The generals talked about torpedoes and she said nothing.

In the mid 1930s, at Schloss Schwarzenau in Austria, Fritz Mandl brought home anyone in the market for weapons. Engineers, officers, men with problems in radio guidance. His wife sat at the end of the table and smiled and poured. Nobody bothered to lower his voice. As far as that room was concerned, she was furniture.

Upstairs, the maids listened in on her phone calls. That was his arrangement. She had married him at eighteen. He required her to convert. He ended her acting career and spent a fortune buying up prints of the film that had made her famous, so no other man could watch it. She kept the houses, the cars, and the jewelry. Years later she could finally name the loss. She was no longer Hedy Kiesler, an individual. She was the wife of Fritz Mandl.

He never had to lock a door. He shrank her world down to a size he could hold, and then he told her what she was, over and over, until agreeing cost less than arguing.