Hedy's Folly
He was wounded, of course, deeply wounded. His response, pointedly written on Hecht-MacArthur Astoria studio stationery, was by turns confidently assertive, respectful or mock-respectful, and grandiose. He was wounded that she thought him conceited; how little she would ever realize the courage it took to write her those letters throughout the years “wherein I had to represent myself in my best light … or better!” Music was “a strange and beautiful thing,” and it would not be made by the opinions of “conservatory professors, however excellent, or by the opinions of antiquated once-great artists out of sympathy with the radical creations of the newer generations.” Neither would it be made by “the critics, nor by the orchestral conductors.” Yet she had been “more than generous. God bless you.” He thanked her from the bottom of his heart. “Goodbye,” he concluded. “I shall show you someday that your friends have been wrong. But never again in writing. I am afraid that this shall be my last letter to you, Mary Louise, whom I have not betrayed.” He signed it: “Faithfully—George Antheil.”
But of course it was not nearly his last letter to his reluctant patron. He would continue to write to her for six more years, and continue to ask for support, or for investment in one or another of his ventures. In the meantime, he had to find a way to feed and house himself and Boski. Movie music would be one solution.
Writing might be another. In Bad Boy of Music, as he did with so many of his struggles, Antheil makes a lighthearted story of his pursuit in 1935 of a writing commission from Arnold Gingrich, the editor of the two-year-old men’s magazine Esquire. George, Boski, their costume-designer tenant, Irene Sharaff, and their sometime post-performance visitor George Balanchine would sit up late drinking Boski’s good Viennese coffee and gossiping:
We had been discussing the subject of how most men are unwilling to believe their wives or mistresses unfaithful and are usually the last to stumble upon that fact. We were merrily racing through the lists of our acquaintances when, suddenly, the thought occurred to me: “Why not write this up for Esquire?”
I did so immediately, twenty-five little squibs, each one an instance of how to detect unfaithfulness. I labeled them, “She Is No Longer Faithful IF,” and sent them off to Arnold Gingrich, Esquire’s editor.
Gingrich knew a good feature when he saw one. Esquire was based at the time in Chicago; he set up a breakfast appointment with Antheil for the following week, when he expected to be in New York. Over breakfast at the Plaza hotel he offered the composer $250 per batch of twenty-five squibs if he would produce sixteen batches.
Antheil did the math. He was stunned. Sixteen batches times $250 was—“FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS! [About $65,000 today.] Holy smoke!”
If he could sell this editor his late-night musings, Antheil thought, maybe he could sell him his hobbyist venture into endocrinology as well. Antheil had been an amateur student of endocrinology for years, ever since a roommate in Berlin had left behind an endocrinology textbook when he moved out. Voracious reader that he was, Antheil had devoured it and become fascinated with what he took to be the possibility of predicting behavior according to which hormones appeared to dominate a subject’s physiology. “By the way, Mr. Gingrich,” he now spoke up, “would you also be interested in a series of articles on how to recognize which girls will and which girls won’t? I have worked out a very scientific method, via endocrinology.”
Gingrich was skeptical. He asked for a demonstration. Antheil, nothing if not bold, “analyzed the next fifty girls that came down the Plaza staircase.” Gingrich happened to know one of them. Evidently, the composer called her correctly. “I went home that morning with exactly five thousand six hundred dollars’ worth of ordered articles,” Antheil concludes. Gingrich had even offered to pay in advance.
[FIVE]
Leaving Fritz
Hedy never specified in detail which German technological advances she heard discussed over luncheons and dinners in the Mandl mansions, but there was much to hear. In 1935, the monocoque-bodied Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter and the dual-use Heinkel He 111 bomber both saw their first flight tests. The small, heavily armed cruisers that the British called pocket battleships began entering service in the German navy. In 1936, the first of the new Type VII diesel-electric attack submarines was commissioned, and Adolf Hitler began planning his Westwall of defensive fortifications opposite France’s Maginot Line.
