HANSON – An actress frequently promoted – an often dismissed – as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” – Hedy Lamarr was so much more than just a pretty face.
In fact, we’ve evidently been pronouncing her name wrong, too.
While it takes away the running gag in Mel Brooks’ spoof of western movies, “Blazing Saddles,” (Harvey Korman’s character Hedley Lamarr was often called “Hedy,” to which he would have to respond: “That’s Hedley!”) … the stage name of Hedwig Eva Keisler was really pronounced “Hey-dee as in lady.”
It was, as dramatized in a performance for the Hanson Historical Society on May 4 by Judith Kalaora, artistic director of History at Play, just one of the things Lamarr had to correct people on over the course of her life and career.
She also spent a lifetime trying to explain how an unscrupulous Czech director duped her into the nude scene in the 1933 film “Ecstasy” and dealing with dismissal of her rightful claim to a role in developing “frequency hopping” technology for radar evasion during World War II, shopping it to the U.S. Navy.
“I have learned, no matter where I have lived, that the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘stupid’ always go together,” she said, knowing full well that life is more complicated than a Hollywood movie, and far less boring, according to Lamarr, who detested boring people and activities.
Kalaora’s one-woman play opened with a hint of her scientific contributions as her side of a telephone conversation with friend and inventing collaborator George Antheil as the two were nervously awaiting a patent for their frequency-hopping invention. They got it U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 – awarded in August of 1942 – but the U.S. Inventors’ Council, a branch of the Navy, and urged her to sell war bonds instead.
Without this technology, today’s cell phones, Bluetooth technology and GPS might not exist. Impressive stuff, but for Lamarr, it was a hobby she put to work in the cause of freedom.
“It is too heavy?,” Hedy as portrayed by Kalaora asked Antheil, whose voice the audience does not hear. “George, how could they? You said the technology could be made so small that it could fit into a pocket watch. How can they say it is too heavy? Well, we will make it lighter.
“Yes, I am sure. This technology will help us to beat the Nazis – and I think the Navy knows it, too.”
Kalaora then took her audience back in time to trace her way to Hollywood where, when she wasn’t working on a film, Lamarr could be found at her drafting table, inventing. She also studied and copied the people around her.
“I always wanted to transform myself,” she said, of her mother who resented having to give up her career as a professional pianist and who resented her daughter for it. Her father doted on her, and was Lamarr’s hero.
As an only child, Lamarr spent a lot of time with her father who discussed the inner workings of machines with her and encouraged Lamarr in her hobby of taking things apart and reassembling them.
“No man I ever met was my papa’s equal,” she said.
She did not take the Navy’s lack of cooperation, well – and was especially angry at the suggestion she stick to selling war bonds like every other starlet in Hollywood. It was an insult to the woman who had escaped her controlling first husband, Austrian munitions dealer Fritz Mandl to whom her mother married Hedy off at age 19. A Jewish man who supplied weapons to the Nazis and Italian fascists, Mandl ended up keeping her as a prisoner in her own home.
When she escaped to London and then America after her father’s death, she was determined to fight the Nazis, having seen first-hand who they were and what they were doing in Europe.
“I was always listening … I learned that the Nazis favor wire-guided torpedoes,” she said of dinner table talk between Mandl and guests to their home. Propulsion bombs were leaving trails of bubbles in the water to enable tracking. She had learned that the Nazis used 18 pre-launch electable frequencies for their aerial-deployed glide bombs divided between 18 planes. If one pilot was shot down or jammed, the others could complete the mission.
“I knew what I was learning,” she said. “I knew it was important. It could help us to beat the Nazis.”
Keeping that in mind, she was able to use that information later in California as she worked with Antheil, a writer and composer I Hollywood, who had been a munitions inspector during WWI and whose brother had been shot down by Nazis at the beginning of WWII, on the frequency-hopping technology. A partnership had been formed.
“I wanted to invent a torpedo that hit its target every time,” she said through Kalaora. “So often the torpedoes were thrown off course so they would detonate before they hit their target. I wanted every torpedo to hit its target, and wanted all those targets to be German U-boats, and I knew George was the only person who could help me.”
“The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together,” according to the National Women’s History Museum. “Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target.”
It was also a way for Hedy to keep from being bored. They came up with the idea while playing a piano game akin to Name That Tune.
“I could see it in my mind,” she said. “I could see all of those Navy men, seated around a table at the Inventors’ Council, trying to figure out how to strap a piano to a torpedo!”
Put off and told to sell war bonds despite using her real name – Hedwig Keisler-Markey – for the patent application, she channeled her anger into outselling most other celebrities in Hollywood.
“I sold $25 million in war bonds,” she said. “I did not care how I helped, as long as I helped – as long as we won.”
She also raised $7 million in one afternoon selling kisses for $50,000 each.
Three years after the patent expired, in 1962, it was used during the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which every ship in the U.S. blockade of Cuba was equipped with the frequency-hopping system.
“I always knew our invention would be used for military purposes,” she said.