Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

59 5 The Most Beautiful Woman in the World Switzerland was regarded by many German and Austrian refugees as a station on their way to France until 1938, when it introduced measures prohibiting Jews from crossing its borders. The better-heeled refugees, whose numbers now included Hedwig Kiesler, chose to spend the winter of 1936–1937 in St. Moritz before heading to Paris. The Swiss resort was a flurry of cocktails, parties, and gossip. As Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his diaries, some refugees began to sink under the boredom, for them drinking began in the early morning; others withdrew into themselves; fights broke out. Certain prominent Jewish dissidents were discomforted to find themselves rubbing shoulders with regular holidayers, whose political views differed sharply from their own. Among the filmmakers, the most prominent was Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite. Billy Wilder was also found in St. Moritz as were the Hollywood stars Eleanor Boardman and Kay Francis.1 Remarque had fled to Switzerland in 1933. His best-known antiwar novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, had been made into a hugely successful Hollywood film, and he was friendly with many people that Hedy would later encounter there, notably Charles Boyer. Back in Germany, Remarque was persona non grata for the same reasons he was feted in Hollywood; the premiere of All Quiet in Berlin had prompted a display of Nazi flag waving, with Goebbels marching out of the cinema to chants of “Judenfilm! Judenfilm!” Nazi supporters set off stink bombs in the auditorium along with releasing hundreds of white mice. Bizarrely, the Nazis then invited Remarque to become Minister of Culture for Prussia. When he declined and went into exile, they responded by banning his books and decreeing that anyone who owned a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front must relinquish it to the authorities. 60 Hedy Lamarr Remarque was extraordinarily good-looking, deeply romantic, and a serial womanizer. He was also bored in St. Moritz and enchanted by meeting Hedy. She embodied, as his biographer writes, “all the qualities that Remarque found attractive—a stunning beauty, an actress, sophisticated , louche, German-speaking.” Soon they began an affair that lasted until the summer of 1937, when two events occurred in short succession: Hedy left for London and Remarque met the woman who was to become his greatest love, Marlene Dietrich.2 In London, Hedy was introduced to Louis B. Mayer. Mayer was there to sign up Greer Garson and, one version of the story goes, was unaware that Hedy Kiesler was the naked girl in Ecstasy, something his aides were afraid to tell him.3 It seems unlikely, however, that Mayer was unaware of who Hedy was or that she did not tell him. Predictably, the most colorful version of the encounter is found in Hedy’s autobiography. She remembers Mayer opening the meeting by acknowledging he had seen Ecstasy: “Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood. Never. A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatergoers. 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.” He then proceeded to give the young hopeful a lesson on how Hollywood morality worked. “We make clean pictures and we like our stars to lead clean lives,” Mayer said. “Of course we don’t control them. I don’t like shenanigans, but I don’t stop them. If you make love . . . fornicate . . . (he hesitated) . . . screw your leading man in the dressing room, that’s your business. But in front of the camera, gentility. You hear, gentility.”4 Whether or not Hedy was accurate in her memory of this exchange, the tone of Mayer’s words rings true. In his biography of Mayer, Charles Higham describes a man who controlled, or tried to control, every aspect of the studio he ran in the most paternalistic, if ruthless, fashion: “Mayer believed that actors did not know what was good for themselves; he controlled them to the point of personally putting saccharine in their coffee to keep their weight down, telling them what they could eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, whom they could marry, whether it was time to have a baby or not, how to obtain an abortionist if a picture was at stake; he was as stern and loving to them as he was to his own daughters.”5 Communist or fascist, gay or straight, prepared to sleep...