An Inventor In Hollywood

Anointed “the most beautiful woman in the world” by the Hollywood press corps, as the new documentary film, “Bombshell” tells us, raven-haired and dark-eyed Hedy Lamarr was born in 1913 to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish couple. Hedi Keisler, as she was then, began acting at 17 and made a controversial Czech film, “Ecstasy,” in which she ran nude through woods and simulated an orgasm. At 20 she married Fritz Mandi, a Jewish arms manufacturer who had converted to Roman Catholicism so he could sell munitions to the Nazis.

Bored by Mandi, who treated her like a prisoner, afraid of the Nazis, and wanting freedom to be herself, Hedi escaped the Mandi castle by drugging a maid and bribing a guard, hopped a train to Paris and then moved on to London. Her newly acquired agent introduced her to Louis B. Mayer, who offered her $125 a week to sign a Hollywood contract. She said no, but within a day she was on the ship carrying him back to New York; a week later he offered her $500 a week. This time she said yes.

In Hollywood, Lamarr — Mayer and his wife gave her the new name — became part of a system that worked its contracted actors six days a week by drugging them with uppers and downers. No wonder then that Lamarr came home after 12 hours in front of the cameras to do what she most enjoyed: inventing. From her “inventing table” came a glow-in-the-dark dog collar, an aid to help people with limited mobility get in and out of the bath, even a sort of bouillon cube that would turn water into Coca-Cola (it was a bust).

But it was “frequency hopping” that was her greatest achievement. Developed with her friend, the avant garde composer George Antheil, and based on the perforated paper roll that controls player pianos, the invention was designed to be a way for the U.S. Navy to launch radio-controlled torpedoes that could not be jammed by the enemy. The Navy, failing to grasp the possibilities of the invention, told Lamarr she could do more for the war effort by selling war bonds and shelved her invention. Today it is the basis of cellular and Bluetooth communication.

Lamarr’s first film for Mayer was “Algiers” with Charles Boyer. Later she had success with Clark Gable in “Boomtown” and with Victor Mature in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 hit, “Sampson and Delilah.”

Married six times, she was the pawn of powerful men who traded on her beauty or wanted her for arm candy. Director Alexandra Dean is fascinated by this enigmatic woman’s highs and lows. Using never-before-heard tapes from telephone interviews conducted with Lamarr in 1990 by Forbes magazine, Dean interweaves them with on-camera comments by family members and friends to tell the story of a woman who spent seven decades trying to be taken seriously and failed.

At times “Bombshell” drags and becomes dry. The family interviews provide little insight; those with Mel Brooks and the late Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne are banal. Best are the tapes of Lamarr musing about what happened to her. During her final years she was a recluse in her tiny Florida apartment, her gorgeous face ruined by successive plastic surgeries. She lived on Social Security, spent little, yet left an estate worth $3.3 million when she died in early 2000. Enigmatic to the end.

“Bombshell” is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, 48 Main St, Millerton, NY 12546 (518) 789-0022.