Hedy's Folly (21 page)

Romuald Scibor-Marchocki, having moved to Aerojet-General in the early 1960s, also made further use of spread-spectrum technology as system manager for a surveillance drone. The drone, he writes, “eventually flew over Vietnam.” He personally designed the two-way radio system for the drone, which was implemented digitally rather than in analog form, as previous incarnations of frequency hopping had been. “
For the first time, we had the ability to switch frequencies rapidly; thus, we called it ‘spread-spectrum.’ It is the same concept as ‘frequency-hopping,’ only performed much faster.… The radio signal required very little transmitter power and was immune to noise and interference from other drones, which would employ the exact same carrier frequency.” In Scibor-Marchocki’s drone radio design is thus the basis for a solution to a problem that would reemerge with
the advent of the cellular phone: allowing many different phones to talk at once by arranging for them to hop in many different sequences, thus staying out of each other’s way.

——

Since all these developments were secret, Hedy and George remained unaware of them. Their patent expired seventeen years out from its awarding, in 1959. George Antheil, the bad boy of music, expired with his patent that year of a heart attack on 12 February at the age of fifty-eight. His 1945 autobiography,
Bad Boy of Music
, had been a best seller, and then he had seen his music finally succeed in the years after the war; in 1947 he was counted among the
top four most performed American composers, in company with Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin.

Antheil had returned to musical drama in the last decade of his life: an opera,
Volpone
, based on the Ben Jonson play; one-act operas,
The Brothers, Venus in Africa
, and
The Wish
; a ballet based on Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Capital of the World”; a cantata,
Cabeza de Vaca
; songs, sonatas, and film, television, and radio scores. “
It is a wonderful feeling,” he wrote to his fellow composer Kurt Weill, “to once more, in my imagination at least, be living back in the theater. It is ‘home.’ ” George and Boski had remained together and close in their intimate, complicated marriage; when George died, in New York City, he left behind not only Boski and Peter but also an illegitimate six-month-old son.

Virgil Thomson’s review of Antheil’s Fourth Symphony, first performed in 1944, catches something of Antheil’s brash character as well as the spirit of his music:

There is everything in it—military band music, waltzes, sentimental ditties, a Red Army song, a fugue, eccentric dancing—every kind of joke, acrobatic turn, patriotic reference and glamorous monstrosity. It is bright, hard, noisy, busy, bumptious, efficient and incredibly real. It is “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” orchestrated in red, white, and blue, with three cheers for the same every five minutes and plenty of pink lemonade. By moments it is thin of texture, but at its best and busiest it makes a hubbub like a live crowd and five military bands. And its tunes can all be remembered.

George Antheil had traveled far from his early cacophonous avant-garde work. He might well have said of his life, as of his music, that he had come home.

——

The birth of her daughter, Denise, in 1945 had left Hedy with psychosomatic pain, for which she began seeing a Boston psychoanalyst. Flying from Hollywood to Boston for treatment “
became a shuttle trip,” she remembered.
Traumas emerged from earlier in her life: a schoolgirl encounter with a flasher;
a workman’s sexual assault when Hedy was fourteen that she had kept secret from her parents out of shame; exposure to a frightening scar, from his rib cage to his hip, that Anthony Eden had revealed when he came aboard in swim trunks to swim with Hedy in the south of France. Two years later, “
time and analysis” had helped her. “I found out who I am,” she said. Part of her problem had been the uncertainty and defensiveness she had felt in “the crisp, competitive world of Hollywood.” Even so, she was one of the few European artists who had successfully transitioned from her native culture and language to America. By 1947 she was ready to remake her life.

Believing that she could find better scripts if she had a wider range of choices, she negotiated past Louis B. Mayer’s angry possessiveness to extricate herself from MGM. Analysis had changed her, and her marriage to John Loder now felt lonely. “
It was the case again,” she recalled, “where the unknown had much more allure for me than what I had now. I wanted a divorce, feeling there were other more exciting, more interesting experiences waiting for me.” First, however, she wanted another child, because she remembered the loneliness of her own childhood and hoped to spare Denise similar isolation. (She had essentially disowned James, her adopted son.) Anthony John Loder, Denise’s younger brother, was born in March 1947. Three months later Hedy divorced her third husband.

She was less successful making films on her own.
“My
judgment on scripts was faulty,” she concluded. “I was embarrassed … and worried.” Out of that limbo, in 1949, Cecile B. DeMille chose her to play Delilah in his costume blockbuster
Samson and Delilah
opposite Victor Mature. The picture premiered in New York on 21 December and broke all box-office records. Afterward, having fought with DeMille on the set about costume and character, Hedy was delighted with the seasoned director’s assessment of her. “
We argued quite a bit,” he told a radio interviewer, “but I respected Hedy. She loves picture-making, it shines out of her. I had no idea Hedy was as good an actress as she turned out to be. She was fiery, yet did everything expected of her. When I was blowing up, Hedy remained calm. She had great self-confidence and self-respect. Considering her reputation and beauty, she is a most unaffected person.”

As her film roles declined in the 1950s, Hedy began working in the new medium of television, although more frequently as a celebrity guest than as an actor. By about 1970 she had given up that work as well. The careers of Hollywood stars, especially women, can be as short as the careers of professional athletes. Hedy’s career in film and television spanned more than thirty years. She estimated she had earned
$30 million or more from acting—$372 million today. Financing films and submitting to voracious California community property laws across six divorces consumed most of it; she lived far more modestly in the later decades of her life than she had in her years of Hollywood stardom.

