Hedy wanted to do
something important with her life.
She wanted to make her mark.
But she was totally judged by that face.
One of the most glamorous stars
show business ever has produced...
One of the most glamorous stars the screen has ever known...
And one of the most beautiful women in the world...
Well, shall we all say it together?
- I think we all know. - ♪ The most beautiful girl
in the world ♪
Hedy Lamarr.
She becomes the model for Snow White.
And she inspired Catwoman.
Oh, my God, I mean, she was...
she was the best-looking movie star that ever lived.
She became my inspiration.
Thank you, thank you, Hedy, thank you.
It's not Hedy, it's Hedley, Hedley LaMarr.
I don't know whether it's true, but you hear things.
I heard that she was a scientist.
So is this true?
Within the nerd community at Google,
Hedy Lamarr was this beloved figure.
For me, she is this perfect underdog,
like, crime-fighter-by-night story
because she lived this life of great accomplishments
and people didn't really know about it.
I remember sitting up in a bare attic with my mother,
she said, "Look, I got a patent."
"You got a patent, Mom?"
- "Yeah." - "You invented something?"
"Yeah, I invented a secret communication system, look."
And, today, we have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
That's my mother's technology.
You see?
No.
Well, it is kind of hard to explain.
Hedy had one of the most recognizable faces of her time,
and yet, she said she was never seen
for who she was.
So, who was she?
Tell me something that I didn't know about you.
I want to be a simple... I am!
I'm a very simple, complicated person.
Could you help her?
- Yes, but not here. - But you know what I mean?
You know what I mean!
This book you're writing now, Hedy, are there...
Incidents, things that nobody ever knew about me.
- Regrets? - Oh, no, no regrets.
You learn from everything all the time.
When I was a child,
she was always working on her story.
She was going to let the world know her version
and her story and her autobiography
in her words, but yet, it never came to be.
Hedy became a recluse.
She wouldn't even see her family.
We wanted to spend time with her,
but she kept us away.
There was so much scandal.
There were different chapters of scandal.
There was her movie Ecstasy that she made as an adolescent,
the nudity and the explicitness of that,
and then the multiple marriages and divorces,
and then the arrests.
My mother has a hard side and an easy side,
and as her son, growing up with Hedy was difficult.
I mean, she had so many sides and so many faces,
and even I couldn't understand who Hedy Lamarr was.
I'd been waiting for somebody to contact me
about Hedy Lamarr
because I had the tapes.
Where did I find it?
It's embarrassing.
I found it behind that blue trash can.
I'd had stuff stowed there and I moved it out of the way,
and there it was.
So, in all, there were four tapes
and this is the first one.
Ready?
Yes?
This is Fleming Meeks at Forbes.
Oh, hello! Thank you so much for the roses.
You're very welcome.
I love them!
I'm very pleased.
I was a staff writer at Forbes
and my father was an astrophysicist at MIT,
and he called me one day, and he said,
"I've just talked with this friend of mine here
and he told me this amazing story
about Hedy Lamarr," and, of course, I pursued it.
I want to sell my life story to Ted Turner
because it's unbelievable.
The opposite of what people think.
The brains of people are more interesting
than the looks, I think.
People have the idea I'm sort of a stupid thing.
I never knew I looked good to begin with.
Because my mother wanted a boy
named Georg (George).
So unfortunately I didn't become that and...
she wasn't too thrilled about that.
I was...
different, I guess.
Maybe I came from a different planet, who knows.
But whatever it is...
inventions are easy for me to do.
My mother was very inventive.
In this article, "Hedy's interest in gadgets
really started at the age of five
when she took an old-fashioned music box apart
and put it back together again."
And this was her childhood music box.
You wind up this little rabbit here
and it plays an Austrian melody.
My mother was curious.
She had a very intellectually curious mind.
She wanted to know how things worked,
and her father told her things.
Although her father's official position
was as bank director,
he was also interested in technology.
So, when they went for their walks,
he would point out to her how things worked.
The streetcar with its electric trolleys
leads these wires to a factory
that generates electricity.
She learned to associate invention
with this father, whom she adored.
My father...
He was a wonderful person.
I miss him.
They lived in Vienna in a fashionable district,
the 19th District.
It was heavily Jewish
but also very artistically inclined.
Hedy's parents were both assimilated Jews.
That was very common in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
They were wealthy, they were cultured.
They took their daughter to the opera, to the theater.
Everyone was connected with this world of make believe.
I miss Austria.
Have you ever been there?
I've been to Austria, yes.
Not Vienna?
Fall is the best time to go there.
Where did you go to school?
In a private school in Vienna.
My favorite thing in school was...
What's that thing when you mix things?
- Chemistry. - Chemistry! Thank you.
Well I'm good at that.
In a different era,
she might very well have become a scientist.
At the very least, it's an option
that was derailed by her beauty.
By the time she was a teenager,
when she walked into a room, conversation stopped.
She was probably a little dazzled by this power,
testing it out,
seeing how it works and so forth.
There's a word for what I was.
A... what?
'Enfant terrible.'
I know that. I know that much French.
Well good!
There are stories about her heading to the photographer
to get her photos taken with and without clothes.
She lived in a society where there were
many prominent women who had not only incredible careers,
but loads of lovers.
Women, especially in the arts,
could have certain kinds of liberties
that they would not find in normal bourgeois society.
Hedy decided one day, at the age of 16,
that she was ready
and went off to the largest film studio and walked in.
Very quickly, within a couple days,
they had her in a walk-on.
I have seen the little weird Viennese films
that she made in the beginning
where she's a little bit awkward
but clearly beautiful.
But it's clearly the 1933 film Ecstasy
that really brought her into everyone's consciousness.
Hedy became world famous
the moment she appeared naked in Ecstasy.
The Pope denounced it
and Hitler refused it to be shown.
People were just shocked by it.
It was quite controversial because she simulated an orgasm.
I think it was the first time anybody had ever done that.
I mean, in some ways, it was analogous to a sex tape.
This was so scandalous and really marked her
as this certain type of woman.
I don't know if you ever saw that.
I don't believe I have.
There was a scene in which I was totally alone
but it was cut so that it
showed that it was a very hot sex scene,
which it wasn't.
You must have seen a picture of that, right?
Yes, ma'am.
