Hedy’s folIy

In a front-page review, on Sunday 18 December 2011, John Adams (the composer) writes about The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes. The illustration accompanying the review speaks to her attributes: a startlingly beautiful Vienna-born actress who, although still in her early 20s, had accomplished her own scandal by appearing nude and simulating passionate adulterous sex in a mostly silent movie called “Ecstasy.”

Louis B. Mayer had seen her "Ecstasy" but was ambivalent about her (“You’re lovely, but . . . I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.”). Nonetheless, he signed her to a contract, with the proviso that she change her name.

She commanded the screen not so much for her acting, which at best was passably droll and arch, but rather for the perfect beauty of her face, with its colliding sensuality and innocence, and for the subtle irony and sly intelligence that animated her work with screen partners like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Charles Boyer.

Under contract to MGM, she worked hard, was generally liked, and although not a diva was scrupulous about fighting for her rights in an era when actors and actresses were “properties” rather than people. She avoided the celebrity party circuit, preferring small gatherings with close friends. At home she set up a drafting table and devoted her downtime to inventions, including a bouillon-like cube that when mixed with water would produce an instant soft drink. It was at a dinner at the home of the actress Janet Gaynor in 1940 that she met George ­Antheil.

Antheil was a composer from Trenton, and had caused a sensation similar to Stravinsky with his Rites of Spring. He went to work in Hollywood, scoring films. He had also written a book, “Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology.” He also wrote pieces for Esquire, and Hedy Lamar had read one of those.

According to Antheil’s autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music,” Hedy requested the meeting because she had read one of his Esquire articles about glands. This was Hollywood, and the most beautiful woman in the world was concerned about her breast size.
These were days before implants.

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials.