Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Dir: Alexandra Dean

2017

****

When most people think of Hedy Lamarr they think of Hollywood glamour, the Golden Age, Boomtown, soft focus and multiple husbands. She was of course a wonderful actor who surprised many back in the day when the male-dominated world of film making didn’t think a pretty girl could also act. She was actually born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna. Her father was born to a Galician Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family. As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna and then began taking acting classes. Lamarr was taking acting classes in Vienna when one day, she forged a note from her mother and went to Sascha-Film and was able to get herself hired as a script girl. While there, she was able to get a role as an extra in Money on the Street (1930), and then a small speaking part in Storm in a Water Glass (1931). Producer Max Reinhardt then cast her in a play entitled The Weaker Sex, which was performed at the Theatre in der Josefstadt. Reinhardt was so impressed with her that he brought her with him back to Berlin. However, she never actually trained with Reinhardt or appeared in any of his Berlin productions. Instead, she met the Russian theatre producer Alexis Granowsky, who cast her in his film directorial debut, The Trunks of Mr. O.F. (1931), starring Peter Lorre. Granowsky soon moved to Paris, but Lamarr stayed in Berlin and was given the lead role in No Money Needed (1932), a comedy directed by Carl Boese. Lamarr then starred in the film which made her internationally famous but also hampered her later career. In early 1933, at the age of eighteen, Lamarr was given the lead in Gustav Machaty’s film Ecstacy. She played the neglected young wife of an indifferent older man. The film became both celebrated and notorious for showing Lamarr's face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes, a result of her being duped by the director and producer, who used high-power telephoto lenses. Although she was dismayed and now disillusioned about taking other roles, the film gained world recognition after winning an award in Rome. Throughout Europe, it was regarded an artistic work. In America it was considered overly sexual and received negative publicity, especially among women's groups. It was banned there and also in Germany. Lamarr played a number of stage roles, winning many accolades from critics. Admirers sent roses to her dressing room and tried to get backstage to meet her. One admirer was more insistent than most. Friedrich Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria, became obsessed with getting to know her. She fell for his charming and fascinating personality, and partly due to his immense financial wealth. Her parents, both of Jewish descent, did not approve, due to Mandl's ties to Italian fascist leader Mussolini, and later, Hitler, but they could not stop their headstrong daughter. In 1933, Lamarr married Mandl. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the Italian government, selling munitions to the country. Lamarr wrote that the dictators of both Italy and Germany attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both her husband and country. One day she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, choosing to be an actress rather than a kept wife. In 1937 she met head of MGM Louis B. Mayer in London when he was scouting for talent in Europe. She initially turned down the offer he made her of $125 a week, but then booked herself onto the same New York bound liner as him, and managed to impress him enough to secure a $500 a week contract. Mayer persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr to distance herself from her real identity, and "the Ecstasy lady" reputation associated with it, choosing the surname in homage to the beautiful silent film star, Barbara La Marr, on the suggestion of his wife, who admired La Marr. He brought her to Hollywood in 1938 and began promoting her as the "world's most beautiful woman". She appeared in many popular productions but she was invariably typecast as the archetypal glamorous seductress of exotic origin. It served her well for a time but she always wanted more – and frankly deserved it. She brought as much as she could to her roles but she was never given anything too meaty, all thanks to Ecstasy. Her off-screen life and personality during those years was quite different from her screen image. She spent much of her time feeling lonely and homesick. Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 in1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild. Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine. In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen. The 1970s were a decade of increasing seclusion for Lamarr. She was offered several scripts, television commercials, and stage projects, but none piqued her interest. In 1974, she filed a $10 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming that the running parody of her name ("Hedley Lamarr") in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles infringed her right to privacy. Brooks said he was flattered; the studio settled out of court for an undisclosed nominal sum and an apology to Lamarr for "almost using her name". Brooks said that Lamarr "never got the joke" and is part of Alexandra Dean’s documentary. With her eyesight failing, Lamarr retreated from public life and settled in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981. In the last decades of her life, the telephone became Lamarr's only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she spent hardly any time with anyone in person in her final years. Her fans will know of her roots but less will know of her decline and hermit lifestyle in later life. Fewer people however will know that she invented Bluetooth and Wi-fi. This isn’t a typo, all those conversations she had with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology had an impact. She was a secret inventor who never received credit for what she created. The technology she developed was taken and used by the military years ago and all these decades later is used in satellites, mobile phones and in pretty much every electric device we use today. As Alexandra Dean’s documentary discovers, her net-worth today should be in the hundreds of billions if her ideas had been patented. This is the ultimate ‘not just a pretty face’ story, a comprehensive biopic that celebrates the true star and not just the one on the cover of a magazine. It’s as timely as ever when you realise that it was misogyny that quashed her genius, an inspiration to many, who died alone and impoverished. A great documentary.