And I said, "Why do I have to put my arms together?"
And they said, "Don't ask so many questions."
"If you don't do what I say then I put the needle
through the couch so you do what I tell you."
And I was...
I didn't want to make any commotion, so I did that.
And when I came back to Vienna
my father... I mean...
it was horrendous.
He wanted to kill me practically.
What I did though...
right after that
I said, "I'll show them."
Fritz Kreisler composed a musical called
'Elisabeth of Austria, ' the Queen of Austria,
and I had a big, big, big success with that.
On stage.
I had ovations
and my father cried.
And then I got married right after that.
Hedwig, as an actress,
drew, of course, the attention of many people,
and one of those was a man named Fritz Mandl.
I was married to a munitions tycoon in Austria!
He is the Henry Ford of Austria.
He, at that point, is 14 years her senior.
He is allied with the Nazis
because he's an armaments manufacturer.
As it is the same today,
a lot of wealthy men would like to decorate themselves
with beautiful women, and I think she was,
for a minute, fascinated with that as well.
We had a country house with 25 guest rooms.
And we went hunting.
And I loved that.
Do you know guns?
Yes.
I had a Browning and I shot a stag into the neck
350 meters.
Meters? Very long.
I'm a good shot so be careful!
Hedy was Mandl's armpiece
at the banquets that he served
for admirals in the German and Italian Navy.
She sat there and it was her job to be beautiful,
but she was bored out of her mind.
Fritz Mandl was, by German measures, Jewish,
and therefore, Hitler was concerned
not to be seen with him,
and I doubt very much if Hitler was a guest
at one of their houses, but Mussolini was.
I assume that your first husband
was supplying arms to the...
To the Germans.
But he never let me in on...
He never even let me come into the factory.
I disturbed the people.
I didn't know why...
Fritz did not like the effect
that his beautiful wife had on other men.
He was immensely jealous and paranoid about his wife.
He was constantly convinced
that she might be having an affair.
The big mistake my husband at the time did
he bought up prints of that...
dumb picture!
Mandl had the problem of this film,
this dirty picture which he tried to buy up,
and they started cranking them out by the dozens,
and he eventually gave up because, obviously,
they could make as many copies as he chose to buy.
He turned out to be someone who had the maids listen in
on her phone calls.
She had everything she could ever want,
except the one thing that Hedwig Kiesler always wanted
which was freedom.
By 1937, the war was inevitable,
and she was in a desperate situation.
Because after all,
Hitler had everything in the palm of his hand.
When Ecstasy was released,
Hitler told the American press he was banning it
because the lead actress was Jewish.
Jewish people were not allowed out on streets
at certain times of the day and, gradually,
they were denied more and more civil rights.
And this is one thing that led
to Hedy's father Emil's death was his stress and worry
about what was happening.
He died suddenly from a heart attack.
And I think that was the turning point for her.
Deep traumatic experiences change us,
and she came out the other side
remembering what her father had advised her from childhood:
"Be yourself.
Choose and take what you want,"
which was certainly Hedy's quality all her life.
There are stories,
whether they're apocryphal or not,
who knows, but almost like a prison escape.
Hedy had people watching her all the time.
There was no way to break loose.
So, one night, they were having a dinner party,
and my mother helped choose the maids
and caretakers, and so she found someone
that looked like her a lot 'cause she had this in mind.
So, she had this sleeping powder,
and she made this tea
and she switched the cups with the maid,
and the maid drank it and kind of fell asleep.
Now my mother's all ready.
She took all her jewels,
put 'em in the lining of her coats.
She put on the maid's costume.
She jumped on her bicycle and rode off.
My parents had friends in England.
So I went there.
Pre-war London was a safe haven.
Hedy spent several months there
trying to figure out her next steps.
We one day went to a movie.
I forgot even what it was.
And they happened to have a lion.
You know, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
So I said, "Oh I want to be in that!"
She quickly found an American film agent.
Somebody took me to a hotel
and there was a little man there.
I didn't know who he was, what he was.
I couldn't speak English, obviously.
Louis B. Mayer was the little man.
That was Louis B. Mayer?
With his entourage, yeah.
Louis B. Mayer, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
had come to Europe to buy up all the actors and actresses
who were escaping Nazi Germany.
He figured he could take them back to Hollywood
and enslave them in his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer empire
for a cheap price.
He offered her $125 a week and reminded her
that she had to keep her clothes on.
And she said, "I'm sorry, that's not good enough,"
and walked out.
She impressed him, I'm sure.
People didn't usually turn down Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
But minutes after she walked out,
she had second thoughts
and quickly booked passage on the Normandie,
the ship Mayer was sailing back to New York.
She, I think, probably rather cleverly
made sure that she saw him about the decks
in her tennis clothes and so forth,
in her bathing suit.
On the first or second night out,
Hedy went to her very modest cabin
and pulled out her designer couturier gown
and she put on the last baubles that she owned
and she walked through the dining room
of the Normandie, past Louis B. Mayer's table.
There's Douglas Fairbanks Jr. sitting right there,
and his eyes are glued to Hedy Lamarr,
as are the eyes of every man and woman
in that dining room.
And Louis B. Mayer knew he had to have her.
He snapped his fingers
and I didn't know why, I didn't know what...
all of a sudden I got $500 every week.
Hedy Kiesler, Hedy Kiesler, Kiesler.
We gotta do something about the name.
So, Louis B. Mayer's wife was there and she said,
"Well, Barbara La Marr is one of my favorites.
Why not Hedy Lamarr?"
Lamarr, the sea, perfect.
Let's be Hedy Lamarr.
She didn't speak a word of English.
She learned those few lines on the boat to convince
Louis B. Mayer that he should hire her as an actress.
She created her own reality,
and I find that really fascinating.
You know, when things don't come easy
figure out why...
and then do something about it.
And if people... walk over you
then don't let them!
She stepped off the ship in New York
to crowds of flashing light bulbs
and reporters firing questions at her as Hedy Lamarr,
the latest discovery of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Hello, everybody,
this is Hedda Hopper reporting to you from Hollywood,
that fabulous place where everyone wants to live
but seldom does.
In Hollywood, she was kicking her heels
and listening to music and being free.
She was a little bit worried because the contract,
it had kind of a trial time before they used her,
and she wasn't getting any movies or parts
and she was very insecure that they didn't want her,
especially since she made Ecstasy
and that was kind of a black mark on her.
