Hedy wanted to do her patriotic best for her adopted country and enlisted Antheil in her cause. Second, Rhodes shows how Lamarr's knowledge of armaments and Antheil's experience with synchronizing player pianos and other mechanic musical instruments led them to a patent for a way to make radio-guided torpedoes jam-proof.

Rhodes weaves a gossipy international, cross-cultural romp worthy of Hedda Hopper. Between them, they seem to have crossed paths with everyone who was anyone in the arts, music and politics, from Benito Mussolini to Howard Hughes, from James Joyce to Clark Gable. First, in tracing the parallel lives of Lamarr and Antheil during the years between the wars. 'All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.' 'Any girl can be glamorous,' Lamarr famously said. Ziegfeld Girl by night, she worked on frequency-hopping. Her inventive talents also now came to the fore. In 1937, she gathered her jewels and furs and, disguised as her maid, escaped to Paris, and eventually to Hollywood, where she was transformed by MGM into Hedy Lamarr and splashed all over the silver screen. 'There was nothing he did not know.'īut Hedwig Kiesler Mandl was not content to be a trophy wife. 'He had the most amazing brain,' Hedy later wrote.

But in Mandl's company she learned about armaments inside and out. It was a fraught, doomed marriage – a rebellious, independent woman and a dominating, possessive man (Mandl tried to buy up every extant copy of the infamous film). Her handsome, vigorous father read her books and took her on long walks, during which he would explain how everything worked, 'from printing presses to streetcars,' she later explained.Īt 19, stunningly beautiful and infamous for her role inĮcstasy, she married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy, Vienna-based arms manufacturer who was apparently willing to sell weapons to whoever would buy.

From an early age, she dreamed of becoming a movie star, but she also had an insatiable curiosity. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in Vienna, in 1913, the only child of a well-to-do family of assimilated Jews. In Hedy Lamarr, he seems to have found a subject dear to his heart. The Making of the Atomic Bomb and other books on the nuclear age. Richard Rhodes is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Among her inventions, in collaboration with the musical composer George Antheil, was a radio guidance system for jam-proof torpedoes that incorporated an idea called 'frequency hopping,' which in its more modern manifestation, as spread-spectrum technology, is the basis for everything from cell phones to GPS.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes