Authors: Richard Rhodes
Hedy's Folly
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
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.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material: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by George Antheil (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1945) and excerpts from the unpublished writings and correspondence of George and Boski Antheil (Library of Congress Antheil Collection).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
INTRODUCTION
Hedy Lamarr, Inventor
[
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.