Hedy Lamarr: inventor

two articles on her life as actress and inventor

Golden-age glamour girl Hedy Lamarr dies      

January 19, 2000 Los Angeles Times 

ORLANDO, Florida -- Actress Hedy Lamarr, one of the most glamorous stars of Hollywood's golden era in the 1930s and '40s, was found dead in her home Wednesday by friends, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said.

Sheriff's Office spokesman Steve Olsen said friends who often visited Lamarr discovered her body inside her modest suburban home just before noon, after they were unable to reach her by phone. Police said they do not consider it a suspicious death. 

Rather, "We are treatingthis as an unattended death," Olsen said. Although he said it appeared she had died in her sleep, it was not immediately clear when she had died. Lamarr's attorney, Michael McDonnell, said the actress had suffered no illness or hospital stays recently. "She had the burdens of old age, but she was sharp as a tack and always able to care for herself," he said.

A Hollywood shooting star

The banker's daughter -- born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria -- was known for her exotic, dark-haired beauty, which was on display throughout her silver screen stardom. A nude scene in a 1933 European film called "Ecstasy" made her a sensation before her arrival in Hollywood.

In the film, the tale of a young woman's ill-fated cuckolding of her elderly husband, a naked Lamarr swam and ran through the woods. The film also featured suggestive closeups of her face during lovemaking scenes -- sensational and unheard of at the time.

Then married to Austrian munitions magnate Fritz Mandl, Lamarr was signed by MGM and brought to the United States in 1937. There, she adopted a screen name said to be an homage to the 1920s screen beauty Barbara La Marr.

Her fast rise made her one of Hollywood's shooting stars. Among Lamarr's leading men were William Powell, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Ray Milland. Her biggest hit came in 1949 with what she'd called her favorite film, Cecil B. De Mille's "Samson and Delilah." As the Delilah to Victor Mature's Samson, she exuded sexuality.

No desire to trade on beauty

But though she was billed as "the world's most beautiful woman," she herself claimed to scorn her glamorous image. In a 1942 Associated Press interview, she showed a reporter her house, complete with hen house and homemade curtains, and asked, "Now you will not write I am a glamour girl?""Any girl can be glamorous," she said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."

Though critics were divided as to whether her talent as an actress was squandered or nonexistent, Lamarr compared herself in acting ability to "a cross between JudyGarland and Greta Garbo." "If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude," Lamarr once said. "I hope to make you use your imagination."

Her career faded in the mid-1950s, when she appeared in some Italian productions. She said she stopped getting high-profile jobs because she wouldn't sleep with a film executive to get ahead. "My problem is, I'm a hell of a nice dame," she said in a 1970 interview. "The most horrible whores are famous. I did what I did for love. The others did it for money."

Diverse talents

Far from the airhead she feared she'd be pigeonholed as, Lamarr was also an inventor, who while married to Mandl developed an idea for a radio signaling device that would reduce the danger of detection or jamming. She and a friend, composer George Antheil, developed the idea further and received a patent in 1942.

The method was not used in World War II, but since the 1980s, high-tech versions of the concept, called "spread spectrum," have been used in some cordless phones, military radios and wireless computer links.

Lamarr is a "huge part of the history of this industry," Proxim Inc. Chief Executive David C. King told The Wall Street Journal in 1997. His company introduced a circuit board with spread spectrum in 1989 and later put out hundreds of products using the technology.

Her spread spectrum patent also earned her a spot in the 1992 book "Feminine Ingenuity."

Stepping back from limelight

Stepping back from the limelight after her acting career faded, the legend of her name kept Lamarr a consistent draw in the media, for better or worse. She sued her ghostwriter over a lurid 1966 autobiography, "Ecstasy and Me," which she said was full of distortions and outright errors. The book was a best seller.

And a pair of shoplifting arrests -- neither of which resulted in convictions -- caused headlines in later years. She was acquitted by a jury in Los Angeles on charges of stealing $86 worth of merchandise from a department store in 1966. Then in 1991, she was arrested and accused of stealing $21.48 of merchandise from a Florida drugstore. She said she and a companion forgot toput the items in their shopping cart. Lamarr was never formally charged.

