In October 1937, Hedy Lamarr stepped off a train in London with little more than the clothes she was wearing and a burning determination to remake her life. She had fled Vienna to escape her husband, the munitions magnate Fritz Mandl, and the growing threat of a German invasion. The twenty-three-year-old Austrian actress, already notorious across Europe for her role in the controversial film Ecstasy, had made her way to Paris and then across the Channel with one goal in mind: Hollywood. Learning that Louis B.
Mayer, the head of MGM, was in London scouting talent, Lamarr arranged a meeting. Mayer was uneasy about the scandal attached to her name, but he was not blind to her presence. He offered her a standard six-month contract at $125 a week. She refused outright.
She had her own sense of her worth and was not about to be pushed into a deal that undervalued her. Mayer was scheduled to leave for France the next day to catch the ocean liner Normandie back to the United States. The voyage was fully booked, but Lamarr was not easily deterred. She sold most of her jewels to secure passage and boarded the ship dressed in a striking gown.
On board, she made certain Mayer noticed her. By the time the liner reached New York, he had sweetened the offer to a seven-year contract starting at $550 a week. She had negotiated her way into Hollywood before she had ever set foot in it. Once in Los Angeles, MGM gave her a new name, styling her as Hedy Lamarr, a persona built on sleek jet-black hair, porcelain skin, and an exotic allure that set her apart from the blonde bombshells of the era.
Her impact on American glamour was immediate. After her first Hollywood film, Algiers, was released in 1938, women across the country rushed to drugstores for hair dye. Actresses like Joan Crawford and Joan Bennett abandoned their blonde and brown locks for the same sharp black look. Lamarr’s signature middle part, her veils, her snoods, her turbans, swept through fashion houses, and hatmakers struggled to keep pace with demand.
By December 1938, the press had crowned her the Glamour Girl of the Year. Yet beneath the carefully manufactured image, there was a deeper story. Lamarr was not simply a beautiful face. She was intensely private, shy, and possessed of a restless scientific curiosity that had little outlet in the studio system.
Photographers found her frustrating. Hungarian photographer Lilo Willinger, who shot her in both Vienna and Hollywood, recalled that she had no idea how to be seductive on command. She would simply sit and assume that was enough. No amount of adjusting lights or angles brought her to life.
Virgil Apger, another MGM photographer, remembered her as difficult, convinced she knew better than the professionals around her. George Hurrell, who photographed her shortly after her arrival, said she was stunning but static. She had one style and it never varied. She dressed in black suits, refused to show off her figure, and seemed to project nothing at all.
And yet, when she wanted to, she could turn on a kind of quiet magnetism that left men helpless. Actress June Allyson observed that Lamarr knew exactly how to give a man that intimate little smile that got him going. Men flocked to her. The trouble was that Hollywood did not know what to do with her beyond that.
New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, reviewing the lackluster Lady of the Tropics, dismissed her as one of those museum pieces who were more beautiful in repose than in motion. The conventional wisdom was that she was an ornament, not a serious actress. It was a judgment that would follow her for much of her career. Lamarr, however, was also quietly brilliant.
Rumors followed her from childhood that she had been taking apart and rebuilding music boxes at age five. Later, during her brief involvement with Howard Hughes, she claimed she had designed a more aerodynamic wing shape for his planes. What mattered most, though, was that she combined her intelligence with a genuine sense of civic duty. In 1940, at a dinner party hosted by fashion designer Adrian, she met George Antheil, a composer and inventor who was also something of an expert on glands.
Lamarr, acting on a suggestion from Louis B. Mayer, asked him about breast enlargement. But as the evening wore on, the conversation turned to the possibility of the United States entering the European war. Lamarr had absorbed a great deal of military technology talk during her marriage to Fritz Mandl, who had held regular business meetings with German and Italian weapons experts.
She was convinced she could contribute something to the Allied war effort. She and Antheil began working on an idea: a radio-guided torpedo whose signal could not be jammed by the enemy. The system would shift between eighty-eight frequencies in a seemingly random pattern, coordinated by a transmitter and receiver using paper rolls similar to those in a player piano. They filed a patent for a Secret Communication System, and on October 1, 1941, the New York Times reported that Hedy Lamarr, actress, had devised a red-hot apparatus for use in defense.
