TRIBUTE TO HEDY LAMARR - BEAUTY AND BRAINS

Hailed as one of the great movie actresses of all time, Hedy Lamarr was born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9^th, 1914 in Vienna, Austria to a Galician-Jewish father from Ukraine and was deputy director of Wiener Bankverein and her mother, Trude, who was a pianist from Budapest and an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family. Trude Kiesler converted to Catholicism and raised Hedy as a Christian, although she was not baptized. At the age of 12, Hedy won a beauty contest in Vienna. She also became interested in invention with her father who would also take her on walks, explaining how different technology was used.

Hedy's first film

Interested in acting, Hedy took acting classes in Vienna and one day she forged a note from her mother and went to seek a job at Sascha-Film. She was hired as a script girl. While there she got an extra role in Money on the Street (1930), and then a speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt cast her in a theater play and was so impressed with her he brought her with him back to Berlin. Hedy never appeared in any of his Berlin productions, but met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931, starring Walter Abel and Peter Lorre. Granowsky moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin being given a lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese.

In 1933, at age 18, Lamarr was given the lead role in Ecstasy, playing a neglected wife of an older man. The film was both celebrated and notorious because Lamarr showed her face in the throes of orgasm and appeared in brief nude scenes. Lamarr stated that she was “duped” by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lens. The film gained world-wide recognition and won an award in Rome. In Europe it was hailed as artistic work, but in America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, so it was banned there as well as in Germany.

Ziegfeld Girl

After that Lamarr played several stage roles in Vienna. Admirers would send roses to her dressing room and tried to meet her backstage. She sent most of them away, but one man was insistent – Friedrich Mandl, who was an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer, reputedly the 3^rd wealthiest man in Austria. Lamarr was impressed with his charm and personality, partly because of his immense wealth. Hedy's parents did not approve because of Mandl's ties to the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, and German Führer Adolf Hitler. Most likely because Hedy's father was Jewish.

On August 10^th, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl at the Karliskirche Church, despite her parent's objection. She was 18 and he was 33. In her autobiography, Hedy described Mandl as a controlling husband and who objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy, so prevented her from pursuing her career in acting. She claimed he kept her a prisoner in their castle home.

Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian and German government, despite his father being Jewish. Lamarr wrote in her autobiography that both dictators would attend lavish parties at the Mandl home. Hedy accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he spent time with scientists and other professionals in military technology. It was then she renewed her interest in applied science, she had fostered with her father.

Lamarr finally felt her marriage was unbearable, so she separated from her husband and left the country in 1937. In her autobiography she wrote that she disguised herself as a maid and fled to Paris. In other accounts, she wore all of her jewelry for a dinner party and then disappeared when it ended. She wrote about her marriage to Mandl:

“I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage. … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded – and imprisoned – having no mind, no life of its own.”

After arriving in London from Paris in 1937, she met Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who was scouting for talent in Europe. Mayer made her an offer of $125/week, but she turned him down; but booked herself on the same ocean liner to New York as he was on. During the cruise she managed to impress him and got a $500/week contract. Mayer persuaded to change her name to “Hedy Lamarr”, mainly to distance herself from her Ecstasy reputation. The chosen surname was homage to the silent film star, Barbara La Marr, at the suggestion of his wife. Mayer brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and promoted Hedy as the “world's most beautiful woman.”

In 1938, Mayer loaned Lamarr to producer Walter Wanger who was making Algiers and Hedy was cast in the lead opposite Charles Boyer.

Lamarr's second American film was Take This Woman, co-starring Spencer Tracy. The film was put on hold and Lamarr was put in the film Lady of the Tropics (1939) opposite Robert Taylor. Now she was being cast with Hollywood favorite lead men and in 1940, after the flop of Take This Woman, she was cast in Boom Town with Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Spencer Tracey. The film made $5 million. Immediately MGM teamed Lamarr again with Gable in Comrade X (1940), a comedy film that became another hit.

In 1941, Lamarr was cast with James Stewart in Come Live with Me, playing a Viennese refugee. Stewart was also featured in Ziegfeld Girl, where Lamarr, Judy Garland, and Lana Turner portrayed showgirls – also a big success.

Also in 1941, Lamarr was billed in leading role in H.M. Pulham, Esq. With Robert Young.

She made a third film with Tracy in Tortilla Flat in 1942. It was successful and so was the next film Crossroads (1942) with William Powell.

1942 was a busy year for Lamarr as she played a seductive native girl in White Cargo with Walter Pidgeon – also a huge hit. Many of Lamarr's roles emphasized her beauty giving her few lines. This was unchallenging to Lamarr, so she took up inventing as a side venture.

Lamarr reunited with Powell in a comedy, The Heavenly Body in 1944 and then was borrowed by Warner Bros for The Conspirators also in 1944. RKO then borrowed her for Experiment Perilous in 1945.

Her Highness and the Bellboy

In 1945, Lamarr was back at MGM to team up with Robert Walker in the romantic comedy Her Highness and the Bellboy, portraying a princess who falls in love with a New Yorker. The film did well, but it was the last film Lamarr would do for MGM.

