Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film

Independence

152 12 Independence While the rifts in Loder and Hedy’s marriage were becoming public, Hedy was busy developing her own production company, Mars Productions Inc. Her partners in the venture were Hunt Stromberg and Jack Chertok. Stromberg was one of Hollywood’s most successful producers and had recently split with MGM after a dispute with Louis B. Mayer. According to some sources, Mayer may not have been sorry to see his once-gifted producer leave, as Stromberg had taken to dosing himself with morphine to treat a slipped disc and was hallucinating at meetings.1 Chertok too had come from MGM, where he had produced, among other films, The Conspirators. The company arranged for their films to be distributed by United Artists. The move to production was perhaps a clear one for Hedy but, as the example of Bette Davis was to prove, a challenge that few women in Hollywood , with its overwhelmingly male management structure, would have considered in the 1940s. Hedy was now confidently rejecting acting roles: In March 1945, Paul Kohner sent her the play Great Love by Ferenc Molnar, which her agent, George A. Lovett, declined on her behalf. Earlier she had said no to another Kohner property, “Madame Bovary of Greenwood Manor.” In September 1945, she turned down two more scripts, “Ave Maria” and “Elisabeth von Osterreich.” She was determined to produce her own films. In Ecstasy and Me, Hedy writes, “when I first came to this country, I acted because I needed a job and afterward I had to support my children. It was usually a chore otherwise. I feel like a puppet, to be moved around as a director says. I much prefer to be on the outside of it all, the creative part, as you put it.”2 There was always a chance that, behind the camera, she might find the satisfaction that acting so evidently did not offer her. Interestingly, on the films that she produced and starred in, she tended to Independence 153 be written out of the picture. By the time The Loves of Three Queens/ Femmina (1954) was being filmed, it is probably true that she engineered her own downfall. Though, as will be detailed, by then her psychological state was too frail to withstand the demands of filmmaking. In the mid1940s , however, Hedy was still able to focus on the work at hand. Unfortunately , she was also capable of stirring enmity, not least by having affairs with her directors and leading men. Her first film with Stromberg and Chertok was The Strange Woman, to be directed by her compatriot and fellow refugee, Edgar G. Ulmer. Hunt Stromberg had purchased the rights to Ben Ames Williams’s novel of the same title, following the recent success of the author’s Leave Her to Heaven,3 which was an overheated melodrama about a daughter’s fixation on her father. Williams took his title for The Strange Woman from Proverbs 5:3–5: “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” The informed reader, therefore, knew what to expect; they were not disappointed. The Strange Woman is set in Bangor, Maine, and opens in 1824 with young Jenny Hager playing with her childhood friend Efraim Poster. She is the daughter of the town drunk; he, the son of a respectable shopkeeper. She taunts Efraim for being a coward and pushes him off the bridge; when he surfaces, she pushes him under again. Only when the Judge (Alan Napier) happens by, does she hurriedly rescue Efraim and take the credit for saving his life. Meg Saladine, the Judge’s daughter, invites Jenny to attend boarding school with her but the Judge amends the offer to a job in the kitchen, which Jenny refuses. Her father overhears this conversation and, as Jenny assures her father that she will do well in later life, she preens herself and admires her reflection in the water. Ripples break up the image and a dissolve brings viewers to the present, with Jenny’s assertion of the value of her beauty accompanying the time lapse. “Men like me,” she tells Tim Hager (Dennis Hoey), “and it’s the men who have the money in this world.” Jenny is now clearly marked as a loose woman, as a scene where she flirts...