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Hedy’s Folly
The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
by Richard Rhodes
Doubleday
After a German U-boat sank an English ship in 1940, killing 245 passengers, including 77 children who were escaping the blitz, A-list Hollywood bombshell Hedy Lamarr decided that something needed to be done — and that she was the person to do it.
In today’s terms, this would be like Angelina Jolie deciding that she and she alone could conquer al Qaeda.
But Lamarr wasn’t as mad as that sounds. As historian Rhodes writes in his new book, Lamarr — who once declared “any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid” — was an inventive genius who dabbled in high-tech weaponry as a hobby. And while her eventual creation, developed with the perfect collaborator, did not assist the war effort, it did lead amazingly to the creation of such staples of modern life as GPS, Wi-Fi and the cellphone.
The Austrian Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler in 1913, was a breathtaking beauty. At 19, she starred in the Czech film “Ekstase,” scandalizing her and her family due to several sexual encounters in the film, including a brief nude swimming scene.
That year, she married Fritz Mandl, a powerful arms dealer and the third-richest man in Austria.
Mandl — who sold arms to governments and political movements, including the Nazis — was possessive and insanely jealous. He forbade her to act and spent over $300,000 in a failed attempt to buy every existing print of “Ekstase” to take it off the market.
While barely allowed to speak at her husband’s social events, Lamarr learned a great deal about the newest weapons technology from the high-level financiers, politicians and military men she encountered through him, including the likes of Benito Mussolini.
After escaping her marriage and decamping to London, she met Louis B. Mayer, then the head of MGM and the most powerful man in Hollywood. Mayer, a champion of family entertainment, reportedly told her, “I saw ‘Ekstase.’ Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood. A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatergoers.”
Mayer offered her a contract for $125 a week for six months and no moving expenses, and she refused it, instead devising a plan to illustrate what she felt was her greater value.
Mayer and his wife were sailing to America on the cruise ship Normandie. Lamarr booked herself a ticket and, in her words, “became the center of attention for all the young males aboard and was able to parade them back and forth past Mr. Mayer.” Mayer wound up offering her a seven-year contract for $500 a week — the equivalent of about $8,000 today.
(It was also on that trip that either Mayer or his wife — stories conflict — christened her Hedy Lamarr).
She came to America, starred in the film “Algiers” and became a superstar, inspiring women across the country to dye their hair black and part it in the middle.
But even with her new status as Hollywood royalty, Mayer had trouble finding good scripts for her, which left her with time to kill. To busy herself, Lamarr took up a hobby — inventing.
She established an “inventor’s corner” in her home, including a drafting table and tools, and “borrowed” two chemists from friend Howard Hughes in a failed attempt to invent a bouillon-like cube that would mix with water to create a Coca-Cola-like soft drink.
But as her native Europe slid toward war and German submarines established maritime dominance over American ships, Lamarr increasingly felt the need to assist her adopted country.
And as she began to wonder how a remote-controlled torpedo might work, she met an avant-garde composer named George Antheil.
George Antheil was a New Jersey native who spent much of the 1920s in Paris, surrounded by the great artistic minds of the era. Ezra Pound wrote a book about him, and he was friends for a time with Igor Stravinsky.
For a time, Antheil found a niche composing for coordinated player pianos. At a show at the Champs-Élysées Theater that Rhodes refers to as “one of the touchstone events of the 1920s in Paris,” Antheil composed a piece for eight grand pianos coordinated by a master piano that he operated, as well as tools including hammers, saws and two airplane propellers.
Once the show began, the cacophony of noise and motion drove the crowd — which included James and Nora Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Man Ray and Pound — into a riotous frenzy. Despite Pound imploring the crowd to behave, the show became “sheer bedlam,” with Antheil’s pianos drowned out by “catcalls and booing” mixed with bellowed exaltations of “Bravo!”
Somehow, amidst the chaos, Antheil won them over and was rewarded with a standing ovation. But his luck failed to repeat at a later Carnegie Hall performance, where electric fans he used in place of the propellors blew “so fiercely” that one audience member “tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air as a sign of surrender.”
Often short on funds, Antheil earned a windfall through a series of articles for Esquire magazine on how to tell if a woman is no longer being faithful. Antheil told magazine co-founder Arnold Gingrich that he could predict which girls were more likely to sleep with a man based on “which hormones appeared to dominate a subject’s physiology.”
