The Beauty and the Brain

edwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna about half a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Later known as the screen star Hedy Lamarr, the clever Austrian would play an interesting off-screen role as an inventor in the Second World War — on the side of her adopted US homeland. This is just one of many facts that make Lamarr's biography quite unlike that of most film stars.

While she shocked European society and gained notoriety with her 10-minute nude swimming scene in the 1933 Austrian-Czech film Ecstasy (Extase, Buy the DVD), still appearing in the credits as Hedy Kiesler, she is perhaps best known today because of the Mel Brooks Western parody, Blazing Saddles (1973). Brooks used the running gag of a villainous character named “Hedley Lamarr” (Harvey Korman) who had to constantly correct people who kept calling him “Hedy.” (It was in that same classic film that Madeline Kahn masterfully portrayed a lisping spoof of Marlene Dietrich.) But such superficial recognition does an injustice to the attractive and highly intelligent Lamarr, who made her last film in 1958.

Hedy Lamarr got her marquee name from MGM's Louis B. Mayer, in remembrance of the beautiful silent-film star Barbara La Marr (born Rheatha Watson in 1896), who had died of a drug overdose in 1926. Mayer's renaming of his new star was also intended to erase any last traces of the Ecstasy scandal. After all, the film had been banned in America. Her new name was so unfamiliar to her that Lamarr misspelled it when she first arrived in Hollywood in 1937 and signed the hotel register at the famous Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard (“Bills to be sent to Louis B. Mayer at MGM.”).

At Mayer's invitation, Lamarr had come to Hollywood from exile in London. She had recently divorced her domineering, pro-Nazi husband and literally escaped from Austria, leaving behind a blossoming Austrian-German film career. Mayer's plans to turn this advocate of unclothed beauty into family entertainment (“We make clean pictures.”) would not be entirely successful.

Six Husbands and a Patent

Austrian industrialist Fritz Mandl became Lamarr's first husband in 1933 when she was barely twenty. Notable for his unsuccessful attempt to buy up all existing prints of his wife's bare Ecstasy appearance, Mandl was also the first in a long chain of Lamarr divorces. The former banker's daughter later became a regular customer of Nevada's six-week divorce mill in Reno, a trend that ran through husband number six. But if she was a poor judge of spouses, she compensated for that as a famous glamour queen of the 1930s and '40s, dubbed immodestly by Mayer again as “the most beautiful girl in the world.”

But surely one of the most fascinating chapters in Lamarr's life and career had nothing to do with her film career and everything to do with her brain power. How many movie stars can you name, who hold the patent on a significant technological breakthrough? It's a story even Hollywood couldn't have invented. Hedy Lamarr shares the title to a 1942 patent, under her then legal name Hedy Kiesler Markey, for a “secret communication system” intended for use as a radio guidance device for US Navy torpedoes. Along with her co-inventor and avant-garde musician George Antheil (1900-1959), Lamarr came up with the idea of “frequency hopping” to quickly shift the radio signals of control devices, making them invulnerable to radio interference or jamming, a feat of technological prowess that was only formally acknowledged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in March 1997 — somewhat belatedly for Mr. Antheil, who died in 1959. But for the 83-year-old Lamarr, then a Florida retiree, “It was about time.”

A portion of the 1942 patent granted to Lamarr (then H.K. Markey) and George Antheil. Ironically, it expired in 1959, the same year Antheil died.
Image courtesy Chris Baumont's Antheil site.

Ironically, the U.S. military simply let the patent languish in their archives, in part because the technology of the time was not up to implementing such a system, and it is only now — in the age of the digital cellular phone — that Antheil's and Lamarr's system has come into its own. Instead of “frequency hopping,” today's technical term is “spread spectrum,” but the basic idea is the same. The FCC allotted a special section of the radio spectrum for an experiment using the spread spectrum to make wireless phone calls more secure from eavesdroppers. First used secretly by the US military in the 1960s, commercial interests could hardly wait to use this “new” technology in the 1990s. A lot of money has been lavished on the process, which has the added benefit of allowing more cell-phone users to use the existing frequency spectrum. Unfortunately for Lamarr, who could have used some of that money, her patent expired long ago.

After peaking in the 1940s, the popular wartime pinup girl's film career started to decline, partly because of some of her own decisions about the roles she would take. For example, she turned down roles in Gaslight and Casablanca that were later filled by Ingrid Bergman. Despite an occasional plum role, such as her strong performance in The Strange Woman (1946) and her sultry portrayal of Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949, with Lamarr on loan to Paramount from MGM), Lamarr found herself in increasingly weaker films. The scandal of her frequent trips to Reno didn't help matters, and an attempt to revive her career in Italy in the early 1950s proved unsuccessful. Her cinematic swan song was in 1958 in The Female Animal, a movie that few critics rate highly. Her part in Slaughter on 10th Avenue a year earlier had ended up on the cutting room floor.

Hedy Lamarr Posters and Photos

In the 1960s Lamarr made occasional television appearances. She was a guest star on "The Bob Hope Show" and on various game and talk shows. In 1965 she was arrested for shoplifting, but later acquitted. The following year Lamarr published her tell-all autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, later suing her ghostwriters for misrepresentation. She had some success as a songwriter in the 1980s. The retired Lamarr lived modestly in the Orlando, Florida area. She would die on 18 January 2000, just weeks after celebrating her 86th birthday on 9 November 1999.

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