Original subtitles

Hedy wanted to do

something important with her life.

She wanted to make her mark.

But she was totally judged by that face.

One of the most glamorous stars

show business ever has produced...

One of the most glamorous stars the screen has ever known...

And one of the most beautiful women in the world...

Well, shall we all say it together?

- I think we all know. - ♪ The most beautiful girl

in the world ♪

Hedy Lamarr.

She becomes the model for Snow White.

And she inspired Catwoman.

Oh, my God, I mean, she was...

she was the best-looking movie star that ever lived.

She became my inspiration.

Thank you, thank you, Hedy, thank you.

It's not Hedy, it's Hedley, Hedley LaMarr.

I don't know whether it's true, but you hear things.

I heard that she was a scientist.

So is this true?

Within the nerd community at Google,

Hedy Lamarr was this beloved figure.

For me, she is this perfect underdog,

like, crime-fighter-by-night story

because she lived this life of great accomplishments

and people didn't really know about it.

I remember sitting up in a bare attic with my mother,

she said, "Look, I got a patent."

"You got a patent, Mom?"

- "Yeah." - "You invented something?"

"Yeah, I invented a secret communication system, look."

And, today, we have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

That's my mother's technology.

You see?

No.

Well, it is kind of hard to explain.

Hedy had one of the most recognizable faces of her time,

and yet, she said she was never seen

for who she was.

So, who was she?

Tell me something that I didn't know about you.

I want to be a simple... I am!

I'm a very simple, complicated person.

Could you help her?

- Yes, but not here. - But you know what I mean?

You know what I mean!

This book you're writing now, Hedy, are there...

Incidents, things that nobody ever knew about me.

- Regrets? - Oh, no, no regrets.

You learn from everything all the time.

When I was a child,

she was always working on her story.

She was going to let the world know her version

and her story and her autobiography

in her words, but yet, it never came to be.

Hedy became a recluse.

She wouldn't even see her family.

We wanted to spend time with her,

but she kept us away.

There was so much scandal.

There were different chapters of scandal.

There was her movie Ecstasy that she made as an adolescent,

the nudity and the explicitness of that,

and then the multiple marriages and divorces,

and then the arrests.

My mother has a hard side and an easy side,

and as her son, growing up with Hedy was difficult.

I mean, she had so many sides and so many faces,

and even I couldn't understand who Hedy Lamarr was.

I'd been waiting for somebody to contact me

about Hedy Lamarr

because I had the tapes.

Where did I find it?

It's embarrassing.

I found it behind that blue trash can.

I'd had stuff stowed there and I moved it out of the way,

and there it was.

So, in all, there were four tapes

and this is the first one.

Ready?

Yes?

This is Fleming Meeks at Forbes.

Oh, hello! Thank you so much for the roses.

You're very welcome.

I love them!

I'm very pleased.

I was a staff writer at Forbes

and my father was an astrophysicist at MIT,

and he called me one day, and he said,

"I've just talked with this friend of mine here

and he told me this amazing story

about Hedy Lamarr," and, of course, I pursued it.

I want to sell my life story to Ted Turner

because it's unbelievable.

The opposite of what people think.

The brains of people are more interesting

than the looks, I think.

People have the idea I'm sort of a stupid thing.

I never knew I looked good to begin with.

Because my mother wanted a boy

named Georg (George).

So unfortunately I didn't become that and...

she wasn't too thrilled about that.

I was...

different, I guess.

Maybe I came from a different planet, who knows.

But whatever it is...

inventions are easy for me to do.

My mother was very inventive.

In this article, "Hedy's interest in gadgets

really started at the age of five

when she took an old-fashioned music box apart

and put it back together again."

And this was her childhood music box.

You wind up this little rabbit here

and it plays an Austrian melody.

My mother was curious.

She had a very intellectually curious mind.

She wanted to know how things worked,

and her father told her things.

Although her father's official position

was as bank director,

he was also interested in technology.

So, when they went for their walks,

he would point out to her how things worked.

The streetcar with its electric trolleys

leads these wires to a factory

that generates electricity.

She learned to associate invention

with this father, whom she adored.

My father...

He was a wonderful person.

I miss him.

They lived in Vienna in a fashionable district,

the 19th District.

It was heavily Jewish

but also very artistically inclined.

Hedy's parents were both assimilated Jews.

That was very common in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They were wealthy, they were cultured.

They took their daughter to the opera, to the theater.

Everyone was connected with this world of make believe.

I miss Austria.

Have you ever been there?

I've been to Austria, yes.

Not Vienna?

Fall is the best time to go there.

Where did you go to school?

In a private school in Vienna.

My favorite thing in school was...

What's that thing when you mix things?

- Chemistry. - Chemistry! Thank you.

Well I'm good at that.

In a different era,

she might very well have become a scientist.

At the very least, it's an option

that was derailed by her beauty.

By the time she was a teenager,

when she walked into a room, conversation stopped.

She was probably a little dazzled by this power,

testing it out,

seeing how it works and so forth.

There's a word for what I was.

A... what?

'Enfant terrible.'

I know that. I know that much French.

Well good!

There are stories about her heading to the photographer

to get her photos taken with and without clothes.

She lived in a society where there were

many prominent women who had not only incredible careers,

but loads of lovers.

Women, especially in the arts,

could have certain kinds of liberties

that they would not find in normal bourgeois society.

Hedy decided one day, at the age of 16,

that she was ready

and went off to the largest film studio and walked in.

Very quickly, within a couple days,

they had her in a walk-on.

I have seen the little weird Viennese films

that she made in the beginning

where she's a little bit awkward

but clearly beautiful.

But it's clearly the 1933 film Ecstasy

that really brought her into everyone's consciousness.

Hedy became world famous

the moment she appeared naked in Ecstasy.

The Pope denounced it

and Hitler refused it to be shown.

People were just shocked by it.

It was quite controversial because she simulated an orgasm.

I think it was the first time anybody had ever done that.

I mean, in some ways, it was analogous to a sex tape.

This was so scandalous and really marked her

as this certain type of woman.

I don't know if you ever saw that.

I don't believe I have.

There was a scene in which I was totally alone

but it was cut so that it

showed that it was a very hot sex scene,

which it wasn't.

You must have seen a picture of that, right?

Yes, ma'am.

