Hedy's Folly
Richard Rhodes
ALSO BY RICHARD RHODES
The Twilight of the Bombs
Arsenals of Folly
John James Audubon
Masters of Death
Why They Kill
Visions of Technology
Deadly Feasts
Trying to Get Some Dignity (with Ginger Rhodes)
Dark Sun
How to Write
Nuclear Renewal
Making Love
A Hole in the World
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Looking for America
Sons of Earth
The Last Safari
Holy Secrets
The Ungodly
The Inland Ground
(illustration credit fm.1)
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Rhodes
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material:
The Estate of George Antheil: Excerpts from Bad Boy of Music by George Antheil (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1945) and excerpts from the unpublished writings and correspondence of George and Boski Antheil (Library of Congress Antheil Collection). Reprinted by permission of The Estate of George Antheil, administered by Charles Amirkhanian.
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and Williams Verlag AG: Excerpts from The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, translated by Helmut Ripperger and Ben Huebsch, copyright © 1943 by the Viking Press, Inc. Rights to the underlying work, copyright © 1977 by William Verlag AG, Zurich. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and Williams Verlag AG.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photo of Hedy Lamarr: Getty Images #2637880 © Hulton Archive/Getty Images
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rhodes, Richard, 1937–
Hedy’s folly : the life and breakthrough inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman in the world / Richard Rhodes.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Lamarr, Hedy, 1913–2000. 2. Actresses—United States—Biography. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Spread spectrum communications. I. Title.
PN2287.L24R54 2011
791.430′28092—dc23
[B] 2011021746
eISBN: 978-0-385-53439-0
v3.1
For Anthony and Denise
A grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supported the research for this book.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION Hedy Lamarr, Inventor
ONE A Charming Austrian Girl
TWO Bad Boy of Music
THREE Mechanisms
FOUR Between Times
FIVE Leaving Fritz
SIX Cinemogling
SEVEN Frequency Hopping
EIGHT Flashes of Genius
NINE Red-Hot Apparatus
TEN O Pioneers!
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Illustration Credits
Illustrations
[INTRODUCTION]
Hedy Lamarr, Inventor
Invention is a strange business. Is it creative, like painting or sculpture? It’s certainly original, by definition genuinely new, but it’s also and fundamentally practical. Patent law says an idea must be “reduced to practice” to be patentable. That means an idea must be embodied in some new and useful mechanism or process or material. So invention is creative, but not in the same way the fine arts are. Usefulness isn’t fundamental to a sculpture or a painting.
Is invention, then, scientific? Many inventions today are explicitly derived from scientific discoveries. The discovery that certain materials, stimulated in a particular way, would emit coherent light—light all of the same wavelength—led to the invention of the laser. The laser was a practical device that embodied the discovery, but it wasn’t the discovery itself. The distinction is clear even in prescientific times: Fire was a discovery; the fireplace was an invention. That fire hardened clay was a discovery; pottery was an invention. Again, as with fine art, usefulness isn’t a requirement for scientific discovery.
That invention is different from fine art or scientific discovery suggests that inventors might be different from artists or scientists. They are. Many inventors are technically trained, of course, especially those who invent professionally. Thomas Edison was home- and self-educated, but Nikola Tesla, the inventor of radio, was an electrical engineer. Some inventors have been artists. Samuel F. B. Morse, the co-inventor of the telegraph, was a professional painter. The same person might do science and invent. I knew such a person, a Nobel laureate American physicist named Luis Alvarez. Luis’s many inventions won him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He told me once that he valued his recognition as an inventor more than the Nobel.
But many inventors, past and present, have been people with no obvious special qualifications for inventing. Come to think of it, there are no special qualifications for inventing. No school I know of offers such a degree. As a sculptor is someone who sculpts, as a writer is someone who writes, an inventor is someone who invents.
The 1940s Austrian-American movie star Hedy Lamarr was an inventor. The public-relations department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Hedy began her American film career, put out the claim that she was “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and by Western standards she may have been. It annoyed her deeply, however, that few people saw beyond her beauty to her intelligence. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she famously and acidly said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
Hedy invented as a hobby. Since she made two or three movies a year, each one taking about a month to shoot, she had spare time to fill. She didn’t drink and she didn’t like to party, so she took up inventing. When she was a girl, her father, a Viennese banker, had encouraged her interest in how the world worked, taking walks with her and explaining the mechanics of the machinery they encountered. As a young woman, before she emigrated from Austria to the United States, she married a munitions manufacturer and listened in on the technical discussions he held with his Austrian and German military clients. She also had a keen sense of the world’s large and small failings, some of which she decided she could fix. In Hollywood she set up an inventor’s corner in the drawing room of her house, complete with a drafting table and lamp and all the necessary drafting tools.
