In 1933, a beautiful young Austrian woman stripped off her clothes for a movie director. She ran naked through the woods and swam naked in a lake. While King Kong was the most popular movie that year, everyone in Hollywood was talking about that scandalous film starring the gorgeous Austrian woman.
Louis B. Mayer, from the giant studio MGM, declared her the most beautiful woman in the world. The film, called “Ecstasy,” was banned almost everywhere, which only made it more popular and valuable. Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price.
The star of the film was Hedwig Kiesler. She claimed the secret of her beauty was “to stand there and look stupid.” In truth, Kiesler was anything but stupid.
When she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Austria, Friedrich Mandl, the country’s leading arms manufacturer. His firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis. Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners with representatives from the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces. One of Mandl’s favorite topics at these gatherings—which included meals with Hitler and Mussolini—was the technology behind radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes.
As a Jew, Kiesler despised the Nazis and loathed her husband’s business ambitions. Mandl reacted to his willful wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. In 1937, she managed to escape by drugging her maid, sneaking out dressed in the maid’s clothes, and selling her jewelry to finance a trip to London. She got out just in time: in 1938, Germany annexed Austria, the Nazis seized Mandl’s factory, and he, being half Jewish, fled to Brazil. Later, Mandl became an adviser to Argentina’s iconic populist president, Juan Peron.
In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B. Mayer and signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM’s biggest stars. She appeared in over 20 films, co-starring with Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope. Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster. Still, Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than making movies.
At the height of her fame, in 1942, she developed a new kind of communications system optimized for sending coded messages that couldn’t be “jammed.” She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always hit their targets—a system designed to kill Nazis. By the 1940s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the kind of single-frequency radio-controlled technology that Kiesler’s ex-husband had been promoting.
Most people won’t recognize the name Hedwig Kiesler or Hedy Markey. But it’s a safe bet that anyone of a certain age will remember one of Hollywood’s greatest beauties from the golden age—Hedy Lamarr. That was the name Louis B. Mayer gave his prize actress.