As Hedi discovered, this was because he was already caught up in trading armaments to the Nazi party, and he didn't want too many social impediments for his schedule. Hedi even claimed that one day she heard Fritz talking to Adolf Hitler in the next room - it's a great scene, with the two men dreaming over guided torpedoes! Unsmiling, she walked out on the man and his millions with just one small suitcase to carry her jewellery.She had been allowed to make no film since Extase, yet her looks and her legend had not suffered. She made it her business to get to London and to lodge at Claridge's hotel ("Only one suitcase, madam?") where Louis B Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was staying. He was on one of his talent hunts, the kind of holiday instilled in him by the discovery of Greta Garbo years earlier. This time, he was especially on the look-out for talented Jews who might be eager to get out of Europe at a cut price They met He was impressed by Hedi but uncertain about her acting. He said if she got herself to America there might be a contract.
But she would have to pay for her own ticket on the boat.At first, she refused, but by the time Mayer boarded the Normandie,
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he found a certain Hedwig Mandl as a fellow-passenger (she was travelling as companion to a child prodigy on the violin!). She danced with LB after dinner and made sure they were noticed. Somewhere at sea a contract was settled on (the violinist was hired, too), and a key scene in the Hedi story has to be the closed-cabin conferences during which the name Hedi Kiesler was amended to Hedy Lamarr.It's easy to be suspicious or cynical about such encounters, but in the annals of show business, "Hedy Lamarr" is not just among the great names, it is one of the most audacious transformations. With those breasts and Mr Mayer's fondness, a solid five-year career was made. But with that name, the entire notion of legend was confirmed.For it was a name that profited from its own errors; just to think of Heady L'Amour, the girl who had come on film, was enough to drive men mad with expectation - and as fascism spread in Europe,there was a need for transporting madness. In fact, Mayer had thought of "Lamarr" after Barbara La Marr, a silent screen goddess who had died in 1926 from drugs (and her real name had been Rheatha Watson). You had only to look at Hedy's raven hair, her dark eyes and their baleful stare to think "femme fatale".In truth, Mayer had been smitten. Lamarr had a $500-a-week contract (modest), yet she walked off the Normandie with several new suitcases full of dresses bought for her at the on-ship shops Still, M-G-M couldn't actually think of how to use her. Hedy could be naked in the American mind, but there was no way she could manage that simplicity on the American screen. So, eventually, at $1,000-a-week, in 1938 she was loaned out to Walter Wanger to play the love interest opposite Charles Boyer in Algiers (the re-make of the very successful French film, P? le Moko).Without great demands, she handled herself pretty well in Algiers, and at last Metro found a few films for her.
