Hedy's Folly (22 page)

Few people were ever blessed with a merrier sense of humor, few sailed through the calamities of life with more of a blithe spirit, few apologized less frequently and seemed to be having more fun, even when the bloodhounds were snapping at her ankles. The Hedy I had known since 1963 was game for anything—a picnic, a charade party, a dress-up affair at [the restaurant] “21,” a walk on the beach or a climb over a “No Admittance” barricade to get a look at something she was curious to investigate. Her energy, curiosity and generosity were enormous.… She was colorful without attempting to be and constantly unpredictable.… A sad figure? No way, and certainly not to the lady herself. She neither complained nor apologized. Hedy embraced that “Auntie Mame” philosophy that “life is a banquet.” If there was any tinge of tragedy connected to Hedy Lamarr, it was the fact that she ever had to grow old. When a face had been as flawless and celebrated as hers, it’s not easy greeting birthdays.… So Hedy retreated from the gazes of those who didn’t look deeper. She avoided cameras, shut the doors, kept out of sight, filled her days with activities (and lawsuits) and, with the humor still intact, tolerated the rest of us.

One man who never forgot about Hedy was a retired U.S. Army colonel named Dave Hughes. Hughes, a highly decorated veteran of both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars who lives in Colorado Springs, had retired early from the Army to explore the developing world of wireless digital communications. Something of a maverick, the descendant of eleven generations of Welsh Calvinists, he got interested in setting up free digital wireless for rural schools that couldn’t afford the high cost and charges of dedicated T1 lines strung out forty or a hundred miles across the Colorado prairie. “
I wasn’t worried about rural kids getting a computer,” he told me. “They were falling in price and were going to be cheap. The problem was going to be the cost of communications and the evil empires called the phone companies.”

Hughes determined to solve that problem, at least by demonstration. He set up the first computer bulletin board in Colorado Springs, “two-way with a Hayes modem.” He helped Montana link up its 114 one-room schoolhouses with FidoNet, the noncommercial network of linked bulletin boards established by the San Francisco artist, pioneer hacker, and self-styled anarchist Tom Jennings in 1984. Then the National Science Foundation heard about Hughes’s work and came calling. After the NSF investigated, it awarded Hughes a seven-year, $7 million grant to continue exploring digital wireless for rural education. And it was while Hughes was doing due diligence for his NSF grant work, investigating the prior art, that he came across the story of Hedy Lamarr and frequency hopping.

By then, Hughes was connected to the burgeoning digital community in the San Francisco Bay Area through the Well, Stewart Brand’s pre-Web, dial-in version of a linked digital community, and he reported his discovery there. In 1993 he received a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that defends digital rights and celebrates electronic pioneering. In 1994, attending an IEEE award ceremony for Mike Marcus, the FCC’s champion of spread spectrum, Hughes was irritated to hear Marcus say that Hedy’s invention was never reduced to practice. “I told him I questioned that,” Hughes says. “Because by this time, Scibor-Marchocki had heard about my discovery and put two and two together. He’d contacted me and told me about his sonobuoy.”

Hughes, a battle veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross who fell in love with Hedy Lamarr when he was thirteen, smelled sexism in the engineering community’s casual dismissal of her contribution. He decided she deserved recognition for her pioneering invention of frequency-hopping spread spectrum. The award he settled on trying to win for her was the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the same award he had received in 1993. (Other recipients: Doug Engelbart, Robert Kahn, Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, pioneers all.) By then, it was 1996. He had become a familiar figure on the Well, and when he reported what he was doing, he says, and explained to the young people who Hedy Lamarr was, “there was a groundswell starting on the Well to endorse the nomination.” He
located Hedy’s son Anthony in Los Angeles. The EFF voted the award, to honor George Antheil posthumously as well. Hedy herself was happy to hear of it—“it’s about time,” she told Anthony—but was unwilling to appear in public to receive it. The EFF agreed that Anthony, now fifty years old and a Los Angeles businessman, could do so on her behalf.

The ceremony was held on the evening of 12 March 1997 at an Electronic Frontier Foundation conference in Burlingame, outside San Francisco. Receiving the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award, Hedy spoke briefly through a recording her son had made. Dave Hughes, always resourceful, had also brought a recorder and caught the message on tape. When I visited him in Colorado Springs in 2010, he played the tape for me, and I heard Hedy’s clear, Austrian-accented voice. “In acknowledgment of your honoring me,” she said simply, “I hope you feel good as well as I feel good about it, and it was not done in vain. Thank you.”

Eighty-two at the time of that long-delayed recognition, she sounded remarkably young.

Afterword

Boski Antheil remained in Los Angeles after her husband’s death, raising their son, Peter. Over the years she worked on writing a memoir of their life together, especially their Paris days. She wrote vivid scenes, some of which I’ve quoted in this book, but never connected them into a coherent narrative. Nor did she live long enough to enjoy the rediscovery of her husband’s work, which began in the 1990s when
Ballet mécanique
was finally produced in something close to its original form with the aid of digital controls, some of them spread spectrum. Since then, George’s mechanical ballet has been performed in many different venues, once using robot performers. When the American composer John Adams was writing the music for his 2005 opera,
Doctor Atomic
, and wanted to invoke the intersection of physics and war that resulted in the invention of the first atomic bombs, he intentionally
scored the overture in the style of
Ballet mécanique
. Other Antheil works have become part of the modern classical canon.

