Hedy's Folly

  One problem that emerged to be solved was how to start both “ribbons”—the one in the transmitter and the matching one in the receiver—at the same time so that the information coded on the two ribbons would be synchronized. If the ribbons were not in sync, the receiver would be tuned to the wrong frequencies when the signals arrived and would fail to pick them up, so the requirement was crucial. Hedy and George’s patent application explains the system they devised:

  It is of course necessary that the record strips … at the transmitting and receiving stations, respectively, be started at the same time and in proper phase relation with each other, so that corresponding perforations in the two record strips will move over their associated control heads at the same time. We therefore provide an apparatus for holding both record strips in a starting position until the torpedo is fired, and for then simultaneously releasing both strips so that they can be moved at the same speed by their associated motors.

  The holding apparatus in both transmitter and receiver used a pin that would engage a special starting hole in the record strip to begin moving the strip forward. A compression spring normally held the pin away from the starting hole. Below the pin was a solenoid—a wire-wrapped iron rod that was held away from the pin magnetically when the wire was electrified. The solenoids on both the transmitter and the receiver were connected by wire to a battery, and the current from the battery kept each solenoid energized. The battery circuit also connected to the transmitter in the ship and the receiver in the torpedo. When the torpedo was launched, it broke the connecting wire, which interrupted the electricity flowing to the solenoids, which ceased to be magnetized, which released the solenoid rods, which pushed up the pins that engaged the starting holes, which allowed the clock motors in both the ship and the torpedo to begin simultaneously moving the record strips.

  A second problem Hedy and George had to solve followed from their decision to include seven transmitting channels in the transmitter but only four receiving channels in the receiver, thus allowing false signals to be sent on three channels to complicate and confuse an enemy’s jamming efforts. Resolving this problem was simpler: they provided for an indicator light at the transmitting station that would flash whenever the units were in transition between frequencies but would stay lit when the three false channels were engaged.

  With these problems solved and the Secret Communication System fully laid out in their patent application, Hedy and George filed with the U.S. Patent Office for patent recognition on 10 June 1941. Receiving a patent would be an achievement different, of course, from a decision by the U.S. War Department to take up their system and develop it for military use. Their patent effort worked through the Patent Office; their War Department effort worked through the National Inventors Council. The council’s response continued to be positive, Antheil wrote to Bullitt on 30 June:

  Recent communications from the office of Lawrence Langner, who is chief of the National Inventors Council, indicate that they and the War Department are deeply interested in Hedy Lamarr’s and my new radio-controlled torpedo; Langner indicates that the torpedo may be constructed and experimented with in Detroit.…

  In the meantime Hedy wants to come with me to Washington but I am discouraging this idea. We wouldn’t come unless the War Department really wants our torpedo, which torpedo is (incidentally) unique in that it is “jam-proof.”

  Hedy was restless in part because she’d been laid off between pictures at MGM. She was ill in February and had lost weight; her illness ran into the layoff when she rejected the scripts she was offered. She was also in the process of negotiating a salary increase. “Hedy was here Sunday,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt on 19 July, “and as you can imagine is very keen about the whole project, and she keeps calling me almost every day to see how it has progressed.… It so happens that you are, apparently, Hedy’s dream prince. Some years ago she’s [sic] apparently seen a picture of you somewhere or another and decided that you are ‘it.’ You’d better watch out for her if she ever comes down to Washington without us. She’s rather inclined to, incidentally, as she is still on probation with M.G.M. and hasn’t anything to do just now.” An asterisk after “inclined to” led to a handwritten footnote: “Only concerning the invention, of course.”

  Early in the new year, Boski Antheil had confronted her husband over his continuing effort to make a killing writing motion-picture scores. She explained the background to the confrontation in her unpublished memoir:

  At that time George’s music was not much played; we lived in Hollywood, and although George was working as much as ever on his symphonic music, as far as New York was concerned, he was corrupted because he did a few picture scores to make a living, he was tainted, and not only tainted but probably living in the lap of luxury, sold himself down the river, probably had a golden bathtub, swimming pool and surrounded by gin and chorus girls. If they only knew! How we had to struggle to make ends meet, juggling bills and sometimes bill collectors, bringing up our son Peter, never really knowing where the next check was coming from. Mainly because George did not wish to become a movie composer, but reserved most of his time for his own music, and one picture a year or even two certainly does not keep the wolf away from the door.

  “Hollywood is a funny place,” Boski added. “If you don’t play the game whole-heartedly and really live the Hollywood game, your price per picture is not very great.” She confronted her husband, hoping to convince him that he should give up his schemes for making a killing so that he could return to serious composing, and she trumped her argument by pointing out that at that time, in early 1941, they had exactly $36 in the bank.

  Antheil saw the point. “O.K.,” he said. “Let’s move away. I’m in a rut.”

  “We moved to a tiny little house on the beach,” Boski remembered, “where we spent two very productive years, the sea and the air clean and windswept. Peter walking around barefooted winter and summer, me cooking big pots of soup, and many friends coming out there to visit us.” The cottage was in Manhattan Beach, a few miles down the coast from what is now Los Angeles International Airport.

