Chapter 1The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Foreword

I had looked at her face a hundred times before I read a single line of her patent.

That is not an exaggeration, and it is not a confession I make comfortably. I write about the people who made the pictures, and her face was one of the instruments of that making — a face that studios lit and columnists captioned and audiences agreed to call the most beautiful in the world. I had seen it on posters, in stills, in the margins of other people's stories. I had filed it exactly where my trade has always filed it: under beauty, under glamour, under the decorative surface of the studio decades. The caption did my thinking for me, as it was designed to. I never once turned the poster over to see what was printed on the back.

What was printed on the back was a number. US Patent 2,292,387. A secret communications system, granted in 1942, that would half a century later sit underneath the wireless architecture of the entire modern world. I had spent years learning to read faces like hers and I had never learned to read that. It is a strange thing to discover, in the middle of a career, that the archive you trust was built to look at exactly the wrong part of the frame.

So this book began as a correction of my own habits before it was anything else. I expected, when I started, the story my trade had prepared me to tell: the scandal of Ecstasy, the six husbands, the beauty that curdled into reclusion. I found some of that, and I have not omitted it. But underneath it I found a woman sitting on a drawing-room rug with a silver matchbox and a set of matches, working out how a signal might hop between frequencies fast enough that no enemy could hold it still — a woman who had received, at an arms dealer's dinner table, an education in military communications that no one in the room thought to notice she was absorbing.

I worked from the record anyone can work from: the public documents, her own published account and the accounts of those who knew her, the court filings and the press morgues, and above all the patent itself, four pages of text and diagram that say plainly what half a century of captions declined to say. I have invented nothing and reported nothing at first hand. The materials were always there. That is rather the point. The evidence of who she was had been sitting in the open the whole time, waiting for someone to read the part of the page the beauty had trained us to skip.

She is worth a book because she is the hardest case my subject offers. If a mind that sharp, attached to a face that famous, could go unread for fifty years, then the failure was never hers. It was ours — the failure of a way of looking that could only see one thing at a time, and chose, every time, to see the face.

I wrote this to look at the other thing. It took me longer than it should have to tune to it. It always does.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Everyone said so. Louis B. Mayer said so when he signed her to a seven-year contract. The press agents at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer said so when they placed the phrase in every column they could reach. The photographers said so when they arranged her face under studio lights, the symmetry of the cheekbones, the dark sweep of the lashes, the wide-set green eyes that communicated both intelligence and something deliberately unreadable. The audiences said so, because they had been told to say so, and because it happened to be true, or at least true enough to function as a kind of public agreement about the nature of female perfection in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

What no one said, what almost no one knew, was that the most beautiful woman in the world held a patent on a secret communications system that would, half a century later, undergird the wireless architecture of modern civilization. That she had designed it at her drawing room table, sitting on the rug with her co-inventor, using a silver matchbox with matches simulating the wiring. That her co-inventor was an avant-garde composer who had once synchronized sixteen player pianos for a single performance. That the United States Navy had received the patent, examined it, and filed it away as impractical. That the technology she had conceived in 1940 would become the foundation of spread-spectrum communications and eventually the protocols that make WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and most modern military communications possible.

"Any girl can be glamorous," she once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

She did not stand still. She was never stupid. And the glamour, which was real, was the least interesting thing about her.

This is a biography about the interesting thing.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born on Sunday, November 9, 1914, in Vienna, at the intersection of two catastrophes. The first was the Great War, which had begun three months earlier and which would unmake the empire into which she was born. The second was slower and would not reach its full force for another quarter century: the catastrophe of being Jewish in a Europe that was preparing, with patient administrative thoroughness, to murder its Jews.

The family lived in a spacious apartment on Peter-Jordan-Strasse in the nineteenth district, Döbling, a comfortable residential neighborhood where the professional class lived in solid buildings with high ceilings and reliable plumbing. They kept a parlor maid, a cook, and a nurse. Her father, Emil Kiesler, was a bank director at the Creditanstalt-Bankverein, successful, cultivated, assimilated in the manner that Viennese Jews of the professional class understood assimilation: not as self-erasure but as cultural fluency. He spoke several languages. He was tall, handsome, athletic. He took his daughter on long walks through the city and explained to her how things worked. "Wherever they went together," Richard Rhodes wrote, "he explained to her how everything worked, from printing presses to streetcars."

