{"id":100269,"date":"2022-12-09T17:05:59","date_gmt":"2022-12-09T15:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=100269"},"modified":"2022-12-05T12:53:22","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T10:53:22","slug":"09-05-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=100269","title":{"rendered":"To Hedy Lamarr, the hidden Jew, beauty was only skin deep"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>To Hedy Lamarr, the hidden Jew, beauty was only skin deep<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MICHAEL FOX<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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ZIEGFELD GIRL, Hedy Lamarr, 1941<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1933, the Viennese actress Hedy Keisler<\/strong> sparked an international furor by swimming nude in a provocative melodrama called \u201cEcstasy.\u201d Alas, it was the tragic fate of Hedy Lamarr, as she was renamed when she arrived in Hollywood, to be perpetually judged by her face and figure rather than her intellect.<\/span><\/p>\n

A splendid study of an extraordinarily complicated and conflicted person, Alexandra Dean\u2019s film, \u201cBombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,\u201d recounts the actress and inventor\u2019s litany of innovations and achievements alongside her frustrations and failures. The documentary, which opened last week at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, is most fascinating when it shifts from Lamarr\u2019s ambivalence toward Hollywood glamour to her wartime invention of a secure communication system.<\/span><\/p>\n

The beloved daughter of a Jewish banker, Lamarr had a comfortable childhood before gravitating to the theater and movies. Fleeing a youthful marriage to a Jewish fascist who made arms for the Nazis, as well as the gathering storm in Europe, she purchased passage on an ocean liner in 1937. Aboard ship, she parlayed her bravado and striking good looks into an introduction to MGM executives and, eventually, studio mogul Louis B. Mayer in Los Angeles.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandfather fled the Nazis in a very similar fashion, on a boat where he met someone from Samuel Goldwyn\u2019s shop and ended up in Hollywood and it saved his life,\u201d Dean said. \u201cHe became a very powerful individual, and he did not like having been victimized by the Nazis and he kind of whitewashed that entire episode in his life. He didn\u2019t think of himself as a victim and he didn\u2019t want to think of his family or his tribe as victims, so being Jewish was a complicated thing for him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Dean saw in Lamarr a similar refusal to be defined by her background or circumstances.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe also had the same kind of complicated relationship with being a woman,\u201d Dean said. \u201cShe wanted to be Louis B. Mayer, she wanted to be Cecil B. DeMille. She didn\u2019t want to identify as a woman and she didn\u2019t want to identify as a Jew.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what does that do to you? I think if you don\u2019t understand her relationship with being Jewish you don\u2019t understand why she was such a broken person.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lamarr\u2019s Jewishness was directly related to her development of a system for ships to communicate that the Nazis couldn\u2019t break, Dean said. Though the technology wasn\u2019t used in World War II, an updated version helped Navy ships during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Lamarr\u2019s invention later led to the development of GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hollywood, the actress wasn\u2019t allowed to be open about her identity because Mayer believed that audiences wouldn\u2019t fantasize about a Jew. At the same time, the Nazis were blowing up ships in the Atlantic with European Jewish children.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her mother converted to Catholicism in 1938 in Vienna, and Dean theorized that her motivation was to make it easier to escape the Nazis. Then Dean discovered a letter that Hedy had written saying, \u201cPlease do this for me, because I don\u2019t want to be identified as a Jew in Hollywood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The psychological effect of Lamarr\u2019s subterfuge mingled with her sorrow over the destruction of European Jewry is difficult to calculate, but it subsequently manifested itself in the insistence to her children that she wasn\u2019t Jewish. In fact, Dean was compelled to confront Lamarr\u2019s offspring with their grandfather\u2019s death certificate \u2014 evidence of his burial in a Jewish cemetery \u2014 and their grandmother\u2019s conversion papers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dean\u2019s greatest challenge in \u201cBombshell\u201d is conveying Lamarr\u2019s many contradictions: strength and shallowness, altruism and cruelty, desire and despair. The film manages to be surprising and unexpected, yet utterly relevant in its portrayal of a woman stymied in her efforts to win respect on her terms.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are very quick to dislike Hedy Lamarr,\u201d Dean said. \u201cIt appalled me, and made me extremely sad that people wouldn\u2019t give her any leeway to express herself.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Actress Hedy Lamarr patents the basis for WiFi<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ruth Barton<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Hedy Lamarr in Her Highness and the Bellboy, 1945.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

On this date in 1942, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr (called \u201cthe most beautiful woman in Hollywood\u201d) received a patent with composer George Antheil for a \u201cfrequency hopping, spread-spectrum communication system\u201d designed to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect or jam. Lamarr and Antheil made an interesting pair of collaborators.\u00a0She was an Austrian-born beauty and American film star who practiced electrical engineering when off the movie lot; he was an\u00a0avant-garde<\/em>\u00a0composer, notably of\u00a0Ballet M\u00e9canique<\/em>, a score that included synchronized player pianos.\u00a0The two devised a method whereby a controlling radio and its receiver would jump from one frequency to another, like simultaneous player pianos, so that the radio waves could not be blocked.<\/span><\/p>\n

The two submitted their patent to the US Navy, which officially opined that Lamarr could do more for the war effort by selling kisses to support war bonds.\u00a0On one occasion, she raised $7 million.\u00a0She and Antheil donated their patent to the US Navy and never realized any money from their invention, which would eventually become the basis for wireless phones, Global Positioning Systems, and WiFi, among other cutting-edge technologies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her son Anthony Loder recalls, “She was such a creative person, I mean, nonstop solution-finding.\u00a0If you talked about a problem, she had a solution.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna on November 9, 1914.\u00a0A student of German theatre director Max Reinhardt, she began her film career in Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1930.\u00a0A brief nude appearance by the actress in the film\u00a0Ecstasy<\/em>\u00a0brought her notoriety and fame before she fled Germany in 1937 as the Nazis rose to power.\u00a0She travelled to America on the same boat that carried Hollywood studio head Louis B. Mayer; by the end of the voyage, Lamarr had a movie contract with MGM paying $600 a week, contingent on her learning English.\u00a0Her film career included\u00a0Algiers<\/em>,\u00a0White Cargo<\/em>, and the lead in\u00a0Samson and Delilah<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1997, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her its prestigious Pioneer Award, three years before her death in Orlando, Florida on January 19, 2000 at age 86.
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More about HedyLamaee:<\/strong>
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