  Antheil echoes his wife. “We got the smallest house … into which three humans can crowd. And all of a sudden, we were all very happy. We didn’t have five dollars to buy groceries with, but we were happy.” It was there that Hedy visited them, in an elegant white silk pantsuit, her rich, dark hair stirred by the breeze off the ocean, happy to spend time at the beach with normal people.

  One day that summer Antheil walked to the Manhattan Beach post office, two miles away, and found a single letter in his box. “It was from my dead brother Henry’s estate and contained a check for $450 [$7,000 today]. ‘O.K., Henry,’ I said into the air, ‘I’m not so dumb but that I can’t get this. You want me to go on with my work, and I’m going on.’ ” Boski’s response to the gift was Hungarian. “His arm out of the grave!” she exulted.

  Henry’s gift added to the Antheils’ reserve from a film George had worked on that spring, he told Bullitt in late July: “I have just finished a very large motion picture score for which I have made the producers pay three times what it was worth; consequently I am able this summer and early autumn to do nothing but my own work, and am turning back again to musical composition. I am just finishing my fourth string quartet.”

  Hedy was finally busy again at the beginning of August, playing the female lead opposite Robert Young in the film version of John P. Marquand’s best-selling novel H. M. Pulham, Esq. For once she was cast not as a remote beauty but as a complex, vital woman, a New York advertising executive in love with a Back Bay Bostonian too proper to give up his settled marriage for love; later she would call it her favorite role. By now she had made seven major American films and was a certified Hollywood star—a superstar, we would say today.

  At the end of September, for reasons of its own, the National Inventors Council leaked the story of Hedy’s inventive gifts, omitting Antheil entirely:

  HEDY LAMARR INVENTOR

/>   Actress Devises “Red-Hot” Apparatus for

  Use in Defense

  Special to the New York Times

  HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept. 30—Hedy Lamarr, screen actress, was revealed today in a new role, that of an inventor. So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details.

  Colonel L. B. Lent, chief engineer of the National Inventors Council, classed Miss Lamarr’s invention as in the “red hot” category. The only inkling of what it might be was the announcement that it was related to remote control of apparatus employed in warfare.

  By then Hedy and George’s Secret Communication System had passed to the Navy for evaluation, which means it had cleared two layers of council examiners. Antheil told Bullitt that it “actually reached [Charles F.] Kettering, who was very enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.” Kettering’s enthusiasm may have prompted the announcement that the New York Times picked up.

  The invention reached the Navy at a bad time. War with Japan was in the air in the autumn and early winter of 1941. On 3 November, the same day the United States began evacuating military and civilian dependents from the islands of Guam, Midway, and Wake, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull warning of the possibility of war:

  [In State Department paraphrase:] The Ambassador said it was his purpose to insure against the United States becoming involved in war with Japan through any misconception of Japanese capacity to plunge into a “suicidal struggle” with us.… It would be short-sighted to underestimate the obvious preparations of Japan; it would be short-sighted also if our policy were based on a belief that these preparations amounted merely to saber rattling. Finally, he warned of the possibility of Japan’s adopting measures with dramatic and dangerous suddenness which might make inevitable a war with the United States.

  Japan did adopt those “measures”; at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, 7 December 1941, a flight of 353 Japanese carrier-based light bombers and other aircraft attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, where a large part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was anchored. Japanese bombs and aerial torpedoes sank or destroyed four American battleships; four others were hit and damaged. Three cruisers were also hit and damaged and three destroyers. The battleship Arizona was devastated by an eight-hundred-kilogram armor-piercing bomb; the bomb started an oil fire forward that initiated a chain of explosions culminating in the explosion of the ship’s main magazine. Everyone belowdecks died: 1,177 men, the largest death toll on a Navy ship in U.S. history.

  A seaman on the battleship California, Eddie Jones, described the devastation on the Pacific Fleet’s flagship:

  When that big bomb blew up and they put the fire out, I looked down in that big hole that went down three or four decks. I saw men all blown up, men with no legs on, men burned to death, men drowned in oil, with oil coming out of their eyes and their mouth and their ears. You couldn’t believe it was happening. You could see it in front of your eyes, but you couldn’t believe it. Here it was, a beautiful day—a beautiful Sunday morning—and you see everything blowing up and ships sinking and men in the water. And you think, we’re at peace with the world. This can’t be happening.

  The next day, 8 December, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a grim assembly of both houses of Congress. “Yesterday,” he began, “December Seventh, Nineteen Forty-One, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He called for a declaration of war, which Congress immediately voted and he signed the same day.

  Two days later, on 10 December, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. The United States had few ships in the area other than submarines and torpedo boats; these were deployed to patrol the region and attack Japanese shipping. “In the weeks and months that followed,” write two American naval historians, “U.S. submariners began to realize that there was something wrong with their torpedoes. More often than not success against Japanese ships was denied by torpedoes that ran too deep, exploded too soon, did not explode at all, or did not have enough explosive power to sink a ship when they did engage and detonate.” In 1942, 60 percent of U.S. torpedoes were duds. Japanese ships steamed into port with unexploded torpedoes stuck in their hulls like arrows.

