Hedy Lamarr. Ruth Barton
by young women with ambition. Yet, today's world welcomes the combination of brains and beauty and is, perhaps, a little more understanding of what a previous generation of women had to become in order to succeed in any professional capacity.
Or maybe that's wishful thinking. The 2008 fictionalized biography What Almost Happened to Hedy Lamarr: 1940–1967, written by the actress's alleged friend, Devra Z. Hill, with contributions by Jody Babydol Gibson, tells of a Hollywood actress named Hedy Lamarr whose career is apparently best summarized by detailed accounts of her sexual romps and power-hungry manipulations. Her hold, for instance, on the weary studio boss, Beldin (presumably modeled on the already larger-than-life, Louis B. Mayer), who gave her her Hollywood break, is facilitated by the photographs she took of an incident in which he inadvertently throttled an aspiring actress with his over-zealous fellatio requirements. That the book is written as a soft-porn narrative ought to be no surprise given Jody Babydol Gibson's notoriety as the Hollywood brothel keeper whose tell-all publication, Secrets of a Hollywood Super Madam, named a string of high-profile celebrities as clients of her lucrative global escort agency. Hill herself, whose résumé includes masters’ and doctoral degrees from unaccredited universities and a career as a self-help nutritionist, claims that the star asked her to write her biography. After Hedy's arrest for shoplifting, Hill developed scruples and decided not to continue. Few scruples are evident in this publication, which has sold itself on its suggestion that Hedy was Hitler's mistress, although in fact Hitler is never mentioned in the book and the suggestion is particularly obnoxious. So much for friendship.
While there's no point in being prudish when writing about Hedy Lamarr, there's little to be added in this respect to her own Ecstasy and Me, outside of what Devra Hill and Jody Babydol Gibson have cooked up. This disputed autobiography has become the official narrative of her life and most writers on her borrow from it generously. It is a run-through of the story of her life and career, heavily laced with spicy details of lesbian affairs, lovers (both named and unnamed), and the maneuverings of Hollywood's power brokers, most notably Louis B. Mayer. It concludes with transcripts from her sessions with a psychoanalyst. Later, Hedy pronounced that none of this was true and sued the ghostwriters. Yet, if much of Ecstasy and Me is fatuous 1960s pseudo-analysis, equally, much of it is, as will be detailed, factual. The account also omits certain key details, to which this text will return.
Mention the name Hedy Lamarr to a passing stranger and they are likely to whoop, “It's not Hedy, it's Hedley. Hedley Lamarr!” If they follow this up with loud flatulence effects, it is only in case you have missed their reference to Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, a cheery deconstruction of the classic Western, one of whose central characters is the unscrupulous attorney general, Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). Already in 1974 when Brooks made his comedy, few people could name a Hedy Lamarr film. By the time of her death in 2000, she was another ghost of the 1940s, a name that conjured up the glamour of Hollywood stardom and its perennial whiff of decadence. She responded to Brooks's jokes with a lawsuit; by then, that was the way she communicated with the world outside whatever small apartment she currently inhabited.
My own interest in writing this biography was to explore the consequences of leading a life that was based on an image, and how that life became increasingly fictionalized. I'm interested in how Hedy's image, often literally (in the form of a portrait or painting), threatened to overwhelm her reality and how she fought to hold her own in a system that she both despised and needed.
I am curious, too, why Hedy Lamarr has been so neglected by post-1960s feminist historians who have reclaimed equally difficult figures such as Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or Marilyn Monroe. One of the few of these to pay attention to Hedy (as I hesitate to call her) was Jeanine Basinger. In her book, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women,1950–1960, she divides the women of that era into three types: “fantasies,” whose appeal was primarily to men; “real women,” women who seemed real and recognizable to women in the audience; and “exaggerated women,” a mixture of the real and the unreal, larger than life characters, such as those played by Bette Davis, whose exaggerated predicaments were understood and enjoyed most of all by women. Within these parameters, Hedy Lamarr falls into the first category, which Basinger also terms “dream images.”5 This unreality is the key to understanding her film performances; if she was wooden, she was also unreadable, lending an ambiguous quality to the parts she played. This in turn disrupted Hollywood's commitment to narrative clarity and its privileging of plot. Writing of Greta Garbo, an actress to whom Hedy was often compared in her early years, Roland Barthes proposes that “her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, which was intellectual more than formal.”6 Hedy too was defined by her face which, like Gar-bo's, was most discussed as an archetype of beauty. Of her own contribution to the acting profession, she is reputed to have commented that “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She never looked stupid, and, indeed, she may never have said this.
The first significant account of Hedy Lamarr's life and career, outside Ecstasy and Me, was Christopher Young's The Films of Hedy Lamarr, published in 1978. It replicates much of the material from the so-called autobiography. Young, who was a devoted fan, interviewed Hedy for his book and she seems to have provided him with much the same information that she gave (or did not give) to her ghostwriters. It is now out of print.
Since then Diane Negra has analyzed Hedy Lamarr's career as a metaphor for American interventionism and analyzed how the narrative of her escape from her first husband, munitions baron Fritz Mandl, and her embrace of American values came to symbolize America's rescue of a decadent but powerless old Europe.7 Peter Körte has applied his imaginative and more Europe-centered approach to the star, writing Hedy Lamarr: Die Stumme Sirene (2000), which is less a biography and more a series of musings on the potency of her image.
The other sympathetic commentator on Hedy Kiesler, subsequently Lamarr, is Jan-Christopher Horak, who has argued for the importance of the star's strong prewar female characters, her “independent, sexually aggressive women of questionable morality,” who always appeared morally ambiguous to middle-class eyes because they foregrounded rather than glossed over the exchange of sex for money.8
My decision to write about Hedy Lamarr started with a series of coincidences that drew me to her life story. They began with a now-forgotten Irish film star, called Constance Smith, whose life I researched for a book, Acting Irish in Hollywood (2006), on Irish film stars in Hollywood. Connie, as she was known, made her film breakthrough in 1946 after winning a Hedy Lamarr look-alike contest organized by an Irish film magazine. Trading on her looks and frequently let down by her lack of acting skills, Connie made it to England and on to Hollywood, where she was placed under contract to 20th Century Fox. Little educated, with no family support and few compatriots to keep an eye on her, Connie at first floundered and then fell from grace, her career determined by latent alcoholism and a long-term relationship with the equally unreliable, but considerably more famous, British documentarist, Paul Rotha. Connie's story ran parallel to that of Hedy in many ways; they even shared a director, Jean Negulesco. But unlike the Austrian, the Irish actress never learned how to better the system, and her life ended in utter destitution. Hedy was rumored to have died destitute too, though she didn't. Stories like Constance Smith's are seldom told, since failure is so invisible. But many, many of the exiles and émigrés who traveled to Hollywood in search of riches ended up having more in common with Connie than Hedy.
Both women moved on to more marriages and more lovers, but through their stories we can take pathways through history that connect us to other pasts and lives lived so differently to our own that is it hard to imagine that less than a hundred years have lapsed since the birth of Hed-wig Kiesler in Vienna. In other ways, she still seems a most modern figure: smart, ambitious, outspoken, and more than a little ahead of her time.
I also want to locate Hedy Lamarr within a history of European exiles to Hollywood and to compensate for her omission in the many histories of these exiles. As in so many other ways, she didn't fit the classic image of the European actor in Hollywood,