Once named the most beautiful woman in the world, Hedy Lamarr was also possessed of a brilliant and inventive mind. In this podcast we celebrate a complicated, but remarkable woman.
Once named the most beautiful woman in the world, Hedy Lamarr was also possessed of a brilliant and inventive mind. In this podcast we celebrate a complicated, but remarkable woman.
It was 1942 and the world was at war. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, America had entered the conflict and times were bleak. Some Hollywood stars were joining up to serve their country and others were doing their bit raising money for the war effort.
But one movie star, perhaps the most beautiful of them all, was working hard into the small hours of the night on a new invention, that might just change the course of the war. Together with composer George Antheil, she was working on a groundbreaking new communication system, able to guide torpedoes to their targets and which involved the use of “frequency hopping”.
The name of this glamorous actress, whose beautiful face was matched by a brilliant mind, was Hedy Lamarr and here is the story of her extraordinary life.
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on 9 November, 1914 in Vienna, Austria. Both parents were of Jewish descent, but Hedy was raised as a Catholic, although it is unlikely she was ever baptised.
Hedy said her mother had wanted a boy and she was aware of the disappointment. Her beauty wasn’t immediately apparent and she said “My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles.”
From the beginning Hedy was a dreamer, spending hours alone creating plays with her dolls and acting out fairy tales and her interest in gadgets started at the age of five when she pulled her music box apart and found that she was able quite easily to put it together again.
She was intellectually curious and was fascinated by knowing how things worked. Her father, a bank manager whom she adored, was himself a lover of technology and would explain things to her when they were out on their walks together, from streetcars and electric trolleys to how a factory was able to generate electricity and at school she excelled in the chemistry classes.
Inventing things came naturally to Hedy. She would create all manner of contraptions for her father and she later said “I guess I came from a different planet.”
She was brought up in a heavily Jewish, artistic and liberal part of Vienna. In her teenage years she became aware of her beauty and the power that wielded and describes herself as an ‘enfant terrible”.
She was set on an acting career and in 1930 at the age of 16 she walked into the largest film studio in Vienna. She was given a bit part in a romantic comedy called Money in the Streets playing a young girl in a nightclub. She was paid around $5, but it was a start.
Her parents were supportive recognising that Hedy had been an actress since she was a baby. More substantial roles in film and on stage followed, but it was the movie Ecstasy, in which she took the leading role, that was to prove a turning part in her life.
In the film Hedy appeares naked and it was the first time that a woman had ever simulated an orgasm on screen and this was considered scandalous at the time. The Pope denounced it and Hitler refused to allow it to be shown.
Hedy had been marked down as a certain ‘type of woman.’ She decided to keep her head down and worked in theatre for a time, achieving considerable success and catching the eye of a munitions tycoon, Friedrich Mandl, one of the richest and most powerful men in Austria who was one first name terms with Mussolini and who had close connections to the Nazi party, despite being of Jewish descent.
They married in August 1933. Hedy at just 18 had been seduced by the power and glamour of this older man, but the marriage turned out to be oppressive and restrictive. They lived in his castle and her job was to look beautiful on his arm, but she was bored and restless.
Handl forbade her acting career and was controlling and manipulative, to the extent that he tried to buy up all the prints and negatives of her film Ecstasy, which he labelled as obscene.
By 1937 the political situation in Austria was by now desperate. Jews were no longer allowed out on the streets and her father died suddenly from a heart attack almost certainly due to stress. Hedy was traumatized and in the meantime her husband became convinced she was having an affair. Hedy realised she had to escape.
However she was aware that due to her husband’s paranoia people were watching her all the time. So one night during a dinner party, she found a maid who resembled her and discreetly slipped sleeping powder into her drink. She put on the maid’s outfit, rode away on a bike and made her way to the station to catch a train for Paris.
She soon found herself in London where she stayed with friends of her parents and here she met movie mogul Louis B. Meyer, who was scouting for European actresses for his MGM movie empire.
On meeting Hedy he offered her $120 a week to sign with him. Unimpressed Hedy turned him down, but it would appear that she had second thoughts.
She booked herself on the ocean liner The Normandie, on which she knew he would be sailing back to America, with the intention of renegotiating the contract. By the time the liner had docked in New York Hedy had been able to secure a contract for $500 a week and having been kitted out in Dior and Chanel on board ship, she stepped out with a designer wardrobe and suitcases to match. Not only that, but she had now been renamed Hedy Lamarr after a friend of Meyer’s wife.