Hedy conceived of her most important invention in 1941, in the dark years between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that finally impelled the United States to enter the war. She wanted to help her newly adopted country (where she was still technically an enemy alien) and saw the need for a weapon to attack the German submarines that were devastating North Atlantic shipping. It’s characteristic of her confidence in her inventive gift that she believed she could devise such a weapon and help change the course of the war. Her belief was folly in two senses of that fine old word: extravagant in consequential invention, and founded on the foolish notion that the United States Navy would take correction from a Hollywood actress of great beauty in a matter about which it was not prepared to listen to its own submarine commanders.
Her unlikely, but ideal, partner in that work
was an avant-garde composer and concert pianist named George Antheil, at five feet four a “cello-sized man,” as Time magazine put it, a New Jersey native whose father owned a shoe store. Antheil was not, like Hedy, an amateur inventor, but he was nearly polymathic in his gifts. When Hedy revealed her idea to him, he immediately saw a way to give it practical form for the purpose of patenting it.
That practical form linked back to Antheil’s most notorious composition, a twenty-minute rhythmic cacophony of grand pianos, electric bells, drums, xylophones, a siren, a gong, an airplane propeller, and sixteen synchronized player pianos called Ballet mécanique, which premiered in Paris in 1926. In his Paris days, before he moved to Hollywood to make a living writing film scores, Antheil was a good friend of Ernest Hemingway, Igor Stravinsky, the bookseller Sylvia Beach (the Antheils lived for ten years in a small apartment on the mezzanine of Beach’s famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore), James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and most of the rest of the fabled crowd of expatriates who helped make Paris a world center of art, music, and literature in the years between the two world wars.
Hedy in Vienna, George in Paris, and then the two of them meeting up in Hollywood to invent a fundamental new wireless technology makes a remarkable story at the center of Hedy Lamarr’s long and fascinating life. Except in the matter of her beauty, which she valued least of all, people regularly underestimated her. She deserved better. The real story will amaze you.
[ONE]
A Charming Austrian Girl
She was Viennese, not yet seventeen in the spring of 1931 but already a professional actress, in rehearsal for a play. Hedwig Kiesler (pronounced HAYD-vig KEES-lur)—Hedy—had won a small role in the Berlin incarnation of The Weaker Sex, which the celebrated Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt was directing. When Reinhardt restaged the play in Vienna that spring, she had single-mindedly quit the Berlin cast and followed him home. “Are you here too, Fraulein Kiesler?” he’d asked her in surprise. “Are you living with your family? All right, you can be the Americaness again.” Édouard Bourdet’s play was a comedy with a pair of boorish stage Americans as foils. Reinhardt had assigned the actor George Weller, Hedy’s husband in the play, to teach her some American songs. “I took this as a mandate to make an American out of Hedy Kiesler,” the young Bostonian recalled.
She was eager to be transformed. “Hedy had only the vaguest ideas of what the United States were,” Weller discovered, “except that they were grouped around Hollywood.” She idolized the California tennis star Helen Wills, “Little Miss Poker Face.” Wills, focused and unexpressive on the courts, all business, was the world’s number-one-ranked female tennis player, midway that year through an unbroken run of 180 victories. “Watch me look like Helen Wills,” Hedy teased Weller when they rehearsed together. “Du, schau’ mal, hier bin ich Kleine Poker Face.” Her lively young face would grow calm, Weller remembered, “expressionless and assured, her brow would clarify, and for a moment she would really become an American woman.” Commandeering the property room, Hedy and George practiced singing “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” and an Austrian favorite, Al Jolson’s lugubrious “Sonny Boy.” It melted the matrons at matinees, many of them mothers with sons lost in the long slaughter of the Great War.
An only child, entertaining herself with her dolls, Hedy had dreamed since she was a little girl of becoming a movie star. “I had a little stage under my father’s desk,” she recalled, “where I would act out fairy tales. When someone would come into the room they would think my mind was really wandering. I was always talking to myself.” Her tall, handsome, vigorous father, Emil, an athlete as well as a successful banker, told her stories, read her books, and took her on walks in their tree-lined neighborhood and in the great park of the Wienerwald—the Vienna Woods. Wherever they went together, he explained to her how everything worked—“from printing presses to streetcars,” she said. Her father’s enthusiasm for technology links her lifelong interest in invention with cherished memories of her favorite parent.
Hedy’s mother was stricter, concerned that such a pretty, vivacious child would grow up spoiled unless she heard criticism as well as compliments. “She has always had everything,” Trude Kiesler said. “She never had to long for anything. First there was her father who, of course, adored her, and was very proud of her. He gave her all the comforts, pretty clothes, a fine home, parties, schools, sports. He looked always for the sports for her, and music.” Trude had trained as a concert pianist before motherhood intervened. In turn, she supervised Hedy’s lessons on the grand piano in the Kiesler salon. “I underemphasized praise and flattery,” Trude determined, “hoping in this way to balance the scales for her.”
