She was the first
actor to feign an orgasm on screen, and she invented technology that would lead
to the mobile phone. The remarkable life
of Hedy Lamarr shows that there is no contradiction between being a racy actor
and technology pioneer.
It’s a common enough
story. Publisher prints salacious book about Hollywood star’s love life.
Hollywood star takes publisher to court. But in one key respect, the case of
Hedy Lamarr v Macfadden-Bartell was wonderfully unusual: the book that prompted
her to sue was her own autobiography. Having been celebrated as ‘the most
beautiful woman in the world’ in the 1930s and 1940s, Lamarr had hoped that her
ghost-written memoir would revive her career in 1966, but when she read the
finished text of Ecstasy and Me, she deemed it “fictional, false, vulgar,
scandalous, libelous and obscene”. Alas, the judge ruled against her,
publishing went ahead, and Lamarr got the kind of publicity she hadn’t
bargained for.
Readers everywhere
learned how she and her third husband, John Loder, attempted to beat an
acquaintance’s 19-times-in-one-weekend lovemaking record. They learned how
another of Lamarr’s partners hired a team of sculptors and make-up artists to
fashion a rubber sex doll that was identical to her in every detail. They also
learned about a less spurious claim to fame: when the teenage Lamarr starred in
a Czech-Austrian romantic drama, Ecstasy, in 1933, she became the first actress
in history to feign an orgasm on film.
But what the memoir
didn’t say about Lamarr was far more remarkable. There is no mention of it in
the book, but during World War Two, she developed a radio-guided torpedo
system, and the ‘spread-spectrum’ technology it fostered would one day be used
in mobile phones and wi-fi connections. Even without any fictional, false and
libellous material, the Austrian actress’s biography is more astonishing than
that of almost any other Hollywood star.
Born in 1914, Hedwig
Kiesler had a comfortable childhood in Vienna. Her governess tutored her in
German, French and Italian, and her father, a Jewish businessman, taught her
engineering, but Kiesler was too intent on becoming an actress to stick with
her education. At 15, she played truant from school, and got a job as a film
studio’s script clerk the same day. This appointment led to work as an extra,
and by the age of 18 she had the controversial lead role in Gustav Machaty’s
Ecstasy.
Kiesler played a young
bride named Eva. Having gone for a liberating naked swim, she meets a strapping
engineer (named Adam, of course), and experiences all the pleasures her
impotent husband can’t provide. Seen in close-up, Eva gasps, throws back her
head and clutches her hair. It’s clear what is being shown – and it had never
been shown on the big screen before. Lamarr later said that her apparently
blissed-out winces were the result of Machaty jabbing her with a safety pin,
but, however the sequence came about, it was convincing enough to cause uproar.
The film was denounced by Pope Pius XI, and Kiesler was labelled ‘The Ecstasy
Girl’.
From Mussolini to the
movies
One of her many new
fans was Friedrich Mandl, an armaments manufacturer and the third richest man
in Austria. After an eight-week engagement, he and Kiesler were married, and
she – still a teenager – was ushered into a life of regal opulence. On one trip
to Paris, Mandl asked his wife if she liked the sparkling jewels on display in
the window at Cartier. When she nodded, Mandl immediately bought her every one
of them. But Kiesler felt “strangled to death by luxury”. Obsessively jealous,
Mandl tried to buy and destroy every print of Ecstasy, and he refused to let
her visit her friends or go to the theatre. The only role he allowed her was
that of a trophy wife, sitting decoratively at the dining table while he talked
munitions with his powerful guests, Mussolini included.
There are several
contradictory accounts of the marriage’s end: the most dramatic tale has
Kiesler drugging her maid with sleeping pills, putting on her uniform and
dashing off to Paris in disguise. What isn’t disputed is that she left Mandl in
1937, and that in 1938, renamed Hedy Lamarr, she starred in a Hollywood film,
Algiers. Audiences and critics were stunned. “She is young, vital, and sure to
be a sensation,” wrote one reviewer. “One doesn’t really notice if she can act
– she’s that beautiful!”
There was never any
doubt about that. Not only was Lamarr a porcelain-skinned, raven-haired
goddess, she also had an exotic accent, a titillating past, and, before long, a
string of handsome husbands and fiancés. To Depression-era audiences, she was a
fantasy made flesh, and to gossip columnists, she was a dream. But the films
never quite matched the myth. Lamarr’s successes included Boom Town with Clark
Gable and Spencer Tracy, My Favourite Spy with Bob Hope, and Cecil B DeMille’s
Samson and Delilah, the highest grossing film of 1949. But there were more flops
than hits, and Lamarr’s acting could be stilted and detached, as if her mind
was on other things.
Perhaps it was. Her
hobby was inventing, and while other Hollywood stars were at parties, Lamarr
was at home, tinkering with a design for a traffic light, or experimenting with
a soluble fizzy-drink tablet. Her most revolutionary idea was one she hoped
would help the Allies win World War Two. Having gleaned invaluable information
on weaponry at Mandl’s dinner parties, she came up with the concept of a
synchronised ‘frequency-hopping’ system: in order to stop enemies jamming the
radio signals between a plane and a guided torpedo, their communications would
keep jumping simultaneously to new frequencies. Working in partnership with
George Antheil, the avant-garde composer, Lamarr was granted a patent in 1942,
but her invention was rejected by the US Navy. It was simply too far ahead of
its time.
Overdue
recognition
Decades later, she and
the world learnt that her innovations had been incorporated into mobile-phone
technology, and in 1996, four years before her death at the age of 85, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation honoured her and Antheil with its Pioneer Award.
But it was a tardy consolation prize for someone who had become known as a
bitter recluse. After Lamarr’s stardom waned in Hollywood, she retired to
Florida, and hit the headlines only when she was arrested for shoplifting, or
when she had ruinous plastic surgery – or when she published, and then
disowned, the sleazy autobiography.
Some devotees see Lamarr as a victim of sexist prejudice: a woman too
attractive to be taken seriously either as an actress or an inventor. Lamarr
herself encouraged this interpretation. Her face, she wrote, “brought me
tragedy and heartache for five decades. My face is a mask I cannot remove: I
must always live with it. I curse it.” But the Lamarr-as-victim narrative
makes her seem weak and passive, whereas in fact she took control of her
destiny time and again, whether she was fleeing from a Swiss finishing school
or a tyrannical husband. In Hollywood, she would go out and fight for the roles
she wanted: instructing her agent to phone DeMille, pushing Orson Welles to
direct her as Lady Macbeth. She was just as determined when it came to turning
down the roles she didn’t want, or upsetting studio bosses by forgoing
publicity tours. Lamarr may not have made the wisest choices, but those choices
were her own.
This was true right
from the start of her Hollywood career, when her willpower was almost as
crucial as her flawless beauty. Having escaped from Mandl in 1937, she was
introduced to the head of MGM, Louis B Mayer, in London. As wary as he was
about signing up the risqué ‘Ecstasy Girl’, he offered her a contract, but the
proposed salary was so small that she walked out of their meeting. She wasn’t
finished with Mayer, however. Her next move was to book a ticket on the very
ocean liner that he was travelling on, so that he would have regular
opportunities to witness the dizzying effect she had on every man onboard. When
she set sail from Europe, she could barely speak English, and her name was
Hedwig Kiesler Mandl. By the time she disembarked in America, she had a
lucrative Hollywood contract, and her name was Hedy Lamarr.
She didn’t just have a
genius for invention, but for reinvention.
