ACTOR. TRENDSETTER. INVENTOR. PIONEER.
WE UNRAVEL THE COMPLICATED, ASTONISHING LIFE OF HE DY LAMAR R, THE ICON WHO WAS TOO GOOD FOR HOLLYWOOD
posted a black-and-white picture of Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr, her caption betraying the excitement of a complete fangirl. “The most unique and multifaceted person I’d love to meet,” she wrote of Lamarr, whose heyday was in the 1940s. “Maybe in another lifetime.” Since then, it’s been confirmed that Gadot will embody her in an eight-episode Apple TV+ miniseries, which she’ll also executive-produce. Hold tight: the Lamarr legend comprises a landmark in on-screen sex and nudity, six husbands, and the magic that makes your mobile phone work. Hollywood publicists called her the “most beautiful woman in the world”, yet between posing for the cameras she invented a military technology that has now become central to modern communications.
Although Lamarr was rich, beautiful and about as famous as a person could get in the 1940s, with a brilliant scientific mind, her life wasn’t easy. She left her home in Europe and her controlling first husband (a fascist munitions dealer nicknamed the ‘Merchant Of Death’) as the Nazis took control, but her adopted country, America, treated her with disdain. The press told her she was nothing more than a pretty face and then mocked her when she lost her looks. The military cheated her out of her best idea. Now, she is beginning to get her due. As Gadot put it on Instagram: “So many wonders in one woman!” glamour and scandal, didn’t follow the usual Hollywood biopic template. This is a woman who declared herself “a sworn enemy of convention”, after all. The new miniseries will set the record straight. Sarah Treem, who was an executive producer on The Affair and House Of Cards, is working with Gadot as an executive producer and writer on the show, which will follow Lamarr from her childhood in Austria to her old age as a virtual recluse. Gadot and Lamarr match each other in intelligence, beauty and charm, Treem tells Empire of the casting, but also, “They’re both immigrants. I think that’s a very big part of Hedy’s story.”
It is also one of the reasons why, says Treem, Lamarr’s story is so timely. “There’s a tremendous reckoning in America happening right now in terms of who we think we are versus who we actually are. One thing we have thought we were for a very long time is this kind of great American melting pot. I don’t believe that’s true. We turn on the people who have come and given us their intelligence and their resources and their lives and their efforts, and then we attack them. I think Hedy’s life suffered from some of that. She was so committed to America, which is why she created this ‘frequency hopping’ technology. It wasn’t for her own gain, it was because she was trying to help the American war effort. They basically took it from her, and never gave her credit for it.”
Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler, in Vienna in 1914, to Jewish parents: her father was a bank manager, her mother a pianist. She was a mechanically minded child, pulling apart her toys to see how they worked, then as a teenager took acting classes and got an early start, both on the stage and in small film roles. In 1933 she married Fritz Mandl, an arms trader who was one of the richest men in Austria, but also a fascist, who kept his young actor wife on a short leash, and taped her private conversations. The same year though, she took the lead role in Czechoslovakian art film Ecstasy.
Ecstasy is about a young woman called Eva who is married to a wealthy older man, but he’s impotent, and she finds sexual fulfilment with a younger man instead. Playing Eva involved an extended nude scene, as she runs through the woods and goes skinny-dipping, as well as the first female orgasm in the movies: Eva’s face is shown in close-up as she has sex, up to the point of her climax. The unromantic stimulus for her throes of passion was a pin pricking Lamarr’s backside, wielded by director Gustav Machatý. “I remember one shot when the close-up camera caught my face in a distortion of real agony,” Lamarr later recalled, “and the director yelled happily, ‘Yes, good!’” Nevertheless, it’s probably the best performance of her career, and she looks stunning, photographed in hazy monochrome. Ecstasy caused a sensation.
After hosting a private screening, an outraged Mandl ordered all the prints to be destroyed. But more were made, and the film’s notoriety spread across Europe and over the Atlantic. “It was a shock to the system,” says Dr Ruth Barton, author of Hedy Lamarr biography The Most Beautiful Girl In Film. “In America some states totally banned it, other states cut it. It was what she became known for.” Meanwhile, Lamarr was keen to leave Mandl, and in 1937 she finally got away by drugging her maid and escaping in her uniform, carrying a suitcase of clothes and jewels. She wasn’t only escaping a terrible marriage, but also the consequences she would face as a Jew in Austria.
