Hedy's Folly

Review by Geoffrey Wawro

Vienna-born Hedwig Kiesler, who went to Hollywood in the 1930s and became Hedy Lamarr—Delilah in Cecil B. De Mille’s blockbuster Samson and Delilah—was also a formidable inventor. Rhodes’ latest book is striking, for Hedy had little formal education beyond primary school. The book also delivers a striking portrait of the 1930s, when Europe competed with Hollywood for film and stage laurels, and someone like Hedy Kiesler could drift profitably between the two worlds. She finally left Europe in 1937 at age 24, in part because of the Nazi menace (she was Jewish), but chiefly to escape her rich husband Fritz Mandl, who was stifling her.

Rhodes’ account of Hedy’s marriage to Mandl (the first of six marriages for her) is equal parts titillating and instructive, delivering keen insights into the murky world of interwar arms dealing in Europe. The half-Jewish Mandl was CEO of Hirtenberger, a big Austrian arms manufacturer with clients in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and elsewhere. Rhodes shows how Hedy picked up her inventive engineering streak while married to Mandl and hosting his countless dinner parties with generals, admirals, air marshals, war ministry secretaries and defense contractors. Hedy listened in on hours of conversation between her husband and his clients—on inventions like the Messerschmitt fighter, the Heinkel bomber, “pocket battleships” and diesel-electric submarines. She loved Mandl for his wealth and power, but also for his mind: “he had the most amazing brain… There was nothing he did not know.” She shared Mandl’s love of learning, and filed away the table talk in her pretty and intelligent head.

She left him in 1937, unable to stomach her loss of independence. “I was no longer Hedy Kiesler, an individual. But I was only the wife of Fritz Mandl.” Feeling “strangled to death by luxury,” she had an affair in St. Moritz with Erich Maria Remarque, and then decamped to America. With her usual flair for networking, she met Louis B. Mayer—the head of MGM Studios—on the way. Mayer gave her the screen name “Hedy Lamarr” as well as her first contract in Hollywood. While making movies, she and the composer George Antheil began inventing together. They worked on a frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum guidance system for glide bombs and torpedoes that was patented, but never procured by the U.S. Navy. Rhodes claims that the murderous U-boat wolf packs that sank passenger liners and unarmed merchant freighters aroused the sympathy of Lamarr and Antheil and their determination to invent a weapon that could rout the German surface and submarine fleet. Rhodes concludes the book by affirming that their frequency-hopping system is even today the guts of cordless phones, WiFi, cellphones and Bluetooth.

Readers will enjoy this unusual book, which hops back and forth across the war-torn Atlantic, and describes the unlikely intersection of entertainment and military technology in the hands of a beautiful Viennese savant and celebrity.