——

Spread-spectrum technologies emerged from government secrecy in 1976 with the publication of the electrical engineer Robert C. Dixon’s textbook
Spread Spectrum Systems
, which a Dixon colleague called the “
first comprehensive, unclassified review of the technology” that “set the stage for increasing research into commercial applications.”

Commercialization was further encouraged by President Jimmy Carter’s inflation czar, Alfred E. Kahn, a Cornell economist best known for deregulating the U.S. airline industry while chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978. Kahn, a liberal Democrat, promoted government deregulation for economic reasons, believing that it spurred economic development—a cause later taken up with conservative ideological fervor by President Ronald Reagan. At the Federal Communications Commission between 1977 and 1981, chairman Charles D. Ferris, a Boston-born physicist and attorney, abandoned the usual FCC practice of finding a consensus with the electronics industry before changing or adding to FCC rules. Instead, in line with Carter and Kahn’s emphasis on deregulation for economic growth, Ferris looked for innovative technologies hampered by what his assistant Michael J. Marcus calls “
anachronistic technical regulations.” There was a reason for the regulations, Marcus explains:

In the 1970s the spectrum technology area was highly concentrated, with only a few major manufacturers:

Western Electric was the near-exclusive supplier of the local and long distance telecommunications industry, cellular was in its experimental stage, and the regulatory status quo was rather acceptable to the small “club” of major manufacturers serving the US market, all of whom were domestic companies. While regulations prevented rapid innovation, it [
sic
] also generally prevented both new entrants and technological surprise from the few competitors. Products could be planned and introduced with assurances that the R&D costs could be amortized over a long sales period. It was a cozy oligarchy for the major manufacturers, but it denied the public the benefits of rapid introduction of new technologies and services just as in the parallel Bell System telecommunications monopoly.

Ferris set out to change the situation, beginning with a
study the FCC commissioned, delivered in December 1980, titled
Potential Use of Spread Spectrum Techniques in Non-government Applications
. Its key finding: “Spread spectrum techniques offer a unique method of sharing a common band between multiple users without requiring the users to coordinate their transmissions in any way.” For technical as well as political reasons, the report raised the possibility of using what are called the ISM bands—the radio frequencies allocated to industrial, scientific, and medical uses other than communication (such as microwave ovens and equipment
for medical diathermy and industrial heating)—for spread-spectrum radio. Such equipment generated radio noise that interfered with narrow-band radio transmissions, which was why it had been allocated frequency bands of its own. (They were also called the garbage bands.) Spread spectrum, however, was resistant to such interference just as it was resistant to jamming. And since radio spectrum is limited, any new technology that could be overlaid onto spectrum already assigned to other transmissions without interfering with those transmissions was of obvious benefit. Or so Ferris and Marcus hoped.

The benefits were less obvious to competing interests within both government and industry. Marcus felt as if he were advancing into a lion’s den in 1983 when he went to the National Security Agency to make his case. “
It became clear,” he writes, “that some individuals at NSA hoped to keep spread spectrum off the commercial market for fear that foreign military use of the technology would complicate NSA’s signal intelligence responsibility.” Fortunately for him, the wife of the “very senior NSA official” who introduced him had just bought a new car with a scanning AM/FM radio, a technology similar to spread spectrum, which meant, he told the assembled, that “
the spread spectrum Pandora’s box may already have been opened and that shutting it was probably futile.” After that fortuitous rescue, Marcus writes, opposition to civil spread spectrum within the U.S. military and intelligence communities began to fade.

The communications industry was
not so easily persuaded. Television networks and manufacturers such as RCA and General Electric feared that spread spectrum would interfere with television signals. Manufacturers of cordless phones, which today use spread spectrum almost exclusively, suspected a plot by the FCC to deny them the narrow channels they preferred by dumping spread spectrum onto them.

Once the FCC understood the industry complaints, it forged an acceptable solution by authorizing spread spectrum in the ISM garbage bands, and then at low (but adequate) wattage. At the same time, and crucially, the commission allowed spread-spectrum communications in those bands to operate
without an FCC license
, unregulated. That meant that inventors, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers could proceed from conception to market without having to slog through the long, legally complicated, and therefore expensive process of seeking FCC approval. (“
Legend has it,” Marcus notes, “that the original unlicensed device was a ‘couch potato’–like remote control for radio receivers.” So the 1939 Philco Mystery Control once again revealed its originality.)

If all this bureaucratic infighting seems obscure, what followed from it is happily familiar. “
The rules adopted,” Marcus writes, “had a much greater impact than any of [their] advocates could ever have imagined at the time. They enabled the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the majority of cordless phones now sold in the US, and myriad other lesser-known niche products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s
$41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more.

A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.

Hedy followed these developments. Sometimes she felt bitter about her lack of recognition as an electronic pioneer. In 1990, when she was seventy-five, she told a reporter for
Forbes
magazine how she felt. “
I can’t understand,” she said, “why there’s no acknowledgment when it’s used all over the world.” The reporter noted that she was “six times divorced and now living in Miami on a Screen Actors Guild pension” and couldn’t help feeling she’d been wronged. “Never a letter,” Hedy added, “never a thank you, never money. I don’t know. I guess they just take and forget about a person.”

Yet she didn’t let her resentment consume her. Robert Osborne, the journalist and television host, recalled her enthusiasm for life in a late profile: