Hedy Lamarr Podcast It Was 1942 and the World Was at War. After Japan's
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Hedy Lamarr Podcast 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.