‘Bombshell’ discovery
Director reveals actress Hedy Lamarr was secret weapon inventor
IN 1940s Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr was dubbed “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” yet the Austrian immigrant, as tomorrow’s new documentary “Bombshell” reveals, was so much more.
“Any girl can look glamorous,” Lamarr famously decreed. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
“What I found,” reveals “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story” director Alexandra Dean, a 2001 Harvard grad, “was one amazing insight (after) another into this woman who had been completely maligned in her lifetime.
“I’ve been accused of being too harsh and too sympathetic and I’m proud of that.”
For two years Dean went digging, researching to tell the remarkable story of how this cinematic siren of “Ziegfeld Girl,” “Algiers” and “Samson and Delilah” made one of the previous century’s most important discoveries, a radio guidance system for torpedoes, patented it, yet never received a cent. It all began far from Hollywood.
“I had been doing this series for Bloomberg television called ‘Innovators.’ I was profiling inventors, delving into what makes an inventor great today and what the obstacles are,” Dean said.
“What most said was, they didn’t look like Tom Edison so it’s very difficult to get taken seriously.
“I wanted to tell a story that would explode that notion of who changed the world.”
Reading a 2014 book “Hedy’s Folly,” about Lamarr’s patent, intrigued Dean. “A lot of people were saying she didn’t do it, it’s an urban legend. Hedy had stopped talking about what she had done, because no one would believe her.
“But in that six-month investigation we found tapes from 1990 where she was interviewed about patent law by this courtly Southern gentleman. He was the first to call about the invention and not the movie star.
“She opens up to him. To our utter astonishment she told the whole story.”
Lamarr’s patent, Dean said, “is something, an evolution of which we all use today. It’s called frequency hopping,” and it’s essential to GPS and Bluetooth.
Lamarr saw that German U-boats were destroying the English by radio hacking.
“She wanted to give ships a way to defend themselves against Nazi U-boats, and what she gave them was a radio-controlled torpedo. There was no way the Germans could hack into it and change its direction.”
But it would be decades before Lamarr’s work was finally recognized.