The Kieslers were assimilated Jews, Trude from Budapest, Emil from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Hedy kept her Jewish heritage secret throughout her life; her son and daughter only learned of it after her death. In prewar Vienna it had hardly mattered. The Viennese population’s mixed legacy of Slavic, Germanic, Hungarian, Italian, and Jewish traditions was one of its glories, one reason for the city’s unique creative ferment in the first decades of the new century. Sigmund Freud’s daughters attended the same girls’ middle school that Hedy later did, and after the war Anna Freud taught there.
Vienna is an old city, with ruins dating to Roman times. The emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his third book of Meditations on that rough Germanic frontier. Set in the broad Danube valley at the eastern terminus of the Alps, it grew across the centuries through great turmoil to become the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A wide ring boulevard supplanted its medieval wall after 1857, opening it up to its suburbs. By 1910, two million ethnically diverse Viennese, reading newspapers published in ten languages, took their leisure in sparkling coffeehouses, and the beneficence of the emperor Franz Josef had filled the city’s twenty-one districts with parks, statues, and palaces. To the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, his birthplace was “a city of a thousand attractions, a city with theatres, museums, bookstores, universities, music, a city in which each day brought new surprises.”
If Vienna was old, it made itself radically modern in the years around the Great War in music, theater, and art. Austrian culture had prepared the way, Zweig believed: “Precisely because the monarchy, because Austria itself for centuries had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in military actions, the native pride had turned more strongly toward a desire for artistic supremacy.” Vienna was the arena of that desire. The roll call of important early-twentieth-century artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and philosophers active in the Viennese milieu is startling: the artists Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka; the writers Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth; the composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Alban Berg. Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis in Vienna. Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Mach contributed importantly to physics there. Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Otto Neurath, and, most famously, Ludwig Wittgenstein transformed philosophy.
“The whole city was at one,” Zweig saw, in its “receptivity for all that was colorful, festive and resounding, in [its] pleasure in the theatrical, whether it was on the stage or in reality, both as theatre and as a mirror of life.” For Zweig, theater was the core Viennese experience:
It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses. The first glance of the average Viennese into his morning paper was not at the events in parliament, or world affairs, but at the repertoire of the theatre, which assumed so important a role in public life as hardly was possible in any other city. For the Imperial theatre, the Burgtheater, was for the Viennese and for the Austrian more than a stage upon which actors enacted parts; it was the microcosm that mirrored the macrocosm, the brightly colored reflection in which the city saw itself.… The stage, instead of being merely a place of entertainment, was a spoken and plastic guide of good behavior an
d correct pronunciation, and a nimbus of respect encircled like a halo everything that had even the faintest connection with the Imperial theatre.
What else but theater, and by extension motion pictures, would a bright, pretty, single-minded Viennese girl choose? “I acted all the time,” Hedy recalled. “I copied my mother. I copied the way she walked and the way she talked. I copied her mannerisms, her facial expression. I copied the guests who came to our house. I copied people I saw in the streets. I copied the servants. I was a little living copybook. I wrote people down on me.”
Acting was in the air. In his school classes, Zweig remembered, “in keeping with the Viennese atmosphere … the impulse to creative production became positively epidemic. Each of us sought some talent within himself and endeavored to unfold it.” Four or five of Zweig’s classmates wanted to be actors. “They imitated the diction of the Imperial players, they recited and declaimed without ceasing, secretly took lessons in acting, and, during the recesses at school, distributed parts and improvised entire scenes from the classics, while the rest of us formed a curious but exacting audience.”
Hedy took more direct action, as her father had taught her. “He made me understand that I must make my own decisions,” she said, “mold my own character, think my own thoughts.” She had met Max Reinhardt, the director and impresario, at a party in 1929, when she was fifteen, and he had seemed interested in her. “He had encouraged me by telling me to hold fast to my dream and that if I held fast it would come true.” She held fast, and it did.
After an unhappy term at a Swiss finishing school that she finessed by running away home to Vienna, she scouted a motion-picture studio, Sascha-Film, the largest in the city. To buy time for her assault, she added a zero to a school absence request her mother had signed, turning one hour into ten—two school days. “I knew that the studio employed script girls. I did not have any idea of what script girls are supposed to do, but I knew that they were on the sets all the time watching the actors work—and that was enough for me.” She slipped into the studio and presented herself. “They asked me, ‘Do you know how to be a script girl?’ and I said, ‘No. But may I try?’ ” Probably because she was pretty as well as brash, the script supervisor laughed and took her on.