And I said, "Why do I have to put my arms together?"

And they said, "Don't ask so many questions."

"If you don't do what I say then I put the needle

through the couch so you do what I tell you."

And I was...

I didn't want to make any commotion, so I did that.

And when I came back to Vienna

my father... I mean...

it was horrendous.

He wanted to kill me practically.

What I did though...

right after that

I said, "I'll show them."

Fritz Kreisler composed a musical called

'Elisabeth of Austria, ' the Queen of Austria,

and I had a big, big, big success with that.

On stage.

I had ovations

and my father cried.

And then I got married right after that.

Hedwig, as an actress,

drew, of course, the attention of many people,

and one of those was a man named Fritz Mandl.

I was married to a munitions tycoon in Austria!

He is the Henry Ford of Austria.

He, at that point, is 14 years her senior.

He is allied with the Nazis

because he's an armaments manufacturer.

As it is the same today,

a lot of wealthy men would like to decorate themselves

with beautiful women, and I think she was,

for a minute, fascinated with that as well.

We had a country house with 25 guest rooms.

And we went hunting.

And I loved that.

Do you know guns?

Yes.

I had a Browning and I shot a stag into the neck

350 meters.

Meters? Very long.

I'm a good shot so be careful!

Hedy was Mandl's armpiece

at the banquets that he served

for admirals in the German and Italian Navy.

She sat there and it was her job to be beautiful,

but she was bored out of her mind.

Fritz Mandl was, by German measures, Jewish,

and therefore, Hitler was concerned

not to be seen with him,

and I doubt very much if Hitler was a guest

at one of their houses, but Mussolini was.

I assume that your first husband

was supplying arms to the...

To the Germans.

But he never let me in on...

He never even let me come into the factory.

I disturbed the people.

I didn't know why...

Fritz did not like the effect

that his beautiful wife had on other men.

He was immensely jealous and paranoid about his wife.

He was constantly convinced

that she might be having an affair.

The big mistake my husband at the time did

he bought up prints of that...

dumb picture!

Mandl had the problem of this film,

this dirty picture which he tried to buy up,

and they started cranking them out by the dozens,

and he eventually gave up because, obviously,

they could make as many copies as he chose to buy.

He turned out to be someone who had the maids listen in

on her phone calls.

She had everything she could ever want,

except the one thing that Hedwig Kiesler always wanted

which was freedom.

By 1937, the war was inevitable,

and she was in a desperate situation.

Because after all,

Hitler had everything in the palm of his hand.

When Ecstasy was released,

Hitler told the American press he was banning it

because the lead actress was Jewish.

Jewish people were not allowed out on streets

at certain times of the day and, gradually,

they were denied more and more civil rights.

And this is one thing that led

to Hedy's father Emil's death was his stress and worry

about what was happening.

He died suddenly from a heart attack.

And I think that was the turning point for her.

Deep traumatic experiences change us,

and she came out the other side

remembering what her father had advised her from childhood:

"Be yourself.

Choose and take what you want,"

which was certainly Hedy's quality all her life.

There are stories,

whether they're apocryphal or not,

who knows, but almost like a prison escape.

Hedy had people watching her all the time.

There was no way to break loose.

So, one night, they were having a dinner party,

and my mother helped choose the maids

and caretakers, and so she found someone

that looked like her a lot 'cause she had this in mind.

So, she had this sleeping powder,

and she made this tea

and she switched the cups with the maid,

and the maid drank it and kind of fell asleep.

Now my mother's all ready.

She took all her jewels,

put 'em in the lining of her coats.

She put on the maid's costume.

She jumped on her bicycle and rode off.

My parents had friends in England.

So I went there.

Pre-war London was a safe haven.

Hedy spent several months there

trying to figure out her next steps.

We one day went to a movie.

I forgot even what it was.

And they happened to have a lion.

You know, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

So I said, "Oh I want to be in that!"

She quickly found an American film agent.

Somebody took me to a hotel

and there was a little man there.

I didn't know who he was, what he was.

I couldn't speak English, obviously.

Louis B. Mayer was the little man.

That was Louis B. Mayer?

With his entourage, yeah.

Louis B. Mayer, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,

had come to Europe to buy up all the actors and actresses

who were escaping Nazi Germany.

He figured he could take them back to Hollywood

and enslave them in his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer empire

for a cheap price.

He offered her $125 a week and reminded her

that she had to keep her clothes on.

And she said, "I'm sorry, that's not good enough,"

and walked out.

She impressed him, I'm sure.

People didn't usually turn down Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

But minutes after she walked out,

she had second thoughts

and quickly booked passage on the Normandie,

the ship Mayer was sailing back to New York.

She, I think, probably rather cleverly

made sure that she saw him about the decks

in her tennis clothes and so forth,

in her bathing suit.

On the first or second night out,

Hedy went to her very modest cabin

and pulled out her designer couturier gown

and she put on the last baubles that she owned

and she walked through the dining room

of the Normandie, past Louis B. Mayer's table.

There's Douglas Fairbanks Jr. sitting right there,

and his eyes are glued to Hedy Lamarr,

as are the eyes of every man and woman

in that dining room.

And Louis B. Mayer knew he had to have her.

He snapped his fingers

and I didn't know why, I didn't know what...

all of a sudden I got $500 every week.

Hedy Kiesler, Hedy Kiesler, Kiesler.

We gotta do something about the name.

So, Louis B. Mayer's wife was there and she said,

"Well, Barbara La Marr is one of my favorites.

Why not Hedy Lamarr?"

Lamarr, the sea, perfect.

Let's be Hedy Lamarr.

She didn't speak a word of English.

She learned those few lines on the boat to convince

Louis B. Mayer that he should hire her as an actress.

She created her own reality,

and I find that really fascinating.

You know, when things don't come easy

figure out why...

and then do something about it.

And if people... walk over you

then don't let them!

She stepped off the ship in New York

to crowds of flashing light bulbs

and reporters firing questions at her as Hedy Lamarr,

the latest discovery of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Hello, everybody,

this is Hedda Hopper reporting to you from Hollywood,

that fabulous place where everyone wants to live

but seldom does.

In Hollywood, she was kicking her heels

and listening to music and being free.

She was a little bit worried because the contract,

it had kind of a trial time before they used her,

and she wasn't getting any movies or parts

and she was very insecure that they didn't want her,

especially since she made Ecstasy

and that was kind of a black mark on her.

Right from the beginning, one of her first interviews

is with Hedda Hopper, who was the famous gossip columnist.

That's where she does her greatest acting

is for Hedda Hopper, crying tears

about how she was forced into this nude scene

and somehow perverted by these European filmmakers

who have no morals whatsoever.

And then, my mother went to a party

by chance one night, and Charles Boyer was there

and he was smitten by her.

And he said, "Can you be in my movie?"

"Oh, no, no, no, my English isn't good enough, no."

And he took her hand, kissed it, he said, "I'll hold your hand

through the whole film."

- "You will?" - "Yes."

"All right, I'll do it."

So, that's how that started.

Charles Boyer was a diamond thief.

She had diamonds.

He thought she was a wealthy, noble-born French woman.

He didn't realize that she was another scamp like him

from the streets of Paris.

There's a wonderful line in the film where he says,

"What did you do before?"

Before what?

Before the jewels.

I wanted them.

That film made her a star instantly.

When I was a kid, I saw her in Algiers,

I said, "I'm gonna get to Hollywood

and I'm gonna marry her.

And if I don't get to marry her,

I'll get to buy her dinner

and feel her up under the table.

Whatever I can get."

After Algiers, Hedy Lamarr was on the cover

of all the movie magazines.

Suddenly, you have in Hollywood,

a lot of women parting their hair in the middle,

darkening it, and changing their makeup

to be little Hedy Lamarrs.

Every woman wanted to be Hedy

and every man wanted to date her.

She seduced men and women.

She was able to meet artists, directors,

brilliant actors, the greats at that time.

Including Kennedy, whom I knew very well.

Oh really?

Yeah, before he became president.

He asked me out.

So he said, "What can I bring you?"

and I said, "Oranges," because...

I lack vitamin C.

Would you believe any other person

would've asked, "Oranges"?

That's the way I am.

A fool!

No matter what, you expect Hedy Lamarr

to be glamorous, sophisticated.

Quite the opposite, she loved picnics,

she loved to go scavenger hunting,

she loved to play Charades.

She wasn't very good at it, but she had a great time.

You know, no pretenses.

She was fun to be with.

At that point, she could have married anyone.

She surprised her fans

by choosing a portly screenwriter

and producer named Gene Markey.

Her letters show she was madly in love with him.

"Dearest Mommy, I never would have thought

that I could ever fall in love again.

Gene has an unbelievable number of traits

in common with Dad.

So considerate, it's touching."

He promised Hedy he'd write screenplays with her.

They even adopted a son.

But within months of their marriage,

he began dating other beautiful actresses.

Hedy was heartbroken.

She said people never got past her face.

You never knew if they loved you

or their fantasy of you.

"A man does not try to find out what is inside.

He does not try to scratch the surface.

If he did, he might find something much more beautiful

than the shape of a nose or the color of an eye."

Only a year after Algiers,

not only was her marriage failing,

her career was in trouble as well.

She was terribly unhappy with the films she did for MGM

because Louis B. Mayer gave her bad scripts

and the films did nothing.

You never got very much out of this, did you?

I got plenty.

All I asked for, except the frosting.

Hedy actually went to Louis B. Mayer

and petitioned for a role in Boom Town.

I'm going to do it because I want to.

It was a small part,

and Louis B. Mayer, at first, was reluctant.

Okay, stranger.

Boom Town was a huge, tremendous success

for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

After Boom Town,

Hedy Lamarr's career was secure.

It's almost unfathomable how busy she was in 1940.

They were expected to do what the studio wanted.

Bette Davis described it as a "slave system."

And they were owned in the sense

that they had signed contracts

that bound them to studios for seven-year periods.

My mother was worked like a racehorse.

She had to run fast all the time.

They gave her pills to wake her up to perform.

Pretty sure it was some form of speed.

And then, to make them sleep, they gave them sleeping pills.

They worked six days a week.

Women really had to get to the studio early

because they had to have their hair done,

their makeup put on, their costumes put on.

And then, you know, they worked into the night.

And here's what's remarkable.

After a grueling day on the set,

Hedy didn't go to bed.

She wasn't socializing.

Hedy was at home working on her latest invention.

Inventing was her hobby.

She not only had a complete inventing table

set up in her house,

but Howard Hughes gave her a small version

of the set of equipment which he had in the trailer

where she stayed in between takes

in her motion pictures.

When Hedy first met Howard Hughes,

he was dating every Hollywood star,

and she did date him.

Howard Hughes, of course, was a great airplane designer,

so probably they had

a compatible spirit with one another.

It was definitely cerebral because she said

he was the worst lover she ever had.

Howard Hughes wanted to build

the fastest planes in the world

so he could sell them to the Air Force.

She was fascinated by his mind and his factories,

and she wanted to go and see

where everything was being made and built,

and she met all the scientists.

He said to her,

"Anything you want my scientists to do for you,

just ask 'em and they will do it."

He relied on me.

I thought the aeroplanes were too slow,

so I decided that's not right.

They shouldn't be square, the wings...

So I bought a book of fish

and I bought a book of birds

and then used the fastest bird,

connected it with the fastest fish.

I drew it together and showed it to Howard Hughes

and he said, "You're a genius."

- You did? - Yep.

Yeah.

Very strange person that was.

Very brilliant.

But very misunderstood as well.

She invented, during that period,

a tablet that would fizz up and make a cola.

I had two chemists Howard Hughes gave me to do that.

You know, during the war nobody had Coca-Cola

and I wanted to compress it into a cube

so that servicemen and factory people,

all they had to have was water and put it in.

But I didn't realize that every state

has different strengths of water,

so it dissolved on the bottom, on top, in the middle.

It was one of my boo boos.

I didn't do that right.

But I don't have to work on ideas.

They come naturally.

What must have been going through the mind

of this young woman.

She's become a huge international film star.

But at the very same time, her country,

the past as she has known it, has been eliminated.

In 1940, the war was raging in Europe

and the United States was a neutral country,

and Hitler was basically taking over

all of Western Europe

and threatening to take over Great Britain.

If only I could do something.

Oh, darling, you've done so much already.

You almost made me forget about being afraid.

Oh, I am afraid now.

She did have a secret.