At the Plaza hotel, Antheil analyzed “50 girls that came down the Plaza staircase. Gingrich happened to know one of them. Evidently, the composer called her correctly.”
Antheil’s impressive feat led to a series of pieces on the topic, including “Glandbook for the Questing Male: Reducing a Laboratory Science to a Sidewalk Sport for a Grading of the Passing Females from A to D.”
Antheil was introduced to Lamarr by mutual friends who had mentioned Antheil’s hobby of endocrinology to the star. He was told that “Hedy Lamarr wants to see you about her glands,” which, he soon learned, meant that the brunette bombshell was concerned that her breasts were too small and wondered if there was a way they could be made bigger — to which, upon meeting her, Antheil blushingly replied, “Much, much bigger.”
Lamarr left her phone number “on his windshield with lipstick.” They dined together the next night so Antheil could explain “various glandular extracts” that would “help the bosom stay up,” but that conversation faded as they began to talk about war. Lamarr, feeling a certain guilt about her success while her adoptive nation suffered, told Antheil of her desire to create a remote-controlled torpedo, and the two began collaborating.
They wanted a torpedo that could be controlled by radio, where frequencies between the transmitter and the receiver shifted in split-second intervals, making them impossible for the enemy to jam.
They worked together through the latter part of 1940. They would often play piano together on breaks — their alternating piano lines are cited as one possible inspiration for the overlapping frequency idea — and they would also sit on the floor using matches and matchbooks to mimic torpedos and their targets.
Antheil’s experience in coordinating player pianos inspired the notion of using perforated “ribbons” — not unlike the paper scrolls in a player piano — in both the transmitter and the receiver to “encode the changes in frequency.” (As if to leave his mark as a musician, he gave the ribbons a range of 88 frequency hops — the same as the number of keys on a piano.)
Lamarr, meanwhile, continued her Hollywood ascent. While developing this new technology, she made the Busby Berkeley film “Ziegfeld Girl” with Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Jimmy Stewart. Rhodes gives no indication if her famous co-stars had any idea what she was up to when not serving as the foremost Hollywood fantasy girl.
Not content with just one potential innovation, Lamarr submitted three “secret weapons gadgets” — some without Antheil’s help — to the National Inventors Council during this time, including an anti-aircraft shell that would “detect a target and detonate an explosive shell at a predetermined distance . . . turning a near miss into a hit.”
In December 1940, the pair submitted their “Idea for a Radio-Controlled Torpedo” to the council, which initially expressed great interest.
The proposal cleared two rounds of review, and made its way to the Navy. But even though 60% of US torpedos were ineffective, with Japanese ships “steaming into port with unexploded torpedos stuck in their hulls like arrows,” the government rejected their torpedo in early 1942.
Ironically, Antheil was convinced that the reason for the rejection was that, in their proposal, they had compared the frequency-hopping mechanism to that of a player piano. He believed that the evaluators read no further, stymied by the mystery of how they’d fit a player piano into a torpedo.
Their work was kept under wraps until the mid-1950s, when an engineer was asked to use their technology to build a jam-proof sonar system called a sonobuoy.
The heart of their invention evolved into a quicker version of frequency-hopping called spread-spectrum, which later enabled engineers to allow different cellphones to talk at once without interfering with each other.
In addition to laying the groundwork for mobile phones, spread-spectrum led to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. A 2009 study for Microsoft estimated that the minimum impact of spread-spectrum technology on the economy came to about $166 billion per year.
In her old age, Lamarr, living off her SAG pension in Florida, retained her hunger for inventing, coming up with ideas for — among other things — a new form of traffic light, a fluorescent dog collar and a “skin-tautening technique based on the principle of the accordion.”
But watching her primary invention change the world was more bitter than sweet for Lamarr. Though she and Antheil patented their work, she never received a dime or a word of thanks. In 1990, she told Forbes, “I can’t understand why there’s no acknowledgement. I guess they just take and forget about a person.”
But she did eventually receive wider recognition when, in 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded her its Pioneer Award.
When she heard about the award, Lamarr — who passed away in 2000 at the age of 85 — told her son, “It’s about time.”