Certainly Hedy listened closely to discussions of submarine and aerial torpedoes, weapon systems for which Hirtenberger was supplying components. The genius of German torpedo development at that time was a northern German mechanical engineer named Hellmuth Walter. Born with the century and educated at the Hamburg Technical Institute, Walter was particularly interested in submarine propulsion, which was limited by the problem of supplying oxygen underwater to sustain combustion.
The standard submarine of the day (and throughout World War II) used diesel engines for surface operation, where it could draw in air from outside the vessel. Underwater, with no available air supply, it had to switch to battery-powered electric motors, which limited its speed and the time it could remain submerged before its batteries had to be recharged. On the surface such a submarine might make 17 knots (“knots” is a phonetic abbreviation of “nautical miles per hour”; 1 knot equals 1.15 miles per hour). Underwater it could make half that speed at best, while the ships it might be stalking could pull away (or hunt it down) at surface speeds of up to 35 knots. Walter wanted to find a means, he wrote, “to drive a submarine at much higher speeds than the conventional 6 or 8 knots, submerged.”
In the 1920s, while employed as a marine engineer at Stettiner Maschinenbau AG Vulcan in Stettin, on the Baltic, Walter worked out his ideas: Instead of carrying fuel for engines that needed air to sustain combustion, preventing their operation underwater, why not identify an oxygen-rich fuel that could be chemically decomposed to supply its own oxygen, and use that reaction to drive a turbine directly? There were such fuels. Pure oxygen was obviously one, but storage in a small space such as a submarine would require that it be cooled to a liquid and maintained there, below its boiling point of −297.33°F. Nitric acid was another, with 63.5 percent oxygen available when decomposed, but it was highly corrosive and difficult to store and handle.
A little research led Walter to hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, a liquid slightly denser than water first isolated by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard in 1818. Used in low concentrations, up to 30 percent, as a bleaching agent and a disinfectant, hydrogen peroxide at high concentrations could be decomposed by contact with an appropriate catalyst into steam and oxygen—H2O + O—in the process generating intense heat: 80 percent H2O2 when it decomposed would generate a temperature of 869°F, superheating the steam sufficiently to drive a power plant without adding any additional fuel. Fuel could be added, however, drawing on the oxygen released from the H2O2 for combustion and further superheating the steam, increasing its propulsive energy. In the first case, the purity of the H2O2 would determine the rate of energy release; in the second, the injection of a fuel such as alcohol or kerosene into a combustion chamber to mix with the decomposing H2O2 could be throttled to vary the output on demand. In either case, the energy would be generated without the need for additional air.
Walter found very little available research on the use of hydrogen peroxide for energy production, he recalled, “only isolated suggestions which have never been developed beyond the stage of theoretical discussion.” Nor was there much interest at Vulcan in H2O2 research. Frustrated, Walter took his ideas to the German naval command in Berlin. “Years later,” a biographer writes, “colleagues remembered him carrying around papers for his Unterwasser Schnellboot [underwater fast boat], so that he could lobby for his proposals at any opportunity.”
The naval command was interested, but before Walter could proceed with research and development, he had to prove to its officials that H2O2 was safe for transportation and storage. Higher concentrations were commonly believed to be dangerously explosive,
a prejudice that had seriously retarded research. Tests at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin—exploding lead azide, a strong detonator, with H2O2, decomposing it under pressure—established its non-detonability up to 80 percent strength. “After the encouraging results of this period of predevelopment and research,” Walter writes, “I founded my own engineering firm on July 1, 1935. The real development of engines and rockets started after this date.”
From his new Walterwerke (Walter Works) in Kiel, Walter proposed to the German naval command a two-thousand-horsepower hydrogen-peroxide-driven four-man mini-sub designed for underwater speeds of up to thirty knots. With support from Captain Karl Dönitz, already an influential submarine flotilla commander, naval command encouraged Walter’s project, which would be awarded a construction contract in 1939. By late 1936, Walter had achieved one thousand kilograms of thrust in a hydrogen-peroxide-fueled turbine. A four-thousand-horsepower system followed not long after.