Her daughter, Denise Loder Deluca, said her mother was deluged by sympathetic calls after the Florida arrest. "It warms my heart that people care," Deluca said at the time. "But she isn't down and out, and she doesn't need help."

Most recently, in June 1999, Lamarr sued a California winery she said was trying to capitalize on her famous face. She sought to stop the E&J Gallo winery from using her likeness in a television commercial. The suit was still in litigation and would continue on behalf of her estate, lawyer McDonnell said Wednesday.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

====

A Starlet's Secret Life -- as an Engineer

By PETER Y. HONG, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Hedy Lamarr, the star of such films as "The Heavenly Body" and "Dishonored Lady," secured her place in history more than 60 years ago as the first woman to romp naked across the screen in a feature film.

Now 82, she is again raising eyebrows for revolutionary work of a very different sort: her little-known contributions to technology that are being used today in military communications.

In 1940, Lamarr, who had learned about weaponry through her marriage to an arms manufacturer, joined with the avant-garde composer George Antheil to invent an anti-jamming device for radio-controlled torpedoes.

The Navy ignored the advice. But years later, after the patent expired, the Lamarr-Antheil idea was independently advanced by other scientists and helped form the basis for the anti-jamming technology now used in the U.S. military's $25-billion Milstar defense communications satellite system.

Lamarr's role in "frequency hopping," overlooked for decades, is now as hot with technology enthusiasts as pinups of Lamarr were with World War II servicemen.

Schematic drawings of her patent appear on Internet Web sites. The actress, who never won an Oscar, is being showered with awards from inventors groups. Her most recent tribute will be accepted by her son Sunday at the Invention Convention in Pasadena.

Lamarr, who lives outside Orlando, Fla., is reluctant to speak to reporters, according to her son, Anthony Loder, who declined to forward a request for an interview.

The inventors who selected Lamarr for the annual Pasadena showcase's "Bulbie" award were surprised when they read about her work in technical publications.

"My mouth dropped wide open," said Showcase Chairman Stephen P. Gnass.

The tale begins with the plight of a young woman trapped by an older, domineering husband.

As a teenage actress in Vienna, Hedy Kiesler married a millionaire arms maker named Fritz Mandl. Mandl was obsessed with his young bride, keeping her constantly at his side.

So at an age when she might have entered a university, Hedy was instead listening in on her husband's discussions of weapons systems with his engineers, soaking up the latest information on munitions, she wrote in her autobiography.

Although Mandl kept Hedy near him as a trophy wife, her mindwas sharp--her parents had hired private tutors throughout her childhood and put her in elite private schools in Vienna--and she retained much of what she heard.

Hedy soon lost interest in her husband, and was disturbed byhis arms sales to Nazis. Afraid of losing his wife, Mandl employed the household servants as guards, placing Hedy under virtual house arrest.

One day when Mandl was on a trip abroad, Hedy slippedsleeping pills into her maid's coffee and, dressed in a servant's uniform, headed straight for a London-bound train.

In London she met studio chief Louis B. Mayer, who signed herto a $500-a-week MGM contract and gave her the name Hedy Lamarr.

Her influence on America began even before she took her firstHollywood part.

Lamarr was already notorious for her nude role in the 1932 film "Ecstasy." The Czech production was banned in the United States until 1935, when U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Learned Hand ruled it could be released.

In Hollywood, she played roles opposite Spencer Tracy andClark Gable and was popular as a femme fatale in parts such as her title role in "Samson and Delilah." Critics of the day thought her acting ability was limited, but Lamarr's look was copied by actresses and moviegoers alike. She inspired the center-parted brunet hairstyle popular with women throughout the 1940s, including Virginia Blythe, mother of a boy later known as Bill Clinton.

It was at a dinner party in 1940 at the home of actress Janet Gaynor that Lamarr engaged composer Antheil in a discussion on theperils of Nazism. According to an article in Forbes magazine, Lamarr told Antheil of an idea she had for a device to protect U.S. radio-guided torpedoes from enemy attempts to jam them. Lamarr thought a signal could be broadcast over a series of quickly changing frequencies. The signal could be picked up by a receiver within the torpedo that would automatically switch frequencies to match the transmitters.

