Welcome to the Family, Hedy Lamarr Stone

(As regular readers of The K.F. Stone Weekly know, we had to send our beloved 13-year old pup and service dog Fwed Astaire Stone “across the Rainbow Bridge” two weeks ago. We have now brought a new star into the family, a 5-year old Beagle we named “Hedy Lamarr Stone.” She is, like her namesake, beautiful and quite loving. She is already showing signs of being a star. And so, as a welcome to the newest in a line of unique canines which extends all the way back to Buster Keaton (a tri-colored Collie who was my great love in grad school), Ginger Rogers (a Chocolate Lab whom many of you knew) and Eleanor Roosevelt (a pug who looked a lot like the late First Lady), it is my pleasure to say a few words about Hedy’s eponymous ancestor, an Austrian Jewish beauty born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler).

Of the scores of stars who graced the silver screen during Hollywood’s “Golden Era,” it is likely that the most beautiful and alluring of all was Hedy Lamarr . . . who was named for the silent star Barbara La Marr, who, in her day was known “the girl who is too beautiful” But unlike Barbara Lamarr, who most lamentably died in 1926 from tuberculosis and nephritis at the tender age of 31, this Lamarr lived to the ripe old age of 86, and was far, far more than just another pretty face. Indeed as early as 1931, her first director, the great Max Reinhardt (Max Goldmann) referred to her as “the most beautiful woman in the world” And for my money, he was clearly correct. Far from being a world-class actor (in all honesty, she was fair at best), Hedy was nonetheless one of the smartest and most accomplished stars of all time . . . both on and away from the silver screen. When she entered a scene or a room, all eyes were upon her. When she entered her lab, she was capable of changing the world.

Born November 9. 1914 in Vienna to Gertrude (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lember, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler the future Hedy Lamarr was raised in a cultured upper-middle class Jewish home in the city of Döbling. It was a small and accomplished family. One of Hedy’s cousins, the avant-garde theater designer and architect Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) became best known for his “Shrine of the Book,” a wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Inextricably drawn to theatre and cinema, Hedy dropped out of school in her teens in order to study with the great theater director Max Reinhardt (Maxmillian Goldmann – 1873-1943) in Berlin. While studying and working with Reinhardt, Hedy (pronounced Hady) befriended such future luminaries as Otto Preminger, Sam Spiegel and Peter Lorre.

Acting at first in minor theatre roles and German-language films, she became internationally famous in her 5th film, Ecstasy, in which she appeared in the nude. Now mind you, this was 1933, when films featuring nude women were not screed in first-rate movie palaces. Ecstasy is believed to have been the first non-pornographic film to depict a woman having an orgasm. Barely making it past the censors in Europe it was spirited to America and quickly banned by the notorious Breen Office. After a particularly nasty trial in Federal Court, its American distributor simply ran off 3 dozen new prints, and started screening the film in America’s most open-minded cities. Although it quickly became a sensation in Europe, it did not receive a full American release until 1940. By then her name had been changed to Lamarr and she had become the exotic apple of every movie-goers’ eye.

Shortly after making Ecstasy, Hedy married a man named Fritz Mandl, the Catholic son of a Jewish munitions merchant. Known variously as ”Austria’s Munitions King” and the “Merchant of Death,” Fritz was a martinet who hid his Jewish background by becoming an ardent Nazi supporter. Indeed, prior to leaving Germany, he made a deal with the Nazis allowing him to keep his non-Austrian holdings. In return he allegedly carried Nazi funds belonging to Göring, Ribbentrop, and other high-ranking party members to invest in Argentina. The marriage didn’t last long; by 1937, Hedy had divorced him; feeling the angst and utter discomfort of Hitler and the Nazis, she set sail for England, were she happened to meet MGM’s Louis B. Mayer who told her that as soon as she could find her way to Hollywood, he would sign her to a major contract. As mentioned above, it was Mayer who would change her name to Hedy Lamarr.