Lamarr's off-screen life was much different then how she appeared in film. Most of her time was spent lonely and homesick. She would swim at her agent's pool, but stayed away from public beaches and anywhere with crowds. She wondered when asked for her autograph why anyone would want it.

Author Richard Rhodes described her “assimilation” into American culture:

“Of all the European émigrés who escaped Nazi Germany and Nazi Austria, she was one of the very few who succeeded in moving to another culture and becoming a full-fledged star herself. There were so very few who could make the transition linguistically or culturally. She really was a resourceful human being – I think because of her father's strong influence on her as a child.”

Lamarr wanted to join the National Inventors Council, but they said she could help the war effort better by using her celebrity status to sell war bonds. So she participated in a war bond selling campaign.

After leaving MGM in 1945, Lamarr formed a production company with Jack Chertok and made the film The Strange Woman in 1946. It went over budget and only made a minor profit. Her production company then made Dishonored Lady in 1947, another thriller and another film over budget, and not a commercial success. She tried a comedy with Robert Cummings, Let's Live a Little (1948).

Lamarr's biggest success was when she portrayed Delilah with Victor Mature as Samson in the Cecil B. DeMille film, Samson and Delilah in 1950. The film won two Oscars.

Lamarr returned to MGM for a film with John Hodiak in A Lady Without Passport in 1950, but it flopped. The next two films were more popular made at Paramount Studios – a Western with Ray Milland, Copper Canyon (1950) and a Bob Hope comedy spy spoof, My Favorite Spy (1951).

After her career was declining in the United States, she went to Italy to play multiple roles in Loves of Three Queens (1954), which she produced. She lost millions of dollars producing the film because of her inexperience and thus was not able to secure distribution for the film.

Lamarr was then Joan of Arc in the epic, The Story of Mankind (1957) and did episodes of Zane Grey Theatre (“Proud Woman”) and Shower of Stars (“Cloak and Dagger”). Her last film was The Female Animal in 1958.

HEDY LAMAR AS AN INVENTOR

Without formal training, Lamarr tinkered in her spare time on various hobbies and ideas that included a traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was not successful and Lamarr admitted it tasted like Alka-Seltzer.

During World War II, Lamar read that radio-controlled torpedoes had being considered, but they feared the enemy would be able to jam the guidance system and set it off course. She discussed this with her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, and they came up with an idea of frequency-hopping the signal to prevent the guidance system from being tracked or jammed. Antheil made a synchronized miniature player piano device with radio signals. The frequency-hopping system was perforated on a paper tape to actuate pneumatic controls. Lamarr introduced Antheil to Samuel Stuart Mackeown, a professor of radio-electrical engineering at CalTech. Lamarr hired a lawyer to search for prior application and also to submit a patent, which was granted on August 11^th, 1942.

This event became history and Lamarr received an Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997 and she was featured on the Science Channel and Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

At the age of 38, Lamarr had become a naturalized citizen on April 10^th, 1953.

In the late 1950s, Lamarr designed and developed with the then-husband, W. Howard Lee the Villa LaMarr ski resort in Aspen, Colorado.

A weird occurrence in 1966: Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were dropped. Again in 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. Charges were dropped in return for her promise to stop breaking law for a year.

By the 1970s, Lamar became increasingly seclusive. She was offered scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but she turned them all down.

In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros, claiming that her name was used (“Hedley Lamarr”) in the Mel Brooks comedy, Blazing Saddles, infringing upon her privacy. The studio settled out of court for an undisclosed amount and an apology to Lamarr. By now, Lamarr's eyesight was failing and she retreated from public life to Miami Beach, Florida in 1981.

A large Corel-drawn image of Lamarr was on the award-winning CorelDRAW software suite box in 1996. Lamarr sued the company for using her image without her permission. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in 1998.

For Lamarr's contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6247 Hollywood Blvd.

In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world – even with her children and close friends. She often talked for six to seven hours a day on the phone.

Lamarr died in Casselberry, Florida on January 19^th, 2000 of heart disease at the age of 85. Her son, Anthony Loder spread her ashes in Austria's Vienna Woods according to her last wishes. In 2014, a memorial to Lamarr was unveiled in Vienna's Central Cemetery.

Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children:

1. Friedrich Mandl (1933-1937).

2. Gene Markey (1939-1941), screenwriter and producer. She adopted a child, James Lamarr Markey during her marriage to Markey. Later he was adopted by Loder.

3. John Loder (1943-1947), actor. Children: Denise Loder (1945), who married Larry Colton, writer and former baseball player; and Anthony Loder (1947), who married Roxanne an illustrator for James McMullan.

4. Ernest “Ted” Stauffer (1951-1952), nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader.

5. W. Howard Lee (1953-1960), a Texas oilman who later married actress Gene Tierney.

6. Lewis J. Boies (1953-1965), Lamarr's divorce lawyer.

After her sixth divorce in 1965, Lamarr remained unmarried for the next 35 years.

PBS produced a special about Hedy Lamarr, focusing upon her intelligence and inventions:

Johnny Depp wrote a song about Hedy Lamarr and performed it with Jeff Beck, the following is the music video of Depp's performance:

This article is a tribute to you, Hedy Lamarr whose ashes are now part of the Vienna Woods in Austria.