CIDRE Portfolio

Combined Film and Book Review

Hidden Figure: An incomplete biography of Hedy Lamarr

A Review of: 

Marie Benedict, The Only Woman in the Room, Sourcebooks (NY, 2019).

“Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story”, a PBS, American Experience documentary, directed by Alexandra Dean, 2017.

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) was a woman hidden in liminal space.  Her nature as a hidden figure is best summarized at the end of Benedict’s fictionalized biography, when she quotes Lamarr lamenting: “To everyone else, I was Hedy Lamarr, only a beautiful face and lissome body. I was never Hedy Kiesler, aspiring inventor, curious, thinker, and Jew.”  Her’s was a world of the hidden and the missing, the disguised and the erased.  Her life is but an exaggerated version of the experiences of other women who made significant, but often hidden and forgotten, contributions to arts and sciences.  Lamarr was noticed only because of her status as a glamorous  movie star from the golden age of Hollywood.

Lamarr was born in 1914 to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna. The first of many veils appears in the prior sentence.  She was Jewish in the technical sense, being born of a mother who was herself born of a Jewish-Hungarian mother.  Before Lamarr was born, her mother, Gertud, converted to Catholicism.  The and Emil, her Glacian-Jewish husband, raised their daughter as an unbaptized Christian. They lived in Döbling—one of the ghettoed Jewish neighborhoods of early-20th-century Vienna—surrounded by a devoutly Catholic population.  Her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy arms dealer was also essentially a crypto-Jew.  Many minorities have disguised their heritage, in order to avoid the penalties applied by a hostile, xenophobic majority.  

The interwar and WWII periods are central to Benedict’s narrative.  Initially the depiction focuses on Lamarr’s difficult  personal life, as Benedict explores the central figure’s virtual imprisonment by her jealous and abusive husband.  Mandl himself avoids the brunt of the heightened anti-semitism of 1930s Central Europe, by being a “useful Jew,” providing arms first to the fascists of Mussolini’s Italy and then, once Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, to Hitler.  Hitler even made Mandl and “honorary Aryan.”  When the Anschluss took place, the less useful Jews of Vienna, hidden or not, realized that the only guarantee of their safety was to flee.  In Hedy’s case, her flight to England served two purposes: escaping her tyrannical husband and the Holocaust.  Benedict pays more attention to the former, rather than the latter; part of what makes her biography read as a pseudo-feminist romance novel.  Furthermore, the fictional nature of Benedict’s work further obscures Lamarr’s past. 

Benedict presents an account of Lamarr’s harrowing escape from Mandl and Austria.  She disguises herself in the uniform of a maid—a maid she chose for her close resemblance—in order to make good her escape.  This was her second attempt.  In the first, failed attempt, Lamarr had spirited away with a man she had deceived to believe—through a clandestine affair—that she was in love with him. On her second try, Lamarr made it to England and then booked passage on the Normandie—paying her fare with jewels she had secreted in her coat—to clandestinely seduce Louis B. Mayer.  She succeeded, and made her way to Hollywood.  Even having attained the physical safety provided by her refuge in Los Angeles, the mask was left on.  In fact, in order to secure her place as a contract player for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Hedy had to hide any hint of her Jewish background.  This is particularly ironic given that Louis B. Mayer, along with many of the other Hollywood studio heads, were Jewish immigrants.  As the PBS documentary points out, prominent Jews—particularly the emigres from Nazi-occupied Europe—were very thankful for the safety and freedom their new home provided.  But they were still guarded about their faith.  America was not devoid of anti-semitism.  Many, like Lamarr chose to camouflage themselves by changing their names (e.g. Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas) and taking on patriotic causes—Lamarr was was the most successful promoter of US War Bonds.

The disguises Lamarr wore were related to gender and intellect.  The former was the focus of Benedict’s book, with the documentary focusing on the latter.  Both pieces make it clear that Lamarr’s beauty was a fortunate curse.  Her beauty brought her fame.  Her fame gave her access to people of power and wealth—allowing her to escape the bounds of her troubled marriages and her probable death, had she remained in Nazi-controlled Vienna.

But her beauty was also a trap.  Her early success came from her performance, at the age of 16, in a scandalous movie: “Ecstasy.”  The most infamous scene depicted Lamarr’s character  in orgasm, though Lamarr contended later that she had no idea of the sexual nature of the scene.  When her first husband saw the scene—during an embarrassing screening of the film to business associates—he attempted to purchase and burn every print and forbade Lamarr from further pursuing her acting career.  As both works make clear, beautiful women were meant to be merely ornamental.  It was assumed that women in general, and certainly one as stunningly glamorous as Lamarr, could not be as intelligent as men.  That is why her involvement in the invention of one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet Age is so compelling.  The story of Lamarr’s development of frequency hopping is like a Matryoshka doll—hidden layers within hidden layers.

At the nadir of WWII, when Allied shipping was being devastated by German U-boats, Lamarr worked, in the hidden hours of the night, to develop a weapon to help turn the war in favor of her adopted land.  Her goal was to create a method of creating a radio-controlled weapon—one that could be guided by unseen hands.  The signal would have to be encoded—contained in a cypher—to prevent the enemy from detecting or wresting control.  The key element was to have the signal vary in frequency, in a preprogrammed pattern, encoded in the device and the controller.  The method came to be known as “frequency hopping;” the key element of cell phone, bluetooth, and other technologies that form the basis of modern communication.

The patent Lamarr and her partner, the composer, George Antheil were issued was kept secret by the War Department.  So secret, in fact, that it remained dormant and unused for many years.  The patent itself was confiscated from Lamarr, because of her status as alien from an enemy nation—despite the fact that the was considered anything but a citizen of Austria.  At some point, possibly in the late 1950s, her patent resurfaced when a weapons contractor, vaguely remembering seeing it during WWII, put it to use in the creation of some of America’s most advanced postwar weapons.  Lamarr was not apprised of the fact that her patent had been used, nor was she ever paid for its use.  In one of the documentary’s most poignant scenes, an elderly Lamarr—now a recluse, her face almost unrecognizable thru a mask of multiple plastic surgeries—is celebrated for her invention at an engineering conference.  But Lamarr is unseen, only her disembodied voice is heard from her son’s phone.