When Hedy arrived at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,

Louis B. Mayer specifically ordered all of his stars

not to talk about their religious backgrounds.

People would say, "You're Jewish,"

and I'm like, "No," and I called Mom and said,

"Mom, are we Jewish," and she said,

"Don't be ridiculous."

I never heard the word "Jewish" from my mother's lips.

The Jewish part of her, she just left behind.

She was probably afraid for many reasons.

And I could feel it,

I could see that she was protecting herself.

I became a manicurist.

That's how I met Hedy.

I told her that I survived the war with camps

and running for my life.

We talked about what was going on

and how I come to America.

I find myself on an American ship.

I was shaking with fear because we heard noises.

We were attacked by the Nazi submarines.

I remember saying, "Oh, dear God,

please don't kill me now, let me see America."

At the time, Hedy's mother was preparing

to make the treacherous Atlantic crossing herself.

She'd fled Austria and gotten as far as London

where she and Hedy were able to write each other.

"Mommy, my mind is so preoccupied

and I would love it if you could come immediately

since the times, they are very uncertain.

I have been listening to the radio day and night

for over a week,

and I've gotten barely any sleep."

Vivid pictures of a naval action

have just been released.

One day, in the summer of 1940,

a shipload of children was torpedoed.

All hands lost including 83 children.

At the time, the German U-boats

were on the verge of winning the war.

They seemed to be unsinkable

because they easily outmaneuvered

the outdated British torpedoes.

In times of crisis, most of us feel powerless,

but a few discover in themselves

unexpected strength.

And Hedy being Hedy, she said,

"I'm gonna do something about that."

So, in this article, Hedy says,

"I got the idea for my invention

when I tried to think of some way

to even the balance for the British.

A radio-controlled torpedo I thought would do it."

A torpedo launched on a given trajectory

might need to be changed, redirected.

You want, ideally, your launching boat

to communicate with the torpedo.

The problem is you can't control radio communications.

They're not secure.

Your enemy, if they're smart,

finds the frequency with which you're talking to the torpedo

and jams it.

Jamming.

The Germans fill the air with radio interference.

She came up with the idea of a secret way

of guiding that torpedo to the target

that couldn't be interrupted, that couldn't be jammed,

that couldn't be messed with.

It was secret.

Instead of just one transmit frequency communicating,

she said, "What if we changed those frequencies constantly

in sync with each other?"

Frequency hopping.

You couldn't jam it because you'd only jam

a split second of it in a single frequency.

So, frequency change, frequency hop,

frequency hop, frequency hop.

That concept, secure radio communications,

was brilliant.

Now there are various versions of how she came up

with her profoundly original idea.

One theory is that she stole it.

The man who championed that idea was an engineer

who once interviewed her named Robert Price.

Robert Price was a pioneer in secret communications,

and he gave me his number and I called him up.

She's an inventor

but I don't know in what sense exactly she is an inventor.

If I want to be harsh

I would say she was a plagiarizer, you understand?

Hedy's first husband

was Austria's leading munitions manufacturer.

Robert Price said to me that he thought

that she just smuggled the idea out of her husband's board room.

In fact, he called her the Mata Hari of World War Il,

the most notorious spy who seduced men

and got all kinds of secrets out of them.

The engineers at Mandl's firm might just have known

about the frequency hopping.

Is that how you were aware of frequency hopping?

No. What, my husband?

No. Nobody did that... invent that before.

I mean, I know what I did.

I don't care what other people say about me.

The record is very clear

that the Germans had not come across the idea

that would be Hedy's signal contribution,

what she called "frequency hopping."

I don't think she was a spy.

It was so obvious. I mean they shot torpedoes

in all directions and never hit the target,

so I invented something that does.

I mean, I can't explain. I have an inventive mind.

I think Hedy got her idea from a curious coincidence

that, in 1939,

the Philco Radio Company produced

a new top-of-the-line remote control.

There's a new gadget just out, see?

You dial your station here and you hear it over there.

- Well, where are the wires? - There ain't any wires.

That's the trick.

We know Hedy was interested in the remote control

and how it worked because the device is sketched

in the invention notebooks.

In here is all the evidence of my mother's invention.

It's this.

She dialed in a radio station and she said,

"If we hop around frequencies, just like I'm hopping

around radio stations on this dialer,

when I transmit this information to the torpedo,

we can make it totally secret."

So the Philco magic box probably inspired

the whole thing.

The fact that she understands this frequency component

of the signal and how that changes

is, I mean, genius in a way.

I mean, we know Thomas Edison was not an engineer.

You don't have to have eight years

of a graduate degree in engineering

in order to come up with something new.

In the inventing process, there is a moment

of high lucidity, of clear thinking.

In the case of Hedy, she had this lucid moment

without knowing how she was going to put it together.

She didn't have the training to make it happen.

And she said that, "The idea was mine,

but the implementation was George's."

My mother met George Antheil at Janet Gaynor's party.

And she liked George Antheil a lot.

So, when she left the party early,

she wrote her phone number in lipstick

on the windshield of his car.

They discovered that they had a great deal in common.

At the time, I think they both felt

like they were not understood for their true qualities.

George Antheil was really quite an unusual American composer,

extremely avant-garde.

Now musicians all over the world love to play Antheil's music,

they love to get into that confrontational space

that was his.

He had a gun, then he would pull it out

and he'd bang it down on the piano

right at the beginning of the show,

and shout, "Lock the doors!"

Sometimes it sounds like his music is jazz

put into a Cuisinart.

It's just, you know, chopped up and there it is.

Well, George Antheil wrote a book

called Bad Boy of Music, and in chapter 32,

"Hedy Lamarr and I invent a radio torpedo."

He says, "We began talking about the war,

which in the late summer of 1940,

was looking most extremely black."

Hedy said that she did not feel comfortable

sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money

when things were in such a state,

and that she was thinking seriously of quitting MGM

and going to Washington D.C. to offer her services

to the newly established Inventors Council.

She was very patriotic, she loved America.

She was grateful to be here, and she wanted Hitler dead.

So did George Antheil.

George had a kid brother 12 years younger

whose name was Henry.

1941, he boarded a plane, and moments later,

the plane was shot down by two Soviet fighters.

This is the first American killed in World War Il.

George, he was just devastated.

