Hedy's Folly
There is everything in it—military band music, waltzes, sentimental ditties, a Red Army song, a fugue, eccentric dancing—every kind of joke, acrobatic turn, patriotic reference and glamorous monstrosity. It is bright, hard, noisy, busy, bumptious, efficient and incredibly real. It is “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” orchestrated in red, white, and blue, with three cheers for the same every five minutes and plenty of pink lemonade. By moments it is thin of texture, but at its best and busiest it makes a hubbub like a live crowd and five military bands. And its tunes can all be remembered.
George Antheil had traveled far from his early cacophonous avant-garde work. He might well have said of his life, as of his music, that he had come home.
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The birth of her daughter, Denise, in 1945 had left Hedy with psychosomatic pain, for which she began seeing a Boston psychoanalyst. Flying from Hollywood to Boston for treatment “became a shuttle trip,” she remembered. Traumas emerged from earlier in her life: a schoolgirl encounter with a flasher; a workman’s sexual assault when Hedy was fourteen that she had kept secret from her parents out of shame; exposure to a frightening scar, from his rib cage to his hip, that Anthony Eden had revealed when he came aboard in swim trunks to swim with Hedy in the south of France. Two years later, “time and analysis” had helped her. “I found out who I am,” she said. Part of her problem had been the uncertainty and defensiveness she had felt in “the crisp, competitive world of Hollywood.” Even so, she was one of the few European artists who had successfully transitioned from her native culture and language to America. By 1947 she was ready to remake her life.
Believing that she could find better scripts if she had a wider range of choices, she negotiated past Louis B. Mayer’s angry possessiveness to extricate herself from MGM. Analysis had changed her, and her marriage to John Loder now felt lonely. “It was the case again,” she recalled, “where the unknown had much more allure for me than what I had now. I wanted a divorce, feeling there were other more exciting, more interesting experiences waiting for me.” First, however, she wanted another child, because she remembered the loneliness of her own childhood and hoped to spare Denise similar isolation. (She had essentially disowned James, her adopted son.) Anthony John Loder, Denise’s younger brother, was born in March 1947. Three months later Hedy divorced her third husband.
She was less successful making films on her own. “My judgment on scripts was faulty,” she concluded. “I was embarrassed … and worried.” Out of that limbo, in 1949, Cecile B. DeMille chose her to play Delilah in his costume blockbuster Samson and Delilah opposite Victor Mature. The picture premiered in New York on 21 December and broke all box-office records. Afterward, having fought with DeMille on the set about costume and character, Hedy was delighted with the seasoned director’s assessment of her. “We argued quite a bit,” he told a radio interviewer, “but I respected Hedy. She loves picture-making, it shines out of her. I had no idea Hedy was as good an actress as she turned out to be. She was fiery, yet did everything expected of her. When I was blowing up, Hedy remained calm. She had great self-confidence and self-respect. Considering her reputation and beauty, she is a most unaffected person.”
As her film roles declined in the 1950s, Hedy began working in the new medium of television, although more frequently as a celebrity guest than as an actor. By about 1970 she had given up that work as well. The careers of Hollywood stars, especially women, can be as short as the careers of professional athletes. Hedy’s career in film and television spanned more than thirty years. She estimated she had earned $30 million or more from acting—$372 million today. Financing films and submitting to voracious California community property laws across six divorces consumed most of it; she lived far more modestly in the later decades of her life than she had in her years of Hollywood stardom.
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Spread-spectrum technologies emerged from government secrecy in 1976 with the publication of the electrical engineer Robert C. Dixon’s textbook Spread Spectrum Systems, which a Dixon colleague called the “first comprehensive, unclassified review of the technology” that “set the stage for increasing research into commercial applications.”
Commercialization was further encouraged by President Jimmy Carter’s inflation czar, Alfred E. Kahn, a Cornell economist best known for deregulating the U.S. airline industry while chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978. Kahn, a liberal Democrat, promoted government deregulation for economic reasons, believing that it spurred economic development—a cause later taken up with conservative ideological fervor by President Ronald Reagan. At the Federal Communications Commission between 1977 and 1981, chairman Charles D. Ferris, a Boston-born physicist and attorney, abandoned the usual FCC practice of finding a consensus with the electronics industry before changing or adding to FCC rules. Instead, in line with Carter and Kahn’s emphasis on deregulation for economic growth, Ferris looked for innovative technologies hampered by what his assistant Michael J. Marcus calls “anachronistic technical regulations.” There was a reason for the regulations, Marcus explains:
In the 1970s the spectrum technology area was highly concentrated, with only a few major manufacturers:
Western Electric was the near-exclusive supplier of the local and long distance telecommunications industry, cellular was in its experimental stage, and the regulatory status quo was rather acceptable to the small “club” of major manufacturers serving the US market, all of whom were domestic companies. While regulations prevented rapid innovation, it [sic] also generally prevented both new entrants and technological surprise from the few competitors. Products could be planned and introduced with assurances that the R&D costs could be amortized over a long sales period. It was a cozy oligarchy for the major manufacturers, but it denied the public the benefits of rapid introduction of new technologies and services just as in the parallel Bell System telecommunications monopoly.
Ferris set out to change the situation, beginning with a study the FCC commissioned, delivered in December 1980, titled Potential Use of Spread Spectrum Techniques in Non-government Applications. Its key finding: “Spread spectrum techniques offer a unique method of sharing a common band between multiple users without requiring the users to coordinate their transmissions in any way.” For technical as well as political reasons, the report raised the possibility of using what are called the ISM bands—the radio frequencies allocated to industrial, scientific, and medical uses other than communication (such as microwave ovens and equipment for medical diathermy and industrial heating)—for spread-spectrum radio. Such equipment generated radio noise that interfered with narrow-band radio transmissions, which was why it had been allocated frequency bands of its own. (They were also called the garbage bands.) Spread spectrum, however, was resistant to such interference just as it was resistant to jamming. And since radio spectrum is limited, any new technology that could be overlaid onto spectrum already assigned to other transmissions without interfering with those transmissions was of obvious benefit. Or so Ferris and Marcus hoped.
The benefits were less obvious to competing interests within both government and industry. Marcus felt as if he were advancing into a lion’s den in 1983 when he went to the National Security Agency to make his case. “It became clear,” he writes, “that some individuals at NSA hoped to keep spread spectrum off the commercial market for fear that foreign military use of the technology would complicate NSA’s signal intelligence responsibility.” Fortunately for him, the wife of the “very senior NSA official” who introduced him had just bought a new car with a scanning AM/FM radio, a technology similar to spread spectrum, which meant, he told the assembled, that “the spread spectrum Pandora’s box may already have been opened and that shutting it was probably futile.” After that fortuitous rescue, Marcus writes, opposition to civil spread spectrum within the U.S. military and intelligence communities began to fade.
The communications industry was not so easily persuaded. Television networks and manufacturers such as RCA
and General Electric feared that spread spectrum would interfere with television signals. Manufacturers of cordless phones, which today use spread spectrum almost exclusively, suspected a plot by the FCC to deny them the narrow channels they preferred by dumping spread spectrum onto them.
Once the FCC understood the industry complaints, it forged an acceptable solution by authorizing spread spectrum in the ISM garbage bands, and then at low (but adequate) wattage. At the same time, and crucially, the commission allowed spread-spectrum communications in those bands to operate without an FCC license, unregulated. That meant that inventors, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers could proceed from conception to market without having to slog through the long, legally complicated, and therefore expensive process of seeking FCC approval. (“Legend has it,” Marcus notes, “that the original unlicensed device was a ‘couch potato’–like remote control for radio receivers.” So the 1939 Philco Mystery Control once again revealed its originality.)
If all this bureaucratic infighting seems obscure, what followed from it is happily familiar. “The rules adopted,” Marcus writes, “had a much greater impact than any of [their] advocates could ever have imagined at the time. They enabled the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the majority of cordless phones now sold in the US, and myriad other lesser-known niche products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more.
A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.
Hedy followed these developments. Sometimes she felt bitter about her lack of recognition as an electronic pioneer. In 1990, when she was seventy-five, she told a reporter for Forbes magazine how she felt. “I can’t understand,” she said, “why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world.” The reporter noted that she was “six times divorced and now living in Miami on a Screen Actors Guild pension” and couldn’t help feeling she’d been wronged. “Never a letter,” Hedy added, “never a thank you, never money. I don’t know. I guess they just take and forget about a person.”
Yet she didn’t let her resentment consume her. Robert Osborne, the journalist and television host, recalled her enthusiasm for life in a late profile:
Few people were ever blessed with a merrier sense of humor, few sailed through the calamities of life with more of a blithe spirit, few apologized less frequently and seemed to be having more fun, even when the bloodhounds were snapping at her ankles. The Hedy I had known since 1963 was game for anything—a picnic, a charade party, a dress-up affair at [the restaurant] “21,” a walk on the beach or a climb over a “No Admittance” barricade to get a look at something she was curious to investigate. Her energy, curiosity and generosity were enormous.… She was colorful without attempting to be and constantly unpredictable.… A sad figure? No way, and certainly not to the lady herself. She neither complained nor apologized. Hedy embraced that “Auntie Mame” philosophy that “life is a banquet.” If there was any tinge of tragedy connected to Hedy Lamarr, it was the fact that she ever had to grow old. When a face had been as flawless and celebrated as hers, it’s not easy greeting birthdays.… So Hedy retreated from the gazes of those who didn’t look deeper. She avoided cameras, shut the doors, kept out of sight, filled her days with activities (and lawsuits) and, with the humor still intact, tolerated the rest of us.