Not long after Mayer proclaimed Hedy was “the most beautiful woman in the world” and the press fell in love with her.
In Hollywood she began to take English lessons and worked on adopting an American accent for the movies. She was also put on a diet and lost 16 pounds in an attempt to attain a more American-styled figure. At the time this was considered par for the course for an aspiring Hollywood actress and she didn’t question it.
After a boring few months when little happened, her big break came when she was offered a part in the film Algiers. She captivated audiences and her star quality was clear. Compared favourably with Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and on the cover of every magazine, she was now a star.
She purchased a luxury home in Beverly Hills, which she redecorated and had a custom made swimming pool installed. Meanwhile her homeland of Austria had been invaded by the Nazis and World War II was looming.
She started to date the screenwriter Gene Markey and they married early 1939. Later that year Hedy began the process of adopting a son James. The circumstances of the adoption are curious as years later his birth certificate was found to list him as the son of Hedy and another young film star John Loder.
This led to speculation that James was in fact Hedy’s son. Hedy then married Gene Markey before giving birth, gave him up for adoption, only for Hedy and her husband to adopt the baby a few months later. As a DNA test has never been done however, this has never been proved and it is still a mystery.
Hedy meanwhile shot the film Lady of the Tropics in which she played a mixed race woman whose ethnicity was part Vietnamese and part European. Whilst today this would be seen as deeply offensive it was common practice in Hollywood at the time. She received mixed reviews and another film I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy fared no better.
Meanwhile after just months of their marriage Markey began to date other women which devastated Hedy and the two separated, divorcing in October 1940. Hedy was now a single working mother.
She began filming Boom Town opposite Clark Gable which was a hit and her next film Comrade X was a critical triumph for her, but the studio system was relentless with the actors filming 6 days a week and well into the night. Film star Bette Davis it as a slave system and being worked like a racehorse. Their contracts bound them to the studio for seven years.
Other successes followed, but Hedy felt she was typecast and was bored. What was sustaining her was that at the end of day Hedy would make her way home to work on her latest invention. Inventing was her hobby.
She had an inventing table set up in her house and after befriending the eccentric aeronautics pioneer Howard Hughes, he gave small version of the equipment for her trailer that she could use between takes. It was around this time that she was really to make her most important contribution to the world.
Hughes and Hedy understood each other. He was attempting to build the fastest aeroplanes in the world intending to sell them to the US airforce. She believed his planes were too slow and she bought a book of fish and a book of birds to look at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes.
She loved to improve things; she upgraded a stoplight and invented a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola, for use by servicemen posted abroad.
In late 1941 Japan had bombed Pearl Harbour and America had entered the war. During her marriage to Mandl, Hedy had acquired knowledge on munitions and various weaponry. She now became aware that controlled torpedos were being used and she began to experiment with ways that a device may be invented which interfered with the signal.
She collaborated with her friend, composer George Antheil and together they developed a social radio guidance system for torpedoes which would use multiple channels rather than just a single frequency. It was called ‘frequency hopping’ which would prevent the enemy eavesdropping and being able to analyse the signal and pinpoint the location of incoming torpedoes.
They conceived the idea as akin to different notes being played on the piano and in 1942 a patent was created for the invention and the U.S. Navy was notified. The invention was way ahead of its time and to their detriment, the Navy ignored it. Only several years later would they fully understand the importance of what had been invented.
With their invention rejected, Hedy turned instead to supporting the war effort with her celebrity by entertaining the troops and selling war bonds. Her mother who had been taking refuge in Britain since the Nazi takeover of Austria, had made her way to join her daughter in Hollywood and took up residence nearby. Hedy meanwhile was warned by Louis B Mayer never to speak of her Jewish heritage.
Hedy’s career was thriving and in the summer of 1942, she married her third husband, the supposed father of James, John Loder. They had two children together, but were divorced only a few years later.
Hedy left MGM in 1945 and formed a film production company. She produced and starred in two film noir pictures, but this in itself was groundbreaking and was not welcomed by a misogynistic Hollywood establishment.
Not all her films were successes, but in 1949 she starred in Samson and Delilah with Victor Mature. It was the second highest grossing film of the decade and Hedy’s Delilah, perhaps her most well known role, was widely praised.
Married again, this time to the band leader Ernest Stauffer, the family moved to Mexico. The children found their new environment difficult and Hedy sent them to boarding school in San Francisco. The elder son James, was by now a adolescence and was unhappy. Hedy was deeply hurt when he chose to stay with a teacher and her family and they became estranged. His letters to Hedy were returned unopened.
