Hedy Lamarr

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna on November 9, 1914, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War ^[1]. Her father, Emil Kiesler, was a bank director, and her mother, Gertrud, had trained as a concert pianist. The family belonged to Vienna's assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie and lived comfortably in the Döbling district ^[2].

Her father encouraged her curiosity about machines. On their walks together he explained how streetcars, printing presses, and other everyday technology worked, and she later credited these conversations with planting the habits of mind that shaped her inventing ^[2]. As a child she took apart a music box to see its mechanism, an anecdote she repeated throughout her life.

School interested her less than the stage. As a teenager she studied briefly with the celebrated Berlin theater director Max Reinhardt and began taking small film roles in Austria and Germany around 1930 ^[1]. Any Hedy Lamarr biography has to reckon with how quickly she moved: by her late teens she was already a working actress with ambitions far beyond Vienna.

Notoriety arrived early. In 1933 the eighteen-year-old Kiesler appeared in the Czech-Austrian film Ecstasy (Ekstase), directed by Gustav Machatý, which included brief nude scenes and a sequence suggesting its heroine's sexual awakening. The film was condemned in several countries and heavily censored in the United States, and it made her internationally famous before she had played a single Hollywood part ^[1].

That same year she married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy Austrian munitions manufacturer with close ties to fascist governments. Mandl was intensely controlling, and Lamarr later described the marriage as a gilded confinement in her 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me ^[3]. Sitting through her husband's business dinners, she absorbed talk of weapons systems, torpedoes, and military radio, knowledge that would resurface years later. In 1937 she left Mandl and made her way to London.

In London she met Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who was scouting European talent. She negotiated a contract, sailed for America aboard the liner Normandie, and arrived with a new screen name: Hedy Lamarr, chosen in tribute to the silent film star Barbara La Marr ^[1]. Her Hollywood debut in Algiers (1938), opposite Charles Boyer, caused an immediate sensation, and MGM began billing her as the most beautiful woman in the world ^[4].

Through the late 1930s and 1940s Lamarr worked steadily at MGM. She appeared in Boom Town (1940) with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, Comrade X (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941) alongside Judy Garland and Lana Turner, and the ensemble drama H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), one of the few roles she considered genuinely substantial ^[4].

Her greatest commercial success came at the end of the decade. Cecil B. DeMille cast her as the Philistine temptress in Samson and Delilah (1949), which became the highest-grossing film of its year and the peak of her box-office career ^[1]. She also made choices she regretted, turning down the female leads in Casablanca and Gaslight, decisions frequently cited in accounts of her career.

Lamarr found the emphasis on her looks limiting. She was frequently cast as an exotic, decorative presence, and she complained that scripts gave her little to do beyond standing still and appearing glamorous ^[2]. Off the set she kept a drafting table and inventing equipment, working on ideas ranging from a bouillon-style tablet to carbonate plain water to improvements suggested to aviation magnate Howard Hughes, who lent her access to his engineers ^[2].

The achievement that transformed her posthumous reputation began in 1940. Alarmed by German submarine attacks on Atlantic shipping, Lamarr wanted to contribute more to the war effort than selling bonds. With her friend George Antheil, an avant-garde composer known for the mechanized score of Ballet Mécanique, she developed a radio guidance system for torpedoes in which transmitter and receiver would jump together across many frequencies in a synchronized pattern, making the signal extremely difficult to jam ^[2].

Antheil proposed synchronizing the hops with a mechanism modeled on player piano rolls, using 88 frequencies, the number of keys on a piano. The pair submitted their idea to the National Inventors Council, and on August 11, 1942 they received United States Patent 2,292,387 for a "Secret Communication System," filed under her married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey ^[5]. The Navy declined to adopt the device during the war, reportedly finding the mechanism impractical for shipboard use, and famously suggested that Lamarr could serve the country better by promoting war bonds, which she did with remarkable success, helping raise millions of dollars ^[2].

The idea outlived its rejection. Frequency hopping is one form of spread spectrum communication, and related techniques were developed by the military in the decades after the patent expired, including systems deployed around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 ^[2]. Among the best known Hedy Lamarr facts is that the family of technologies her patent anticipated now includes methods used in Bluetooth, some Wi-Fi standards, and secure military communications, though she earned nothing from the invention ^[6].

Lamarr married six times. After Fritz Mandl came screenwriter and producer Gene Markey (1939), the British-born actor John Loder (1943), bandleader Ernest "Ted" Stauffer (1951), Texas oilman W. Howard Lee (1953), and her divorce lawyer Lewis J. Boies (1963). None of the marriages lasted, and she spent her final decades unmarried ^[1].

She raised three children: an adopted son, James, and two children with John Loder, Denise and Anthony. She became an American citizen in April 1953 ^[1].

Her later personal life was often difficult. Her ghostwritten 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, embarrassed her with its lurid tone, and she sued the publisher, saying the book distorted her life ^[3]. She was arrested for shoplifting in 1966 and again in 1991; the first case ended in acquittal and the second was dropped ^[1]. Repeated cosmetic surgeries changed her appearance, and she increasingly withdrew from public view.

Her film career wound down in the 1950s. After the poorly received epic The Story of Mankind (1957) and The Female Animal (1958), she stopped making movies altogether ^[1]. She lived for a time in New York and then settled in Florida, where she spent her last years in the town of Casselberry, near Orlando, keeping in touch with the world largely by telephone ^[2].

Recognition for her scientific work finally arrived in the 1990s, after journalists and engineers rediscovered the 1942 patent. In 1997 Lamarr and George Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, and that year she also became the first woman honored with the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, sometimes described as an Oscar of inventing ^[6]. Told of the EFF award, she is reported to have replied simply that it was about time.

Hedy Lamarr died at her home in Casselberry on January 19, 2000, at the age of 85 ^[1]. Following her wishes, her son Anthony Loder scattered a portion of her ashes in the Vienna Woods of her native Austria.

Lamarr's reputation has been rebuilt around the pairing of glamour and invention. In 2014 she and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their spread spectrum patent ^[6]. Her story reached new audiences through Richard Rhodes's 2011 book Hedy's Folly and the 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, directed by Alexandra Dean, which drew on rediscovered taped interviews with the actress ^[7].

Her birthday, November 9, is observed in several countries as Inventors' Day, a nod to her example. Lists of Hedy Lamarr achievements now typically place the frequency-hopping patent above any single film, a reversal she did not live to see completed ^[2].

She also remains a fixture of Hollywood history, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and an enduring visual influence: her look is often cited as an inspiration for the animated Snow White and the comic-book Catwoman. The larger lesson of her life, repeated by museums and engineering societies that now tell her story, is a warning against assuming that beauty and technical intelligence cannot share one person ^[6].