He wanted revenge for his brother's assassination

and opportunity with someone who knew

what she was talking about.

Hedy and George worked on three inventions together,

all weapons meant to help the Allies fight Germany.

I have letters from George Antheil.

In one of the letters, he wrote,

"All she wants to do is stay home and invent things.

She is an incredible combination of childish ignorance

and definite flashes of genius."

"She calls in the middle of the night

because an idea hit her."

So, my mother was a pest.

She had to invent, she had to invent,

and she pulled George Antheil in with her.

The most successful of their inventions

was a secret communication system

based on Hedy's idea of frequency hopping.

George is taking all these notes,

and I think there was some sort of a-ha moment

where he said, "You know, I have this system,"

I guess he got from dealing with player pianos,

"that we might be able to adapt

and make... make your concept work."

George Antheil got thrown out of Trenton High School

when he was 17,

so he had no special training in engineering.

What he did know was how to synchronize player pianos.

George's most famous composition

was for a film called Ballet Mécanique.

He scored it for 16 player pianos.

George's big realization was,

if piano rolls can activate piano keys,

why couldn't they activate radio frequencies

in both torpedo and the ship?

The basic idea is that by using

two miniature piano rolls

that would start at the same moment

and turn at the same speed,

a ship and a torpedo could secretly communicate

on the same pattern of frequencies.

Ultimately, Hedy and George wanted their torpedo and ship

to communicate on 88 different frequencies,

like an encryption system, basically,

that nobody could crack.

Wonderfully clever idea.

And the Inventors Council agreed.

The members of the National Inventors Council...

And it was a council of actual engineers

with a major inventor in his own right,

Charles Kettering,

who was struck by the value and the originality

of Hedy and George's idea.

So they helped George and Hedy

by connecting them up with a physicist at Caltech

in California who was an expert on electronics.

And he presumably designed

the electronics part of this device.

The day came when this invention

was issued a full patent.

Hedy and George donated their invention

to the National Inventors Council,

but it was generally understood

that if the military used an invention,

the inventors would be paid.

They gave it to the Navy,

and as George Antheil liked to tell the story later,

I went in to see the Navy Brass

and they threw the patent on the desk and said,

"What do you want to do,

put a player piano in a torpedo?

Get out of here!"

And that was that.

Sons of bitches.

Shame.

Shame on them.

Well, that's why I was in the Army,

because the Navy was never that bright.

After the Navy rejected their invention,

Hedy wanted to continue developing it.

But George, who always had bills to pay,

wasn't interested.

I think George was very proud that he had done it,

but I think he just got over it.

I think that for Hedy,

she saw it as perhaps her ticket to be recognized

for the brilliant woman that she was.

And the patent, like all things submitted to the military,

was put in a safe somewhere and labeled Top Secret.

So it disappeared from the world

for the rest of the war.

The Navy basically told her,

"You know, you'd be helping the war a lot more, little lady,

if you got out and sold war bonds

rather than sat around

trying to invent new kinds of torpedoes.

Leave that to the experts.

Get out there and raise money."

You don't get to be Hedy Lamarr and smart.

No.

No.

I worked for the government at the bond tour.

Really? How?

By appearing, by dancing with these people.

Hedy used to go to the Hollywood Canteen

and entertain the troops.

Hedy Lamarr hands out autographs.

She was not yet an American citizen

and she was there working on behalf of the United States

and its soldiers every night

as often as she could be.

It's a great thing, really.

Hedy sold something like $25 million worth of war bonds,

which if you translate that into modern dollars,

comes out around $343 million worth of war bonds.

To be told to just raise money for the war,

it's unfortunate.

That was the way that people thought that she would do good

in the best way within her realm of capabilities.

F-35, somebody have it?

I've got it!

Go ahead!

Oh no.

Like, go and sell a kiss to a strange man.

Maybe... maybe she would have felt a little bit better

about her accomplishments if she received recognition

for her intellect.

Oh, you'll get used to it.

I don't want to get used to it.

I have my own life.

My own life!

To add insult to injury,

the U.S. Government seized Hedy's patent in 1942

as the property of an enemy alien.

I don't understand.

They use me for selling bonds,

then I'm not an alien.

And when I invent something for this country

I am an alien?

I am Tandelayo.

After she did the invention,

what did Louis B. Mayer offer Hedy Lamarr?

White Cargo.

We were at war by then and Louis B. Mayer

wanted to entertain the servicemen

who would pay money

to see what was considered a dirty picture.

Louis B. Mayer divided the world

into two kinds of women,

Madonna and whore.

I don't think he ever believed

she was anything but the latter

because of Ecstasy.

You better go now.

Audiences ate it up.

This was a woman who had tried to change the course of the war.

Now she found herself in a third rate film

as a distraction for the troops.

They think I'm a bad actress.

I think sometimes in life I act more than on the screen.

Hedy really struggled to make her mark in Hollywood.

She knew she wasn't respected

like a Garbo or a Dietrich.

She wanted to have roles that allowed her to do something more

and to give her an acting challenge.

So that brought her in some conflict with Louis B. Mayer.

He sued her a couple times.

I mean, he tried to keep her on a very tight leash.

She wouldn't let herself be kept on a tight leash

and there were always problems.

And she got the reputation of being difficult.

I believe that we are controlled by ourselves,

by our way of thinking,

by our way of dealing with people.

I mean, there comes a point

when you can't take anymore...

then you have to make yourself heard.

She needed to be free.

I think she was brave and courageous.

She felt like, "I'm gonna do it for myself.

I'm gonna live the way...

I bloody wanna live my own life."

So she said, "Well, you know what?

I'll make my own movie.

I'll produce my own movie."

I don't really recall anybody except Hedy

went out and actually produced a movie.

It was very unusual in 1946.

The system didn't welcome it,

they didn't want movie stars going out of control

and producing their own films.

What a terrible idea.

Especially the women.

She was so ahead of her time with being a feminist.

She's never been called that, but she certainly was.

Don't worry about me.

I can handle trouble.

I know you can.

And then she co-produced Dishonored Lady,

and I think that both films were produced very well.

She made Dishonored Lady with my father.

It's the only movie they were in together.

I've always wondered if it were possible for people

like you and me.

This was a time when America was recovering

from World War Il.

And like the rest of the country,

she too wanted a family and a home life.