While exploring development of his new submarine, a potentially devastating weapon, Walter also describes working on missile engines and assisted-takeoff devices (ATOs, temporarily adding thrust, enable aircraft to take off from shorter runways or boost heavily loaded aircraft into the air) for the German air force, the Luftwaffe:
The first flight with a liquid propellant took place in February 1937, with 100-kg thrust. Later in that year and during 1938, a great number of flight tests were made with ATO’s at 300 to 500-kg thrust with land and sea planes.… All of these were mono-fuel devices working with 80 percent hydrogen peroxide. A number of unguided missiles were tested, among them a midget prototype of the V-2 [rocket] which climbed up to 18-kilometer height and broke through the sound barrier. Rocket-propelled depth charges were thrown over 200-meter distances, and sea mines, dropped from an airplane, were decelerated so that they fell gently into the sea. During the summer of 1939, the first airplane took off (Heinkel 178) propelled solely by a controllable rocket. The first torpedoes were launched just at the outbreak of the war. In this case, the propulsion engine was used with a dual fuel system [of] kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.
In addition, and most relevant to Hedy’s eventual purposes, Walter and his staff were involved with developing methods of remote control for their torpedoes. They would also have been aware of work at the German Aviation Research Institute in Berlin Adlershof on radio-controlled anti-ship glide bombs, because at least one of the glide bombs under development, the Henschel Hs 293A, used hydrogen peroxide for propulsion.
The German navy’s work on torpedo control had begun in 1935, early enough for Hedy to have heard about it. Radio control of submarine torpedoes was difficult—radio signals don’t travel far through seawater—and most German specialists favored wire guidance, the torpedo paying out a thin insulated wire behind it as it left the submarine that connected it electrically to a human controller guiding its path. But the anti-ship glide bombs under development for delivery by plane were radio controlled. Furthermore, they used a system of frequency selection that might have offered Hedy one piece of the puzzle of how to prevent a radio-control signal from being jammed.
The radio-control system that the Germans used on their Fritz X and Henschel Hs 293 glide bombs, an American guided-missile expert writes, featured a transmitter that “could operate on any of 18 pre-launch selectable frequencies, spaced 100 KHz apart, between 48 and 50 MHz. This capability was designed into the system to enable coordinated simultaneous mass attacks by formations of bombers and allowed up to 18 missiles to be separately controlled at one time. It also helped to negate the effects of any enemy electronic jamming directed at the guidance system.”
So the German system did not move the transmission around among radio frequencies to avoid a jamming signal; it merely assigned the communications between each bomber and its single glide bomb to one of eighteen different radio frequencies, allowing each plane to control its own bomb without radio interference from other bombers, which had similarly been assigned different exclusive frequencies spaced one hundred kilohertz apart in the frequency band between forty-eight and fifty megahertz. Since each bomber-missile pair communicated on only one frequency, the enemy could still jam the signal, but he might need a few minutes to figure out which of eighteen different frequencies he had to jam to confuse a particular bomb heading his way.
Hedy Kiesler Mandl met Hellmuth Walter in December 1936. The occasion was the annual Christmas gala at the Hirtenberger factory in Hirtenberg, Austria. “He was very interesting,” she told an interviewer late in life of her meeting with Walter. “As we had dinner, he was talking about his remote-controlled, wakeless torpedo.” The torpedo in question was wire guided and hydrogen peroxide powered; the steam that drove the torpedo that resulted from H2O2 decomposition quickly dissipated in seawater, leaving no telltale wake, another advantage of the system. The torpedo had other problems, it seemed, related to the relatively small volume of fuel it could carry.
