Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton

      Introduction: Waxworks

      ON A SEPTEMBER DAY in 1973, Richard Dow, a caretaker at the Hollywood Wax Museum, started his workday as usual. “I walked down the dark corridors to the back of the museum, and I reached behind a black curtain to turn on a sequence of spotlights,” he told reporters afterward. It was then that he saw the demolished figure of Madame Tussaud. “The more lights I switched on, the more damage I saw. I walked down one corridor and I tripped over the head of a mad scientist.” Now feeling more than a little uneasy, Dow started to take stock of the damage. All in all, thirteen statues had been destroyed. These included: Jean Harlow, Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward, Tyrone Power, Sony Bono, a couple of U.S. presidents, and Hedy Lamarr. “Now we'll have to keep a security man on after hours,” mused Spoony Singh, the museum owner. “We used to have a watchman. We went through a string of them. But they complain of having to be there all alone with those wax figures. After a while some of them claimed they could see the figures moving.”¹ The break-in led the museum to take stock of its silent luminaries; sadly Hedy Lamarr did not make the cut. She was melted down and later replaced by Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.

      If that break-in had occurred two or three decades later, the outcome for the Viennese actress, whose reputation derived from a brief, naked run through a wooded copse, followed by a swim, filmed by a long-forgotten Czech director for a 1930s European art film, might have been otherwise. When Hedy Lamarr arrived in America, her reputation preceded her. Few people had seen Ecstasy, the film that had made her famous. Fewer would later remember the plot of Ecstasy or their last glimpse (depending on which version they saw) of the character played by Hedwig Kiesler, as the eighteen-year-old was then called, on the station platform in the early hours of the morning, gently kissing her sleeping lover, folding her coat under his head, and walking away from him.

      If art preempted life in the most curious manner in these early years of the soon-to-be renamed Hedy Lamarr, so too would there never be a shortage of stories and anecdotes to accompany her later progress through Hollywood. In the 1930s and through the war years, magazines competed to put her photograph on their covers, and gossip columnists revelled in her every move. Simultaneously, and with one voice, film critics agreed that Hedy Lamarr could not act. What did it matter, when she had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world?

      Her last film appearance was in 1958. Subsequently, she became best-known for a salacious autobiography (Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman), published in 1966, and for a string of legal cases, most infamously involving shoplifting. She lived out her final years as a virtual recluse, her sight seriously impaired and her once- beautiful face destroyed by plastic surgery.

      Since her death in 2000, and even somewhat before that, Hedy Lamarr's reputation has grown. To quite a large extent, this has been because of her increasing fame as an inventor; her design, with the American avant-garde composer George Antheil, for a long-range torpedo-guidance system forms the basis of our modern mobile telephone technology and also played a major part in the Cuban missile crisis. Several retrospectives of her Hollywood films have been staged, both in her hometown of Vienna and on American television. Documentaries have been produced, exploring her career, her personality, and her legacy. She is the subject of numerous Internet sites and entries.

      Can waxworks come alive? Why the comeback? What is now so intriguing about the pampered only child of a well-off Viennese banker and his pianist wife, and her (mis) fortunes in exile? In part, this intrigue is due to our fascination with the stories of émigrés who fled fascist Europe for America. Although she is only one of many Europeans who found refuge in Hollywood, Hedy is one of the few high-profile women to have done so on her terms, rather than as the wife or daughter of a more famous man or as the protégée of an established director. Her continued insistence on doing things on her own terms was equally remarkable, even if it contributed toward making her the difficult individual she was.

      The pages of this book are littered with anecdotes concerning the pranks her directors and costars played on her, particularly during the filming of love sequences. Without giving too much away in advance, they involve variously pins, bananas, batons, and suggestive comments, as well as picking her up by the ass and throwing her off the set. Maybe such behavior is still acceptable; certainly it was when Hedy was undergoing what passed for screen-acting training—most of the perpetrators of these pranks claimed they were prompted by a desire to see her express emotion. Cecil B. DeMille spoke of the challenge of breaking through her “impassive air,” and with her beauty came a coldness that many men found threatening.²

      In small ways, and often inadequately, Hedy took her revenge. She also married six times, which hardly makes her a feminist icon, nor do many of her other activities or her statements about sex and marriage—she told Zsa Zsa Gabor that “If a man sends me flowers, I always look to see if a diamond bracelet is hidden among the blossoms. If there isn't one, I don't see the point of flowers.”³ In role after role she played strong women who knew what they wanted—most often sexual satisfaction, professional satisfaction, and wealth. If she got her man, it was not because she was the cute-as-apple-pie good girl whom the entire neighborhood loved and the community respected; the opposite rather. Hedy made a career out of playing bad women, characters who threatened the veneer of respectability established by the community; in Hollywood, these were usually foreigners. In her case, they were often exotic natives, of which the most famous is her half-Arab Tondelayo in the 1942 version of White Cargo. Her roles came to an end in the complacent 1950s, when home and hearth were the order of the day and foreigners were dismissed as communists.

      Most people assumed that she couldn't be beautiful and clever or independent or self-aware. Only a few of her fellow workers realized how much more lay below the glacial surface. One of these, as will be detailed, was King Vidor. Another was that equally displaced, unhappy, and eventually unhinged European in Hollywood, George Sanders:

      When I first met Hedy Lamarr, about twenty years ago, she was so beautiful that everybody would stop talking when she came into a room. Wherever she went she was the cynosure of all eyes. I don't think anyone concerned himself very much about whether or not there was anything behind her beauty, he was too busy gaping at her. Of her conversation I can remember nothing: when she spoke one did not listen, one just watched her mouth moving and marvelled at the exquisite shapes made by her lips. She was, in consequence, rather frequently misunderstood.⁴

      Since then, attitudes have changed. They haven't altered beyond recognition and many of the prejudices that Hollywood