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Glamour and Munitions: A Screen Siren’s Wartime Ingenuity
Hedy Lamarr, center, with the composer George Antheil, second from right, and his wife, Boski, second from left.
Hedy Lamarr, center, with the composer George Antheil, second from right, and his wife, Boski, second from left.
By DWIGHT GARNER
HEDY’S FOLLY
The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
By Richard Rhodes
Illustrated. 261 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.
Did you hear the one about the actress and the composer who tried to invent a remote-controlled torpedo? It sounds like the opening line of a bar joke, but it’s actually the premise of Richard Rhodes’s slim new book, “Hedy’s Folly.”
The actress was Hedy Lamarr, the sloe-eyed Hollywood siren who starred in 1940s films like “White Cargo” and the Busby-Berkeley-choreographed musical “Ziegfeld Girl,” in which she wore a memorable peacock-feather headdress. Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, Lamarr arrived in Hollywood in 1937, fleeing a tyrannical husband and Europe’s growing anti-Semitism.
Lamarr was called, by the studio head Louis B. Mayer, “the most beautiful girl in the world.” It’s the kind of slogan that does a woman no favors. You begin to scan her bewitching face in this book’s black-and-white photographs, forced to propose alternatives mentally. Gene Tierney? Ava Gardner? Mary McCarthy?
The composer was George Antheil, born in 1900 in Trenton. A child prodigy, the dashing Antheil dropped out of high school and left for Europe, where he made a name for himself in the classical and avant-garde music worlds. He befriended Igor Stravinsky and Ezra Pound, and lived with his wife, Boski, for more than 10 years above Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore. The Antheils moved to Hollywood shortly before Lamarr did.
Mr. Rhodes’s book, culled from biographies, unpublished memoirs and other sources, doesn’t present a great deal of new information. By cropping these two lives down to the size of their short-lived technological collaboration in the early ’40s, however, he has isolated and framed a resonantly weird story. It’s got the makings — war, glamour, obsession, the intellectual underpinnings of the digital age — of a great Errol Morris documentary.
Mr. Rhodes, who has written many kinds of books, is best known as a historian of America’s nuclear age. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” He’s a straightforward, no-frills, anti-style stylist. He presents this story clearly, but I longed for more: crisper and more evocative prose, more of an essayistic and metaphysical bent, more moments that go off in your head like chimes.
Learning that Hedy Lamarr devised a remote-controlled torpedo during World War II is a bit like being told that Ali MacGraw developed the science behind napalm. The mind boggles for a moment. It’s to Mr. Rhodes’s credit that he gently makes this implausible story plausible.
Lamarr’s first marriage was to the arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandle, the third-richest man in Austria. During the years before World War II, she absorbed plenty of top-secret table talk — Mussolini was a dinner guest — about weapons systems. She didn’t share her husband’s opportunistic right-wing politics. Once divorced and in America, she began to think about how she could help the war effort here.
Mr. Rhodes makes it plain that Lamarr was not an intellectual. She had an alert mind, however, and loved to tinker purposefully. Howard Hughes once provided her with a pair of chemists to assist with one of her ideas, for a kind of bouillon cube that, when dropped into water, would create a Coca-Cola-like soft drink. The scheme (pun half intended) fizzled. But throughout her life, the author writes, “Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and to bring order to a world she thought chaotic.”
She met George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner party. Antheil later admitted that his “eyeballs sizzled” that evening. “Her breasts were fine too,” he wrote.
It’s doubtful, Mr. Rhodes declares, that the two had an affair. For one thing, Lamarr liked tall men; Antheil was once described by Time magazine as “cello-sized.” But Antheil claimed that Lamarr wrote her telephone number in lipstick on his windshield that first night, which is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever heard.
Antheil was a receptive audience for Lamarr’s weapons talk. He was a former United States munitions inspector. More important, for her torpedo idea, he was an expert in making machines communicate with one another. His groundbreaking and cacophonous work, “Ballet Mécanique” (1924), which caused an uproar at its Paris premiere, was written to include the synchronization of 16 player pianos. His description of “Ballet Mécanique,” in a letter to a childhood friend, is memorably fierce: “Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. NO LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates.”
Lamarr and Antheil ultimately obtained a joint patent in 1942 for a torpedo with a radio-guidance system that could not be jammed because the signal hopped around the radio spectrum, like the flickering notes on a player piano, on different frequencies. The United States military never picked up the idea, and Antheil died in 1959. But their work, Mr. Rhodes demonstrates, was a precursor to the so-called spread-spectrum technology that today gives us wireless phones, GPS and Wi-Fi. Mr. Rhodes suspects that Lamarr’s ideas were dismissed because of sexism. But her achievements have begun to be recognized. In 1997 she received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that defends digital rights and celebrates electronic pioneers. She died in 2000, at 86.