I was married and married because

I liked the companionship of a man, obviously.

I think, you know, he was quite a bit older and British.

I don't think he was the love of her life.

I think she had said he was stuffy and boring.

You know, you're not at all what I imagined.

No?

No.

So this is a letter from George Antheil.

"The last time I saw Hedy,

she looked paler.

Something's troubling her.

John Loder is really and honestly too dull

for this sparkling and unbelievable diamond."

And I think he hit the nail on the head with that one.

She was independent, she was the breadwinner.

She wasn't stuck in a marriage.

Will you please go?

Of course I'll go.

I think he left, I was a toddler and Tony was a baby,

and I never heard from him.

She was a single mother in the '40s,

so she was basically alone.

When we were little,

she was the most charming, lovely person I can imagine.

And so nice and warm and loving,

and she opened my hands that were held in a ball,

"Relax, don't go to sleep angry."

She was just such a great mother.

I taught my children swimming.

The little children have little armbands to swim.

- Have you ever seen that? - Yes.

Makes absolutely no sense.

because the middle, the center

is where they should be lifted.

Mm-hm.

That's how I taught my children

and they swim like fish.

They really were good as gold.

I did a good job with them.

It made me a little tired but that's...

that's part of it, the job, I guess.

My mother worked her ass off.

She had to earn a living.

She was on her own.

It was such pressure.

At least she didn't have to worry about granny.

By then she'd made it safely to California

and Mom paid for her to live nearby.

Financially, Hedy wasn't in the best of shape.

She had two independent films,

she made a lousy comedy,

and she knew she was going in the gutter career-wise.

She needed a breath of fresh air.

And just by a stroke of luck,

her agent at the time mentioned,

"Well, I was talking to C.B. the other day,"

Cecil B. DeMille,

great motion picture producer.

He was just beginning his biblical epics

of sex and sand.

And Hedy called Cecil B. DeMille and said,

"I understand you're casting for a new motion picture.

I am Delilah."

No man leaves Delilah.

Look at her, Samson.

Look well.

Satan himself taught her all the arts of deception.

Howard Hawks had a great line about DeMille.

He says, "You know,

DeMille is so bad he's almost good."

But anyway, Samson and Delilah was a huge hit.

I think it was her biggest success.

It thoroughly revived Hedy's name

into the public consciousness.

Samson and Delilah was the second highest grossing film

of the decade.

Only Gone with the Wind surpassed it.

Hedy took notice.

She decided to produce her own epic

in the style of DeMille.

She would film it in Italy and title it

The Loves of Three Queens.

Hedy played all three lead roles.

The subject was beauty

and how it got in the way of love

for the great women of history.

They're leading you into a trap.

Oh, Napoleon, you're blind.

There is no choice.

It was a huge production.

She didn't have the training

to take on a project of this size.

And when she was finished with it,

she couldn't find distribution in the United States.

She spent millions of dollars on it,

no one would touch it.

She lost all her money.

She found herself with nothing.

I'm a good artist and a very bad business person.

She's no longer a star

and she doesn't really have any money.

She was in Houston for an event

and she ran into Howard Lee the oil man.

And then I found out my name was now Tony Lee.

And we were living in Texas.

Mom actually had a Texas twang with a Viennese accent.

It was hilarious.

He was a nice guy.

I really kind of felt Texan for a while.

In Texas, Hedy found herself a trophy wife again.

You know, Texas was retirement.

But a creative person needs something to do.

She didn't have much to do.

We went on vacation in Aspen, Colorado.

I used to ski when I was a young girl.

I skied to school, I skied all over the place.

And I went through Aspen.

There was nobody there. Nothing.

Just a little store and a few houses.

And they said, "This could be a very wonderful skiing resort."

So I started to build a place called Villa Lamarr.

She wanted to build a ski resort,

so she convinced Howard to buy some land.

It was all Austrian, it's beautiful.

She spent years making that place.

She created some of her homeland.

That's why it meant a lot to her.

She was really, I think, homesick.

It was after that

that everything started falling apart.

Their relationship wasn't good.

It was pretty traumatic; he was an alcoholic.

With children it was very difficult so I walked away.

I said, "All I want is Aspen," which I built myself.

My chalet there which makes

a million a day, I suppose, now.

Hedy told me again and again

about her divorce with Howard Lee.

May be the darkest time in her life.

And then my daughter said,

"Ma, something happened to Tony."

My son was almost killed in a car accident.

While her son was in the hospital near death,

Hedy was called to testify in divorce court.

Stressed and traumatized to the point of breakdown,

she sent her Hollywood body double

to testify in her place.

She infuriated the judge,

who punished her by cutting her share

of the divorce settlement.

He took everything away.

Aspen, which was beautiful.

I mean, it was a big shock.

So with the pressure here and pressure all over

that's all I needed. So I collapsed.

I had a nervous breakdown.

I feel like I was dead for...

I don't know how long, but I was dead.

And so much so that this light you see really exists

on the ceiling.

I saw my father.

She said Emil, her father,

was her greatest love,

or no one could compare to him.

Well, he knew her before she was this celebrity.

And so she felt real love there.

And I don't know if she felt that again.

Hedy had two more husbands in her life.

Neither marriage lasted much more than a year.

I wish my mother had a husband

who knew how to love her.

But she never did.

When I ended up living with her after Texas,

it was very, very tricky, very hard.

I think the drugs were very responsible.

The slightest thing could... could set her off.

There was erratic behavior.

She was becoming more unstable.

I guess it pretty much started with Jimmy.

As an adult, I was looking at baby pictures

and it was my first birthday with my mom...

and mother and father behind me.

And in between them, a boy.

Um, I told Mom,

"Who's this boy?"

And she literally said,

"Oh, it was an adoption that didn't work out."

She told me that he was really rebellious

and was acting out big time.

And Jimmy was put in a military boarding school.

So the sports coach

kind of took Jimmy under his wing,

coach and the wife,

and he asked Hedy if he could live with them.

And Mom was apparently so hurt she said yes.

And I can't believe that I have no memory of him.

She's my mother and I love her.

I called her sometimes and she called me sometimes.

I never really blamed her for anything,

I... I just...

I knew she was upset because I, you know,

kind of like slapped her in the face.

Like saying, "I don't love you anymore."

But still I never saw her after that for 40-some years.

