Sand I say Hedy Lamarrmany will shake their heads. Never heard of it. Nevertheless, this Austrian, born in 1914, became such an icon of beauty that when Walt Disney drew Snow White in 1937 he gave her her unmistakable, perfect face, light skin, dark dark hair, delicate nose, big green eyes and perfect arched eyebrowsdrawn with a compass.
Not by chance Marco Buticchi titles his new novelin which Hedy plays an important part, The most beautiful in the world (Longanesi): In the years of the Golden Age of American cinema, the Viennese had no rivals in terms of charm and elegance. And in any case Lamarr’s life is already a novel of its own. The future Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, the only child of wealthy Jewish parents. Excellent at school, she attended the same prestigious high school in Vienna as Freud’s daughters.
Without veils on the screen
It is said that from an early age she did formidable things, disassembled and reassembled objects, created music boxes at the age of six, and had the technical “gift” of great engineers. But what you notice about Hedwig Eva is above all her absolute beauty and in front of her high school there are cinematographic factories. At 16, she will go to school for studies and at 18 she will already be famous. Worse, she will be the scandal girl.
Hedy Lamarr (1914 – 2000) in a 1944 photo for the launch of the film “The Heavenly Body” (Photo by Clarence Sinclair Bull/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images).
Galeotto is the meeting with the Czech director Gustav Machatycommitted artist which convinced her, in 1933, to shoot the famous film Ecstasyin which she plays the character of Eva, nomen omen. Married to an elderly husband who does not consummate the marriage, Eva, disappointed and frustrated, jumps on a horse and goes swimming in a pond. She takes off her delicious white sleeveless onesie under which she wears nothing, places it on the saddle and enters the water. The director plays with transparency between leafy branches, reflections in the water and distant shots, but in short, you can see something and for those years they are terribly risqué sequences.
As if this wasn’t enough, the horse walks away with the clothes on its back and when Eva comes out of the pond she finds herself chasing him completely naked. Nearby they are building a railway and the young and handsome engineer who supervises the work (and, imagine, his name is Adam) stops the fleeing horse and brings it back to Eva, hidden in the bushes.
Shortly afterwards the two will make love and the camera focuses on her face which she shows the first – and very polite – female climax in the history of cinemaall wide-eyed, lip-biting and white hands opening and closing. In short, full nudity and an orgasm during adulterous sexual intercourse, more than enough at the time to provoke an uproar of censorship, condemnations, cuts, bans, interdicts. And to catapult what is still Hedwig Eva to the forefront of the news.
Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy
Everyone wanted to see the film, even if only to criticize it harshly. In 1934 Mussolini sent him to the Venice Film Festival. And if it is officially opposed in Germany, then it turns out that Hitler, Goebbels and Göring keep a copy in the safe, to enjoy it in private. To make amends, she plays Princess Sissi in the theater (the one who Romy Schneider will make famous in the 1950s) and thus meets the man who will become the first of her six husbands, the unscrupulous arms dealer Fritz Mandl14 years older than her, of Jewish origin, but on excellent terms with the Nazi-Fascists.
Hedy Lamarr in the 1940s (Photo by George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images).
Jealous and possessive, Fritz tries to make all copies of Ecstasy from the market. In vain. She lasts five years in that gilded cage, then escapes to Hollywood, where the producer Louis B. Mayer, despotic head of MGM, makes her become Hedy Lamarr and forces her to lose ten kilos.
Buticchi in his novel outlines the smoking relationship between the two: «Half of my male actors have bigger breasts than you, young lady» she has the producer say during the tough hiring negotiations. «Today a German name doesn’t work in America. Do you have any stage names in mind? Mayer’s wife will solve the problem in the novel. «Lamarr! How about Hedy Lamarr? I can already see the name dominating the posters.” Otherwise. Her style is popular, young Americans try to look like her, they do their hair like her with a parting in the middle and want a little nose like hers. Hedy Lamarr is an icon of femininity.
