Hollywood’s Smartest Seductress
THE SCREEN SIREN’S KIDS OPEN UP ABOUT HER TRUE PASSION
As a young boy, Anthony Loder discovered something truly special about his movie-star mother, Hedy Lamarr. “Mom was going through things she’d put into storage,” he tells Closer of a day the two spent in their attic in Houston. “She grabbed a paper and said, ‘Oh, yeah. I got a patent. It’s for my invention for a secret communications system.’ Nobody knew about it!”
The actress, whose extraordinary life is examined in the new documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, wouldn’t be recognized for her 1941 technological innovation until 1997. “It’s about time,” Hedy said when the tech group Electronic Frontier Foundation lauded her. “Hollywood offered her fame and money,” Stephen Michael Shearer, author of Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr, tells Closer, “but what she always wanted in life was to be accepted for her intelligence.”
Hedy wowed audiences in films such as 1938’s Algiers and 1949’s Samson and Delilah, but Anthony, 70, notes his mother always struggled with people’s obsession with her physical features. “When you’re told you’re beautiful 100 times a day,” he says, “it gets boring.”
Daughter Denise Loder-DeLuca (she and Anthony are from Hedy’s third of six marriages) adds that Hedy — born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Austria in 1914 — never fully embraced the celebrity scene. “She didn’t like movie stars,” Denise, 72, tells Closer. “The people she’d socialize with were composers and artists.”
A BRILLIANT MIND
Nevertheless, Hedy had many highprofile romances, which included Charlie Chaplin and Howard Hughes. “He relied on me,” Hedy said of the latter, and when she told him his planes were too slow, she set about improving the design of plane wings by researching the fastest bird and the fastest fish. “I drew [them] together,” she explained, “and showed it to Howard. He said, ‘You’re a genius.’ ”
Her co-inventor on her technology breakthrough was composer George Antheil, and they gave their frequency-hopping system away for free to the U.S. Navy during World War II. It would later revolutionize digital communications, paving the way for everything from GPS to WiFi.
Her frustrations over being more recognized for her beauty than her brains led Hedy to become reclusive: She died alone in Florida in 2000 at 85.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame posthumously inducted Hedy in 2014 and Anthony spoke on her behalf. “Students will call me and say they’re doing a science project on her [work],” he reports, proudly adding, “My mother’s legacy is now cemented in history as an inventor, more than a beautiful face.”