Emil had a way of reading to his daughter that she remembered for the rest of her life: "He'd unfold his hand, as if it were a book, look at his palm and begin his story. 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."

He was, by every account she would later give, the first person who treated her mind as interesting. He died on February 14, 1935, of a heart attack, found dead in Hedy's former bedroom by a servant. He was in his mid-fifties. When Hedy learned of his death, she was trapped in the Mandl castle, and the news was delivered by her mother: "He spoke of you with his last breath. How he loved you." She would say, sixty-four years later, that the greatest love of her life was "my father." She never said this about any of her six husbands. The man who unfolded his hand like a book remained the standard against which every other man was measured, and every other man fell short. The father who had taught her to think was the only man who had valued her thinking, and his death, in his mid-fifties, in the bedroom where she had once slept, was the loss from which she never recovered. Everything else, the Hollywood career, the marriages, the patent, the recognition, the decline, was lived in the shadow of that loss.

Her mother, Gertrud, born Lichtwitz, was a trained concert pianist from Budapest who had settled into the Viennese bourgeoisie with the conviction that art was the proper business of civilized life. Gertrud had converted to Catholicism, as many assimilated Jewish women did, though the conversion was more social strategy than theological commitment. She supervised piano lessons with the rigor of a trained professional, insisting on proper hand positioning and daily practice, and she dressed her daughter with the deliberate care of a woman who understood that surfaces mattered in Vienna, perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe. Her parenting philosophy was deliberate and counterintuitive: "I underemphasized praise and flattery, hoping in this way to balance the scales for her." She could see what was developing in her daughter's face, could predict the gravitational pull it would exert, and she tried, with the instruments available to a bourgeois Viennese mother, to counterweight the imbalance between what the world would praise and what deserved praise.

Emil came from Lemberg, now Lviv. Gertrud came from Budapest. The Kieslers were assimilated Jews in the way that Vienna's professional class understood assimilation: not as self-erasure but as cultural fluency, a negotiation with a society that demanded conformity as the price of inclusion. Hedy kept her Jewish heritage secret throughout her life. Her son and daughter only learned of it after her death. In Vienna before the Anschluss, Jewishness was a fact that could be softened, decorated, or officially papered over, but not eliminated. The Kieslers were Jewish in the way that mattered: by blood, by name, by the knowledge that their neighbors knew.

She was a strange child, by which we mean she was an intelligent child in an era that did not quite know what to do with intelligent girls. She took things apart. She disassembled a music box to understand its mechanism and reassembled it successfully, which impressed her father and alarmed her mother in roughly equal measure. She studied the mechanisms of locks, clocks, and household machinery with the concentrated attention that other children gave to dolls. Her childhood nickname was "Hedl," her mother's name for her. She could not pronounce "Hedwig" as a small child, said "Hedy" instead, and it stuck, a self-invention so early it preceded memory.

"I had a little stage under my father's desk where I would act out fairy tales," she remembered. "When someone would come into the room they would think my mind was really wandering. I was always talking to myself." The detail is worth preserving because it contains, in embryonic form, the duality that would define her entire life. She was acting and she was inventing, simultaneously, under the same desk, in the same childhood. The performance and the engineering were not separate impulses. They were two expressions of the same capacity: the ability to construct something from nothing, to build a world from materials at hand, to transform the space under a desk into a theater and a music box into a lesson in mechanical engineering. The adults who walked into the room and thought her mind was wandering were making the same mistake the world would make for the next eight decades: assuming that because a beautiful girl appeared to be daydreaming, nothing serious was happening.

"I acted all the time," she said. "I copied my mother. I copied the way she walked and the way she talked. I copied her mannerisms, her facial expression. I copied the guests who came to our house. I copied people I saw in the streets. I copied the servants. I was a little living copybook. I wrote people down on me." The description is remarkable for its self-awareness and for the metaphor it deploys: she did not merely imitate people, she wrote them on herself, as though her body were a recording medium and the people around her were signals to be captured. The metaphor anticipated the technology she would later invent: a system for encoding, transmitting, and receiving information. She was, from the beginning, a woman who processed signals.