Right from the beginning, one of her first interviews
is with Hedda Hopper, who was the famous gossip columnist.
That's where she does her greatest acting
is for Hedda Hopper, crying tears
about how she was forced into this nude scene
and somehow perverted by these European filmmakers
who have no morals whatsoever.
And then, my mother went to a party
by chance one night, and Charles Boyer was there
and he was smitten by her.
And he said, "Can you be in my movie?"
"Oh, no, no, no, my English isn't good enough, no."
And he took her hand, kissed it, he said, "I'll hold your hand
through the whole film."
- "You will?" - "Yes."
"All right, I'll do it."
So, that's how that started.
Charles Boyer was a diamond thief.
She had diamonds.
He thought she was a wealthy, noble-born French woman.
He didn't realize that she was another scamp like him
from the streets of Paris.
There's a wonderful line in the film where he says,
"What did you do before?"
Before what?
Before the jewels.
I wanted them.
That film made her a star instantly.
When I was a kid, I saw her in Algiers,
I said, "I'm gonna get to Hollywood
and I'm gonna marry her.
And if I don't get to marry her,
I'll get to buy her dinner
and feel her up under the table.
Whatever I can get."
After Algiers, Hedy Lamarr was on the cover
of all the movie magazines.
Suddenly, you have in Hollywood,
a lot of women parting their hair in the middle,
darkening it, and changing their makeup
to be little Hedy Lamarrs.
Every woman wanted to be Hedy
and every man wanted to date her.
She seduced men and women.
She was able to meet artists, directors,
brilliant actors, the greats at that time.
Including Kennedy, whom I knew very well.
Oh really?
Yeah, before he became president.
He asked me out.
So he said, "What can I bring you?"
and I said, "Oranges," because...
I lack vitamin C.
Would you believe any other person
would've asked, "Oranges"?
That's the way I am.
A fool!
No matter what, you expect Hedy Lamarr
to be glamorous, sophisticated.
Quite the opposite, she loved picnics,
she loved to go scavenger hunting,
she loved to play Charades.
She wasn't very good at it, but she had a great time.
You know, no pretenses.
She was fun to be with.
At that point, she could have married anyone.
She surprised her fans
by choosing a portly screenwriter
and producer named Gene Markey.
Her letters show she was madly in love with him.
"Dearest Mommy, I never would have thought
that I could ever fall in love again.
Gene has an unbelievable number of traits
in common with Dad.
So considerate, it's touching."
He promised Hedy he'd write screenplays with her.
They even adopted a son.
But within months of their marriage,
he began dating other beautiful actresses.
Hedy was heartbroken.
She said people never got past her face.
You never knew if they loved you
or their fantasy of you.
"A man does not try to find out what is inside.
He does not try to scratch the surface.
If he did, he might find something much more beautiful
than the shape of a nose or the color of an eye."
Only a year after Algiers,
not only was her marriage failing,
her career was in trouble as well.
She was terribly unhappy with the films she did for MGM
because Louis B. Mayer gave her bad scripts
and the films did nothing.
You never got very much out of this, did you?
I got plenty.
All I asked for, except the frosting.
Hedy actually went to Louis B. Mayer
and petitioned for a role in Boom Town.
I'm going to do it because I want to.
It was a small part,
and Louis B. Mayer, at first, was reluctant.
Okay, stranger.
Boom Town was a huge, tremendous success
for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
After Boom Town,
Hedy Lamarr's career was secure.
It's almost unfathomable how busy she was in 1940.
They were expected to do what the studio wanted.
Bette Davis described it as a "slave system."
And they were owned in the sense
that they had signed contracts
that bound them to studios for seven-year periods.
My mother was worked like a racehorse.
She had to run fast all the time.
They gave her pills to wake her up to perform.
Pretty sure it was some form of speed.
And then, to make them sleep, they gave them sleeping pills.
They worked six days a week.
Women really had to get to the studio early
because they had to have their hair done,
their makeup put on, their costumes put on.
And then, you know, they worked into the night.
And here's what's remarkable.
After a grueling day on the set,
Hedy didn't go to bed.
She wasn't socializing.
Hedy was at home working on her latest invention.
Inventing was her hobby.
She not only had a complete inventing table
set up in her house,
but Howard Hughes gave her a small version
of the set of equipment which he had in the trailer
where she stayed in between takes
in her motion pictures.
When Hedy first met Howard Hughes,
he was dating every Hollywood star,
and she did date him.
Howard Hughes, of course, was a great airplane designer,
so probably they had
a compatible spirit with one another.
It was definitely cerebral because she said
he was the worst lover she ever had.
Howard Hughes wanted to build
the fastest planes in the world
so he could sell them to the Air Force.
She was fascinated by his mind and his factories,
and she wanted to go and see
where everything was being made and built,
and she met all the scientists.
He said to her,
"Anything you want my scientists to do for you,
just ask 'em and they will do it."
He relied on me.
I thought the aeroplanes were too slow,
so I decided that's not right.
They shouldn't be square, the wings...
So I bought a book of fish
and I bought a book of birds
and then used the fastest bird,
connected it with the fastest fish.
I drew it together and showed it to Howard Hughes
and he said, "You're a genius."
- You did? - Yep.
Yeah.
Very strange person that was.
Very brilliant.
But very misunderstood as well.
She invented, during that period,
a tablet that would fizz up and make a cola.
I had two chemists Howard Hughes gave me to do that.
You know, during the war nobody had Coca-Cola
and I wanted to compress it into a cube
so that servicemen and factory people,
all they had to have was water and put it in.
But I didn't realize that every state
has different strengths of water,
so it dissolved on the bottom, on top, in the middle.
It was one of my boo boos.
I didn't do that right.
But I don't have to work on ideas.
They come naturally.
What must have been going through the mind
of this young woman.
She's become a huge international film star.
But at the very same time, her country,
the past as she has known it, has been eliminated.
In 1940, the war was raging in Europe
and the United States was a neutral country,
and Hitler was basically taking over
all of Western Europe
and threatening to take over Great Britain.
If only I could do something.
Oh, darling, you've done so much already.
You almost made me forget about being afraid.
Oh, I am afraid now.
She did have a secret.