The National Inventors Council rated the invention as highly significant. When the patent was granted in August 1942, Lamarr and Antheil offered it to the U. S. government.
The military, however, deemed the device too bulky and shelved it. Instead, Lamarr was encouraged to sell war bonds, which she did with enthusiasm. The invention was largely forgotten until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when U. S.
Navy ships were fitted with frequency-hopping technology based on the same principle to secure their communications. By the time the public learned of her contribution, the patent had long since expired. In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil, both dead by then, received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. In 2014, Lamarr was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Her technological brilliance, however, did not translate into career success. Hollywood never figured out how to use her. In 1942, MGM turned down a loan request from Warner Brothers to cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. She was instead placed in the embarrassing White Cargo.
She later missed out on the leads in Laura and Gaslight, roles that went to Gene Tierney and Ingrid Bergman. Each missed opportunity narrowed her path. She chose bad scripts, clashed with directors, and developed a reputation for being difficult. In 1943, she sued MGM over unpaid salary, claiming the studio owed her $2,000 a week that was being withheld under wartime salary caps.
The case was settled out of court, but it set a pattern. Lamarr would turn to litigation repeatedly throughout her life, often over money. After leaving MGM in the late summer of 1945, she formed her own production company with Jack Chertok, the producer of her 1944 film The Conspirators. Their first picture, The Strange Woman, did well, offering Lamarr a chance to show a more nuanced side of her acting.
But the follow-up, Dishonored Lady, was a costly failure. She staged a comeback in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of the decade, but then fell out with Paramount over promotional fees. She invested heavily in her own projects, borrowing against Rome’s resources, but the ventures collapsed.
She had overextended herself, alienated too many people, and burned too many bridges. Her personal life mirrored the professional chaos. She married six times: Fritz Mandl, screenwriter Gene Markey, actor John Loder, nightclub owner Ernest Stauffer, oil millionaire W. Howard Lee, and lawyer Lewis W.
Boies. None of the marriages lasted more than six years, and she did not always make the most of her divorce settlements. She spent lavishly, collected Modigliani, Chagall, Rodin, Dufy, Utrillo, and Renoir, and lived in luxurious homes while also worrying about money. By the mid-1960s, her career had collapsed and her finances were in disarray.
She wrote a scandalous autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, but later claimed she was shocked by its contents and challenged its accuracy in court. In 1966, she was charged with shoplifting. She was charged again in 1991. Both times she avoided serious legal consequences.
She summed up her attitude toward money in her autobiography with a characteristic mix of defiance and regret: she claimed she had made and spent some thirty million dollars, and advised people not to save but to enjoy it. Her health deteriorated as she aged. In the 1950s, she became a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, known as Miracle Max, who treated a clientele of Hollywood royalty with injections of amphetamines, animal hormones, bone marrow enzymes, human placenta, painkillers, steroids, and vitamins.
In December 1958, her eleven-year-old son Anthony was hit by a car while riding his bicycle and suffered serious injuries. The shock contributed to increasingly erratic behavior. As her looks faded in the 1960s, she underwent unsuccessful cosmetic surgery and became reluctant to appear in public. Reflecting on her life, Lamarr once said her face had been her misfortune.
It had attracted six unsuccessful marriage partners and all the wrong people into her life. She called her face a mask she could not remove. In the January 1951 issue of the Los Angeles Examiner, gossip columnist Louella Parsons printed a letter from Lamarr announcing her retirement from the screen. She said she wanted the privilege of a private life.
John Fraser, her former co-star, observed that by 1952 she had become neurotic, unable to communicate socially, and unaware of anyone but herself, speaking in meaningless monologues whenever she appeared in public. Hedy Lamarr was a woman of extraordinary gifts, both public and hidden. She was a star of the Golden Age who could not be contained by its rules, and a serious inventor whose work was finally recognized decades after she was gone. She died in 2000, leaving an estate of about $3.
3 million and a legacy that straddles two very different worlds: the glittering surface of Hollywood and the silent precision of a frequency-hopping radio signal that helped change the course of modern communications.