HOLLYWOOD’S FORGOTTEN GENIUS:
actress Hedy Lamarr’s brilliant discovery
To her adoring fans, Hedy Lamarr was a screen temptress – the exquisite Delilah in 1949 Samson and Delilah, which became box of ce lm of the year and revived the fortunes of MGM. But she was much, much more, and had opportunities for women been what they are today, her life and legend could have been very different more than half a century ago.
Documentary lmmaker Alexandra Dean’s vital, excellent lm, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, with co-executive producer Susan Sarandon, goes a long way to putting that watery history into perspective, even discovering a recording of the legend being interviewed at 75 years old.
As a child in Austria, Hedy tinkered and “took things apart”; her untutored brilliance in science producing homemade gadgets. Once World War II started, she began dreaming up ideas to help the Allied cause, as the Nazis began to take hold on Europe, targeting Jewish families like her own.
Years later, while acting during the day, she would continue to invent at night. Working in her home laboratory or in her trailer on set, she created new designs to streamline her aviator and lm director boyfriend Howard Hughes’ airplanes. Theirs was very much a meeting of mechanics – their connection a love of invention; Hughes giving her access to his team of scientists to execute her inventions.
And her most signi cant discovery would be the precursor to Bluetooth and wi- . It was what she called “frequency hopping”; a coded form of radio communication, to securely
guide Allied torpedoes to their targets. If given credence by the navy at the time, it could have changed the course of World War II.
“It was so obvious,” she said. “They shot torpedoes in all directions and never hit the target so I invented something that does.” Hedy had never forgotten the war that was ravaging her homeland.
“When I started working on this,” says Bombshell director Alexandra Dean, “I did not think we would be sitting here saying, ‘Hedy Lamarr was a genius’. I thought maybe she was a pretty smart cookie. Hedy Lamarr was actually a genius. She would have ashes of inspiration. During the war, her mother was stuck in England and she had to come over treacherous waters to the US, and kids were getting blown up on those waters, and Hedy had had enough.”
She collaborated with avant-garde composer friend George Antheil and although the invention was patented, they earned nothing from the patent.
“When Hedy patented her technology, she gave it to the US Navy, but sadly, they didn’t take her seriously,” says Alexandra. “They said it was too bulky and not a useful military technology. What they were really saying was that it was unlikely that an actress and a musician had come up with a technology they could use. In actual fact, it was ahead of its time and some say it could have shortened the war by a year or more. And it was the size of a watch face.”
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, on November 9, 1914, the only child of wealthy Jewish parents (her father was a banker) in Vienna. She grew up immersed in the city’s sophisticated cultural life.
But this strong-minded woman with classic looks was different. Her beauty masked a brilliant mind. Her face was the inspiration for the innocence of Disney’s rst Snow White cartoon, and later, the inspiration for the invincible Catwoman.
The Guardian UK’s lm critic Peter Bradshaw says, “Lamarr was an enigma: a great brain trapped in a silly, spurious image of glamour, while her real talent was allowed to wither.”
Alexandra cites Hedy’s demise as being of its time. “She didn’t know what to do with that power. And, when at last she managed to do something incredible to try to change the world, she got little or no recognition for it.”
It was as a talented chemistry student that Hedy the schoolgirl gate-crashed a Viennese lm studio, landing a bit part. Broadway had appeal as well as the Bunsen burner.
But it was her rst lead role that created the controversy which would hound her career. Ekstase [ Ecstasy], a 1933 Czechoslovakian-Austrian
lm, became notorious for 18-year-old Hedy swimming nude and running through woods “starkers” and her simulating intense passion (a cinematic rst). It was condemned by the Pope and banned by Hitler, but the latter for different reasons: the lead actress was Jewish. It was banned in the US for years as legally obscene.
In her 1966 autobiography Ecstasy and Me: My Life As A Woman, Hedy said that she was tricked into the nude scenes; the director shooting from a distant hill with a telescopic lens.
"The primary objection was not the nude swimming scene, but the close-ups of my face in that cabin sequence where the camera records the reactions of a love-starved bride in the act of sexual intercourse."
