Hedy
Lamarr (November 9, 1913 January 19, 2000) was an actress
and communications innovator. She was known as The Most
Beautiful Woman In Films and also as the inventor of
the first form of spread spectrum.
Life :
Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna,
Austria and died in Altamonte Springs, Florida.
While married to her first husband,
Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer, she socialized
with Adolf Hitler and Mussolini. She also became educated
technically in his trade. Mandl was obsessed with
his wife and never let her out of his sight. She hated
him and his Nazi friends and finally escaped to London
by drugging him.
She met Louis B. Mayer of MGM in London.
He hired her and changed her name to Hedy Lamarr,
the surname in homage to a famously beautiful film
star of the silent era, Barbara LaMarr. She had already
appeared in several European films, including Ecstasy,
in which she played a love-hungry young wife of an
indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face in passion,
and long shots of her running naked through the woods,
gave the film notoriety.
She was also known as the "Laurence
Olivier of Orgasm".
In Hollywood, she appeared in many
films, usually cast as glamorous and seductive, including
White Cargo and Tortilla Flat (both 1942), based on
the novel by John Steinbeck. Her biggest success came
in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) with
Victor Mature as the Biblical strongman.
Lamarr became a naturalized citizen
of the United States on April 10, 1953.
Secret Communications System
Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received patent
number 2,292,387 for their "Secret Communications
System." This early version of frequency hopping
used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies
and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder
for enemies to detect or to jam. The patent was little-known
until recently because Lamarr applied for it under
her then-married name of Hedy Kiesler Markey. Neither
Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the patent.
Lamarr wanted to join the National
Inventors Council but was told she could better help
the war effort by using her celebrity status to sell
war bonds. She once raised $7,000,000 at one event.
Marriages
The actress was married to:
(1) Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl (1900-),
married 1933-37; chairman of Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik,
a leading armaments firm founded by his father, Alexander
Mandl. In 1938, when his property was seized by the
Austrian government, Mandl, a Nazi sympathizer who
had become close to Prince Ernst Ruediger von Stahremberg,
the deposed Fascist Austrian Vice-Chancellor, fled
to Brazil and later Argentina, where he became a citizen
and remarried. He also become an advisor to Juan Peron
and a film producer whose leading ladies included
the future Eva Peron. He also founded a new company,
an airplane factory called Industria Metalurgica y
Plastica Argentina and served a prison sentence.
(2) Gene Markey (died 1980), screenwriter
and producer, married 1939-41; son (adopted), James
Lamarr Markey (1939-). When Lamarr and Markey divorced
-- she claimed they had only spent four evenings alone
together in their marriage -- the judge advised her
to get to know any future husband more than the four
weeks she had known Markey. Previously married to
the actress Joan Bennett (whose daughter, Diane Bennett
Fox, he adopted and gave his surname) and father of
their daughter Melinda, Markey later married Lucille
Wright (née Parker), the owner of Calumet Farms,
the thoroughbred horse farm in Kentucky.
(3) John Loder (né John Muir
Lowe, 1899-1989), actor, married 1943-47; two children:
Anthony Loder (1947-) and Denise Loder (1945-). In
1949, Loder married Evelyn Auffmordt (née Carolan),
and in 1958, he married Alba Julia Lagomarsino. He
also had a son and a daughter by his first two marriages
to Sophie Kabel and Micheline Cheirel. NOTE 1: Loder
adopted James Lamarr Markey and gave him his surname.
Now a riverboat casino guard, James Lamarr Loder later
challenged Hedy Lamarr's will in 2000, which did not
mention him. He later dropped his suit against the
estate in exchange for a lump-sum payment of $50,000.
Loder is married to the former Ona Minor and has four
children, all of whom carry Lamarr as their middle
name: Timothy, Ronald, Nadine, and Susan. NOTE 2:
A former Nordstrom employee, Denise Loder, now known
as Denise Loder DeLuca, lives in Seattle. NOTE 3:
Anthony Loder is the owner of Phone USA, a cellular-phone
store in Los Angeles.
(4) Ernest "Ted" Stauffer,
nightclub owner, restaurateur, and former bandleader,
married 1951-52. He was married in 1955 to Anne Nekel
Brown.
(5) W. Howard Lee (1909-1981), a Texas
oilman, married 1953-60. In 1960, he married film
star Gene Tierney.
(6) Lewis J. Boies (1920-), a lawyer,
married 1963-65. They were divorced after Lamarr claimed
he had threatened her with a baseball bat.
Anecdotes
In one story presented in her autobiography, Ecstacy
and Me, once while running from Mandl she slipped
into a brothel and hid in an empty room.
While her husband searched the brothel,
a customer entered the room and she had sex with the
man so she could remain hidden. She was finally successful
in escaping when she hired a new maid that looked
like herself, drugged her and used the maid's uniform
as a disguise to escape.
Lamarr later sued the publisher claiming
that many of the anecdotes were fabricated by the
ghost writer.
According to accounts in film histories,
Cecil B. DeMille is said to have gathered the 1900
peacock feathers that Lamarr wore on her 18-foot-train
dress in the 1949 movie Samson and Delilah himself,
having chased molting peacocks on his ranch for the
previous 10 years until he had collected enough feathers
to have the garment made.
Quotes
"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do
is stand still and look stupid." Hedy Lamarr
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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