Hedy's Folly
I said, “Uh-huh.”
They repeated, “Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.”
“It’s funny,” I said, “but I keep hearing you both say, ‘Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.’ ”
… “But she does, she really does!” they insisted.
“You mean,” I faltered, “that Hedy Lamarr wants to see … little me?”
“Yes,” they said, “and moreover we’re going to arrange it for next week. Now don’t protest.”
“Who’s protesting?” I said, bewildered.
So George Antheil met Hedy Lamarr one evening in late August 1940 at the Adrians’ house. His “eyeballs sizzled,” she was “undoubtedly … the most beautiful woman on earth,” she looked even better in person than she did on the screen, and “her breasts were fine too, real postpituitary.” In the rush of all this gushing, Antheil the author fails to explain that Hedy wanted to see him not generally about her “glands” but specifically because she was concerned that her breasts were too small. (In her book, Ecstasy and Me, she attributes this canard repeatedly to Louis B. Mayer, which was probably true.)
“You are a thymocentric,” George told the actress once the subject of breast size was invoked, “of the anterior-pituitary variety, what I call a ‘prepit-thymus.’ ” She responded, “I know it. I’ve studied your charts in Esquire. Now what I want to know is, what shall I do about it? Adrian says you’re wonderful.” In his memoir George feigned embarrassment. Hedy pressed him: “The thing is, can they be made bigger?” Yes, said George, blushing, “much much bigger!”
When Hedy left, Antheil claimed, she wrote her phone number on his windshield with lipstick.
The next day he called her, she invited him to dinner “high up in her Benedict Canyon retreat,” and over dinner, served by a butler, they discussed the use of “various glandular extracts” that would make “an honest gland” of her post-pituitary (the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland). “And so the bosoms stay up,” Antheil concluded his presentation. Later that evening:
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 very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about new munitions and various secret weapons, some of which she had invented herself, and that she was thinking seriously of quitting M.G.M. and going to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established Inventors’ Council.
“They could just have me around,” she explained, “and ask me questions.”
Although Antheil describes Hedy as “very, very bright,” he succeeds here in making her sound at least scatterbrained. In fairness, he does add that she had been the wife of Fritz Mandl, had “overheard him and his experts discussing new devices, and … had retained these ideas in basic form,” but then goes on, “in her beautiful beringleted head—while all the time clever Fritz Mandl didn’t think she knew A from Z.” Even this explanation doubles back on itself: Did Hedy invent independently or simply borrow the “ideas” she had “retained … in basic form”? The misogynistic debate about whether or not Hedy’s ideas were original or borrowed continues to this day. Evidently, Fritz Mandl wasn’t the only one who, deep down, “didn’t think she knew A from Z.”
When Hedy suggested that the National Inventors Council, just established in August 1940, could profitably ask her questions, she wasn’t implying she was a prodigy who could spontaneously generate inventions out of nowhere; she was referring to the fortuitous espionage she had conducted over the Mandl dinner table listening to Austrian and German experts discuss their weapons projects and problems. In effect, she was proposing that Washington could benefit from debriefing her about the weapons-development work of the Austrian and German engineering establishments. That was one way she believed she could help the Allied war effort.
Another way she thought she could help was by working on inventions of her own. She had several weapons inventions in mind. In Bad Boy of Music, Antheil locates her discussion of one such new weapon during that first evening at her house. But Hedy told an interviewer many years later that the impetus for her idea of inventing a remote-controlled torpedo had been the sinking of the City of Benares on 17 September, which was still four weeks away when Antheil first met her. Evidently, Antheil, to make a better story, compressed his several early meetings with Hedy into one.
Several years later, drafting a chapter for his memoir, Bad Boy of Music, Antheil described the setting for invention he found at Hedy’s house:
Here, then, and at long last must suddenly come the true solution as to why Hedy does not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her, why her “drawing room,” sure enough, is filled both with unreadable books and very useable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use. Why apparently she has no time for anybody except something ultra mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents! I believe it because I know.
By 12 September 1940, George could report to Boski that he had only the title music of the film score left to write. He was also working on the edited draft of his book about the war, The Shape of the War to Come. A writer who was a friend of his had taken the original manuscript in hand, George reported: “Our pal, Ted Mills, turned out to be an angel … and has done such an expert rewrite job with the book that I can hardly believe I wrote it. The facts are all mine, however. They [Longmans, Green] are featuring it on their fall list.” Antheil had worked himself into exhaustion, however, which had resulted in an accident that needed his doctor’s attention:
I have been up so many nights and have lost so much sleep that several days ago I was sharpening my pencils with a razor blade and gashed the forefinger of my left hand, which I promptly tourniqueted … and took to [Dr.] Lou Eshman who, fortunately, was home. He washed and bandaged it, saw that it was not serious, and since then I have had to play with 4 fingers of the left hand—until it heals which will not be for another week or two. But it shows you how extremely nervous I am.
