Hedy's Folly Read Free

applied for it and right away I got it,” Hedy recalled. In this account, for an American magazine, she translates her starting salary as “five dollars a day.”
    Then she had to tell her parents that she was dropping out of school at sixteen to become a professional actress. As she remembered the negotiation in 1938:
Well, it was not too bad. They were bewildered a little but not very surprised. They were never surprised atanything I did. And besides, I had been talking movies for so long that they were really prepared for this. My dear father finally laughed and said, “You have been an actress ever since you were a baby!” So my parents did not try to prevent me. They were willing to give me this great wish of my heart.
    She recalled it differently later in life. She had persuaded the director, Georg Jacoby, to give her the part. Her parents, she wrote, “were much more difficult to persuade than [Jacoby], because it meant my dropping school. But at last they agreed. My father had never forbidden his little princess anything, and besides, he reasoned that I would soon enough quit of my own accord and go back to school.”
    When Geld auf der Strasse wrapped, a better role followed as a secretary in Sturm im Wasserglas ( Storm in a Water Glass ), another Jacoby project. Then Reinhardt cast her in The Weaker Sex . “Reinhardt made me read, meet people, attend plays.” She followed him back to Vienna when he restaged the play there. “Yes, we have no bananas.”
    “When you dance with her,” George Weller remembered, “as I did every night for about three months, she is a trifle stiff to the touch. Reedlike, that’s what Hedy Kiesler is, sweet and reedlike, and when she wants to talk to you she doesn’t lean over your shoulder and arch herself out behind like a debutante.… She leans back from you [and] takes a good look in your eyes and a firm grip on your name before she will allow herself to say a word.”
    Weller was present when Reinhardt gave Hedy her lifelong byname, a christening later claimed by the Hollywood studio head Louis B. Mayer:
It was at the rehearsal of a cafe scene in a comedy, and the Regisseur [that is, the director] was Reinhardt. There were Viennese newspapermen watching. Suddenly the Herr Professor, a man not given to superlatives, turned to the reporters and mildly pronounced these words: “Hedy Kiesler is the most beautiful girl in the world.” Instantly the reporters put it down. In five minutes the Herr Professor’s sentence, utter and absolute, had been telephoned to the newspapers of the [city center], to be dispatched by press services to other newspapers, other capitals, countries, continents.
    The Weaker Sex played in Vienna for one month, from 8 May to 8 June 1931. “Almost before we knew it,” Weller recalled, “another play was in rehearsal.” Hollywood was buying up European actors as it rapidly expanded film production, a trend that would accelerate after 1933 when the Nazis took power in Germany and then in Austria, and Jews saw their civil rights stripped away. The play, Film und Liebe ( Film and Love ), satirized the earlier, commercial phase of the exodus. Weller won the role of “a brash Hollywood director who thought … that Central European talent could be seduced by American gold into immigrating to California.”The female lead as Weller remembered it called for a character “who simply recoiled at the sight of a Hollywood contract,” which would have been a stretch for Hedy. In any case the director offered her a smaller role.
    She rejected it. “I’ve never been satisfied,” she explained. “I’ve no sooner done one thing than I am seething inside me to do another thing. And so, almost as soon as I was inside a studio I wanted to be acting in a studio. And as soon as I was acting in a studio, I wanted to be starring in a studio. I wanted to be famous.” Her stage roles had been limited and her reviews mixed. Weller thought she simply “decided