MGM boss Louis B. Mayer probably met Lamarr at a party in England later that year, although the studio spun the line that they met on an ocean liner to the US, a boat the starry-eyed Lamarr had hopped with that same suitcase and a dream of a new life. Mayer gave her a little lecture on what he called her “shenanigans” in Ecstasy. “Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood,” he told her. “Never. A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatregoers.” By the time he had signed her to a contract at MGM, the studio would take a more pragmatic view. Head of publicity Howard Dietz quizzed his new actor: “Did you appear in the nude?” “Yes,” she replied. “Did you look good?” “Of course!” “Then it’s alright, no damage has been done.”
Mayer had big plans for Lamarr, whom he saw taking the place of the recently deceased Jean Harlow as the studio’s leading sex symbol. He arranged for her to have English lessons, a Hollywood diet and a new name, and the publicity that launched Lamarr consciously evoked the early days of Hollywood, when vamps such as Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, Nita Naldi and Theda Bara were in vogue. “Hedy takes up where the sinuous heroines of yesterday’s movies left off,” wrote one journalist.
This image was largely based on the fact that Lamarr was not American, and it affected the kind of roles that she could play, says Barton. “She was characterised as exotic. She always had to be that sort of foreign, vampy woman, slightly more sexually available than the cutie-pie American stars of the era. She’s a marriage-wrecker or a seductress.” Her first Hollywood role set the trend. MGM loaned her to United Artists for Algiers (1938), in which her character encounters a jewel thief hiding out in the Casbah quarter of Algiers. The film was a massive hit, nominated for four Oscars, and launched Lamarr into the top flight, although critics were nonplussed by her performance, more breezy than vamplike. “This is the stuff of glamour,” commented Silver Screen magazine. “It is nothing that Hedy did. Actually, Hedy did almost nothing, on the screen or off of it. It is simply that Hedy is beautiful.”
George Sanders, who played opposite Lamarr on more than one occasion, recalled: “She was so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into a room… Of her conversation
I can remember nothing: when she spoke one did not listen, one just watched her mouth moving and marvelled at the exquisite shapes made by her lips. She was, in consequence, rather frequently misunderstood.” This is exactly what would prove Lamarr’s downfall. The interest that Hollywood, and the rest of America, took in her was only skin-deep.
THE CONSENSUS AMONG REVIEWERS WAS THAT
Lamarr was exceptionally good-looking, but they were unsure she could act. “I think that she never really gave herself to roles,” says Barton. “She was always holding something back. Right from Algiers, she just wouldn’t give them what they were looking for, quite. As a consequence she was termed difficult, but I think it was much more complicated than that.”
Treem agrees. “She was a very headstrong person and as much as she liked being an actress, she didn’t like the Hollywood machine. To me, her story is very tragic: she was fighting to be her own person and be known as who she is in this world at a time that really just didn’t want to allow that to happen.”
It was because of Algiers that Lamarr was the first choice to play Ilsa in Casablanca, but MGM refused to loan her out, and the role went to Ingrid Bergman. She turned down Gaslight of her own volition, and also Otto Preminger’s Laura. Though she missed out on these plum jobs, which might have enhanced her reputation with the critics, Lamarr enjoyed a sustained period of success in the 1940s, and kept the gossip writers busy with her complex love-life, marrying again in 1939, 1943, 1951, 1953 and 1963; her longest marriage lasted seven years, to Houston oilman W. Howard Lee, and she had three children with the actor John Loder, husband number three. She said her motto was, “Never stay too long, anywhere, with anyone,” and told Zsa Zsa Gabor, “If a man sends me flowers, I always look to see if a diamond bracelet is hidden among the blossoms. If there isn’t one, I don’t see the point of flowers.”
After leaving MGM in 1945, she formed her own production company, to make The Strange Woman and Dishonored Lady, an act of independence that did not endear her to the studio moguls. Then in 1949, aged 35 and looking just as slinky as ever, she starred in Cecil B. Demille’s biblical epic Samson And Delilah. As Delilah she purrs, “Will you tame me, Samson?” to her co-star Victor Mature. The film was the biggest of Lamarr’s career: a huge success, winning Oscars for its costumes and art direction. It was her first appearance in Technicolor and combined lavish sets and an epic narrative with a kinky subtext: Delilah is far more sexually assertive than Samson, and ties him up in chains. But as far as Hollywood was concerned, 35 was already over the hill, and Lamarr career’s ground to a slow stop in the mid-1950s, as the studio system fell apart and her model of glamour fell out of fashion. “She had become sort of virtually unknown and for a while she was kind of a joke,” says Treem.
