Hedy Lamarr
—Chrissie
Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hwts-247-hedy-lamarr--60668617
At one time, Hedy Lamarr was best known for her acting, particularly her seeming willingness to appear nude in one of her earliest films, but now she is much better known for her contribution to communications technology. Her 1941 invention, which was intended to help keep Allied communications secret, was an important first step in the process to create the modern wireless technology on which we now rely.
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna in 1914. Her father, Emil, was a banker, and her mother, Gertrud, was a pianist. Both were Jewish by birth, but Gertrud had become Catholic at some point prior to Hedy’s birth. This was to be an important factor in the family’s safety in the interwar period in Europe. She showed an early interest in the sciences as well as theater, but the latter was more enticing. By her mid-teens, she had acted in a few plays and minor roles in movies. At 17, she had her first starring role in the German comedy No Money Needed. This brought her to the attention of director Gustav Machaty, who cast her as the lead role in his erotic romance, Ecstasy. The film features scenes of nudity and sex, things nearly unheard of in films of the era. There is some question as to how much Lamarr knew going into the film: Machaty claimed she was aware these scenes were part of the script; Lamarr claims the director demanded she completely disrobe unexpectedly and he met her refusal with a threat to have to pay for the reshoots if he had to replace her, so she acquiesced, with the understanding that these would be distant and show little intimate detail. He lied. She walked out of the premiere, wanting to distance herself from the role (and the director) in hopes of salvaging her career. The movie was considered artistic in Europe and even won some awards but, in the United States it was deemed pornographic and banned.
In August 1935, she married Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian arms manufacturer nearly twice her age. He had close ties to the Fascist governments of Italy and Nazi Germany. The couple often hosted high-ranking members of both at their home. At these dinners and other meetings, she was privy to conversations about the military situations and technology used by both countries. Her husband and his clients were unconcerned by her presence, they didn’t think she was at all paying attention or understood what they were discussing. Their mistake led to her having information about the Axis military situation that she could later provide to the Allies. In discussing the marriage, she relates that she was virtually imprisoned by her husband on his estate; he prevented her from continuing her acting career, and treated her as “a doll…some object of art to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” In 1937, she ended the marriage in the only way available to her: escape to another country. She took her jewelry and disguised herself when she fled to London.
In England, she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, who brought her to Hollywood. She negotiated a $500 per week contract with MGM, for whom she worked almost exclusively until 1945. Between making movies, she designed and drafted her technological ideas. She worked with George Antheil, a composer who worked with player pianos, on a way to create a radio guidance system that could not be disrupted by the enemy. She had learned of this issue during her marriage to Mandl and understood the advantage such technology could give the Allies. They combined the ideas involved in synchronizing player pianos using punch cards with radios to create frequency hopping. She was granted the patent in 1942 and soon after presented it to the Navy for use in torpedo guidance. They saw the potential value in the idea, but could not work out how to make a system small enough to fit inside the torpedoes. They told her she would be more useful to the war effort by using her celebrity to sell war bonds, which she did between movies for the next three years.
The end of the war coincided with the end of her MGM contract, which freed her to work with other production companies on her own terms. Despite her best efforts, she was typecast as the foreign seductress, so she opened her own production company. The movies from this company gave her opportunities to play different roles, but they weren’t financially successful. She continued acting until 1958, and her most successful film was Samson and Deliliah, which won two Oscars in 1950.
Lamarr married and divorced five more men between 1938 and 1965, eventually choosing to stay single. With her third husband, John Loder, she had two children and the couple adopted a third. The adopted son, James, cut ties with his mother a few years after the divorce, having found out he was Lamarr and Louder’s natural son, born while she was still married to her second husband. On this basis, as Lamarr’s eldest son, he demanded control over her estate after her death in 2000, at which point DNA testing indicated he was not related to either Lamarr or Louder.
Her memoir, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966. She sued the publishing company, claiming it was almost completely fictionalized by the ghostwriter and that they refused to give her final approval. After this, she became increasingly secluded. In the last decades of her life, she rarely saw anyone in person, but was known to spend hours on the telephone daily with friends and family. She died in 2000 of heart disease.
It was not until the mid-1990s that Lamarr’s inventions and technological work became more recognized. She has been given many posthumous honors for her inventions and is now better known for these than her work as an actress.