All this knowledge of developing German military technology was Hedy’s capital as she prepared herself to leave Fritz Mandl and Austria and find her way to Hollywood. She spoke of it later as protective, as information she could use or did use to persuade Mandl to allow her to leave him, but wasn’t it just as likely to be dangerous for her to know? Or did she count on the chauvinism of the German military men with whom she socialized—standing still and looking stupid—to protect her?
Hedy told various tales of how she freed herself from Fritz Mandl. She would have had reason to lie about their breakup. She had already been stigmatized for her appearance in Ecstasy—the film had been publicly censored in the United States. Divorce was a scandal in 1930s America; elaborating a story of brutal confinement and clever escape might avoid further stigma.
In the most elaborate version Hedy told, she picked out one of her housemaids who closely resembled her in height, weight, and coloring, befriended the maid, studied the maid’s manner until she was confident she could imitate it, drugged her one day by putting sleeping pills in her coffee, dressed in her uniform and slipped out of the house, raced for the train to Paris, filed for a French divorce on the sardonic ground of desertion, and raced on to London to put herself beyond Mandl’s grasp. The story is so Bluebeardian that it may well have been an invention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity department.
Hedy came closest to telling the truth about her breakup with Fritz Mandl in a 1938 as-told- to interview. Even there she left out the backstory, which can be at least partly reconstructed from contemporary newspaper reports and later documents.
After attending the Christmas gala at her husband’s factory in Hirtenberg, Hedy spent the winter season at St. Moritz, the fashionable Swiss ski resort where the 1928 Winter Olympics had been held. Her husband did not accompany her. His work may have kept him away—he was already busy sequestering assets in Switzerland and investing in Argentina—or he and Hedy may have separated after one of their escalating series of battles. “I felt more and more,” she said in 1938, “every day now, every hour, that I must escape or be strangled to death by luxury, by a vain attempt to find happiness.”
Part of that vain attempt at St. Moritz was apparently a brief affair with the writer Erich Maria Remarque, famous for his World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front and a man like her father, tall, older, handsome, and confident. Remarque spent two months, January and February 1937, vacationing at St. Moritz, his biographer reports, summarizing his experience afterward in a diary entry. “ ‘Went walking to begin with; afterwards mostly sat in the bar,’ his diary records.… Then follows a selective list of the people he associated with [including the writers Louis Bromfield and Georges Simenon, the Hollywood stars Kay Francis and Eleanor Boardman, and the film directors Leni Riefenstahl and William Wyler].… Casually infiltrated into the list is the single name Hedy, the only person not fully identified or attributed with an explanatory word or two. Remarque’s discretion betrays as much as it conceals the degree of intimacy between them.”
Remarque’s new novel, Three Comrades, had begun serialization in Good Housekeeping magazine in January and would be published in May. The novelist’s previous works had been burned in Germany in the notorious Nazi-sponsored book burning in 1933, however, and Remarque himself was persona non grata there. It’s easy to see what he and Hedy had in common—including, as she would make clear in America, contempt for the Nazis.
A key requirement for a successful transformation of personal identity is a mentor or model to guide the novice over the treacherous crevasse that separates the old identity from the new. Given what followed in Hedy’s life that crucial year, Remarque probably filled that role for her. He himself had already transitioned successfully from war-weary soldier to best-selling novelist. He had gone into exile from his homeland as well, driven there by the gathering power of fascism.
Whatever happened between the German novelist and the Austrian film star at St. Moritz, Hedy returned to Vienna sometime that late winter or spring determined to renew her career as an actress. Fritz Mandl was equally determined that she should not. He failed to anticipate that Hedy might appeal to his political partner and close friend Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg. A report in New York’s Sunday News on 19 September 1937 describes what followed:
Hedi is expected to appear at the Josefstadt Theatre in Clare Boothe’s play, “The Women,” which is about to be produced in German.
PALLY WITH STARHEMBERG
Although the invitation to play a leading role came from Director Horch, it is common knowledge here that Hedi arranged the request, presumably through Prince Starhemberg, her husband’s closest friend.
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: