Hedy Lamarr

The Full Biography

Hedy Lamarr. Actress. Inventor. The Vienna girl the town hired as a face, who then spent a war trying to give the Navy a way to steer a torpedo that would not be jammed — and a later life watching the town remember only the face.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a close-up MGM could sell, a profile that made “the most beautiful woman in the world” a press-office job. What the still cannot show is Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler of Vienna, a marriage to an arms merchant she fled, a patent with the composer George Antheil, and a later life of shoplifting charges, surgery, and a Florida death in 2000 that the face had already outlived as a fact.

She was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, to a Jewish household that assimilated hard. Emil Kiesler was a bank director. Gertrud, born Lichtwitz, had been trained as a concert pianist. The house had music and a careful silence about what was coming. Max Reinhardt’s orbit taught her how a face reads from the third row. Ecstasy (1933), Gustav Machatý’s Czech picture, put her on a screen in a way the American columns never let her put down: a swim, a close-up, a scandal that followed her across an ocean. She was eighteen. The stills outran the girl.

That same year she married Friedrich Mandl, who sold munitions and did not like a wife who listened at the table. His guests talked range, fuse, and radio. She sat through dinners that were briefings. She left him and left the continent — Paris, then London, then a crossing on which Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer renamed her Hedy Lamarr and rented the profile. The name was a cut. The contract was a cage with good lighting. Hollywood debuted her opposite Charles Boyer in Algiers (1938). The town decided she was a climate. The parts decided she was a cheekbone.

I Take This Woman (1940) put her with Spencer Tracy in a picture that was reshot until it forgot itself. Boom Town (1940), with Clark Gable, Tracy, and Claudette Colbert, is the oil-boom drama that still plays on a Saturday. Comrade X (1940) asked Gable and Lamarr to pretend a Soviet joke was a romance. Come Live with Me (1941) and Ziegfeld Girl (1941), the latter with Judy Garland, Lana Turner, and James Stewart, showed what MGM did with women it considered ornaments: parade them, then give the song to someone else. King Vidor’s H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941) is the rare credit in which she is allowed a mind. She knew the difference. She was bored in the way a mind is bored when the job is a cheekbone.

Tortilla Flat (1942) and Crossroads (1942) filled the contract. White Cargo (1942) made her Tondelayo, a part the stills sold and the script did not deserve. The Heavenly Body (1944) is the publicity year of the photograph this page still uses. Experiment Perilous (1944), for Jacques Tourneur, is the one thriller in which the face is a plot, not a poster. Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945) sent her back to costume. She produced, with some of her own money, The Strange Woman (1946) and Dishonored Lady (1947), trying to own a part instead of renting one. The town preferred her as a loan.

Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) is the hit. Victor Mature. A scissors. A box office that finally matched the press-office sentence. A Lady Without Passport (1950), Copper Canyon (1950), and My Favorite Spy (1951) with Bob Hope are the taper. The Story of Mankind (1957) and The Female Animal (1958) are what a profile does when the studio has already moved on. She had been, for a stretch, a leading woman whose parts were thinner than the forehead the stills adored. The filmography is real. So is the boredom.

In 1941, between those calls, she sat with George Antheil, the composer who understood player pianos, and they drew a way to steer a torpedo that a jammer could not sit on. The idea was frequency hopping: a radio signal that jumped among frequencies in a pattern sender and receiver both knew, so an enemy listening on one channel heard only a fragment. Antheil’s contribution was mechanical and exact. A player piano has eighty-eight keys. Their drawing used eighty-eight frequencies and a punched roll, like a score, to keep transmitter and receiver in step. They filed on June 10, 1941, as Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil. On August 11, 1942, the United States issued Patent No. 2,292,387, “Secret Communication System.” The Navy classified the paper and did not deploy the drawing as drawn. She offered the idea as a war gift. The town filed it under novelty.

She did not invent Wi-Fi as a product. She did invent, with a composer, a hopping method engineers still cite when they teach spread spectrum. Bluetooth, some cellular codes, and the family of wireless links that live in a pocket sit on a tree that includes that 1942 paper. Both sentences belong. The slogan does not. The workbench does. The patent expired in 1959, while she was still being asked about her face. In the early 1960s the Navy used related frequency-hopping ideas on ships. She was not in the room. She was, by then, a woman the columns preferred to photograph leaving a courthouse.

The war years in Hollywood were a second education. She sold war bonds. She entertained at the Hollywood Canteen. She kept a drafting table in the house on Benedict Canyon and treated an evening after a call time as a chance to solve something the stills could not use. Antheil, who had written Ballet Mécanique for player pianos and airplane propellers, understood synchronization as music. She understood jamming as a dinner-table problem from Mandl’s house. Together they described a system that could also, on paper, carry other secret traffic, not only a torpedo. The Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance filed the drawing under secrecy and told them, in the polite language of 1942, that the idea was interesting and not yet a weapon they would build. She offered to walk them through it. They preferred a face on a poster. That is not a metaphor. It is the assignment the town knew how to give her.

After DeMille, she tried to own the means. The Strange Woman and Dishonored Lady were independent productions in which she is greedy, intelligent, and allowed to be wrong. They did not change the rental market for her face. Bob Hope in My Favorite Spy is the last big-studio joke: the profile as a gag prop. She took it. She needed the check. She had already, by then, been Markey’s wife long enough to adopt a son, Loder’s wife long enough to have Denise and Anthony, and a woman the columns could marry off again without asking about the patent number. The filmography after 1951 is a taper, not a mystery. The mystery is why the 1942 paper sat in a drawer while the close-ups kept earning.

Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.Hedy Lamarr

The turn is the patent and the town’s refusal to file it next to the still. Six marriages. Pictures that got smaller. Shoplifting arrests in the 1960s and 1990s that the columns treated as a punch line about a fallen face. She withdrew. She died on January 19, 2000, in Casselberry, Florida. She was eighty-five. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had already given her a Pioneer Award, in 1997, with Antheil named beside her. The Oscars had not. The pocket devices had, without a credit on the lock screen.

Her children — Denise and Anthony, from the marriage to John Loder, and James, adopted during the brief marriage to the screenwriter Gene Markey — have had to share a mother who is a meme and a patent number. Friends from the quiet years describe a woman who could be generous on the phone and finished with Hollywood’s idea of a visit. The Lamarr who lived in Florida did not owe another close-up. She had already paid in profile.

The later years

After the last pictures, the life was long and poorly lit. She had already been through Mandl, Markey, Loder, the bandleader Teddy Stauffer, the Texas oilman W. Howard Lee, and the lawyer Lewis J. Boies. Six certificates. Two children she raised in public and one she did not. The marriages are a second filmography the columns preferred to the patent. She did not. She preferred, when anyone still asked, the workbench and a telephone that could reach an engineer.

In 1966 a book appeared under her name, Ecstasy and Me. She sued, saying the ghostwriters had invented a life she did not recognize. The suit is the file. The book is what the town wanted instead of Patent 2,292,387. That same year she was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charge was small. The headline was the face. In 1991, in Winter Park, Florida, another arrest, again for merchandise that would not have paid a day’s publicity in 1944. She was in her seventies. The columns catalogued the surgery the way they had once catalogued the cheekbone. She stopped going out.

Casselberry, Florida, is not a studio. She lived there as a woman who took calls, watched the news, and let the profile age off-camera. In 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation named her, with Antheil, a Pioneer. She did not walk a stage in San Francisco to collect it. A son accepted. Austria, which had been the first country, began to put her name on prizes and streets. She was still alive for some of that weather and already gone for the rest. On January 19, 2000, she died at home of heart disease. She was eighty-five. Her son Anthony has said some of the ashes went into the Vienna Woods. The rest stayed with the family. Both geographies are true.

Fourteen years after the death, in 2014, the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted her and Antheil for the Secret Communication System. The citation is dry and correct. It does not mention Delilah. It does not need to. Documentaries found the patent and then found the stills and then, too often, made a slogan out of a hopping method. The correction is simple. She was a contracted actress who sat at a table with a composer and solved a jamming problem the Navy did not, in 1942, know how to want. The devices in a pocket are cousins, not children she named. That is enough. It is also more than the town gave her while she could still walk into a room.

Vienna still claims the girl. MGM still claims the cheekbone. The patent office claims the hop. The hop is the chapter that lasted. The last years were not a coda of glamour. They were a mind that had always been the undercredited instrument, living in a Florida house, waiting for a sentence the lock screen still does not print.

She took calls from journalists who wanted the face and, if they stayed on the line, would sometimes get the patent. She was wary of the slogan even then. She had watched a generation turn “most beautiful” into a job description and did not intend to let “invented Wi-Fi” become the next one. Friends who reached her in the 1990s describe a woman who could be funny about Mayer, exact about Antheil’s eighty-eight keys, and finished with a visit that required makeup. She watched television. She read. She let the children handle the rooms that still wanted a close-up. When Austria named prizes after her, she was already too sick, or too private, to treat the honor as a comeback tour. The honor was late. It was also the first official sentence that put the workbench in front of the cheekbone.

What remains of those Florida years is not a second filmography. It is a telephone, a house, a son who would stand in for her at the EFF, and a decision not to become a wax museum of 1944. She had already paid in profile. She spent the last decade as Hedwig Kiesler who had once been rented, and who still knew how a signal jumps. That is the chapter the stills cannot show and the one the pocket devices still use without printing her name.

After she was gone

Every “beautiful and brainy” headline still steals her as a type. Every wireless lecture still owes the 1942 paper a footnote. Ecstasy still gets the cheap paragraph. The workbench is the correction. Documentaries and classroom slides now run her face next to a spectrogram. That pairing would have surprised Mayer. It would not have surprised the woman who was bored on a soundstage.

She came out of Vienna, fled a munitions table, rented a profile to Mayer, hopped a frequency with a composer, watched the Navy file it, and died in Florida while the pockets of the world used a cousin of the idea. If you only remember the face, you have the still. If you remember Kiesler, Mandl’s table, and the patent, you have her.

Portrait: Unknown author (MGM publicity) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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