Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton
as sex, particularly premarital or miscegenation.27 Filmmakers either heeded Breen's advice or risked having no outlets that would show their film. Cummins appealed Breen's decision, pointing out that, among other issues, the film was already being shown at independent production houses and if anything people were disappointed that it was so mild.28
PCA vice president Francis Harmon urged Breen to remain steadfast. Ecstasy violated the Production Code on several counts, primarily in its refusal to take a moral stand on the actions of its protagonists, its depiction of nudity, and its proposal that adultery was attractive. Warming to his theme, Harmon wrote that
this girl, married unfortunately to an impotent husband, could have secured an annulment under civil law or the canonical law of various religious bodies. She had adequate grounds for a divorce. Yet her craving for sexual satisfaction is so pronounced that she dashes through a terrific storm to commit adultery with a man who had caught her fancy, as uninhibited by legal or moral considerations as her father's mare which ran away with her clothes at the neigh and scent of a stallion. Nor does the picture have sufficient compensating moral values to correct this distorted attitude toward the sacred union between a man and a woman, licensed by the state and approved by religion, upon which our entire social structure rests.29
As always, the most pressing anxiety weighing on the administrators of the Production Code was that susceptible individuals (i.e., women and members of the working class) would be led into the moral abyss by watching this kind of fare. Ecstasy, they concluded, was designed to wake lustful desires in those who viewed it. Doubtless, they were less worried by the reaction of audiences who had benefited from the kind of education that they relied on to guide their decisions.
When PGA board members viewed the contentious film in Columbia's projection room, they were quite immune to its artistic merits; indeed Harmon remarked that his colleagues were so bored during the first few reels, it was hard to persuade them to stay. Only during the scene in the engineer's cabin did they begin to sit up and take notice.
Once again, Joseph Breen declared that Ecstasy was not suitable fare for the American public, and editing would not make it so.
Proposals to remake the film immediately began circulating Hollywood, most particularly in the PGA offices. In 1941, a Mr. Geza Herczif wrote a script intended as a remake of Ecstasy, with the same title. Herczif was an associate of Martin Licht, director of Wyngate Company.30The script was rejected by the PGA. Wyngate, however, leased Ecstasy from Eureka and, despite the PCA, it gained a limited showing from October 1941 through September 1942. As a result, it once again became the subject of a court case, this time over the American rights to the soundtrack (anyone today watching the film on DVD or in an English-language version will not hear the original soundtrack, most of which was replaced, most notably with Tchaikovsky's “None But the Lonely Heart”).
By July 1945, Machaty himself proposed a remake. The new version would feature a voice-over from Eva, affirming that she was divorced from her first husband and would marry Adam. Set in Prague, it was to star Hedy Lamarr and Aribert Mog with Zwonimir Rogoz as Frederick and Leopold Kramer as the Father; Joy Williams was to narrate.
However, the script, titled My Ecstasy, contained both the nude sequence and the orgasm scene. The PGA informed Machaty that the film could not be titled Ecstasy or anything similar and they approved a new title, Rhapsody of Love. Machaty also had to remove the offending scenes before the film received the PCA's Certificate of Approval in February 1949. Machaty's producer was the Pix Distributing Corporation in New York City, which was headed by Harry Rybnick. Pix changed the title to My Life.
Released in January 1950, the film played in New York City's Rialto Theatre. However, the Rialto advertised it as the complete version of the original Ecstasy and adorned its foyer with stills from the original alongside news reports of its sensational nature. The PCA sent two employees, Gordon S. White and Arthur deBra, to see what the Rialto was showing. They reported back that the film was being advertised as “HEDY LAMARR in MY ECSTASY” and that it carried a Production Code Seal but that this was a completely different film from the one the PCA approved. Furthermore, it included “close-up detail of the Heroine presumably in the act of her surrender.”31
PCA chief Joseph Breen was far from happy: “This seems to me to be a pretty clear cut-and-dried case of bad faith, and I hope you will keep me advised as to the developments. It is really shocking!”32
On 2 February 1950, the two agents, now accompanied by a Miss Young, returned to the Rialto to see how things were shaping up. Not only did they find the same picture playing, the only change was that the PCA's seal had been removed. The New York State Censor Board issued a general alert for any versions of the offending picture and the Ecstasy print went underground. In January 1951, the illicit print again appeared at the Times Theatre at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue.
The film also played in Germany in 1950, where it was again promoted on the promise of sexual explicitness and Hedy Lamarr's nude scenes. This version had a new ending, shot with a stand-in for Hedy, where the young couple, it hints, live happily ever after in South America. In Frankfurt, screenings of the film were accompanied by protests that took the form of defacing the posters bearing the star's naked image. The protestors were divided into two camps: a Catholic youth organization that was opposed to the film's eroticism, particularly as promoted in its publicity, and filmgoers who were disappointed by its lack of erotic qualities.33 Again, the suggestion that the film had been banned in the 1930s because its star was Jewish was revived by the Jewish press.
In America, the film continued to emerge and vanish equally swiftly, and, as so often was to be the case, to disappoint audiences by its unpornographic take on sexuality. Exhibitors began to intervene and Pauline Kael reported hearing of “versions in which someone had decided to prolong the ecstasy by printing the climactic scenes over and over.”34
In 1933, however, all this was yet to come and the film's beguiling star was still named Hedy Kiesler and only nineteen years old. She was, as far as most people were concerned, an exquisite Viennese mädl, whose acting abilities were as yet untested by a major dramatic role. Her reputation was the creation of men who were considerably older and worldlier than she. She would soon meet one more such man, her first husband, Fritz Mandl.
4
Fritz Mandl
THE SUCCESS and notoriety of Ecstasy opened doors for the young star; although for the moment those were to be stage doors. Interviewed during the shooting of Ecstasy, Hedy was firm: she did not want a Hollywood career. “I don't want to become a slave to cinema,” Hedy said. “I want to film when I feel like it, and to take a break when I don't. I'll probably go back to Berlin.”1 Any mention of a contract with Paramount and a trip to Hollywood with her mother vanished as unexpectedly as they had appeared. What she did not then know was that she had left Berlin and the Weimar film industry for good.
As the German film industry increasingly fell under Nazi control, a brief window of opportunity opened for studios in Vienna. Over the long winter of 1932, nothing had been filmed. By summer, the Filmhof Café was filled with the same faces that had so recently gathered in Berlin's Romanische Café. Six companies were filming simultaneously in The Sascha Film Studios, and anyone from the opera world willing to work in a light operetta, set in Vienna, and featuring sweet young Viennese girls, could name their price.
According to Christopher Young's account of Hedy's life and her autobiography, during this period her fiancé, Franz von Hochstetten, pleaded with her to marry him and when she refused, he committed suicide. Soon afterward, Hedy met Count Blucher von Wahlstatt and they announced their engagement. This too ended quickly. If true, the engagement must have ended around December 1932. It's difficult to pinpoint where and how the many rumors surrounding Hedy started, particularly when you find them repeated in Ecstasy and Me. From a young age, she seems to have reveled in the company of adoring men, many of them older. She also seems to have held little regard for the bonds of marriage, but beginning in her teens, evidently