The copying was a method of study. She was not imitating for approval; she was reverse-engineering human behavior, disassembling the social mechanism the way she had disassembled the music box. The copying was performance. The music box was engineering. She was both from the beginning, and the two capacities would run in parallel for the rest of her life, each invisible to people who could see only the other.

She idolized the American tennis star Helen Wills, known as "Little Miss Poker Face." She would announce to whoever was watching: "Du, schau' mal, hier bin ich Kleine Poker Face," and her lively face would grow calm, expressionless and assured. It was her first experiment in signal control: the deliberate suppression of one kind of information to transmit another.

Emil had a habit: he was "always licking his index finger and thumb before turning the pages of a book." The detail is worth preserving because it is the kind of sensory particular that Hedy noticed, the physical specificity of the man she loved most. He would read by the fireplace in the evenings, wetting his fingers, turning pages, and his daughter would watch him with the focused attention of a child who was studying not just the story but the person telling it.

On their walks through Vienna, Emil would stop at construction sites, at the tramway junctions, at the Danube Canal locks, and explain the principles. He was an engineer by temperament if not by training, a man who believed that understanding how the world was built was the foundation of all other knowledge. Hedy absorbed it. She did not merely listen; she asked questions that indicated she was building models in her head, testing explanations against her own emerging sense of how systems behaved.

We cannot know whether Emil understood he was educating a future inventor. The evidence suggests he understood he was educating an unusual mind. He treated her, in an era when daughters were ornamental, as a person who deserved to know how things worked. This was his great gift to her.

Vienna in the 1920s was the city of Freud and Schnitzler, of twelve-tone music and logical positivism, of the Red Vienna housing projects and the increasingly violent anti-Semitism that would destroy everything the city's liberal culture had built. The Vienna Circle was remaking philosophy. Schoenberg was remaking music. The coffeehouses functioned as seminar rooms where a single cup of coffee purchased hours of heated argument about the nature of reality.

Hedy grew up breathing this air. The city took ideas seriously, valued wit and precision, regarded intellectual achievement as the highest form of human accomplishment. It was also, beneath its civilized surface, profoundly sick. Karl Lueger had built his political career on anti-Semitism. The young Adolf Hitler, living in Vienna from 1908 to 1913, had absorbed Lueger's methods. The Kieslers navigated this landscape with the strategies available to assimilated Jews: education, culture, and the good taste not to insist upon their Jewishness too visibly. Gertrud's conversion to Catholicism was one such strategy. The family's position in the professional bourgeoisie was another. These were shields, not armor. They could deflect casual hostility but would not survive a determined assault.

At school, Hedy was what teachers described as "bright but restless," a category that, for girls in the 1920s, was understood as a mild behavioral problem rather than an intellectual signal. She excelled in languages and mathematics, struggled with the patience required for needlework. A classmate recalled that she could be "charming and then suddenly very serious, as if she had remembered something important that she was supposed to be thinking about."

By fourteen, she attended the theater obsessively: the Burgtheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt, the smaller experimental houses. She was studying the craft with the same analytical attention she brought to mechanical devices. How did an actor produce the illusion of emotion? How did timing create meaning? How did a performer control the audience's attention, directing it toward what she wanted them to see and away from what she wanted to conceal?

At sixteen, she was tall, dark-haired, and in possession of the face that would later be called perfect. She was also restless. The bourgeois trajectory laid out for her, marriage, children, a respectable life in the nineteenth district, did not interest her. She wanted to act. The desire was not mere adolescent rebellion. It was the expression of a mind that needed to understand how systems worked, and the theater was a system she had not yet taken apart.

She met Max Reinhardt, the most important theatrical director in the German-speaking world, at a party in 1929, when she was fifteen. "He had encouraged me by telling me to hold fast to my dream," she recalled, "and that if I held fast it would come true." It was Reinhardt who first called her "the most beautiful girl in the world," the moniker that MGM would later promote to global saturation. What Reinhardt meant by beauty was not merely physical. He meant the beauty of a complete theatrical instrument: a face that communicated, a body that moved with precision, and a mind that understood the architecture of performance.

