In the spotlight…..

Hedy Lamarr 1913--2000 ….a beauty with brains!

Promoted by Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in films, she once remarked “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”  Uninhibited and totally aware of her beauty, the lady chose to hide her most important attributes….intelligence and an uncanny memory. It seems Hedy Lamarr’s only flaw was the inability to select good film material.

Hedy at 9

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria on November 9th, 1913 but her name was supposed to be George. Emil Kiesler was a banker and fully expected a son to carry on his name. But he loved the little girl on sight. The doctor assured him the baby was healthy and, in time, “her nose will develop beyond those two little holes” in her very sweet face. Years later plastic surgeons would be besieged by women seeking “Hedy Lamarr noses”! But little Hedwig was the center of her parents attention and had everything she wanted….ballet and piano lessons, private tutors and then private schools. However, what their little “princess” really wanted was to be an actress and, reluctantly, they finally agreed to that, too.

As Eve in Ecstasy 1933

Hedy began her career with a bit part in director Alexis Granowsky’s “Storm in a Water Glass” then won the ingénue role in “One Doesn’t Need Money” where, ironically, the backers were more interested in what her father’s bank could do for them. It was her 5th film “Ecstasy” in early 1933 that would cause all the commotion….showing all of Hedy in a swimming scene, the first naked scene in a feature film shown outside art theaters. But it was the close-ups of Hedy acting out love-making that made it banned in America.  It was probably all of this together that persuaded her parents to marry her off to Fritz Mandl, a wealthy munitions manufacturer 10 years her senior. Mandl tried to buy up all copies of the film but was unsuccessful. However, his iron control over his wife parading her like a trophy he had won,  preventing her from continuing her acting career and associating with Nazi arms dealers ( although he was part Jewish) made Hedy determined to leave him. In the meantime, Hedy also realized that the munitions specialists, army generals and top Nazi officials who graced her table never believed she could understand their highly technical discussions and spoke freely in front of her. They were wrong.

Fritz Mandl

According to her autobiography, Hedy was under guard at all times. Mandl knew she would try to run away and he also knew she could be kidnapped for ransom by his enemies. So when a maid left her employ, Hedy interviewed dozens before she found Laura who was the same size and coloring as herself. She also learned that Laura had a soldier boyfriend she sometime met in Paris. Before their next meeting, Hedy mailed all her expensive jewelry to a friend in Paris, then drugged the maid and drove away from the estate in the maid’s old car. However, Hedy and her lawyers repudiated this version later claiming it was fabricated by the ghost writer. The most accepted story has been that she persuaded Fritz to let her wear her most expensive jewelry to a party and escaped from there. By whatever avenue used,  Hedwig Kiesler Mandl  made her escape.

Hedy in 1938

Hedy got a divorce in the French courts charging desertion (the judge admitted he found this hard to believe). Her heart was broken to hear that her father had died but she didn’t dare return home. She sold her jewelry and went to London. In no time at all Louis B. Mayer, there  on a European tour, sent his agent, Bob Ritchie, around to set up an  interview. What Mayer didn’t know was that Hedy could drive a hard bargain. What Hedy didn’t know was that Mayer could be just as controlling as Fritz Mandl .He loaned her to Walter Wanger for a 200% markup on her salary and had her name changed to Hedy Lamarr. The name change was also to “divorce” her forever from the Ecstasy scandal.

... with Reginald Gardiner 1939

Hedy made "Algiers" with Charles Boyer for Wanger in 1939 and followed it with "Lady of the Tropics" with Robert Taylor for MGM. She also married her second husband, screenwriter-producer Gene Markey after knowing him only 4 weeks and they adopted a son, James that same year. The marriage lasted less than 2 years. Ironically Gene had been married to Joan Bennett who went from blonde to brunette for Tay Garnett’s “Trade Winds” and looked …just like Hedy. Could it be that’s why Gene divorced her and married her lookalike?  

the blonde Bennett!

the brunette Bennett!

...and Hedy!

In 1942 Hedy met her neighbor, pianist-composer George Antheil, who had been experimenting with synchronized piano rolls and thought that might be just the way to adapt the theories she had picked up from her dinner guests in Austria on “frequency hopping” or the spreading of signals from one frequency to another shielding radio-controlled torpedoes from German signal-jamming. But it was a idea ahead of its time and couldn’t be developed with 1940s technology. So the invention was never used until 1963 when US military ships employed it during a blockade of Cuba. Today that same system is called “spread spectrum” and used in WiFi network connections, cell phones and wireless internet connections.  Neither Hedy or George (who died in 1959)ever got a penny for their invention but in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy the EFF Pioneer award for her work in  “the invention and development in 1942 of the original frequency hopping concept from which the spread spectrum stems.”

George Antheil

Patent.....filed under H(edy) K(iesler) Markey

Hedy with costume designer Elois Jensson

Hedy Lamarr married five more times but all of them ended in divorce. However, her third marriage to actor John Loder gave her two beautiful children, daughter Denise (1945) and son Anthony (1947). The others were:  #4  nightclub owner/bandleader Ernest “Ted” Stauffer (1951-1952), #5  Texas oilman W. Howard Lee (1953-1960) and #6 Lewis J. Boles, an attorney, from 1963 to 1965.

Her career took a lot of twists and turns. In 1949 it got a boost when she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic "Samson and Delilah" a lavish production that made Biblical epics a trend for years to come. But soon MGM had her back in  so-so shady lady roles and by 1958 her career was at an end. Hedy had some success as a songwriter in 1980s but never made another film. She was almost forgotten even by her fans when her name appeared in a Florida paper in connection with a shoplifting charge. Arrested for stealing $86 worth of merchandise from a department store, Hedy was found not guilty but lost a role in a B-picture to Zza Zsa Gabor.  In 1991 the same thing happened in a Florida drugstore and fans felt their idol was just beset by old age problems.

Hedy in the 1950s

Hedy Lamarr died alone at her home in Altamonte Springs, Florida on January 19th, 2000 of natural causes.  Her son, Anthony had her body cremated and the ashes flown to Vienna where they were spread in the Wienerwald,  a low wooded section of the Alps also known as the Vienna Woods.

More about Hedy Lamarr at Arabella's Notes

The Vienna Woods in summer

Filmography