Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one,

Beauty and Brains.

To be a glamorous movie starlet in the golden age of cinema, appear in Academy Award-winning

films and have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, set you apart from the crowd.

To develop technologies decades ahead of their time and be inducted into the Inventors Hall of

Fame set you apart from another crowd.

To do both in a single life.

Well, there hardly seems to be a crowd left to be set apart from.

Hedvig Ava Maria Kiesler was born to Jewish parents in Vienna Austria in 1914 at the beginning of

World War I.

Before she was 20 she had acted in a number of Austrian, German, and

Czech films and married a wealthy ammunition manufacturer with close ties to fascist and

Nazi governments. Then in 1937, oppressed by her domineering

husband and experiencing the intensifying anti-Semitism in Austria, she looked

for an opportunity to escape.

There are at least two stories about how she managed it.

According to one, she drugged her maid, dressed in the maid's clothes, and fled to Paris.

According to another account, she persuaded her husband to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party with Nazi big weeks, then disappeared.

However she got out, she made her way to London, met Louis B. Mayor, head of MGM Studio, signed a Hollywood movie contract, and began being promoted as

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