Hedy's Folly (19 page)

Antheil echoes his wife. “
We got the smallest house … into which three humans can crowd. And all of a sudden, we were all very happy. We didn’t have five dollars to buy groceries
with, but we were happy.” It was there that Hedy visited them, in an elegant white silk pantsuit, her rich, dark hair stirred by the breeze off the ocean, happy to spend time at the beach with normal people.

One day that summer Antheil walked to the Manhattan Beach post office, two miles away, and found a single letter in his box. “
It was from my dead brother Henry’s estate and contained a check for $450 [$7,000 today]. ‘O.K., Henry,’ I said into the air, ‘I’m not so dumb but that I can’t get this. You want me to go on with my work, and I’m going on.’ ” Boski’s response to the gift was Hungarian. “His arm out of the grave!” she exulted.

Henry’s gift added to the Antheils’ reserve from a film George had worked on that spring, he told Bullitt in late July: “
I have just finished a very large motion picture score for which I have made the producers pay three times what it was worth; consequently I am able this summer and early autumn to do nothing but my own work, and am turning back again to musical composition. I am just finishing my fourth string quartet.”

Hedy was finally busy again at the beginning of August, playing the female lead opposite Robert Young in the film version of John P. Marquand’s best-selling novel
H. M. Pulham, Esq
. For once she was cast not as a remote beauty but as a complex, vital woman, a New York advertising executive in love with a Back Bay Bostonian too proper to give up his settled marriage for love; later she would call it her favorite role.
By now she had made seven major American films and was a certified Hollywood star—a superstar, we would say today.

At the end of September, for reasons of its own, the National Inventors Council leaked the story of Hedy’s inventive gifts, omitting Antheil entirely:

HEDY LAMARR INVENTOR

Actress Devises “Red-Hot” Apparatus for
Use in Defense

Special to the New York Times

HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept. 30—Hedy Lamarr, screen actress, was revealed today in a new role, that of an inventor. So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details.

Colonel L. B. Lent, chief engineer of the National Inventors Council, classed Miss Lamarr’s invention as in the “red hot” category. The only inkling of what it might be was the announcement that it was related to remote control of apparatus employed in warfare.

By then Hedy and George’s Secret Communication System had passed to the Navy for evaluation, which means it had cleared two layers of council examiners. Antheil told Bullitt that it “
actually reached [Charles F.] Kettering, who was very
enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.” Kettering’s enthusiasm may have prompted the announcement that the
New York Times
picked up.

The invention reached the Navy at a bad time. War with Japan was in the air in the autumn and early winter of 1941. On 3 November, the same day the United States began evacuating military and civilian dependents from the islands of Guam, Midway, and Wake, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull warning of the possibility of war:

[In State Department paraphrase:]
The Ambassador said it was his purpose to insure against the United States becoming involved in war with Japan through any misconception of Japanese capacity to plunge into a “suicidal struggle” with us.… It would be short-sighted to underestimate the obvious preparations of Japan; it would be short-sighted also if our policy were based on a belief that these preparations amounted merely to saber rattling. Finally, he warned of the possibility of Japan’s adopting measures with dramatic and dangerous suddenness which might make inevitable a war with the United States.

Japan did adopt those “measures”; at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, 7 December 1941, a flight of 353 Japanese carrier-based light bombers and other aircraft attacked the U.S. naval base
at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, where a large part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was anchored. Japanese bombs and aerial torpedoes sank or destroyed four American battleships; four others were hit and damaged. Three cruisers were also hit and damaged and three destroyers. The battleship
Arizona
was devastated by an eight-hundred-kilogram armor-piercing bomb; the bomb started an oil fire forward that initiated a chain of explosions culminating in the explosion of the ship’s main magazine. Everyone belowdecks died: 1,177 men, the largest death toll on a Navy ship in U.S. history.

A seaman on the battleship
California
, Eddie Jones, described the devastation on the Pacific Fleet’s flagship:

When that big bomb blew up and they put the fire out, I looked down in that big hole that went down three or four decks. I saw men all blown up, men with no legs on, men burned to death, men drowned in oil, with oil coming out of their eyes and their mouth and their ears. You couldn’t believe it was happening. You could see it in front of your eyes, but you couldn’t believe it. Here it was, a beautiful day—a beautiful Sunday morning—and you see everything blowing up and ships sinking and men in the water. And you think, we’re at peace with the world. This can’t be happening.

The next day, 8 December, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a grim assembly of both houses of Congress. “Yesterday,”
he began, “December Seventh, Nineteen Forty-One, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He called for a declaration of war, which Congress immediately voted and he signed the same day.

Two days later, on 10 December, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. The United States had few ships in the area other than submarines and torpedo boats; these were deployed to patrol the region and attack Japanese shipping. “In the weeks and months that followed,” write two American naval historians, “
U.S. submariners began to realize that there was something wrong with their torpedoes. More often than not success against Japanese ships was denied by torpedoes that ran too deep, exploded too soon, did not explode at all, or did not have enough explosive power to sink a ship when they did engage and detonate.” In 1942, 60 percent of U.S. torpedoes were duds. Japanese ships steamed into port with unexploded torpedoes stuck in their hulls like arrows.

It took the submarine service eighteen months to push past Navy bureaucracy, skepticism, and hostility to determine what was wrong with its torpedoes. The answer was, almost everything. In the years between the world wars, torpedo research and development at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, had withered on an annual budget of only $90,000. Because Newport saved money by testing
its torpedoes’ depth meters with lighter practice torpedoes in still water, the weapons ran too deep, missing their targets entirely. Newport’s secret magnetic exploder, which was supposed to serve as a proximity fuse, failed to detect an enemy ship more often than it succeeded, and frequently triggered an explosion soon after the torpedo had left its submarine.
These and other problems, including the torpedo station’s bitter and prolonged labor troubles, gave way only slowly to the determined assault of frustrated submarine commanders in the field.