When Hedy arrived at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
Louis B. Mayer specifically ordered all of his stars
not to talk about their religious backgrounds.
People would say, "You're Jewish,"
and I'm like, "No," and I called Mom and said,
"Mom, are we Jewish," and she said,
"Don't be ridiculous."
I never heard the word "Jewish" from my mother's lips.
The Jewish part of her, she just left behind.
She was probably afraid for many reasons.
And I could feel it,
I could see that she was protecting herself.
I became a manicurist.
That's how I met Hedy.
I told her that I survived the war with camps
and running for my life.
We talked about what was going on
and how I come to America.
I find myself on an American ship.
I was shaking with fear because we heard noises.
We were attacked by the Nazi submarines.
I remember saying, "Oh, dear God,
please don't kill me now, let me see America."
At the time, Hedy's mother was preparing
to make the treacherous Atlantic crossing herself.
She'd fled Austria and gotten as far as London
where she and Hedy were able to write each other.
"Mommy, my mind is so preoccupied
and I would love it if you could come immediately
since the times, they are very uncertain.
I have been listening to the radio day and night
for over a week,
and I've gotten barely any sleep."
Vivid pictures of a naval action
have just been released.
One day, in the summer of 1940,
a shipload of children was torpedoed.
All hands lost including 83 children.
At the time, the German U-boats
were on the verge of winning the war.
They seemed to be unsinkable
because they easily outmaneuvered
the outdated British torpedoes.
In times of crisis, most of us feel powerless,
but a few discover in themselves
unexpected strength.
And Hedy being Hedy, she said,
"I'm gonna do something about that."
So, in this article, Hedy says,
"I got the idea for my invention
when I tried to think of some way
to even the balance for the British.
A radio-controlled torpedo I thought would do it."
A torpedo launched on a given trajectory
might need to be changed, redirected.
You want, ideally, your launching boat
to communicate with the torpedo.
The problem is you can't control radio communications.
They're not secure.
Your enemy, if they're smart,
finds the frequency with which you're talking to the torpedo
and jams it.
Jamming.
The Germans fill the air with radio interference.
She came up with the idea of a secret way
of guiding that torpedo to the target
that couldn't be interrupted, that couldn't be jammed,
that couldn't be messed with.
It was secret.
Instead of just one transmit frequency communicating,
she said, "What if we changed those frequencies constantly
in sync with each other?"
Frequency hopping.
You couldn't jam it because you'd only jam
a split second of it in a single frequency.
So, frequency change, frequency hop,
frequency hop, frequency hop.
That concept, secure radio communications,
was brilliant.
Now there are various versions of how she came up
with her profoundly original idea.
One theory is that she stole it.
The man who championed that idea was an engineer
who once interviewed her named Robert Price.
Robert Price was a pioneer in secret communications,
and he gave me his number and I called him up.
She's an inventor
but I don't know in what sense exactly she is an inventor.
If I want to be harsh
I would say she was a plagiarizer, you understand?
Hedy's first husband
was Austria's leading munitions manufacturer.
Robert Price said to me that he thought
that she just smuggled the idea out of her husband's board room.
In fact, he called her the Mata Hari of World War Il,
the most notorious spy who seduced men
and got all kinds of secrets out of them.
The engineers at Mandl's firm might just have known
about the frequency hopping.
Is that how you were aware of frequency hopping?
No. What, my husband?
No. Nobody did that... invent that before.
I mean, I know what I did.
I don't care what other people say about me.
The record is very clear
that the Germans had not come across the idea
that would be Hedy's signal contribution,
what she called "frequency hopping."
I don't think she was a spy.
It was so obvious. I mean they shot torpedoes
in all directions and never hit the target,
so I invented something that does.
I mean, I can't explain. I have an inventive mind.
I think Hedy got her idea from a curious coincidence
that, in 1939,
the Philco Radio Company produced
a new top-of-the-line remote control.
There's a new gadget just out, see?
You dial your station here and you hear it over there.
- Well, where are the wires? - There ain't any wires.
That's the trick.
We know Hedy was interested in the remote control
and how it worked because the device is sketched
in the invention notebooks.
In here is all the evidence of my mother's invention.
It's this.
She dialed in a radio station and she said,
"If we hop around frequencies, just like I'm hopping
around radio stations on this dialer,
when I transmit this information to the torpedo,
we can make it totally secret."
So the Philco magic box probably inspired
the whole thing.
The fact that she understands this frequency component
of the signal and how that changes
is, I mean, genius in a way.
I mean, we know Thomas Edison was not an engineer.
You don't have to have eight years
of a graduate degree in engineering
in order to come up with something new.
In the inventing process, there is a moment
of high lucidity, of clear thinking.
In the case of Hedy, she had this lucid moment
without knowing how she was going to put it together.
She didn't have the training to make it happen.
And she said that, "The idea was mine,
but the implementation was George's."
My mother met George Antheil at Janet Gaynor's party.
And she liked George Antheil a lot.
So, when she left the party early,
she wrote her phone number in lipstick
on the windshield of his car.
They discovered that they had a great deal in common.
At the time, I think they both felt
like they were not understood for their true qualities.
George Antheil was really quite an unusual American composer,
extremely avant-garde.
Now musicians all over the world love to play Antheil's music,
they love to get into that confrontational space
that was his.
He had a gun, then he would pull it out
and he'd bang it down on the piano
right at the beginning of the show,
and shout, "Lock the doors!"
Sometimes it sounds like his music is jazz
put into a Cuisinart.
It's just, you know, chopped up and there it is.
Well, George Antheil wrote a book
called Bad Boy of Music, and in chapter 32,
"Hedy Lamarr and I invent a radio torpedo."
He says, "We began talking about the war,
which in the late summer of 1940,
was looking most extremely black."
Hedy said that she did not feel comfortable
sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money
when things were in such a state,
and that she was thinking seriously of quitting MGM
and going to Washington D.C. to offer her services
to the newly established Inventors Council.
She was very patriotic, she loved America.
She was grateful to be here, and she wanted Hitler dead.
So did George Antheil.
George had a kid brother 12 years younger
whose name was Henry.
1941, he boarded a plane, and moments later,
the plane was shot down by two Soviet fighters.
This is the first American killed in World War Il.
George, he was just devastated.