Lamarr longed for people to see her as more than another sultry face. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/hedys-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html?ref=books
HEDY’S FOLLY
The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
By Richard Rhodes
Illustrated. 261 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.
Did you hear the one about the actress and the composer who tried to invent a remote-controlled torpedo? It sounds like the opening line of a bar joke, but it’s actually the premise of Richard Rhodes’s slim new book, “Hedy’s Folly.”
The actress was Hedy Lamarr, the sloe-eyed Hollywood siren who starred in 1940s films like “White Cargo” and the Busby-Berkeley-choreographed musical “Ziegfeld Girl,” in which she wore a memorable peacock-feather headdress. Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1913, Lamarr arrived in Hollywood in 1937, fleeing a tyrannical husband and Europe’s growing anti-Semitism.
Lamarr was called, by the studio head Louis B. Mayer, “the most beautiful girl in the world.” It’s the kind of slogan that does a woman no favors. You begin to scan her bewitching face in this book’s black-and-white photographs, forced to propose alternatives mentally. Gene Tierney? Ava Gardner? Mary McCarthy?
The composer was George Antheil, born in 1900 in Trenton. A child prodigy, the dashing Antheil dropped out of high school and left for Europe, where he made a name for himself in the classical and avant-garde music worlds. He befriended Igor Stravinsky and Ezra Pound, and lived with his wife, Boski, for more than 10 years above Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore. The Antheils moved to Hollywood shortly before Lamarr did.
Mr. Rhodes’s book, culled from biographies, unpublished memoirs and other sources, doesn’t present a great deal of new information. By cropping these two lives down to the size of their short-lived technological collaboration in the early ’40s, however, he has isolated and framed a resonantly weird story. It’s got the makings — war, glamour, obsession, the intellectual underpinnings of the digital age — of a great Errol Morris documentary.
Mr. Rhodes, who has written many kinds of books, is best known as a historian of America’s nuclear age. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” He’s a straightforward, no-frills, anti-style stylist. He presents this story clearly, but I longed for more: crisper and more evocative prose, more of an essayistic and metaphysical bent, more moments that go off in your head like chimes.
Learning that Hedy Lamarr devised a remote-controlled torpedo during World War II is a bit like being told that Ali MacGraw developed the science behind napalm. The mind boggles for a moment. It’s to Mr. Rhodes’s credit that he gently makes this implausible story plausible.
Lamarr’s first marriage was to the arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandle, the third-richest man in Austria. During the years before World War II, she absorbed plenty of top-secret table talk — Mussolini was a dinner guest — about weapons systems. She didn’t share her husband’s opportunistic right-wing politics. Once divorced and in America, she began to think about how she could help the war effort here.
Mr. Rhodes makes it plain that Lamarr was not an intellectual. She had an alert mind, however, and loved to tinker purposefully. Howard Hughes once provided her with a pair of chemists to assist with one of her ideas, for a kind of bouillon cube that, when dropped into water, would create a Coca-Cola-like soft drink. The scheme (pun half intended) fizzled. But throughout her life, the author writes, “Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and to bring order to a world she thought chaotic.”
She met George Antheil at a Hollywood dinner party. Antheil later admitted that his “eyeballs sizzled” that evening. “Her breasts were fine too,” he wrote.
It’s doubtful, Mr. Rhodes declares, that the two had an affair. For one thing, Lamarr liked tall men; Antheil was once described by Time magazine as “cello-sized.” But Antheil claimed that Lamarr wrote her telephone number in lipstick on his windshield that first night, which is one of the sexiest things I’ve ever heard.
Antheil was a receptive audience for Lamarr’s weapons talk. He was a former United States munitions inspector. More important, for her torpedo idea, he was an expert in making machines communicate with one another. His groundbreaking and cacophonous work, “Ballet Mécanique” (1924), which caused an uproar at its Paris premiere, was written to include the synchronization of 16 player pianos. His description of “Ballet Mécanique,” in a letter to a childhood friend, is memorably fierce: “Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. NO LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates.”
Lamarr and Antheil ultimately obtained a joint patent in 1942 for a torpedo with a radio-guidance system that could not be jammed because the signal hopped around the radio spectrum, like the flickering notes on a player piano, on different frequencies. The United States military never picked up the idea, and Antheil died in 1959. But their work, Mr. Rhodes demonstrates, was a precursor to the so-called spread-spectrum technology that today gives us wireless phones, GPS and Wi-Fi. Mr. Rhodes suspects that Lamarr’s ideas were dismissed because of sexism. But her achievements have begun to be recognized. In 1997 she received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that defends digital rights and celebrates electronic pioneers. She died in 2000, at 86.
Lamarr longed for people to see her as more than another sultry face. “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”