What is clear is that the marriage did not survive the decade. Her father, Emil Kiesler, died in 1935. Her primary anchor in Vienna was gone. Exactly how and when she left Mandl has been told in several versions. She may have disguised herself as a maid. She may have simply walked out. Some accounts say she fled in 1937; others say the marriage was annulled by Mandl in 1938 on racial grounds, as Austria moved toward the Nazi annexation that would come in March of that year. Lamarr’s own memoir account is, in the words of researchers who have examined it carefully, unreliable in some of its details. The Jewish Women’s Archive notes that Mandl may have had the marriage annulled. What is not disputed is that by 1937 Lamarr was in London, the marriage was over, and Fritz Mandl was on his way, within a year, to Buenos Aires, taking the arms business with him.
The Anschluss, the absorption of Austria into Hitler’s Germany, occurred on March 12, 1938. Lamarr was already gone.
## The Normandie and Louis B. Mayer
The account of how Hedwig Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr is, like many Hollywood origin stories, embellished in the retelling but grounded in something that actually happened. She went to London. She met the right people. Somewhere — accounts disagree on whether the meeting was in London itself or aboard the ocean liner SS Normandie — she encountered Louis B. Mayer.
Mayer was the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest and most powerful studio in Hollywood. He was in Europe looking for talent, which was one of the things powerful Hollywood executives did in the late 1930s. He was also aware, as most well-connected people in the film industry were aware, of Ecstasy, and of the face it had made famous. His offer to Kiesler was reportedly modest — a standard contract at a salary that she found inadequate. The negotiations, whether conducted in London or on the Normandie, ended with her agreeing to his terms, and with Mayer reportedly deciding on a new name.