Her first job in cinema came through sheer nerve: she crashed the Sascha-Film Studios by forging a late-permission slip from her mother and got hired as a script girl. "They asked me, 'Do you know how to be a script girl?' and I said, 'No. But may I try?'" The phrasing was characteristic: polite, direct, and predicated on the assumption that competence could be acquired on the spot. Her first actual film role was a bit part in Storm in a Water Glass, a silent film directed by Alexis Granowsky. Her second film, One Doesn't Need Money, directed by Carl Boese in 1932, cast her as the daughter of a mayor because she was the daughter of a bank director and Boese wanted to impress backers. The logic was already operating: who she appeared to be mattered more than what she could do.

She was learning her craft, though the craft she was learning was not only acting but the more complex art of being looked at, of managing the gaze of others, of understanding that her face was a kind of technology. In Berlin, she sneaked into Reinhardt's dramatic school rehearsal. Otto Preminger let her in. Reinhardt spotted her, gruffly demanded what she was doing there, and cast her in The Weaker Sex. She also appeared in Private Lives on stage, gaining experience in the sophisticated comedy that required precise timing and the management of audience expectation. Her stage husband in The Weaker Sex, George Weller, taught her American songs: "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and "Yes, We Have No Bananas." The songs were novelties, ephemera, but they were the first American sounds she absorbed, and they planted an idea: there was a country across the ocean where a woman could reinvent herself.

In 1933, the Czech-Austrian director Gustav Machaty cast Hedwig Kiesler in a film originally titled Symphony of Love. It would be released as Ekstase, Ecstasy. She was seventeen or eighteen, depending on whether you trust her autobiography or Stephen Michael Shearer's research. Machaty was thirty-two, Czech, ambitious, and possessed of a vision for the film that he had not fully disclosed to his young lead. The plot: a young woman named Eva marries an older man, Emil, played by Zvonimir Rogoz, who cannot consummate the marriage. She returns home. While swimming nude in a forest lake outside Prague, she is spied by a young engineer named Adam, played by Aribert Mog.

The filming deserves precise examination, because the facts were almost immediately distorted and would remain so. Hedy balked at the nudity. "I won't. I won't take off my clothes!" Machaty offered a compromise: the cameras would be on a hill, roughly fifty yards away. "The cameras will be so far off it will be just an impression, a mood." She agreed. "One deep breath, and I ran zigzagging from tree to tree and into the lake. My only thought was 'I hope they get the splash.'" He fired a gun as the signal to start running. But he had used a telescopic lens, and at the preview, the forest was "just too close."

The famous close-up, the face in ecstasy: Machaty achieved it with a safety pin. "You will lie here," the director told her. "I will be underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react!" She described what followed: "Some of those pin-pricks shot pain through my body until it was vibrating in every nerve. I remember one shot when the close-up camera caught my face in a distortion of real agony and... the director yelled happily, 'Ya, goot!'"

Over 250,000 feet of film was cut before release. The producer Josef Auerbach claimed "the love scenes were real, since Hedy was engaged to her leading man at the time." Hedy "long resented Auerbach's cheap comments." The resentment was proportional: a man had diminished the violation she had experienced by turning it into a dirty joke. The director had fired a gun as the signal to start running, and the violence of that cue, the report of a pistol, the girl's startled sprint through the trees, was itself a metaphor for everything that followed: the sudden exposure, the inability to take it back, the realization that she had been used by a man who understood exactly what he was doing.

Her father took her to the preview. "It's artistic," Hedy whispered nervously. But the telescopic lens revealed all. Emil "simply rose, and said grimly, 'We will go.'" They walked out. "I was never to act in another picture." The sentence, from her autobiography, carries the weight of a door slamming shut. Her father's judgment was final. The film had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.

Ecstasy was shown at the Venice Film Festival in August 1934, where it detonated. Pope Pius XI condemned it. The U.S. Treasury Department judged it "obscene" in January 1935. A U.S. Marshal destroyed one print in July of that year. Judge Learned Hand overruled: "I saw nothing in any sense immoral." A New York state ban lasted until 1940. Only about 400 houses showed it over twenty years. The film made Hedwig Kiesler one of the most recognized faces in Europe, not because of what the face expressed but because of what the audience knew the body below the frame had revealed.