She was a woman of extremes.

I mean, Hedy can just leave things behind.

She cut off Jimmy, she cut off being Jewish.

She was broken, she was missing pieces of herself.

A lot of stars from the studio system

did carry over this addiction to pep pills, speed.

It does explain, in hindsight,

a lot of her behavior.

There are always a great many rumors

about her connection to the famous Dr. Feelgood.

Dr. Feelgood was Max Jacobson.

Look at the Aretha Franklin song,

"Oh, Dr. Feelgood, please make me feel good."

Everybody called him Dr. Feelgood

because he made them feel good.

When Cecil B. DeMille had his heart attack

on the set of The Ten Commandments,

he flew Dr. Max over.

And then DeMille said,

"Go inject Charlton Heston.

There's not enough energy.

His Moses is too lackadaisical."

Hedy Lamarr became a patient of his

from the 1950s until Max Jacobson

lost his medical license in 1974.

Somebody did me in like many times

and gave me a shot. I don't know what it was.

I thought it was vitamins but it wasn't.

Said, "Oh, you should try these vitamin B shots.

They give you so much energy."

What Max Jacobson said

is they were special vitamin elixirs.

And he loaded up a vial

with 40 milligrams of methamphetamine.

Meth was legal.

And he gave Hedy a shot.

And the thing about methamphetamine

is once you get a couple of shots,

you're hooked because the brain will demand

more and more of that reward.

So she got hooked on these "vitamins."

And they turned her into a monster.

I was standing in the kitchen

and she was holding a fork and she dropped it.

And all of a sudden she just hauls up and, bam,

smashes me across the face.

"Whenever I drop something, you pick it up!"

You know, she was just out of control.

Now I can be forgiving for all that erratic behavior

because in a way she was a victim

of the very system that made her famous.

Thank you very much. Howdy-hi, Shindiggers.

I'm Jimmy O'Neill and tonight it's my great pleasure

to introduce the beautiful Ms. Hedy Lamarr.

Of course anyone growing up in Hollywood in the early '60s

was aware of her as the kind of caricature

of herself that she had become.

Lucille Ball, I remember,

used to do an outrageous takeoff of Tandelayo.

I am Tandelayo.

I think it was offensive to her.

She didn't want to be a joke.

Mom was not in a good... good way

when I was away at college.

I remember one day walking to school at Cal,

with my books,

and I walked past a newsstand

and there's a picture of Mom in jail.

Mrs. Lamarr was shopping

at the May Company Department Store

and evidently was arrested

by one of the security personnel

of the store.

And it was apparent that she had

something like approximately $14,000 on her,

but she had still taken about $80 worth of merchandise.

When you see that on the front page,

it's like you want to just crawl in a hole.

The defendant is quoted as saying,

"I didn't mean to steal anything.

I'll be glad to pay for the items.

I have the money."

She was acquitted for that.

She said it was a misunderstanding.

Who knows?

You know, a lot of people handle stress in different ways.

It was a shock.

She was such a big star.

She seemed so untouchable

to be reduced to that.

And I think that most people thought

it must be a kind of mental illness.

I want to see the store manager.

No.

I want to see the store manager.

You're not seeing the store manager.

Andy Warhol's school of filmmaking

makes a film that is very obviously lampooning her image.

And she becomes, essentially, a punch line.

The shoplifting also resulted

in her inability to play her final role.

She was signed to do

Picture Mommy Dead

and Zsa Zsa Gabor stepped in to replace her.

They just fired me.

- Were you shocked? - No.

I'm not shocked at that, no.

This is gonna go into your book, I trust.

Oh, yes, indeed.

What's the name of that book?

The longer I wait, the better the book gets.

Somebody suggested doing her autobiography,

that she should do it.

She had no interest in the book itself,

but she wanted the money from it.

There really hadn't been any sort of scandalous tell-all.

She spoke with ghostwriters

for many, many hours about her past,

and then they translated her memories

into a narrative.

I think her business manager was paid off

to get all this stuff past her.

And she didn't want to deal with paperwork,

so she just trusted him.

Your book, called Ecstasy and Me...

Don't talk about that.

That's not my book.

- You wrote it. - No.

Did that hurt your image in Hollywood?

I don't know what is an image.

I mean, what's your image, Woody?

What's my im... same as yours.

Okay, now you want me to tell you what your image is?

- Yeah. - It's a glamorous,

beautiful,

internationally known star

who obviously rides in limousines

and has great jewels

and you don't scrub your kitchen floors.

I don't like that, no, but tell me more.

I never lived that way.

Isn't that what it's all about?

No, not to me.

I guess in the image it is.

She was known for her glamour and her beauty.

It was impossible to live up to

as she got older.

She would see that

and you knew that it disturbed her.

She started having plastic surgery in her 40s.

One of her plastic surgeons told me once

that she was a groundbreaker even in plastic surgery

where she came up with ideas.

She said, "My arms are crepey and I want you to cut here

right in the line of the fold

and I want you to get rid of the excess skin

and leave the scar here.

Leave the scar on my knee, behind my knee.

Put the scar behind my ear.

And they did it and the surgeons said, you know,

"A lot of these things she did

we were never doing before."

You'll mention her to an older plastic surgeon

and they remember their...

all their actresses coming in saying,

"You know, well, Hedy, she had this done.

Can I get this done too?"

She was really one of the first women out there saying,

"Why isn't this possible?

Why can't we do this?"

She looked wonderful for her age,

but all of that didn't work

because people still wanted

that old image of Hedy Lamarr.

You know, the only thing that would have...

that would have solved the problem

is if she'd died young.

People were cruel to her.

People would come up and say, "You were so beautiful."

The press was mean.

I said, "Oh, Mom,

I feel I really have empathy for that pressure on you."

So no wonder she kind of hid away.

Do you think you are unsociable?

Me? No!

Have I been reserved with you?

No, I mean are you unsociable here in America?

I only know that they do not understand me.

How can you understand a person who

has had as many phases in life as I have?

I have been through a lot, my whole life.

You start to think,

"I have experienced everything now in life."

"Now I want peace."

I miss Vienna.

I would like to make a movie about it.

What would the movie look like?

All of the nice things I have seen when I was a child.

The opera.

The Spanish Riding School.

Schönbrunn Palace.