He wanted revenge for his brother's assassination
and opportunity with someone who knew
what she was talking about.
Hedy and George worked on three inventions together,
all weapons meant to help the Allies fight Germany.
I have letters from George Antheil.
In one of the letters, he wrote,
"All she wants to do is stay home and invent things.
She is an incredible combination of childish ignorance
and definite flashes of genius."
"She calls in the middle of the night
because an idea hit her."
So, my mother was a pest.
She had to invent, she had to invent,
and she pulled George Antheil in with her.
The most successful of their inventions
was a secret communication system
based on Hedy's idea of frequency hopping.
George is taking all these notes,
and I think there was some sort of a-ha moment
where he said, "You know, I have this system,"
I guess he got from dealing with player pianos,
"that we might be able to adapt
and make... make your concept work."
George Antheil got thrown out of Trenton High School
when he was 17,
so he had no special training in engineering.
What he did know was how to synchronize player pianos.
George's most famous composition
was for a film called Ballet Mécanique.
He scored it for 16 player pianos.
George's big realization was,
if piano rolls can activate piano keys,
why couldn't they activate radio frequencies
in both torpedo and the ship?
The basic idea is that by using
two miniature piano rolls
that would start at the same moment
and turn at the same speed,
a ship and a torpedo could secretly communicate
on the same pattern of frequencies.
Ultimately, Hedy and George wanted their torpedo and ship
to communicate on 88 different frequencies,
like an encryption system, basically,
that nobody could crack.
Wonderfully clever idea.
And the Inventors Council agreed.
The members of the National Inventors Council...
And it was a council of actual engineers
with a major inventor in his own right,
Charles Kettering,
who was struck by the value and the originality
of Hedy and George's idea.
So they helped George and Hedy
by connecting them up with a physicist at Caltech
in California who was an expert on electronics.
And he presumably designed
the electronics part of this device.
The day came when this invention
was issued a full patent.
Hedy and George donated their invention
to the National Inventors Council,
but it was generally understood
that if the military used an invention,
the inventors would be paid.
They gave it to the Navy,
and as George Antheil liked to tell the story later,
I went in to see the Navy Brass
and they threw the patent on the desk and said,
"What do you want to do,
put a player piano in a torpedo?
Get out of here!"
And that was that.
Sons of bitches.
Shame.
Shame on them.
Well, that's why I was in the Army,
because the Navy was never that bright.
After the Navy rejected their invention,
Hedy wanted to continue developing it.
But George, who always had bills to pay,
wasn't interested.
I think George was very proud that he had done it,
but I think he just got over it.
I think that for Hedy,
she saw it as perhaps her ticket to be recognized
for the brilliant woman that she was.
And the patent, like all things submitted to the military,
was put in a safe somewhere and labeled Top Secret.
So it disappeared from the world
for the rest of the war.
The Navy basically told her,
"You know, you'd be helping the war a lot more, little lady,
if you got out and sold war bonds
rather than sat around
trying to invent new kinds of torpedoes.
Leave that to the experts.
Get out there and raise money."
You don't get to be Hedy Lamarr and smart.
No.
I worked for the government at the bond tour.
Really? How?
By appearing, by dancing with these people.
Hedy used to go to the Hollywood Canteen
and entertain the troops.
Hedy Lamarr hands out autographs.
She was not yet an American citizen
and she was there working on behalf of the United States
and its soldiers every night
as often as she could be.
It's a great thing, really.
Hedy sold something like $25 million worth of war bonds,
which if you translate that into modern dollars,
comes out around $343 million worth of war bonds.
To be told to just raise money for the war,
it's unfortunate.
That was the way that people thought that she would do good
in the best way within her realm of capabilities.
F-35, somebody have it?
I've got it!
Go ahead!
Oh no.
Like, go and sell a kiss to a strange man.
Maybe... maybe she would have felt a little bit better
about her accomplishments if she received recognition
for her intellect.
Oh, you'll get used to it.
I don't want to get used to it.
I have my own life.
My own life!
To add insult to injury,
the U.S. Government seized Hedy's patent in 1942
as the property of an enemy alien.
I don't understand.
They use me for selling bonds,
then I'm not an alien.
And when I invent something for this country
I am an alien?
I am Tandelayo.
After she did the invention,
what did Louis B. Mayer offer Hedy Lamarr?
White Cargo.
We were at war by then and Louis B. Mayer
wanted to entertain the servicemen
who would pay money
to see what was considered a dirty picture.
Louis B. Mayer divided the world
into two kinds of women,
Madonna and whore.
I don't think he ever believed
she was anything but the latter
because of Ecstasy.
You better go now.
Audiences ate it up.
This was a woman who had tried to change the course of the war.
Now she found herself in a third rate film
as a distraction for the troops.
They think I'm a bad actress.
I think sometimes in life I act more than on the screen.
Hedy really struggled to make her mark in Hollywood.
She knew she wasn't respected
like a Garbo or a Dietrich.
She wanted to have roles that allowed her to do something more
and to give her an acting challenge.
So that brought her in some conflict with Louis B. Mayer.
He sued her a couple times.
I mean, he tried to keep her on a very tight leash.
She wouldn't let herself be kept on a tight leash
and there were always problems.
And she got the reputation of being difficult.
I believe that we are controlled by ourselves,
by our way of thinking,
by our way of dealing with people.
I mean, there comes a point
when you can't take anymore...
then you have to make yourself heard.
She needed to be free.
I think she was brave and courageous.
She felt like, "I'm gonna do it for myself.
I'm gonna live the way...
I bloody wanna live my own life."
So she said, "Well, you know what?
I'll make my own movie.
I'll produce my own movie."
I don't really recall anybody except Hedy
went out and actually produced a movie.
It was very unusual in 1946.
The system didn't welcome it,
they didn't want movie stars going out of control
and producing their own films.
What a terrible idea.
Especially the women.
She was so ahead of her time with being a feminist.
She's never been called that, but she certainly was.
Don't worry about me.
I can handle trouble.
I know you can.
And then she co-produced Dishonored Lady,
and I think that both films were produced very well.
She made Dishonored Lady with my father.
It's the only movie they were in together.
I've always wondered if it were possible for people
like you and me.
This was a time when America was recovering
from World War Il.
And like the rest of the country,
she too wanted a family and a home life.
