City of Nets Read Online Free PDF Page B

in New York until a censored version was officially approved in 1940.
    By then, of course, Hedy Lamarr was famous, both as a beauty and as a fugitive. Her husband, Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a secret financial backer of the Austrian Nazis, was reputed to have spent more than $300,000 buying up and destroying copies of Ecstasy. He also kept its heroine under close supervision in his palace in Vienna. According to her disputed memoirs, she disguised herself as her own maid and fled to Paris. The subsequent gossip in Hollywood, according to Errol Flynn, was that the beautiful prisoner had persuaded Mandl to let her wear all the family jewels at a dinner for the Nazi Prince Ernst von Stahremberg, then pleaded a headache and disappeared. When Flynn asked her at a party to tell the details of her departure from her husband, she answered only, “That son of a bitch!”
    Frau Mandl’s flight in the summer of 1937 led her to London, and there to the hotel of Louis B. Mayer, the chief of M-G-M, and thence to the S.S. Normandie, bound for New York. Mayer just happened to be traveling on the same boat; the actress presented herself as a governess to a violin prodigy named Grisha Goluboff; by the time the boat docked in New York, she had acquired M-G-M contracts for both the violinist and herself (at five hundred dollars a week), and a new name as well. When a Daily News reporter went to the pier to interview “The Ecstasy Lady, brunette Hedy Kiesler,” she said, “My name is Hedy Lamarr. Please call me that.” Mayer had apparently named her after Barbara La Marr, a great beauty he had admired in the 1920’s, who had succumbed to drugs and alcohol. After Mayer shipped his newest acquisition to Hollywood and signed her up for English lessons, however, he didn’t know what to do with her. It was apparently Charles Boyer who encountered her at a party and then persuaded the producer Walter Wanger to borrow her, for a fee of fifteen hundred dollars a week to Mayer, as his leading lady in Algiers.
    â€œCome with me to the Casbah.” The most famous line in Algiers is—like Humphrey Bogart’s “Play it again, Sam,” in Casablanca —not actually in the movie at all. * Boyer, as the fugitive jewel thief Pépé le Moko, could hardly invite the roving Hedy Lamarr to the Casbah, since he himself was already trapped within its walls. The police wanted Hedy to lure him out, and so he was duly enticed, caught, killed. Despite the glib absurdity of the story, the reviewers were very much impressed. “Best of all,” said Time, “is the smoldering, velvet-voiced, hazel-eyed, Viennese Actress Hedy Kiesler (Hollywood name: Hedy Lamarr).”
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    This, then, was probably what made Bennett Cerf’s wrinkled jowls tingle when he wrote to Nathanael West. These were some of the essential elements of the imagined Hollywood of 1939: imagined romance, imagined sex, vaguely foreign and thus vaguely unreal, and thus permissible. There were, of course, other kinds of unreality also being manufactured and merchandised in Hollywood. The previous year’s Academy Awards had been presented to Spencer Tracy as the heroic priest in Boys Town and Bette Davis as the Dixie prima donna in Jezebel, but Louis B. Mayer’s great favorites were the pseudo-family comedies featuring Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy, fourteen of which were churned out between 1937 and 1943. Once, to demonstrate how Andy should pray for his sick mother, Mayer fell heavily to his knees, clasped his hands together, and looked up toward heaven. “Dear God,” he begged, almost in tears, “please don’t let my mom die, because she’s the best mom in the world. Thank you, God.” When Mayer compared such scenes with other movies of the time, his judgments were forthright. “Any good Hardy picture,” he said, “made $500,000 more than Ninotchka made.”
    That was the most