Once Lamarr lost her looks, her star fell, hard. From the 1960s onwards her name became increasingly obscure and disrespected. She was hounded by reporters. Out of work, she described herself as “a woman over 50 with no money for the next meal, and children that I am unable to help.” She was caught shoplifting on the verge of what might have been her screen comeback, the 1966 horror film Picture Mommy Dead, and was fired after collapsing on set. She was also very litigious, even suing the ghostwriter of her own memoir, describing Ecstasy And Me as “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libellous and obscene”. In Andy Warhol’s Hedy (1966) she is played by the drag queen Mario Montez, and portrayed as a narcissist who asks a plastic surgeon to make her look like a 14-year-old girl, and who is put on trial for shoplifting, judged by
a jury of her ex-husbands. The film is a compilation of everything Lamarr found humiliating.
By the 1970s Lamarr had become a punchline in a Mel Brooks movie: remember the attorney general in Blazing Saddles, who hates people mispronouncing his name? “It’s not Hedy, it’s Hedley. Hedley Lamarr!” She sued Brooks’ studio too. By the end of the decade, she stopped appearing in public at all. Lamarr’s children have said that the loss of her looks hit her hard. “Something deeply tragic about being a woman in general is that if beauty is your objective, you’re going to lose,” says Treem.
But there was far more to Lamarr than that. “She was always a little out of step with her time,” says Treem, whose show won’t take a linear approach to Lamarr’s life. To tell the truth about this intriguing woman, you have to understand that she was playing multiple parts at the same time.
THE MECHANICALLY MINDED CHILD WAS AN
inventive adult. Lamarr was full of brainwaves, such as fizzy drinks in tablet form. She gave her lover Howard Hughes tips on how to make his planes more aerodynamic. In her later years she would in vent new techniques for plastic surgery( including an accordion inspired instrument for stretching skin ), which she put into practice on her own face, with damaging results. But it was during World War II, at the height of her Hollywood fame, that she came up with her most successful idea: a “secret communications system” to guide underwater missiles. This was “frequency hopping”, which she developed with composer George Antheil, inspired by the paper rolls that made a player piano work. The idea was that signals could be sent from the transmitter to the torpedo via rapidly changing radio frequencies, so the message could not be intercepted or jammed by the enemy. They used the rolls to synchronise the complex sequence of frequencies.
Before granting the patent, the National Inventors’ Council leaked the story to the press, prompting a few “Hedy’s secret weapon” jokes. The Film Daily gasped: “Hedy Lamarr has an invention so vital to national defense that government sources won’t allow details disclosed beyond the fact that the discovery is ‘red hot’ (can it be that Hedy has found a way of duplicating herself?)”
What happened next is what really smarts. The NIC told Lamarr the invention was no good, and her best bet to help the war effort was to appear at war bond rallies and play the forces’ pin-up. Which she did, but the patent was far from unworkable: the US used it in the failed Bay Of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and eventually, it became the basis for Wifi, GPS and Bluetooth. The success of her invention wasn’t revealed until much later in Lamarr’s life, and today she is arguably more celebrated for the impact her scientific genius made on the world than the films that were seen by millions of cinemagoers in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Those people who looked no further than Lamarr’s beauty back in the 1940s missed out on a remarkable woman. The American public were not trusted to believe a movie star could be as intelligent as she was sexy. “If there’s one thing I’d like people to know about Lamarr,” says Barton, “it would be the fact that she could be brilliant and beautiful at the same time. It’s really important, because it’s still something that there is a lot of prejudice about.”
It’s hard not to speculate on how different life could have been for Lamarr today, in a world that may have offered her a greater opportunity to express herself and explore all her interests. “She is a feminist icon,” says Treem. “She was basically the primary caretaker for her children. She made all of her own money. She invented Wifi. She really is somewhat heroic.” Superheroic, even.