I was married and married because
I liked the companionship of a man, obviously.
I think, you know, he was quite a bit older and British.
I don't think he was the love of her life.
I think she had said he was stuffy and boring.
You know, you're not at all what I imagined.
No?
No.
So this is a letter from George Antheil.
"The last time I saw Hedy,
she looked paler.
Something's troubling her.
John Loder is really and honestly too dull
for this sparkling and unbelievable diamond."
And I think he hit the nail on the head with that one.
She was independent, she was the breadwinner.
She wasn't stuck in a marriage.
Will you please go?
Of course I'll go.
I think he left, I was a toddler and Tony was a baby,
and I never heard from him.
She was a single mother in the '40s,
so she was basically alone.
When we were little,
she was the most charming, lovely person I can imagine.
And so nice and warm and loving,
and she opened my hands that were held in a ball,
"Relax, don't go to sleep angry."
She was just such a great mother.
I taught my children swimming.
The little children have little armbands to swim.
- Have you ever seen that? - Yes.
Makes absolutely no sense.
because the middle, the center
is where they should be lifted.
Mm-hm.
That's how I taught my children
and they swim like fish.
They really were good as gold.
I did a good job with them.
It made me a little tired but that's...
that's part of it, the job, I guess.
My mother worked her ass off.
She had to earn a living.
She was on her own.
It was such pressure.
At least she didn't have to worry about granny.
By then she'd made it safely to California
and Mom paid for her to live nearby.
Financially, Hedy wasn't in the best of shape.
She had two independent films,
she made a lousy comedy,
and she knew she was going in the gutter career-wise.
She needed a breath of fresh air.
And just by a stroke of luck,
her agent at the time mentioned,
"Well, I was talking to C.B. the other day,"
Cecil B. DeMille,
great motion picture producer.
He was just beginning his biblical epics
of sex and sand.
And Hedy called Cecil B. DeMille and said,
"I understand you're casting for a new motion picture.
I am Delilah."
No man leaves Delilah.
Look at her, Samson.
Look well.
Satan himself taught her all the arts of deception.
Howard Hawks had a great line about DeMille.
He says, "You know,
DeMille is so bad he's almost good."
But anyway, Samson and Delilah was a huge hit.
I think it was her biggest success.
It thoroughly revived Hedy's name
into the public consciousness.
Samson and Delilah was the second highest grossing film
of the decade.
Only Gone with the Wind surpassed it.
Hedy took notice.
She decided to produce her own epic
in the style of DeMille.
She would film it in Italy and title it
The Loves of Three Queens.
Hedy played all three lead roles.
The subject was beauty
and how it got in the way of love
for the great women of history.
They're leading you into a trap.
Oh, Napoleon, you're blind.
There is no choice.
It was a huge production.
She didn't have the training
to take on a project of this size.
And when she was finished with it,
she couldn't find distribution in the United States.
She spent millions of dollars on it,
no one would touch it.
She lost all her money.
She found herself with nothing.
I'm a good artist and a very bad business person.
She's no longer a star
and she doesn't really have any money.
She was in Houston for an event
and she ran into Howard Lee the oil man.
And then I found out my name was now Tony Lee.
And we were living in Texas.
Mom actually had a Texas twang with a Viennese accent.
It was hilarious.
He was a nice guy.
I really kind of felt Texan for a while.
In Texas, Hedy found herself a trophy wife again.
You know, Texas was retirement.
But a creative person needs something to do.
She didn't have much to do.
We went on vacation in Aspen, Colorado.
I used to ski when I was a young girl.
I skied to school, I skied all over the place.
And I went through Aspen.
There was nobody there. Nothing.
Just a little store and a few houses.
And they said, "This could be a very wonderful skiing resort."
So I started to build a place called Villa Lamarr.
She wanted to build a ski resort,
so she convinced Howard to buy some land.
It was all Austrian, it's beautiful.
She spent years making that place.
She created some of her homeland.
That's why it meant a lot to her.
She was really, I think, homesick.
It was after that
that everything started falling apart.
Their relationship wasn't good.
It was pretty traumatic; he was an alcoholic.
With children it was very difficult so I walked away.
I said, "All I want is Aspen," which I built myself.
My chalet there which makes
a million a day, I suppose, now.
Hedy told me again and again
about her divorce with Howard Lee.
May be the darkest time in her life.
And then my daughter said,
"Ma, something happened to Tony."
My son was almost killed in a car accident.
While her son was in the hospital near death,
Hedy was called to testify in divorce court.
Stressed and traumatized to the point of breakdown,
she sent her Hollywood body double
to testify in her place.
She infuriated the judge,
who punished her by cutting her share
of the divorce settlement.
He took everything away.
Aspen, which was beautiful.
I mean, it was a big shock.
So with the pressure here and pressure all over
that's all I needed. So I collapsed.
I had a nervous breakdown.
I feel like I was dead for...
I don't know how long, but I was dead.
And so much so that this light you see really exists
on the ceiling.
I saw my father.
She said Emil, her father,
was her greatest love,
or no one could compare to him.
Well, he knew her before she was this celebrity.
And so she felt real love there.
And I don't know if she felt that again.
Hedy had two more husbands in her life.
Neither marriage lasted much more than a year.
I wish my mother had a husband
who knew how to love her.
But she never did.
When I ended up living with her after Texas,
it was very, very tricky, very hard.
I think the drugs were very responsible.
The slightest thing could... could set her off.
There was erratic behavior.
She was becoming more unstable.
I guess it pretty much started with Jimmy.
As an adult, I was looking at baby pictures
and it was my first birthday with my mom...
and mother and father behind me.
And in between them, a boy.
Um, I told Mom,
"Who's this boy?"
And she literally said,
"Oh, it was an adoption that didn't work out."
She told me that he was really rebellious
and was acting out big time.
And Jimmy was put in a military boarding school.
So the sports coach
kind of took Jimmy under his wing,
coach and the wife,
and he asked Hedy if he could live with them.
And Mom was apparently so hurt she said yes.
And I can't believe that I have no memory of him.
She's my mother and I love her.
I called her sometimes and she called me sometimes.
I never really blamed her for anything,
I... I just...
I knew she was upset because I, you know,
kind of like slapped her in the face.
Like saying, "I don't love you anymore."