Under the circumstances, the Navy had no interest whatsoever in developing a new torpedo with a complicated guidance mechanism; it would be happy simply to see its old-fashioned unguided torpedoes occasionally both hit their marks and explode.

Hedy and George heard of the decision months before their patent was allowed—in late January or early February 1942. “
After considering our torpedo for a long while,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt on 5 February, “(during which period it seems that it was almost accepted) the government declined our torpedo, saying that it was excellently worked out, but still somewhat too heavy. Miss Lamarr now insists that we get to work and lighten it.”

Whether they did or not, the record doesn’t reveal. By summer, Antheil was prepared to explain to Bullitt what he believed had gone wrong, an explanation worth quoting at length:

Hedy and I spent a lot of time—and money—designing and perfecting [our torpedo]. It was then sent in—and it actually reached Kettering, who was very enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.

But it was turned down at the Navy.

Now, Bill, I don’t carp at that; God is my witness that if our Navy has something better than the Antheil-Lamarr radio torpedo no one would be happier than I. Honestly.

But it’s the way they turned it down.

They said that the mechanism we proposed was “too bulky to be incorporated in the average torpedo.”

Now, if there’s one single criticism they could not, nor should not have made, it was THAT one.

Our fundamental two mechanisms—both being completely, or semi-electrical—can be made so small THAT THEY CAN BE FITTED INSIDE OF DOLLAR WATCHES!

I know (or I think I know) why they said that. In our patent, Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that a certain part of it worked not unlike the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-hatted gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words “player piano.”

“My God!” I can see [them] saying. “We can’t put a player piano into a torpedo!”

Or so it would appear. Remember that Kettering—who is quite a genius along the line of torpedoes—recommended it.

Our invention—had it been accepted—would enable a plane far above to steer a torpedo or A WHOLE FLEET OF TORPEDOES—against an enemy squadron, correcting and re-correcting their rudders from a single steering wheel in the plane—AND the enemy fleet could not POSSIBLY “jam” or “smear” this control. (This latter feature is our main contribution to already known and tested elements of the so-far useless radio controlled torpedo.)

The U.S. Patent Office had a better opinion of Hedy and George’s invention than did the U.S. Navy. On 11 August 1942, it issued the two inventors U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. Curiously, Hedy had filed not under her current legal name of Lamarr but disguised, as it were, as Hedy Kiesler Markey, as if she were determined not to allow her celebrity to influence the judgment of the patent examiners either way.

When the Navy acquired the patent to a technology it had formally rejected is a question that can’t be answered until the National Inventors Council records are opened; they have remained off-limits now for decades on the grounds that they
contain proprietary information. The Navy as well kept the technology secret for the next forty years, one reason Hedy and George’s contribution long went uncelebrated.

After the patent was awarded, Antheil wrote to Bullitt again, complaining about the Navy’s rejection of his and Hedy’s inventions. Bullitt’s influence had declined sharply in Washington, however. He had dreamed of becoming secretary of state. Antheil had even encouraged him to think of running for president as Roosevelt’s successor. But Bullitt had destroyed his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt the previous year by pressing Roosevelt to dismiss Bullitt’s archrival Sumner Welles, whom the Secret Service had reported drunkenly propositioning a series of annoyed African-American Pullman porters on a late-night train trip from Huntsville, Alabama, to Washington. Bullitt, writes George Kennan, “
unquestionably dealt to his relationship with FDR a blow from which it was never fully to recover. Welles was a close personal friend of the Roosevelt family. The President never fully forgave Bullitt for what he regarded as an uncharitable personal vendetta—a vendetta pursued not just in this one highly unpleasant interview in the White House but in statements to other people which were not long in reaching the Presidential ears.”

Beset with troubles, Bullitt had no influence to spare for George Antheil. “
I am sorry you feel so frustrated about your torpedo idea,” he responded on 25 August, “and wish I could do something to help you. I have, however, referred
your idea to the proper people here and will take it up again. I am still learning the Navy from the ground up and, at the moment, can do nothing more.”

By then, both Hedy and George had given up trying to change the Navy’s mind. They had both moved on. Antheil settled in at Manhattan Beach to write symphonies; he composed his Third Symphony, he told Bullitt, “
during the anxious days of midsummer 1942”—anxious because the Germans and the Japanese were on the advance and the Allies on the defensive in those early months of American engagement in the war—and began his Fourth Symphony that year as well. Boski said later that the new work had been her husband’s creative “
rebirth.” His
Tragic
Symphony followed, as well as less ambitious compositions. Between 1940 and 1946, Antheil wrote no movie music at all, supporting his family by working behind the scenes as a
news analyst for the journalists Manchester Boddy and John Nesbitt, employment which had followed from his book and articles predicting with remarkable accuracy the course of the war.

Hedy’s war work took a more public direction, appropriately for a celebrity. Antheil had advised her at the outset of their partnership that she would serve the nation better selling war bonds than inventing. So had the Navy when it rejected the Secret Communication System. Evidently, Hedy decided to prove just how successful a salesperson she could be. While effectively out on strike from MGM in a salary dispute,
she campaigned nationally with other movie stars to sell war bonds to raise money for the war. War bonds allowed ordinary citizens to feel they were helping with the fight while controlling inflation by removing money from circulation. They were sold in denominations from $18.95 ($260 today) up to $1,000 ($14,000 today), with ten-cent-savings-stamp books available to those who couldn’t afford to buy an entire bond at once.