One man who never forgot about Hedy was a retired U.S. Army colonel named Dave Hughes. Hughes, a highly decorated veteran of both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars who lives in Colorado Springs, had retired early from the Army to explore the developing world of wireless digital communications. Something of a maverick, the descendant of eleven generations of Welsh Calvinists, he got interested in setting up free digital wireless for rural schools that couldn’t afford the high cost and charges of dedicated T1 lines strung out forty or a hundred miles across the Colorado prairie. “I wasn’t worried about rural kids getting a computer,” he told me. “They were falling in price and were going to be cheap. The problem was going to be the cost of communications and the evil empires called the phone companies.”
Hughes determined to solve that problem, at least by demonstration. He set up the first computer bulletin board in Colorado Springs, “two-way with a Hayes modem.” He helped Montana link up its 114 one-room schoolhouses with FidoNet, the noncommercial network of linked bulletin boards established by the San Francisco artist, pioneer hacker, and self-styled anarchist Tom Jennings in 1984. Then the National Science Foundation heard about Hughes’s work and came calling. After the NSF investigated, it awarded Hughes a seven-year, $7 million grant to continue exploring digital wireless for rural education. And it was while Hughes was doing due diligence for his NSF grant work, investigating the prior art, that he came across the story of Hedy Lamarr and frequency hopping.
By then, Hughes was connected to the burgeoning digital community in the San Francisco Bay Area through the Well, Stewart Brand’s pre-Web, dial-in version of a linked digital community, and he reported his discovery there. In 1993 he received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that defends digital rights and celebrates electronic pioneering. In 1994, attending an IEEE award ceremony for Mike Marcus, the FCC’s champion of spread spectrum, Hughes was irritated to hear Marcus say that Hedy’s invention was never reduced to practice. “I told him I questioned that,” Hughes says. “Because by this time, Scibor-Marchocki had heard about my discovery and put two and two together. He’d contacted me and told me about his sonobuoy.”
Hughes, a battle veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross who fell in love with Hedy Lamarr when he was thirteen, smelled sexism in the engineering community’s casual dismissal of her contribution. He decided she deserved recognition for her pioneering invention of frequency-hopping spread spectrum. The award he settled on trying to win for her was the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the same award he had received in 1993. (Other recipients: Doug Engelbart, Robert Kahn, Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, pioneers all.) By then, it was 1996. He had become a familiar figure on the Well, and when he reported what he was doing, he says, and explained to the young people who Hedy Lamarr was, “there was a groundswell starting on the Well to endorse the nomination.” He located Hedy’s son Anthony in Los Angeles. The EFF voted the award, to honor George Antheil posthumously as well. Hedy herself was happy to hear of it—“it’s about time,” she told Anthony—but was unwilling to appear in public to receive it. The EFF agreed that Anthony, now fifty years old and a Los Angeles businessman, could do so on her behalf.
The ceremony was held on the evening of 12 March 1997 at an Electronic Frontier Foundation conference in Burlingame, outside San Francisco. Receiving the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award, Hedy spoke briefly through a recording her son had made. Dave Hughes, always resourceful, had also brought a recorder and caught the message on tape. When I visited him in Colorado Springs in 2010, he played the tape for me, and I heard Hedy’s clear, Austrian-accented voice. “In acknowledgment of your honoring me,” she said simply, “I hope you feel good as well as I feel good about it, and it was not done in vain. Thank you.”
Eighty-two at the tim
e of that long-delayed recognition, she sounded remarkably young.
Afterword
Boski Antheil remained in Los Angeles after her husband’s death, raising their son, Peter. Over the years she worked on writing a memoir of their life together, especially their Paris days. She wrote vivid scenes, some of which I’ve quoted in this book, but never connected them into a coherent narrative. Nor did she live long enough to enjoy the rediscovery of her husband’s work, which began in the 1990s when Ballet mécanique was finally produced in something close to its original form with the aid of digital controls, some of them spread spectrum. Since then, George’s mechanical ballet has been performed in many different venues, once using robot performers. When the American composer John Adams was writing the music for his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, and wanted to invoke the intersection of physics and war that resulted in the invention of the first atomic bombs, he intentionally scored the overture in the style of Ballet mécanique. Other Antheil works have become part of the modern classical canon.
The beginning of an essay Boski drafted in the late 1960s recalls her characteristic voice and connects her past and present:
Some time ago my son Peter, who is in his thirties, asked me when I first came to America. He is a great devotee of the Twenties and at that time he was particularly interested in vintage cars. When I told him that it was in 1927 (the occasion being the Carnegie Hall performance of George’s Ballet mécanique), he exclaimed:
“It must have been wonderful to see all the old cars!”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“But Peter, then they were new cars!”
And so it goes. Even though at times I feel like a vintage car myself, as most of my contemporaries are passing away, somehow the past seems as present to me as if it happened yesterday. It is hard for me to imagine that I am an ancient relic of the Twenties. I really don’t feel that old, unless I suddenly realize that I am talking of a period about forty to forty-five years ago.