But still I never saw her after that for 40-some years.
She was a woman of extremes.
I mean, Hedy can just leave things behind.
She cut off Jimmy, she cut off being Jewish.
She was broken, she was missing pieces of herself.
A lot of stars from the studio system
did carry over this addiction to pep pills, speed.
It does explain, in hindsight,
a lot of her behavior.
There are always a great many rumors
about her connection to the famous Dr. Feelgood.
Dr. Feelgood was Max Jacobson.
Look at the Aretha Franklin song,
"Oh, Dr. Feelgood, please make me feel good."
Everybody called him Dr. Feelgood
because he made them feel good.
When Cecil B. DeMille had his heart attack
on the set of The Ten Commandments,
he flew Dr. Max over.
And then DeMille said,
"Go inject Charlton Heston.
There's not enough energy.
His Moses is too lackadaisical."
Hedy Lamarr became a patient of his
from the 1950s until Max Jacobson
lost his medical license in 1974.
Somebody did me in like many times
and gave me a shot. I don't know what it was.
I thought it was vitamins but it wasn't.
Said, "Oh, you should try these vitamin B shots.
They give you so much energy."
What Max Jacobson said
is they were special vitamin elixirs.
And he loaded up a vial
with 40 milligrams of methamphetamine.
Meth was legal.
And he gave Hedy a shot.
And the thing about methamphetamine
is once you get a couple of shots,
you're hooked because the brain will demand
more and more of that reward.
So she got hooked on these "vitamins."
And they turned her into a monster.
I was standing in the kitchen
and she was holding a fork and she dropped it.
And all of a sudden she just hauls up and, bam,
smashes me across the face.
"Whenever I drop something, you pick it up!"
You know, she was just out of control.
Now I can be forgiving for all that erratic behavior
because in a way she was a victim
of the very system that made her famous.
Thank you very much. Howdy-hi, Shindiggers.
I'm Jimmy O'Neill and tonight it's my great pleasure
to introduce the beautiful Ms. Hedy Lamarr.
Of course anyone growing up in Hollywood in the early '60s
was aware of her as the kind of caricature
of herself that she had become.
Lucille Ball, I remember,
used to do an outrageous takeoff of Tandelayo.
I am Tandelayo.
I think it was offensive to her.
She didn't want to be a joke.
Mom was not in a good... good way
when I was away at college.
I remember one day walking to school at Cal,
with my books,
and I walked past a newsstand
and there's a picture of Mom in jail.
Mrs. Lamarr was shopping
at the May Company Department Store
and evidently was arrested
by one of the security personnel
of the store.
And it was apparent that she had
something like approximately $14,000 on her,
but she had still taken about $80 worth of merchandise.
When you see that on the front page,
it's like you want to just crawl in a hole.
The defendant is quoted as saying,
"I didn't mean to steal anything.
I'll be glad to pay for the items.
I have the money."
She was acquitted for that.
She said it was a misunderstanding.
Who knows?
You know, a lot of people handle stress in different ways.
It was a shock.
She was such a big star.
She seemed so untouchable
to be reduced to that.
And I think that most people thought
it must be a kind of mental illness.
I want to see the store manager.
No.
I want to see the store manager.
You're not seeing the store manager.
Andy Warhol's school of filmmaking
makes a film that is very obviously lampooning her image.
And she becomes, essentially, a punch line.
The shoplifting also resulted
in her inability to play her final role.
She was signed to do
Picture Mommy Dead
and Zsa Zsa Gabor stepped in to replace her.
They just fired me.
- Were you shocked? - No.
I'm not shocked at that, no.
This is gonna go into your book, I trust.
Oh, yes, indeed.
What's the name of that book?
The longer I wait, the better the book gets.
Somebody suggested doing her autobiography,
that she should do it.
She had no interest in the book itself,
but she wanted the money from it.
There really hadn't been any sort of scandalous tell-all.
She spoke with ghostwriters
for many, many hours about her past,
and then they translated her memories
into a narrative.
I think her business manager was paid off
to get all this stuff past her.
And she didn't want to deal with paperwork,
so she just trusted him.
Your book, called Ecstasy and Me...
Don't talk about that.
That's not my book.
- You wrote it. - No.
Did that hurt your image in Hollywood?
I don't know what is an image.
I mean, what's your image, Woody?
What's my im... same as yours.
Okay, now you want me to tell you what your image is?
- Yeah. - It's a glamorous,
beautiful,
internationally known star
who obviously rides in limousines
and has great jewels
and you don't scrub your kitchen floors.
I don't like that, no, but tell me more.
I never lived that way.
Isn't that what it's all about?
No, not to me.
I guess in the image it is.
She was known for her glamour and her beauty.
It was impossible to live up to
as she got older.
She would see that
and you knew that it disturbed her.
She started having plastic surgery in her 40s.
One of her plastic surgeons told me once
that she was a groundbreaker even in plastic surgery
where she came up with ideas.
She said, "My arms are crepey and I want you to cut here
right in the line of the fold
and I want you to get rid of the excess skin
and leave the scar here.
Leave the scar on my knee, behind my knee.
Put the scar behind my ear.
And they did it and the surgeons said, you know,
"A lot of these things she did
we were never doing before."
You'll mention her to an older plastic surgeon
and they remember their...
all their actresses coming in saying,
"You know, well, Hedy, she had this done.
Can I get this done too?"
She was really one of the first women out there saying,
"Why isn't this possible?
Why can't we do this?"
She looked wonderful for her age,
but all of that didn't work
because people still wanted
that old image of Hedy Lamarr.
You know, the only thing that would have...
that would have solved the problem
is if she'd died young.
People were cruel to her.
People would come up and say, "You were so beautiful."
The press was mean.
I said, "Oh, Mom,
I feel I really have empathy for that pressure on you."
So no wonder she kind of hid away.
Do you think you are unsociable?
Me? No!
Have I been reserved with you?
No, I mean are you unsociable here in America?
I only know that they do not understand me.
How can you understand a person who
has had as many phases in life as I have?
I have been through a lot, my whole life.
You start to think,
"I have experienced everything now in life."
"Now I want peace."
I miss Vienna.
I would like to make a movie about it.
What would the movie look like?
All of the nice things I have seen when I was a child.
The opera.
The Spanish Riding School.
Schönbrunn Palace.