Boski and Peter must have been away for most of the month of September, which would be consistent with a long trip by train across the United States and back—six days round trip—and with grieving in-laws; Hedy and George began working on Hedy’s idea for a remote-controlled torpedo some time after the 17 September City of Benares disaster. When Boski returned at the end of the month, Antheil reports in his memoir, she was suspicious of her husband’s new friendship with a beautiful movie star. “Boski was so indignant,” he writes, “that I had to bring Hedy down to our house just to show Boski what a nice girl Hedy really was.” His wife wasn’t convinced, Antheil adds, but “as time went by, Boski and Hedy became good friends anyway. They are really very much alike basically; both are Hungarian-Austrian and have many tastes in common.”
Left unsaid in Antheil’s public version of Boski’s reaction to Hedy is a long-standing conflict between the Antheils over George’s evident infidelities. Writing to Boski from his hotel while she was away, George had reported on his behavior: “I have been a very very very VERY good boy—why this time I haven’t even had a girl out to lunch, or dinner, to say nothing of anything else. Why I haven’t even spoken to a girl—any girl—alone!!!!! Nor have I wanted to, really.” But of course he had spoken to a “girl,” to Hedy, and had dinner with her as well, although at that point perhaps only with the Adrians chaperoning. The story, in Bad Boy of Music, about Hedy writing her phone number on his windshield in lipstick, whether true or not, is certainly intended to invoke a standard device in B movies of signaling the beginning of a sexual liaison, another marker Antheil plants to demonstrate that he was a certified bad boy.
Yet an affair between Hedy and George seems highly unlikely. Even without heels she was three inches taller than he, and all the men in her life were tall. Boski, for obvious reas
ons, monitored George’s behavior closely. Her skeptical initial response to his friendship with Hedy is one example. Another is her response to an offer from Hedy. The two women may have become friends, but later, Antheil writes, “when Hedy moved down into Beverly Hills proper and discovered that the so-called ‘play’ house in back of her swimming pool was fully equipped and furnished” and invited the Antheils to move in rent free, Boski turned down the offer, even though the Antheils were, as usual, short of funds. Boski had asked Hedy if she went swimming every day. Hedy had said yes, she did, “but nobody else comes, excepting [her fellow MGM star] Ann Sothern.” Boski had then inspected the house and found that every window looked out on the pool. The Antheils stayed where they were.
As late as 1945, George still had to reassure his wife about his behavior when they were apart, writing to her:
By the way, don’t take my letters to the “girl friends” seriously. It hardly ever does occur to me—but once in a long while the darkness still momentarily descends, and in a flash of white anger I sometimes still do whip out—but more and more harmlessly. I know you’ll understand what I mean.
Here is the fact: I’ve been away for a month, and I haven’t even taken a girl out to dinner, let alone anything else. This for me is a record. Especially with everybody in the world at hand. I promise to stay true.
“Whip out,” in the context of Antheil’s anger, seems to mean “lash out.” What darkness was he speaking of? He didn’t say, but certainly his struggles for recognition, even sometimes for bare existence, could have been enough to set a small, proud man hunting for sexual conquests.
By 30 September Boski had returned to find George and Hedy working on their invention. George wrote to Bullitt that day, shamelessly name-dropping without explaining why he and Hedy were spending time together, and included her autographed photo. “I get around Hollywood a great deal, because, often, I must,” Antheil told his influential friend obscurely, “and the other night when I was having dinner with the ultra-beautiful Hedy Lamarr … she expressed such fervent admiration for you that—for the jest of the thing for I know it’ll make you smile—I made her go to her cabinet, get out her most gorgeous photograph, and sign that admiration upon it. It may amuse you, inasmuch as I notice that TIME Magazine of this week declares that Hedy Lamarr is the American soldier’s favorite, Ann Sheridan coming second.”
How did an actress and a composer go about inventing a remote-controlled torpedo? What was original about their invention that allowed them to successfully patent it, as they eventually did? Hedy discussed the invention process at length in 1997 in a telephone conversation with a fellow inventor, Carmelo “Nino” Amarena, who is also an electrical engineer expert in the field of digital wireless communications. “We talked like two engineers on a hot project,” Amarena told me, “prompting one another to the next subject. I never felt I was talking to a movie star, but to a fellow inventor. When you talk to a sympathetic mind about technology, gender, age, and experience disappear completely, and soon you’re one-on-one with the topic at hand.” Hedy told Amarena that she thought first of a torpedo that was remote controlled. For that she thought of radio.
Amarena wasn’t sure why she thought of radio when the Mandl dinner table discussions had concerned wire guidance, but there is reference in the working patent documents that Hedy’s son Anthony provided to me to a particular 1939 Philco console-model radio with a unique new feature: the retail radio market’s first wireless remote control, a six-inch cabinetry cube with a dialer on top with ten finger holes, like the dialer on a dial telephone. The holes matched up with a ring of small indentations impressed into the surface of the cube printed with the call letters of the radio stations set up to be dialed. Inserting a finger into the dialer hole corresponding to the station to be dialed, rotating the dialer, and letting it return signaled the radio to change frequency to that of the desired station. There were dial positions for up to eight radio stations, plus a dial position for volume control and another that would turn the radio off. (It had to be turned on by hand.) Philco called its new remote the Mystery Control. It was essentially a one-tube radio that communicated on a fixed frequency with either one of two models of console radios, the less expensive 39-55RX or the more elaborate 39-116RX. Each had a corresponding fixed-frequency accessory receiver inside its cabinet that processed the signals from the remote.
