hedy lamarr

hedy lamarr

Hollywood is a place where folks are often recognized more for their looks than their talent - and actress Hedy Lamarr was no exception. But it's what she invented in her spare time - to help end that war - that has history turning a kinder eye, linking her to a bombshell of a whole different sort. Lee Cowan reports:

She possessed the kind of beauty that was haunting - an almost smoldering sensuality, with an exotic accent to match.

Even her name - Hedy Lamarr - sounded dark and mysterious. But although she shared the screen with Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart, people rarely remember Hedy's talent.

So what got a science writer interested in a half-forgotten celebrity? Quite simply, Hedy's other side - the intellectual side - and had it turned out, it might have been the blueprint for success far beyond Hollywood.

To the untrained eye the drawing is just a maze of wires and switches. But to Richard Rhodes, it was genius. What surprised him most, he told Cowan, was "the sheer inventiveness of the invention."

Her life reads like a Hollywood script: The glamorous movie star by day was, by night, the lonely immigrant channeling an inner Thomas Edison.

"She set aside one room in her home, had a drafting table installed with the proper lighting, and the proper tools - had a whole wall in the room of engineering reference books." That, Rhodes said, was where she "invented."

It was a hobby that remained obscured in the shadow of her celebrity - one she rarely revealed, even to her own son, Anthony Loder: "She was such a creative person, I mean, nonstop solution-finding. If you talked about a problem, she had a solution."

It was 1940, and German U-boats were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic torpedoing ships, very often with women and children aboard trying to flee the Nazis - something Hedy knew a little about.

Born Hedwig Kiesler to Jewish parents in Austria, Hedy had married a wealthy arms manufacturer named Fritz Mendl.

She spent many an evening absorbing his talk of top-secret weapons systems with the likes of Mussolini and others.

But with both the war and the Nazis approaching, Hedy decided to flee her homeland - and her marriage - and booked passage to Hollywood aboard the Normandy, a ship she knew was carrying a very famous passenger, movie mogul Louis B. Meyer.

She was already a name in the industry. Hedy had become infamous for her racy performance in the foreign film "Ecstasy." 

"By the end of the voyage, she had arranged with him, a contract of $600 a week, which would be $3,000 today, with the proviso that she learn English," Rhodes said. "Which she pretty quickly did."

Her career took off. But the war in Europe was never far from her mind. And a chance dinner party with a Hollywood composer named George Antheil changed everything.

Like her, Antheil tinkered with ideas. He was famous for composing an avant-garde symphony using unconventional instruments, not the least of which were 20 player pianos, all synchronized.

And that gave the two of them an idea: If pianos could be synchronized to hop from one note to another, why couldn't radio signals - steering a torpedo - hop as well? Their inventive partnership was born.