It followed her forever. Sixty-seven years later, when she died in her Florida home, the obituaries would still lead with Ecstasy. The patent would be the footnote.

Then came Friedrich Mandl. One of the richest men in Austria, an arms manufacturer who controlled the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, the country's largest munitions factory. He was fourteen years her senior, Catholic, politically connected, and possessed of a need for control so absolute that it constituted a pathology.

They married in August 1933, at the Church of St. Karl's in Vienna. Hedy wore a black and white print dress and carried a bouquet of white orchids. She was eighteen. He gave her an eleven-carat diamond ring, nine chauffeured automobiles, seven servants, a ten-room Vienna apartment, and a twenty-five-room hunting lodge at Castle Schwarzenau.

"I had anything I wanted," she said later. "Clothes, jewelry, seven cars. Every luxury except freedom. For Mandl actually held me a prisoner."

He screened the film for his lieutenants. "When the lights went on, his face was red. I looked away." His command was immediate: "Buy up every print in existence. Get that negative, I don't care how much you have to pay." He spent over $300,000 attempting to acquire copies. Mussolini owned one and would not hand it over at any price. Mandl would sit in the projection room and watch the nude scenes again and again. The film was not a source of shame to be managed but a theft to be reversed: other men had seen something that belonged to him, and the fact that he could not unsee it on their behalf drove him to a fury that was both possessive and perversely voyeuristic.

His dinner guests included military attaches, weapons engineers, government procurement officials, and representatives of both Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. "Posturing Adolf Hitler kissed my hand," Hedy recalled, "and on another occasion pompous little Mussolini held my chair." She dined with Mussolini himself, who bowed, kissed her hand, and insisted on sitting next to her. Even Sigmund Freud and his daughter dined at the Mandl table. She was expected to be decorative and silent. She was decorative. She was listening. "Fritz would be thinking of time bombs or gas masks," she said. "He was oh so much for business that husband of mine." She "would listen to the conversations carefully" about weapons technology, absorbing everything about radio-guided torpedoes, about the vulnerability of single-frequency communications to jamming, about the military applications of synchronized signaling systems. Rhodes called it her "fortuitous espionage... over the Mandl dinner table," and the word "fortuitous" was important. She was not a spy. She was simply a person with a powerful technical mind, placed in an environment saturated with technical information, who could not stop her mind from working on the problems she heard discussed.

Emil Kiesler died of a heart attack on February 14, 1935, in his mid-fifties. He was found dead in Hedy's former bedroom in Vienna. He had spoken of her with his last breath. Hedy was twenty years old and still trapped in the Mandl marriage when the man who had taught her how the world worked left it.

By 1937, she knew she had to escape. She told multiple versions of her departure over the years: the drugged maid, the stolen uniform, the bicycle to the border. Rhodes debunked the dramatic versions as "so Bluebeardian that it may well have been an invention of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity department." The historical record is more practical: "I packed my jewels and such furs and clothes as I could take with me... two large trunks and two small ones and three suitcases." She and Mandl had filed a mutual divorce. She was both smarter and more practical than the legend required.

She had also begun an affair with Prince Starhemberg, Mandl's best friend, the commander of the Heimwehr militia. Starhemberg gave her a private key to his palace. A newspaper reported in September 1937: "'Ecstasy' Star to Quit Rich Mate for Stage." The affair was both personal and strategic: Starhemberg represented an alternative source of protection, a man powerful enough that even Mandl could not simply make him disappear.

She was twenty-two years old. She had been a scandalous film star, an arms dealer's captive wife, and a woman who had received, without anyone noticing, a technical education in military communications from some of the foremost arms manufacturers in Europe. She took almost nothing that mattered, some jewelry, some furs, the contents of those trunks and suitcases, and everything she had learned at Friedrich Mandl's dinner table about radio frequencies, torpedo guidance systems, and the problem of transmitting a signal through a hostile environment. She made her way to London, and from London to a ship bound for America.

But first, she had to get on the boat.