With reference in their working documents to the Philco Mystery Control, Hedy or George must at least have seen the radio somewhere. The 116RX was Philco’s top-of-the-line model, with a ten-tube radio and expensive cabinetry; it cost $162.50, which would be about $2,600 today, and only 20,480 were manufactured. It was too expensive for the Antheils. Hedy may have bought one or received one as a gift in 1939, the first year of its manufacture. With a Mystery Control in hand, changing stations on her Philco radio from across the room, she could easily have conceived the idea of using radio to control a torpedo, changing its direction remotely just as she changed radio stations.
But conceiving a new use for an existing invention that is substantially the same as the old is not usually a patentable idea. Nor did Hedy think it so. She took her idea a step further, not to make it patentable merely, but to solve a problem she foresaw of torpedo control by radio: jamming. How she knew that set-frequency radio-control systems were easily jammed, she never said. The Philco radios that used Mystery Control were plagued with interference problems, and jamming is simply deliberate interference. The radios had to be adjusted in apartment buildings and other close quarters to prevent signals sent in one apartment from changing stations on radios in other apartments, much as early fixed-frequency garage-door remote controls sometimes signaled neighbors’ garage doors to open that happened to be tuned to the same frequency.
Another possible model for Hedy’s thinking was German research ongoing in the 1930s on radio-controlled anti-ship weapons such as glide bombs, research about which she might have heard over the Mandl dinner table. Radio control had already been pioneered before and during World War I. The Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla patented a radio-controlled boat, which could of course be loaded with explosives and serve as a torpedo, in 1898; a text on the subject, Radiodynamics: The Wireless Control of Torpedoes and Other Mechanisms, by a U.S. Navy engineer, B. F. Miessner, was published in the United States in 1916.
Miessner examines the problem of jamming but offers no solution comparable to the one Hedy would eventually conceive. The closest he comes is a system that generates high-frequency signals so far above the contemporary range of signaling frequencies that an enemy would be unlikely to detect it, much less jam it. The system had a serious flaw: had it been developed, it would eventually have started a minor arms race, with each side moving to higher frequencies as previous operating frequencies were overrun. Success would depend, that is, on an enemy’s temporary ignorance of a frequency selection rather than on an active mechanism that somehow blocked or evaded a jamming attempt.
A glide bomb, as its name implies, is a winged bomb dropped from a plane that can be guided by radio control of its wing surfaces to glide forward and change direction as it falls, maneuvering toward a target even if the target attempts to move itself out of the way. The Japanese kamikaze suicide planes that plagued U.S. Navy ships late in World War II were essentially powered glide bombs, except that the glide bombs developed in Germany were remote controlled so that no human pilot had to be sacrificed to their operation.
Formal German development of glide bombs began in 1938 with the opening of a research program at the German Aviation Research Institute, but discussions of such technology had been ongoing in the German engineering community during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when the Luftwaffe, which participated in that war on the side of the Spanish Fascists, struggled with the problem of bombing ships that were maneuvering to evade its aircraft. (It was the Luftwaffe’s notorious Condor Legion that bombed the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, the subject of Picasso’s fa
mous painting.) And significantly for Hedy’s possible knowledge of early glide-bomb research, one of the first bombs that Germany developed, the Henschel Hs 293, used a Walter hydrogen-peroxide rocket to increase its forward motion enough to prevent it from being overtaken by its control plane, a serious problem with earlier unpowered models. (When the German glide bombs were deployed operationally, midway through World War II, they caused great destruction. Their threat was finally abated by bombing the limited number of airfields specially equipped to launch them.)
None of these unrelated developments adds up to Hedy’s invention, but they do suggest what some of the possible components and extrapolations might be that prepared her for her breakthrough. Nino Amarena, the inventor and engineer, commented on the phenomenon in our discussion of his 1997 interview with Hedy. “More often than not,” he told me, “the inventive process follows a cascade of ideas and thoughts interconnected from previous concepts that for the most part lie separate, unconnected and unrelated. It takes a clear state of mind, which is usually someone thinking ‘outside the box,’ to suddenly or serendipitously see the connection between the unrelated concepts and put it all together to create something new.” In that regard, the process of invention is no different from the creative process in other fields. Scientific discovery proceeds the same way. So do painting and sculpture. So does creative writing. The results are different, because each process operates on different realities and by different rules.
Hedy’s original idea is simple to state: if a radio transmitter and receiver are synchronized to change their tuning simultaneously, hopping together randomly from frequency to frequency, then the radio signal passing between them cannot be jammed. Hedy called this idea “hopping of frequencies,” a grammatically German translation of the German compound word Frequenzsprungverfahren, “frequency-hopping process”—in colloquial English, “frequency hopping.”