The diva with a passion for inventions
But in the meantime the clouds of war are gathering. If during the day she is the most beautiful woman in cinema, dressed in sequins and languidly stretched out on the chaises longues that decorate the sets of very forgettable films, at night she transforms, and the babe becomes the nerd. His talent remained to invent and now there is a need for something that can help defeat the Nazis.
In 1941, he met the musician George Antheil, author of a Ballet Mécanique composed to make 16 mechanical pianos play in sync. Together with George, the then twenty-six year old Hedy develops a project to remotely control a torpedo switching from one frequency to another over the 88-key range of a piano, so as to evade enemy detection and interference, based on so-called “frequency hopping”.
Despite the resistance of the Navy which did not consider it usable because there was not yet a technology that would allow it to be implemented quickly, their “Secret Communication System” obtained a patent from the US Patent Office on 11 August 1942.
Kisses for sale for the homeland
But no one takes it seriously. When he leaves the patent office, the officers in charge, after asking her to take a nice photo with them, neighbors, advise her, if she really wants to help her new homeland, to do something differently. «Are you, Mr. Robson, inviting me to forget about my efforts and studies to invent a system capable of guiding a fleet of torpedoes against the enemy, to go and be a beautiful figurine distributing free kisses in American squares?» Hedy asks the patent clerk indignantly in Buticchi’s novel.
That’s right. And she satisfies them: «On her own she managed to sell war bonds worth 25 million dollars» comments Buticchi. In fact, Hedy’s invention prefigures the “spectrum expansion” that will make cell phones workwireless Internet, satellite systems, drones and other equipment. But it ends up in a drawer. It will only be revived in 1962, with the Cuban crisiswhen the patent has now expired. So Hedy won’t get a cent.
A whirlwind of love
On the other hand, Off the set she allowed herself a very lively private life throughout her lifeloving famous men, from Eric Maria Remarque to Otto Preminger, from John Kennedy to Billy Wilder to Charlie Chaplin, from David Niven to Errol Flynn, also intimately dating women and changing husbands constantly. After Mandl married the screenwriter Gene Markey, then the English actor John Loder, with whom she had two children, Denise and Anthony. Then the Swiss musician Teddy Stauffer, then the oilman W. Howard Lee and finally his divorce lawyer, Lewis J. Boies who leaves in 1965. All short or very short relationships.
Hedy Lamarr with her fifth husband, W. Howard Lee (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
When time begins to take its toll and the most beautiful in the world is no longer such, the collapse begins. The children are far away. Her last marriage is over, no one writes for her in Hollywood anymore, she doesn’t work on TV, her parents are dead and the mirror no longer shows her anything so amazing. In the meantime, however, military secrecy has lapsed and we begin to know about her 1942 patent. The phone no longer rings to ask her about when she swam naked, but to tell her about a flurry of awards and recognitions. They call her from Lockheed to give her the Milstar award, they give her the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, they claim her from the Inventors Club of America.
Hedy Lamarr, not just “the most beautiful woman in the world”
In October 1998 the Austrian Academy of Sciences awarded them the Victor Kaplan, the prestigious Austrian medal which is the highest recognition for inventors. It’s a shame that she isn’t very well: she’s 84 years old and can’t make it to Vienna to collect it.
On Wednesday, January 19, 2000, Hedy Lamarr died, alone, in her villa in Florida. They find her on the sofa holding the remote control. He turned 85 on November 9th. In his honor, his birthday becomes “Inventor’s Day” (der Tag der Erfinder) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, to celebrate all those great brains who have given something to the world without even receiving a thank you in return.
In 2014, Hedy Lamarr’s name entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame. You had to become ugly, old and die before getting your due credit. One can imagine Hedy, in the role of the Snow White to whom she had given her face, asking with sweet irony looking straight into the camera: “Mirror, servant of my desires, tell me now: who has the best brain in the kingdom?”.