Although she was only one of many Europeans who found refuge in Hollywood, Hedy was one of the few high profile women to have done so on her terms, rather than as the wife or daughter of a more famous man or as the protégée of an established director. Her continued insistence on doing things on her own terms was equally remarkable, even if it contributed toward making her the difficult individual she was. She arrived in 1937 and was immediately signed to an MGM contract starting at $550.00 a week. The 5’7” Lamarr was also told that she must immediately take off a minimum of 15 pounds.

It turned out that before Mayer could put her in a picture, she was lent out to independent producer Walter Wanger (Feuchtwanger) who immediately cast her in the remake of the 1937 French gem Pepé lo Moko, directed by Julien Divivier and starring the marvelous Jean Gabin. In this new, translated version, entitled Algiers, Hedy, playing a character named Gaby costarred alongside French heartthrob Charles Boyer. Algiers is a moody melodrama revolving around Pepé (Charles Boyer), a charming fugitive from the law and his battle of wits with Slimane (Joseph Calleia), the police chief dedicated to luring him from the relative safety of the Casbah. Costarring in her first Hollywood-made film, Hedy Lamarr was never better cast than as Gaby, a faintly shady adventuress. She scored big in her love scenes with the newly emergent sex symbol Boyer.

With her marvelous notices, Hedy Lamarr was quickly cast in a series of films opposite some of the most popular and dashing stars in the Hollywood firmament:

1939: Lady of the Tropics (Robert Taylor)
1940: I Take This Woman (Spencer Tracy)
1940: Boom Town (Clark Gable)
1940: Comrade X (Clark Gable)
1941: Come Live With Me (James Stewart)
1941: Ziegfeld Girl (James Stewart)
1941: H.M. Pulham, Esq. (Robert Young)
1941: Tortilla Flat (John Garfield)
1942 Crossroads (William Powell)
1942: White Cargo (Walter Pidgeon)
1944: The Heavenly Body (William Powell)
1944 The Conspirators (Paul Henreid)
1946: The Strange Woman (George Sanders)
1949 Samson and Delilah (Victor Mature)
1950: Copper Canyon (Ray Milland)
1951 My Favorite Spy (Bob Hope)

In total, Hedy Lamarr appeared/starred in 35 films. In the early part of her career, she generally was cast in exotic roles, most notably Tondelayo in 1940’s White Cargo. The only well-above average films associated with her are her first, Algiers (with the famous line (“Come with me to the Casbah!”) and her own personal favorite, Samson and Delilah, directed by C.B. DeMille. Nonetheless, her films were, for the most part, box-office successes and kept the public coming back to see her in films for nearly 15 years.

Her private life was filled with ups-and-downs, to say the least. Six times married and divorced, her most famous husbands were former co-star John Loder and screenwriter Gene Markey, known more for having also been married to Myrna Loy and Joan Bennett than for any particular screenplay.

Hedy’s greatest contributions however, had nothing to do with acting: she literally changed the world through her brilliance as an inventor. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Howard Hughes (then a movie producer/director) helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on the set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind the process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked 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. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”

Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II.

In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the axis powers.

The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds.

Lamarr’s patent for her frequency hopping device expired before she ever saw a penny from it. Estimates of its current value start at $30 billion. While she continued to accumulate credits in films until 1958, her inventive genius was yet to be recognized by the public. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s later years that she received any awards for her invention. The Electronic Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamarr and Antheil with their Pioneer Award in 1997. Lamarr also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the development of her frequency hopping technology in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Lamentably, Hedy Lamarr spent the last years of her life living in penury in Casselberry, Florida, where was twice arrested for shoplifting. Her name eventually came back into headlines when, in 1974, Mel Brooks gave actor Harvey Korman the name “Hedley LaMarr” in his classic Western spoof Blazing Saddles. In many scenes, cast members would refer to Korman’s character as “Hedy Lamarr,” to which he immediately - and angrily - responded “That’s Hedley.” Ms. Lamarr eventually sued Mel Brooks for an undisclosed sum and settled out of court.

Annie and I are delighted to name our newest family member after a truly gifted, unique and beautiful creature. We are happy to report that she is already beginning to respond to her new name, and like her “ancestor” of old, is not at all adverse to applause . . .

Could autographs be far behind?