My school in Döbling.

Whatever, I don't know.

I am always Austrian.

We met in person two times in my life.

She would send me autographed pictures of herself,

you know,

which they're mostly like those studio prints.

Even though she says it was a curse,

that's what people liked and loved about her and she...

for some reason I think she thought even her family,

her grandchildren, her children want that.

She did a lot of sadly not so good plastic surgery

in her later years,

each one fixing the flaws of the last.

And she no longer went out in public.

And then the money started running out

because she only got something

from Screen Actors Guild

and Social Security.

All they give me $300.

Per month?

Yep.

That's not much, is it?

No, it's not very much.

Have you ever tried to get... uh

some recompense... for your idea?

...the patent?

No.

I was surprised that they don't even acknowledge it.

In 1969, Hedy had written to a friend in the Navy

asking if he could find out what happened to her patent.

"Laura Slainier, Washington Patent Office,

has an invention of mine,

a missile-guided torpedo.

Maybe you can get it."

So this was important to her.

His reply has been lost,

but she probably learned that her idea,

frequency hopping,

had been put to use in military communications.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

when President Kennedy sent Navy ships

to blockade Cuba,

the ships that were running the blockade

were all equipped with frequency-hopped radios.

When she found out that the patent was used,

she thought, "Hey, I should be making some money from this."

I mean, isn't that normal to get something?

Yes, it is.

Well... apparently they didn't think so.

Well, it has to do with the nature of patent law.

I think that it wasn't actually used

during the life of the patent

and it was only after the patent expired

that it went into common use.

I don't think so.

They used it before!

For Hedy to be paid,

the Navy had to use her patent

before it expired in 1959.

And there's evidence they did give it to a contractor.

Romuald Scibor sent me an email.

And he said, 19... it was about '55,

he said he was handed that patent.

And they were tasked to create a sonobuoy.

A sonobuoy is a floating submarine detection device.

Someone in the Navy found the patent and thought,

"Well, I don't know if there's anything here,

but let's toss it to a contractor."

And he took that patent and used it

as the basis for communications

from the sonobuoy in the water

to a passing naval airplane

that would also be secure.

The inventor of the sonobuoy had a website

where he paid tribute

to the Markey-Antheil invention.

Will you take a look?

Sure.

A Tribute to Hedy Lamarr

by Romuald Scibor-Marchocki.

No, I haven't seen this.

"I designed the sonobuoy,

one of the first deployments of frequency hopping."

And he goes on to write about surveillance drones

at Aerojet-General.

"I was the systems manager building the surveillance drone

which eventually flew over Vietnam.

I personally designed the reliable and secure

two-way radio communications system.

For the first time,

we had the ability to switch frequencies rapidly.

Now that I know who invented frequency hopping,

I, who was the only person who remembers

those early applications of this concept,

want to express my sincere admiration

and belated thanks to Hedy Lamarr."

How 'bout them apples?

She should have gotten paid.

What would you have the government do to repay you?

At this point I don't even care.

There she is.

The Tyrolean beauty.

Toward the end of Hedy's life

she began to reflect.

She began to have insight.

Well, things don't always work... straight forward.

They have detours sometimes.

That's part of living.

Yep.

I didn't expect that I'd come here and fall apart either

but things happen.

She always talked about writing her autobiography

and wanting to get the story out

about who the real Hedy Lamarr was,

not the Hedy Lamarr in the movies,

which I think she often thought

movies were really trivial.

Now I'm becoming smart all of a sudden.

Better late than never, right?

Absolutely.

Maybe someday I'll become smart too.

I gave you a little lesson there right now.

Yes ma'am.

I guess I should let you...

I guess you should.

...let you go, but...

I enjoyed talking.

I enjoyed talking to you and perhaps I'll...

Maybe you can do some good.

I hope so.

The article I wrote,

I like to think that that was really a part

of how she gained recognition.

So Forbes magazine,

May 1990,

this is the first time the mainstream press

released the information that Hedy was glamorous, yes,

stupid, no.

I called her and said, you know, "Mom, people are interested

in what you thought of back in '42."

She said, "It's about time."

The first to pick up Hedy's story

were people in the communications industry

because they realized frequency hopping

was revolutionary.

It was already finding its way into GPS,

Wi-Fi technology, Bluetooth,

and billion-dollar military satellites.

Five, four, three,

Atlas engine ignition,

one, zero,

and liftoff of Lockheed Martin...

The Milstar satellite system provides

protected, secure communications

for the President of the United States

and high priority military users.

The work that Hedy Lamarr did in her patent,

Milstar took that technology

in order to implement frequency hopping

on the system.

And that's what we trust our most important

nuclear command and control messages with.

The Navy, Milstar, and Lockheed Martin

actually gave Hedy an award

thanking her for coming up with her idea.

And when I called her, I said,

"Mom, they're gonna give you an award,"

but she just didn't want to be seen.

The award I'm about to present is in recognition

of a famous actress turned inventor,

Hedy Lamarr.

I gave a talk to about 800 people.

But right in the middle of it...

If I have seen farther...

Oh, my God.

Are you serious?

My mother's here too.

I'll tell you a little bit later.

Hello?

How did it go?

I'm in the middle of it.

I just said, "Mom, if you could say something,

what would you say?"

And this is what she said.

I'm happy that this invention has been so successful.

I appreciate your acknowledgement

of you honoring me

and that it was not done in vain.

Thank you.

Perfect.

- Okay? - Okay.

I love you!

Love you too.

Bye.

And they all stood up and clapped.

I thought it was really great.

She would love to be remembered

as someone who contributed

to the well-being of humankind.

She did make her mark.

It's the one thing she did for other people

that she's gonna be long, long remembered for.

It was New Year's,

January 1st, 2000.

She called my sister and I separately,

"Turn on the TV!

It's Vienna, Vienna!

You'll see Vienna!"

And so we turn on the TV

and the Viennese Symphony Orchestra

was playing on TV.

She died a few days later.

She fell asleep and she just didn't wake up.

I'll read you something pretty.

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you

of selfish alternative motives.

Do good anyway.

The biggest people with the biggest ideas

can be shot down

by the smallest people with the smallest minds.

Think big anyway.

What you spend years building

may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

Give the world the best you have

and you'll be kicked into the teeth.

Give the world the best you've got anyway.