Six marriages over thirty years, two biological children (James and Denise, both with Loder), one adopted child (Anthony), and a private life that the public record catches only in glimpses.
The marriages have been used to support various interpretations of her character — she was searching for security, she was unable to commit, she was drawn to powerful men who disappointed her. These interpretations are all speculative. The record does not show us what she was looking for, only what she found and then left. The most honest thing to say is that her personal life was complicated in ways that would require her own testimony to explain, and her own testimony — given in interviews, in the unreliable autobiography, in reported conversations — was partial and sometimes contradictory.
What the marriages do show is that she was not passive. She left relationships that did not work. She married people who interested her at the time, sometimes for reasons of practicality and sometimes, apparently, for reasons of real feeling. She made her own decisions, including several that she later regretted. She was human.
The patent she filed in 1941 carried the name Hedy Kiesler Markey — Gene Markey’s surname — because they were married when the application was submitted. By the time the patent was granted in 1942, she had divorced Markey. Her contribution to the invention is thus attached, in the official record, to a married name from a marriage she no longer had, filed at a time when she was preparing to become someone else’s wife again. The administrative irony is not without meaning: her identity in the historical document was already being shaped by the men around her.