Hedy and Ernest divorced soon after with Hedy citing him as being physically abusive and she married her fifth husband, the oil tycoon W. Howard Lee.
She went to live with him in Texas and again became a trophy wife and was feeling frustrated. On a visit to the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado however, she was inspired by how much it reminded her of her homeland and spent years creating an Austria in Colorado.
Hedy’s fifth marriage ended acrimoniously with them both in court accusing the other of abuse. The day she was due in court to testify, her son was in a serious car accident and she sent a body double to testify for her. The Judge was so incensed that he cut her share of the divorce settlement.
At this very low point in her life Hedy collapsed and had a breakdown. She claimed that her father was her greatest love and no-one would ever live up to him. Only one more short marriage followed before this too quickly collapsed and this was to be her last.
Hedy had also sunk into a spiral drug addiction which had almost certainly started when she was part of the Hollywood studio system and she had become hooked on shots of the dug methamphetamine which caused erratic behaviour.
She wrote an infamous Hollywood autobiography, but hated it and afterwards claimed it was mostly fabricated by her ghost writer and she would sue the publisher for printing what she claimed was false material. However, she was not able to stop it becoming a best seller.
In January 1966 Hedy faced the humiliation of being arrested for shoplifting, possibly the result of mental illness. Although her work had for the most part dried up, she was still a glamorous star and why she did it was a mystery, though she claimed it was all a big misunderstanding.
She had been pulled over in car shortly before the incident and suspected of being under the influence. She persuaded the police officer that she was sober enough to drive and he let her go. She then went shopping, dropped various items into her bag and stepped out of the store without paying whereupon she was confronted by the store detective. The police were called and she was arrested. Whilst she was quickly released, but she was pilloried at a press conference the following day.
She was dropped from the production she was currently working on and had to appear in court to face charges. She was found not guilty by a sympathetic jury, but her reputation was damaged.
Hedy now became almost a caricature of herself, ridiculed in the press and seen as a joke. She had also been having plastic surgery in an attempt to keep her looks and took an active part in the process pinpointing the best places to cut and she was a groundbreaker in the field. However as time went on she was just not able to live up to people’s idealised image of her and she had plastic surgery that went wrong. The public were cruel, lamenting the loss of her beauty. She withdrew into her shell and holed up in a New York apartment to get away from the limelight. Hedy was now rarely seen.
Her money also run out and she was reduced to living on $300 dollars a month from social security. In her later days she would spend her time watching old movies from her heyday in Hollywood.
In 1974 Hedy sued Warner Bros and director Mel Brookes for $100,000 for using a parody of her name, Hedley Lamar, in the film Blazing Saddles which she claimed infringed on her right to privacy. Brooks chose to not fight it and the studio settled out of court for a small sum and an apology for "almost using her name.”
In the 1980s she moved to Florida and there was a further shop lifting charge. But it was also around this time that the scientific community started to rediscover her invention and realise its importance the world. Eventually it was acknowledged to be a forerunner for modern applications such as bluetooth, mobile phones and wi-fi. By this time however, the patent had expired, and Hedy was never to receive a single payment for her revolutionary invention.
In 1997 she received an award from The Electronic Frontier Foundation which finally recognised her contribution to the world. She declined to show up in person to collect it, but instead sent her son, Tony and in the acceptance speech he played a message from her in which she said “I feel good about it and it was not done in vain.” She received a standing ovation. Finally, at the end of her life she was given the recognition she deserved and her great achievement was acknowledged.
On January 19, in the year 2000 Hedy Lamarr fell asleep and did not wake up, but she died in the knowledge that the achievement of which she was most proud and which would have such a dramatic effect on the world had been recognised.
The market value of her invention is said to be approximately $30 billion dollars and at the end of the film Bombshell, an extraordinary documentary about her life, they claim that if current trends continue experts believe that almost every person in the world will soon be connected by Hedy’s invention of frequency hopping. In 2014 Hedy and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
It strikes me that Hedy’s life was one of extremes. Her beautiful face masked a brilliant mind. A glamorous Hollywood career masked drug addiction and would lead to desperate attempts to retain her looks and a struggle with mental illness. She endured six unhappy marriages to men who would never live up to the love of her life, her beloved father.
For all her fame and fortune much of Hedy’s story is incredibly sad, but her talent and passion for science and invention and an extraordinary achievement which has made such an impact on the world should be an inspiration to us all and everyone should know of the story of a quite remarkable woman.