sustained for the rest of her life. A governess by the name of Nicolette, or Nixy as Hedy called her, taught her German, French, and Italian. Nixy would become the one constantly present adult whom Hedy could rely on for advice and security during her childhood.

“My parents did not know any actors,” Hedy would recall years later. “They did not (often) take me to theatres, but mostly to concerts and to operas. There were never any theatrical people in our home.” 11The Kieslers were prominent in Vienna society and would often entertain the city’s elite as well as businessmen, local politicians, and even occasionally royalty. But they were not impossibly wealthy. As Oleg Cassini, one of Hedy’s suitors, would later recall, “Hedy, of course, was not born with a gold spoon in her mouth, although it must have been sterling silver.” 12

Hedy’s first memories were of her father telling her stories. “He’d unfold his hand, as if it were a book, look at his palm and begin his story,” she told a columnist. “He would stop to explain something to me, then say: ‘Where was I?’ and hunt through his open hand to find his place. I was enchanted.” 13She would recall her father reading to her by the fireplace in the library or while tucking her in bed at night, always licking his index finger and thumb before turning the pages of a book. These books likely included Grimm’s Fairy Tales ; Johanna Spyri’s Heidi ; Max und Moritz , a book in cartoons and verse; and the strange Struwwelpeter , which dealt with cruel and gruesome punishment bestowed on naughty young people. Like most children in Austria and Germany, Hedy was mesmerized by these stories of princesses and monsters, sentiment and horror, magic and superstition.