Intrigued, Antheil suggested that they develop the ideatogether. Lamarr agreed, and scrawled her phone number in lipstick across the windshield of Antheil's car.A wildly experimental composer long before the likes of JohnCage and Philip Glass, Antheil had once scored a composition for16 synchronized player pianos, two electrically driven airplanepropellers, four xylophones, four bass drums and a siren.

Now, he proposed controlling the frequencies for thetransmitter and receiver with paper rolls like those controllingplayer pianos: The couple's design specified the use of rollsperforated with identical patterns to match the split-second hops in radio frequencies. The number of frequencies to be used, 88, matched the number of keys on a piano.

Lamarr and Antheil sent their idea to the National InventorsCouncil, a Commerce Department division that had been created toencourage ideas from the public, and patented their idea.

But after turning their idea over to the government for thewar effort, the composer and screen siren were largely ignored.

"She was naively thinking they would implement it right awayto stop Hitler," Loder said. Lamarr also offered to work for the National Inventors Council, but was told she could be more helpful selling War Bonds as a celebrity. She obliged, selling $7 million worth of bonds in a single day by offering kisses at $50,000 a pop.

In the late 1950s, after Lamarr's and Antheil's patentexpired, Sylvania engineers independently developed a similarconcept. Their device, using electronic controls instead of paper rolls, became the foundation for the secure military communications used today. 

The fact that two artists had beaten the engineers to thepunch by nearly two decades seemed destined to escaped publicnotice forever. In the Cold War era, the military expanded its use of frequency hopping (also known as spread spectrum) technology, relying on it to secure communications during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. But the idea was not widely known in the civilian world.

All of that changed in the 1990s, as telecommunicationsbecame a bigger part of everyday life. Interest in frequencyhopping grew because it is one way to enable multiple users to share a single radio frequency--an important task as more and morepagers, cellular phones and other devices crowd into limitedairwave space. With the growth in magazines and journals devoted to telecommunications, and abundant Internet sites on the topic, the work of Lamarr and Antheil (who had died in 1959) found an eager audience.

Robert Price, a Lexington, Mass., electronics consultant who worked on research and development of communications systems for the military and industry, said Lamarr deserves credit for heroriginal idea. "Whether [others conceived the idea] independently or not, it was still her idea," he said.Price said the Milstar system, designed to launchintercontinental nuclear missiles, may be the most importantapplication of Lamarr's concept.

"Her technology survived to the present day in one majorsystem on which the security of the U.S. depends," he said.

Another researcher, David Hughes of Colorado Springs, is nowworking on a National Science Foundation-funded project usingtechnology based partly on Lamarr's and Antheil's concept toaccess the Internet through radios instead of telephones. Hugheshopes that application will make the Internet more accessible to rural schools.

The renewed interest may be the best publicity Lamarr hasgotten in decades. Her film career faded in the 1950s. Later,Lamarr lost a part to Zsa Zsa Gabor, and she made her last movie, "The Female Animal," in 1957.

Lamarr was infuriated by a ghost-written 1967 autobiographythat detailed her sexual encounters with men and women, according to her son. "That was a real shock to Hedy, it's what blew her into seclusion," Loder said.

Lamarr also was arrested for shoplifting twice. In 1966 shespent five hours in Los Angeles' Sybil Brand jail. In a 1991incident, no charges were filed after an arrest outside Orlando, Fla. After years of tribulations, including six marriages and divorces, Loder said, the current celebration of Lamarr's invention has made his mother "very happy."

"She's happy for all that grew from the seeds she planted,that it was not conceived in vain," he said.

~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~

  related Talent Development Resources pages :

GT Adults blog gifted/talented/high ability

Highly Sensitive People

gifted / talented news & resources

giftedness : articles

giftedness : books

HSP & gifted books

intensity / sensitivity

intensity / sensitivity resources : articles sites books

introversion / shyness.

introversion resources : articles  sites  books

perfectionism

~ ~ ~