  It took the submarine service eighteen months to push past Navy bureaucracy, skepticism, and hostility to determine what was wrong with its torpedoes. The answer was, almost everything. In the years between the world wars, torpedo research and development at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island, had withered on an annual budget of only $90,000. Because Newport saved money by testing its torpedoes’ depth meters with lighter practice torpedoes in still water, the weapons ran too deep, missing their targets entirely. Newport’s secret magnetic exploder, which was supposed to serve as a proximity fuse, failed to detect an enemy ship more often than it succeeded, and frequently triggered an explosion soon after the torpedo had left its submarine. These and other problems, including the torpedo station’s bitter and prolonged labor troubles, gave way only slowly to the determined assault of frustrated submarine commanders in the field.

  Under the circumstances, the Navy had no interest whatsoever in developing a new torpedo with a complicated guidance mechanism; it would be happy simply to see its old-fashioned unguided torpedoes occasionally both hit their marks and explode.

  Hedy and George heard of the decision months before their patent was allowed—in late January or early February 1942. “After considering our torpedo for a long while,” Antheil wrote to Bullitt on 5 February, “(during which period it seems that it was almost accepted) the government declined our torpedo, saying that it was excellently worked out, but still somewhat too heavy. Miss Lamarr now insists that we get to work and lighten it.”

  Whether they did or not, the record doesn’t reveal. By summer, Antheil was prepared to explain to Bullitt what he believed had gone wrong, an explanation worth quoting at length:

  Hedy and I spent a lot of time—and money—designing and perfecting [our torpedo]. It was then sent in—and it actually reached Kettering, who was very enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.

  But it was turned down at the Navy.

  Now, Bill, I don’t carp at that; God is my witness that if our Navy has something better than the Antheil-Lamarr radio torpedo no one would be happier than I. Honestly.

  But it’s the way they turned it down.

  They said that the mechanism we proposed was “too bulky to be incorporated in the average torpedo.”

  Now, if there’s one single criticism they could not, nor should not have made, it was THAT one.

  Our fundamental two mechanisms—both being completely, or semi-electrical—can be made so small THAT THEY CAN BE FITTED INSIDE OF DOLLAR WATCHES!

  I know (or I think I know) why they said that. In our patent, Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that a certain part of it worked not unlike the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-hatted gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words “player piano.”

  “My God!” I can see [them] saying. “We can’t put a player piano into a torpedo!”

  Or so it would appear. Remember that Kettering—who is quite a genius along the line of torpedoes—recommended it.

  Our invention—had it been accepted—would enable a plane far above to steer a torpedo or A WHOLE FLEET OF TORPEDOES—against an enemy squadron, correcting and re-correcting their rudders from a single steering wheel in the plane—AND the enemy fleet could not POSSIBLY “jam” or “smear” this control. (This latter feature is our main contribution to already known and tested elements of the so-far useless radio controlled torpedo.)

  The U.S. Patent Office had a better opinion of Hedy and George’s invention than did the U.S. Navy. On 11 August 1942, it issued the two in
ventors U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. Curiously, Hedy had filed not under her current legal name of Lamarr but disguised, as it were, as Hedy Kiesler Markey, as if she were determined not to allow her celebrity to influence the judgment of the patent examiners either way.

  When the Navy acquired the patent to a technology it had formally rejected is a question that can’t be answered until the National Inventors Council records are opened; they have remained off-limits now for decades on the grounds that they contain proprietary information. The Navy as well kept the technology secret for the next forty years, one reason Hedy and George’s contribution long went uncelebrated.

  After the patent was awarded, Antheil wrote to Bullitt again, complaining about the Navy’s rejection of his and Hedy’s inventions. Bullitt’s influence had declined sharply in Washington, however. He had dreamed of becoming secretary of state. Antheil had even encouraged him to think of running for president as Roosevelt’s successor. But Bullitt had destroyed his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt the previous year by pressing Roosevelt to dismiss Bullitt’s archrival Sumner Welles, whom the Secret Service had reported drunkenly propositioning a series of annoyed African-American Pullman porters on a late-night train trip from Huntsville, Alabama, to Washington. Bullitt, writes George Kennan, “unquestionably dealt to his relationship with FDR a blow from which it was never fully to recover. Welles was a close personal friend of the Roosevelt family. The President never fully forgave Bullitt for what he regarded as an uncharitable personal vendetta—a vendetta pursued not just in this one highly unpleasant interview in the White House but in statements to other people which were not long in reaching the Presidential ears.”

  Beset with troubles, Bullitt had no influence to spare for George Antheil. “I am sorry you feel so frustrated about your torpedo idea,” he responded on 25 August, “and wish I could do something to help you. I have, however, referred your idea to the proper people here and will take it up again. I am still learning the Navy from the ground up and, at the moment, can do nothing more.”