Hedy had married millionaire Austrian munitions manufacturer
Fritz Mendl (one of six husbands), shortly after the movie’s completion; but he was unaware of her risqué role. Embarrassed, he tried to buy up all the copies of the lm. He did not succeed and it was nally shown in the US in 1937 – the same year the couple divorced – becoming an even bigger hit because of his actions.
When anti-Semitism was rising in her homeland, Hedy ed to London and there she was famously sent to meet “a little man”, Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. He was in Europe hoping to hire some of the eeing Jewish talent, cheaply on contracts. But because of Ecstasy he was unsure Hedy was right for his studio family.
Finally he said he was willing to pay her $125 a week, an offer she immediately refused. Even though she turned down his rst offer, Hedy followed Mayer to New York, on the same ocean liner; her glamorous attire attracting looks from all on board.
By the time they docked, Mayer had offered her a seven-year contract at $500 a week. Critics described her talent as “moderate” compared to Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Nevertheless Mayer was delighted and vowed to make her the greatest motion picture star ever, when he loaned her out in 1938 to another studio on a 200 per cent mark-up on her salary.
By 1941 the intriguing European sophisticate was posing with her Ziegfeld co-stars Judy Garland and Lana Turner. A caption in David Shipman’s The Great Movie Stars,
The Golden Years, of the three actresses on set observes, “Lamarr was already the veteran of two marriages ... between them (Lamarr, Garland and Turner) they would rack up a total of 17 marriages.”
Hedy always admitted it was a mistake to turn down the lead role in Casablanca alongside Humphrey Bogart; it went to Ingrid Bergman and the lm won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1944.
After her hit Delilah, considered the best role of her career, she was on
screen less and less. She knew the
lms she was being cast in were pretty forgettable. Sadly, the lm production company she founded – unheard of in the male mogul world of the day – was nancially ruinous.
Her six marriages and divorces all ended badly, and she once sent her on-set body double to testify in divorce court on her behalf. The judge was not impressed. She had an adopted son, a biological son and daughter.
“My face has been my misfortune,” said Hedy herself. “It has attracted six unsuccessful marriage partners. It has attracted all the wrong people into my boudoir and brought me tragedy and heartache for ve decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove. I must always live with it. I curse it.”
Says Alexandra Dean: “I think Hedy had greatest power as a teenager – I don’t think you can beat the power of walking into a room and having people lose their breath at the sight of you.”
Tragically, Hedy died in poverty, living on Social Security, while her invention was worth billions.
She was nally recognised for her accomplishments in an investigative piece for Forbes magazine by journalist Fleming Meeks in 1990, when she was 75 years old. She agreed to discuss the invention but refused to pose for pictures, or grant a face-to-face interview. “I still look good, though,” she said by phone. These were the recorded tapes Alexandra discovered and used – “The tapes were a real bolt from the blue,” she says.
What more could Hedy have achieved, had she had more support?
“I knew that Hedy Lamarr was in that rst, really risqué lm and that she was absolutely gorgeous, and that she died a recluse and unappreciated. But I didn’t have the middle,” says Susan Sarandon.
Hedy Lamarr died on January 19, 2000, at the age of 86.
“I ended the lm with Hedy reading a poem to her children on their answerphones,” says Alexandra in an interview with Catherine Jewell of World Intellectual Property Organization. “She says even if life kicks you in the teeth and the world doesn’t recognise your achievements, do it anyway. What’s important is that you tried to change the world for the better. That is what you will remember. The applause doesn’t matter; what matters is the doing.
“I hope that any young woman watching the lm will take heed of Hedy’s message: if you want do something, just do it. Follow your passion. Not just for your own sake, but for the bene t of society because you will be part of that new, diverse team of people who will shape our world.”
Perhaps Hedy will now be remembered by a new legion of fans for her beauty, brains and balls. She tells a funny anecdote from a brief time dating John F. Kennedy before he became President. “He said, ‘What can I bring you?’ I said, ‘Oranges, because I like vitamin C’,” the unforgettable Hedy recalled.