Hedy Lamarr

Bombshell

Hedy Lamarr was often called the most beautiful woman in Hollywood during the late 1930s and 1940s, and sometimes she was even called the most beautiful woman in the world, but it is in candid photographs with windswept hair in the 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story that her real beauty is revealed; she looks brainy, restless, flighty, even a little silly. In still photographs where she is overly made up and in most of her movies, Lamarr has a distant, lacquered quality, as if her mind were elsewhere, and what this documentary reveals very convincingly are the flashes of genius she experienced in her side-career as an inventor, a hobby for her that has caused much comment and press coverage in recent years.

Born in Vienna to a father who adored her, the young Hedwig Kiesler was the type of child who would take apart a music box and put it back together just to see how it worked. After appearing in Gustav Machatý’s erotic classic Ecstasy (1933), where she did a nude swimming scene and simulated an orgasm on screen, she escaped Europe and a confining marriage to powerful munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl to go to Hollywood, where she was signed by MGM, a studio that first gave her “pep” pills and sleeping pills, and given a new name.

Lamarr had to keep her Jewish background hidden, and she was very concerned about the threat of Nazism while working as a top glamour girl in movies in the early 1940s, and so in her spare time she thought up a way of jamming torpedo frequencies so that Nazi submarines would no longer be able to detect them. Bombshell director Alexandra Dean fleshes this out by including Lamarr’s notebooks on screen with some visuals that make her ideas understandable for a non-science person, and these ideas seem very impressive.

Lamarr got the composer George Antheil to collaborate with her, and he came up with a way of implementing her invention with rolls from a player piano; based on what we hear in Bombshell, it is Antheil’s contribution to the frequency hopping idea that got it disregarded by the navy. Lamarr took out a patent on it, but she was advised to sell war bonds instead, and so she sold kisses to soldiers and earned millions of dollars for the government. In the 1950s, the American military did begin using her invention in aerial warfare, but Lamarr never received any money for it, and her patent expired in 1959.

In the very sad last 40 years or so of her life from 1960 to 2000, Lamarr was a has-been, a drug addict (she became addicted to meth), a shoplifter, and then a victim of plastic surgery so ill-advised that it left the once-perfect beauty of her face disfigured, which is why she spent most of the last 20 years of her existence in seclusion. It is as if Lamarr bought into the idea that her only value had been her famous face and body. (In the 2017 documentary, her granddaughter says that Lamarr would send her autographed photos from her movie heyday in lieu of real-life meetings.) But around 1990, Lamarr finally started to get some recognition for her contribution to the concept of frequency hopping, which is the basis of Wi-Fi.

As an older woman living on meager pension checks, Lamarr held out hope that her major invention might bring her some financial security, or at the very least some credit. In Bombshell we hear her discussing her inventions and her life and film career in an interview she did in 1990 for Forbes magazine, and her voice sounds alternately spiky and wistful. “They say I was a bad actress,” Lamarr says at one point, and she sounds melancholy about it. “I sometimes think I did more acting off the screen than on.” It’s true that on camera she often seems blank or hidden, though she is very sexy and touching in the near-silent Ecstasy and she commands the camera in near-static close-ups in Algiers (1938), which made her a star, and in which pretty much every shot of her is a film-stopping amazement.

Lamarr manages to be extremely erotic in her temptress stances yet a hoot at the same time in her biggest financial hit, Samson and Delilah (1949), a biblical epic in Technicolor for Cecil B. DeMille, and she was pure camp in White Cargo (1942), where her delivery of the line, “I am…Tondelayo,” inspired a generation of drag queens. But she was far more real and appealing in a movie that she made for King Vidor, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), where she plays an independent and exciting career woman with a male name, Marvin. Vidor is the only director who truly seems to understand Lamarr, seeing beneath her mask of beauty to the restless and often-inspired intellect underneath.

Her financial difficulties came about in part because she sank most of her savings into Loves of Three Queens (1954), a color epic she could not find distribution for, and by that point Lamarr was 40, which was a death knell for the careers of love goddesses of that time. She built a resort in Aspen, Colorado, that was lost to her after one of her many divorces; she was always thinking big, achieving something big, and then being disappointed.

When Lamarr started having plastic surgery to try to hold on to the face that had made her a star, she even had ideas about taking skin from different parts of the body and thoughts about where scars could be easily hidden. Yet her ghostwritten memoir Ecstasy and Me (1966) was an exploitation book that leaned into many descriptions of lurid and fictional sexual encounters meant to shock and titillate readers. Lamarr was horrified when she read it, and she tried to have it stopped legally, to no avail. The times she lived in and the pressures of having That Face finally extinguished the mind that kept trying to distinguish itself and contribute to society and make a mark.

In the interview tapes for Forbes from 1990, Lamarr does not sound bitter. In fact, this is how the documentary ends, with Lamarr reciting these lines: “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 in the teeth—give the world the best you’ve got anyway.’”