delirium clemens

The Austrian-born American diva Hedy Lamarr “was feted for her beauty — but she also had a talent for inventions, including elements of today’s GPS.”

Article by Peter Conradi (c) THE SUNDAY TIMES, 2011

It’s a problem faced by many a Hollywood starlet: how to while away the many months of the year when you are not filming. Partying is a common way of filling the gap; ill-advised love affairs another. And then there is all that time that must be spent maintaining the looks that propelled you to the top of the pile in the first place.

Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born siren labelled “the most beautiful woman in Europe”, had no shortage of affairs: she married six times and had a string of lovers. Nor did she neglect her looks: so determined was she to cling to her beauty that she embarked on a series of unfortunate forays into plastic surgery that turned her in later life, in the words of her son, Anthony, into a recluse and “a Frankenstein’s monster”.

Yet Lamarr, who died in 2000 aged 86, was never much of a one for socialising, according to Richard Rhodes, author of a biography out this week. Instead she preferred to spend evenings in her Los Angeles home with George Antheil, a diminutive avant-garde composer, indulging her real passion — inventing.

Her best invention was an anti-jamming device for radio-controlled torpedoes that the pair of them cooked up during the second world war. It was eventually to pave the way for the technology used in mobile telephony.

“She didn’t drink and she didn’t like loud, noisy parties,” said Rhodes, whose previous works have included a Pulitzer-prize-winning account of the history of the American atomic bomb. “Her idea of a good evening was an evening at home working on an invention.”

What explained the secret passion of the woman whose career began with a slew of European films, including the scandalous 1933 Czech-made Ecstasy — in which she pioneered full-frontal nudity — and who went on the following decade to become a Hollywood sex symbol with appearances alongside the likes of James Stewart, Victor Mature and Bob Hope?

Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Lamarr acquired her fascination with technology from her banker father, Emil, who like her mother, Trude, was an assimilated Jew. When they went out walking, Emil would explain to his daughter how everything worked — from printing presses to the trams.

Her interest was further fuelled by her marriage, aged just 19, to Fritz Mandl, an autocratic arms manufacturer and Nazi sympathiser who was 13 years her senior.

During dinners with his business associates, Lamarr would listen to discussions about the torpedoes and other weapons systems for which her husband’s company was supplying components. She absorbed it all.

Lamarr was to draw on that knowledge a decade later. After finally summoning the courage to leave Mandl in 1937, she had travelled to London, where she met Louis B Mayer, the head of MGM Studios, who offered her a contract — despite initial misgivings about her appearance in Ecstasy. “A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatre-goers,” Mayer told her. “Never get away with that stuff in Hollywood.”

During their Atlantic crossing, it was decided to change her name from Kiesler, deemed too Germanic, to Lamarr, in homage to the silent screen actress Barbara La Marr, who had died several years earlier.

Lamarr settled in Hollywood and in between work began to indulge her passion for inventions, the first of which was a tablet that could turn water into a cola drink, developed with the help of two chemists loaned by Howard Hughes, one of her many lovers. It flopped. Americans preferred the real thing.

It was thanks to her meeting with Antheil, every bit the polymath that she was, that Lamarr turned her creative energies to weightier matters. Their first meeting was dominated by a discussion about what Antheil, who had a curious sideline in endocrinology, could suggest to enlarge her breasts.

Their relationship swiftly moved to another level, however, after they found that, as well as having a shared love of inventing, they also wanted to put it to good use.

Pearl Harbor and America’s belated entry into the war were still more than a year away, but both were determined to do their bit to fight Hitler. They were pushed into action by the sinking by German U-boats in August and September 1940 of two British liners transporting hundreds of children across the Atlantic.

“Hedy was keenly aware that her country, Austria, had been absorbed by Nazi Germany and that her former husband was involved in the development of some of these torpedoes,” Rhodes said. “So she felt personally responsible and that she should try to solve the problem.”

The pair set out to invent a radio-controlled torpedo that could destroy U-boats before they attacked. The challenge was to prevent the enemy jamming the signal sent by the ship or plane controlling it. Their solution was to send the signal in bursts, changing frequency each time — Frequenzsprungverfahren in Lamarr’s native German, or more simply, “frequency-hopping”. The device, which they patented, worked with the kind of punched tape Antheil used to synchronise player pianos during performances of his experimental music.

Although ingenious, it was never built. Antheil claimed that was because a naval official in Washington misread the patent. “The navy guys didn’t understand and famously said, ‘Do you want to put a player piano in a torpedo?’,” Rhodes said.

Yet once the know-how had been passed over, it began to acquire a life of its own behind the cover of military secrecy. In the mid-1950s, by which time Lamarr’s screen career was foundering, the technology was studied as part of the control system for a sonar buoy to help the US Navy locate enemy shipping. Technical difficulties prevented it being introduced, but the underlying idea of frequency hopping was applied in the emerging world of mobile communications, which was quickly embraced by the military.

When the technology was declassified in the 1980s, it was seized on by the emerging mobile phone industry. And although most of today’s mobile phones use a simpler and less sophisticated system, Lamarr’s idea underlies the technology used in wireless phones in the home, in the Bluetooth system that allows mobile devices to talk to one another and in global positioning systems (GPS).

The original patent had run out in 1959 and Lamarr did not try to renew it, which meant she did not benefit directly from her idea’s many uses. This did not stop her trying: strapped for cash in her old age, and living largely from lawsuits against companies that reproduced her image without permission, she managed to extract $300,000 from a phone maker that used her technology.

Belated recognition came in 1997 when Lamarr was given an award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Well, it’s about time,” she said. By then, well into her eighties and reluctant to allow the world to see the result of her overindulgence in plastic surgery, she declined to pick it up in person but did record a message of thanks.

She had still not lost her passion for innovation. In her last years, she was working on a number of inventions, among them a fluorescent dog collar, a device to help people with mobility problems get in and out of the bath and shower and, most curious of all, modifications to the design of Concorde.

“This woman spent her life being known for her great beauty, but she thought it was a curse, because nobody looked past her face,” Rhodes said. “She felt unappreciated and unrecognised for her intelligence and other gifts.

“She patented many things but never followed through. Invention is 99% selling the invention after you make it. But she never did that part.”

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Photo: Hedy Lamarr in the 1949 film Samson and Delilah (c) Moviestore Collection

PS: A 1991 NEW YORK TIMES article on Lamarr´s shop-lifting charge in Florida; it took 20 more years to create a public awareness of Lamarr´s intellectual achievements…

This entry was posted on 30 November 2011 at 08:00 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags America, Austria, film history, film star, Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood, inventions, Vienna. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.