Hedy Lamarr:
‘Bombshell’ Hedy Lamarr was also a talented inventor
“Bombshell” documentary reveals how the actress’ beauty masked her intelligence and derailed her second career as an inventor.
During her tenure as an MGM star of the 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Another actress might have been flattered, but Lamarr, a Viennese emigre with a curious mind and restless nature, felt imprisoned.
“Any girl can look glamorous,” she once said. “All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”
In “Bombshell — The Hedy Lamarr Story,” a documentary that screens in the Jewish Film Festival beginning Wednesday, July 26, we see how the actress’ luminous beauty not only masked her intelligence and imagination but thwarted her second career as an inventor.
“Hedy wanted to do something important with her life; she wanted to make her mark,” Robert Osborne, the late Turner Classic Movies host and a close friend of Lamarr,
says in “Bombshell.” “But she was totally judged by that face.”
When Lamarr wasn’t alluringly draped in doorways, allowing the hot studio lights to emphasize her perfect bone structure, she was bent over a drafting table at home — moonlighting as an inventor. For decades, that part of her life was unknown.
Lamarr collaborated on three inventions with George Antheil, an avant-garde composer and pianist. In 1941, eager to help the Allies defeat Germany, they developed a radio communication system designed to guide U.S. Navy torpedoes to German U-boats. Called spread-spectrum technology, the system manipulated radio signals to jump from one frequency to another, thereby altering the trajectory of the torpedo and preventing the Germans from tracking or jamming the signal. Lamarr called it “frequency hopping.”
“It was a profoundly original idea,” says Richard Rhodes, whose book “Hedy’s Folly” provides the fascinating backstory to the Lamarr/Antheil collaborations. Antheil, best known for his ambitious “Ballet Mechanique” composition, described Lamarr as “an incredible combination of childish ignorance and definite flashes of genius.”
In 1942, Lamarr and Antheil were granted a U.S. patent for their design, but the U.S. Navy rejected their proposal. Dismissively, they told the glamorous movie star to go sell war bonds if she wanted to help the war effort — which she did, raising $25 million ($375 million in today’s dollars) for her adopted country. “She was very patriotic,” her son Anthony Loder says in the film. “She loved America. She was grateful to be here, and she wanted Hitler dead.”
The Navy didn’t use Lamarr’s spread-spectrum technology until 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the influence of her invention is vast: The wireless technology that Lamarr first envisioned is used today in cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and military guided missiles. The patent for her design, Loder said by phone from his Los Angeles home, “is now worth billions of dollars.”
Born Hedwig Kiesler in 1914, Lamarr was the daughter of wealthy, erudite, assimilated Jewish parents. She was indulged by her father (“Be yourself, choose and take what you want,” he told her) and developed an assertive nature and narcissistic need for attention. At 16, she brashly entered a film studio, offered her services and was put to work almost immediately. In 1933, she became an international scandal when she briefly appeared nude in the Czech film “Ecstasy.”
There were six marriages and divorces, the third to English actor John Loder (“Now, Voyager”), who fathered her son, Anthony, and a daughter, Denise. Her first husband, Fritz Mandl, was a German munitions manufacturer who sold arms to the Nazis.
After leaving Mandl, Lamarr met MGM chief Louis B. Mayer in London and booked passage on the crossAtlantic steamship that Mayer was taking to New York. Mayer signed her to a contract and renamed her Hedy Lamarr — la mar is Spanish for “the sea” — and in 1938 she made her Hollywood debut in “Algiers” opposite Charles Boyer.
MGM gave her wealth and exposure, but Lamarr rebelled when Mayer relegated her to lightweight, decorative parts. After the U.S. Navy rejected her patent, her first part was Tondelayo, a dusky jungle siren in the ludicrous “White Cargo.” Her biggest box-office success, Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah,” was released in 1949 but was followed by a series of bitter disappointments. After 1958, she never appeared in another movie.
Had the Navy adopted Lamarr’s frequency-hopping technology, Anthony Loder says, “My mother would’ve jumped right into it. She would never have gone back to Hollywood and probably stayed in Washington, D.C., and had a fulfilling, happy life.”
One of the confounding aspects of Lamarr’s life is the schism between her independence and accomplishments on the one hand, and her erratic, often self-destructive personal life on the other. Her marriages all failed. She lost her savings when she produced the epic “Loves of Three Queens” (1954) but couldn’t find a distributor. She became addicted to methamphetamine when notorious Manhattan physician Max Jacobson administered his energizing elixirs to her, claiming they were multivitamin concoctions. In 1966, her worst year, she was arrested for shoplifting at a Los Angeles department store and saw the release of “Ecstasy and Me,” a ghostwritten autobiography. Lamarr foolishly never read the book in galley form and discovered upon its publication that the writers had fabricated a lurid, largely fictionalized potboiler. She sued for libel and lost.
“The book devastated her,” Loder said. “She left Hollywood with her tail between her legs. Her life went downhill. She moved to New York, to Aruba, to Miami. She spent her life alone, with no one to ground her or care for her. She got screwed a lot: with her invention, with her husbands, her career. Her own lawyers cheated her. It was just bam, bam, bam! One thing after another.”
In 1990, when a Forbes magazine article resurrected the story of her spread-spectrum invention, Lamarr received the satisfaction of belated recognition. In 1997, she and Antheil were given the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award. In 2014, they were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
“All her life she was known for her face,” Loder says. “Now, for all of history she’s going to be known as someone who came up with a brilliant idea.”
In January 2000, Lamarr died alone at her home in Florida, at 85. At her request, her son and daughter took her cremated remains to Vienna and scattered them on a hillside outside her beloved city of birth.