My school in Döbling.
Whatever, I don't know.
I am always Austrian.
We met in person two times in my life.
She would send me autographed pictures of herself,
you know,
which they're mostly like those studio prints.
Even though she says it was a curse,
that's what people liked and loved about her and she...
for some reason I think she thought even her family,
her grandchildren, her children want that.
She did a lot of sadly not so good plastic surgery
in her later years,
each one fixing the flaws of the last.
And she no longer went out in public.
And then the money started running out
because she only got something
from Screen Actors Guild
and Social Security.
All they give me $300.
Per month?
Yep.
That's not much, is it?
No, it's not very much.
Have you ever tried to get... uh
some recompense... for your idea?
...the patent?
No.
I was surprised that they don't even acknowledge it.
In 1969, Hedy had written to a friend in the Navy
asking if he could find out what happened to her patent.
"Laura Slainier, Washington Patent Office,
has an invention of mine,
a missile-guided torpedo.
Maybe you can get it."
So this was important to her.
His reply has been lost,
but she probably learned that her idea,
frequency hopping,
had been put to use in military communications.
By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
when President Kennedy sent Navy ships
to blockade Cuba,
the ships that were running the blockade
were all equipped with frequency-hopped radios.
When she found out that the patent was used,
she thought, "Hey, I should be making some money from this."
I mean, isn't that normal to get something?
Yes, it is.
Well... apparently they didn't think so.
Well, it has to do with the nature of patent law.
I think that it wasn't actually used
during the life of the patent
and it was only after the patent expired
that it went into common use.
I don't think so.
They used it before!
For Hedy to be paid,
the Navy had to use her patent
before it expired in 1959.
And there's evidence they did give it to a contractor.
Romuald Scibor sent me an email.
And he said, 19... it was about '55,
he said he was handed that patent.
And they were tasked to create a sonobuoy.
A sonobuoy is a floating submarine detection device.
Someone in the Navy found the patent and thought,
"Well, I don't know if there's anything here,
but let's toss it to a contractor."
And he took that patent and used it
as the basis for communications
from the sonobuoy in the water
to a passing naval airplane
that would also be secure.
The inventor of the sonobuoy had a website
where he paid tribute
to the Markey-Antheil invention.
Will you take a look?
Sure.
A Tribute to Hedy Lamarr
by Romuald Scibor-Marchocki.
No, I haven't seen this.
"I designed the sonobuoy,
one of the first deployments of frequency hopping."
And he goes on to write about surveillance drones
at Aerojet-General.
"I was the systems manager building the surveillance drone
which eventually flew over Vietnam.
I personally designed the reliable and secure
two-way radio communications system.
For the first time,
we had the ability to switch frequencies rapidly.
Now that I know who invented frequency hopping,
I, who was the only person who remembers
those early applications of this concept,
want to express my sincere admiration
and belated thanks to Hedy Lamarr."
How 'bout them apples?
She should have gotten paid.
What would you have the government do to repay you?
At this point I don't even care.
There she is.
The Tyrolean beauty.
Toward the end of Hedy's life
she began to reflect.
She began to have insight.
Well, things don't always work... straight forward.
They have detours sometimes.
That's part of living.
Yep.
I didn't expect that I'd come here and fall apart either
but things happen.
She always talked about writing her autobiography
and wanting to get the story out
about who the real Hedy Lamarr was,
not the Hedy Lamarr in the movies,
which I think she often thought
movies were really trivial.
Now I'm becoming smart all of a sudden.
Better late than never, right?
Absolutely.
Maybe someday I'll become smart too.
I gave you a little lesson there right now.
Yes ma'am.
I guess I should let you...
I guess you should.
...let you go, but...
I enjoyed talking.
I enjoyed talking to you and perhaps I'll...
Maybe you can do some good.
I hope so.
The article I wrote,
I like to think that that was really a part
of how she gained recognition.
So Forbes magazine,
May 1990,
this is the first time the mainstream press
released the information that Hedy was glamorous, yes,
stupid, no.
I called her and said, you know, "Mom, people are interested
in what you thought of back in '42."
She said, "It's about time."
The first to pick up Hedy's story
were people in the communications industry
because they realized frequency hopping
was revolutionary.
It was already finding its way into GPS,
Wi-Fi technology, Bluetooth,
and billion-dollar military satellites.
Five, four, three,
Atlas engine ignition,
one, zero,
and liftoff of Lockheed Martin...
The Milstar satellite system provides
protected, secure communications
for the President of the United States
and high priority military users.
The work that Hedy Lamarr did in her patent,
Milstar took that technology
in order to implement frequency hopping
on the system.
And that's what we trust our most important
nuclear command and control messages with.
The Navy, Milstar, and Lockheed Martin
actually gave Hedy an award
thanking her for coming up with her idea.
And when I called her, I said,
"Mom, they're gonna give you an award,"
but she just didn't want to be seen.
The award I'm about to present is in recognition
of a famous actress turned inventor,
Hedy Lamarr.
I gave a talk to about 800 people.
But right in the middle of it...
If I have seen farther...
Oh, my God.
Are you serious?
My mother's here too.
I'll tell you a little bit later.
Hello?
How did it go?
I'm in the middle of it.
I just said, "Mom, if you could say something,
what would you say?"
And this is what she said.
I'm happy that this invention has been so successful.
I appreciate your acknowledgement
of you honoring me
and that it was not done in vain.
Thank you.
Perfect.
- Okay? - Okay.
I love you!
Love you too.
Bye.
And they all stood up and clapped.
I thought it was really great.
She would love to be remembered
as someone who contributed
to the well-being of humankind.
She did make her mark.
It's the one thing she did for other people
that she's gonna be long, long remembered for.
It was New Year's,
January 1st, 2000.
She called my sister and I separately,
"Turn on the TV!
It's Vienna, Vienna!
You'll see Vienna!"
And so we turn on the TV
and the Viennese Symphony Orchestra
was playing on TV.
She died a few days later.
She fell asleep and she just didn't wake up.
I'll read you something pretty.
People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you
of selfish alternative motives.
Do good anyway.
The biggest people with the biggest ideas
can be shot down
by the smallest people with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
What you spend years building
may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
Give the world the best you have
and you'll be kicked into the teeth.
Give the world the best you've got anyway.