The beginning of an essay Boski drafted in the late 1960s recalls her characteristic voice and connects her past and present:

Some time ago my son Peter, who is in his thirties, asked me when I first came to America. He is a great devotee of the Twenties and at that time he was particularly interested in vintage cars. When I told him that it was in 1927 (the occasion being the Carnegie Hall performance of George’s
Ballet mécanique
), he exclaimed:

“It must have been wonderful to see all the old cars!”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“But Peter,
then
they were
new
cars!”

And so it goes. Even though at times I feel like a vintage car myself, as most of my contemporaries are passing away, somehow the past seems as present to me as if it happened yesterday. It is hard for me to imagine that I am an ancient relic of the Twenties. I really don’t feel that old, unless I suddenly realize that I am talking of a period about forty to forty-five years ago.

I get along with young people very well, in fact. Especially the kids in their early twenties, as they seem to be more related to the “20’s,” more in rapport with it. In a way they are trying to do pretty much what our
generation was trying to do. The after-war generation wanted to deny the existing order, disillusioned and disgusted with the bourgeois generation responsible for the 1st world war and all its middle-class values. We really wanted to start the world from scratch … and believe me, when you are very young, this seems to be a very real possibility.

Boski Antheil died in 1978, Peter Antheil in 2010.

Fritz Mandl successfully escaped Austria after the
Anschluss
and immigrated to Argentina, where he became an Argentine citizen and manufactured munitions and light aircraft for the dictator Juan Perón. (He also invested in a minor Hollywood film company, Gloria Pictures, although he does not seem to have attempted to cast his former wife in a film.) During World War II the British Foreign Office, concerned that U.S. business interests might collude with Mandl to monopolize the postwar South American arms trade, set out to smear the Austrian parvenu as a Nazi sympathizer.

“
To neutralize Mandl,” writes a Canadian historian, “British diplomats adroitly manipulated the FBI and the anti-Mandl faction of the [U.S.] State Department; these Americans in turn manipulated public and official opinion in the United States. The campaign was successful: by mid-1945, Mandl had been swept from the board.” After a 1955 treaty between the Western powers and the Soviet Union restored Austria to sovereignty, he returned to his native
country and reclaimed his Hirtenberg empire, supplying the Austrian army and, later, such clients as Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, and the United Arab Emirates. He died in 1977, roundly despised but seemingly possessed of a golden passport.

Hedy continued to receive honors after the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. The Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors awarded her its Viktor Kaplan Medal in 1998. An exhibition,
Hommage à Hedy Lamarr
, toured Austria in 1999.

“
Hedy’s fondness for invention remained with her until the end,” writes her biographer Ruth Barton. “She had a proposal for a new kind of traffic stoplight and some modifications to the design of the Concorde [the Anglo-French supersonic passenger airliner that flew from 1976 to 2003]. There were plans for a device to aid movement-impaired people to get in and out of the bath, a fluorescent dog collar, and a skin-tautening technique based on the principle of the accordion. To the end of her days, she could perform devastatingly complex card tricks.”

Her last residence was a three-bedroom house in Casselberry, Florida, north of Orlando. She moved there in October 1999. That same month, in
Vanity Fair
, she answered a “Proust questionnaire”—an old European parlor game that the magazine had revived. Her idea of perfect happiness, she answered, was “
living a very private life,” her real-life heroes Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. She was happiest
“between marriages.” Her favorite fictional hero was the scofflaw child Bart Simpson of the television cartoon series
The Simpsons
, and like Bart her motto was, “Do not take things too seriously.”

Hedy’s final goal in life was to live into the new millennium. As with movie stardom, wartime fund-raising, and pioneering invention, she persevered and achieved what she set out to do; she died alone at home in Florida, in her sleep, on the night of 19 January 2000. She was eighty-five years old. She left her children an estate valued at $3 million, most of it won in court settlements against corporations that tried to exploit her name and image and through shrewd stock investments. Her son Anthony carried her cremated remains back to Austria, as she had requested, and scattered them in the Vienna Woods on the slope of a hill overlooking her native city. There she rests today, high above the wide Danube valley where Marcus Aurelius wrote his
Meditations
, one with the trees and the grasses.

Acknowledgments

This book emerged from discussions at meetings of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation book committee and with Sloan programs vice president Doron Weber. A grant from the foundation supported the work of research.

Hedy Lamarr’s daughter, Denise Loder-DeLuca, was generous with her time and enthusiasm. Sheila Weller introduced us. Hedy’s son, Anthony Loder, scanned vital documents for me and reviewed them with me at a time of grave illness. I value their confidence and hope that the result warrants it.

Nino Amarena, inventor, electrical engineer, and man for all seasons, tutored me in hydrogen peroxide technology, radio control, frequency hopping, the pleasures and frustrations of invention, and much more. His knowledge and guidance have been invaluable.

Dave Hughes gave me a day and evening to explore his nomination of Hedy for an Electronic Frontier Foundation award and his own electronic pioneering. Susi Maurer not only
guided me around Vienna but also located and drove me to one of Fritz Mandl’s hunting lodges, where we peered in windows and interviewed locals who remembered stories their parents told them of Hedy’s isolation and loneliness there. Stanford University librarian Mike Keller and his staff at the university libraries were unfailingly helpful. Tara C. Craig of Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library located an important letter for me. My daughter, Katherine, drove me to Los Angeles to interview Anthony Loder.

At the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Washington, curator Ron W. Roehmholdt briefed me and my grandson Isaac on torpedoes. Director Bill Galvani not only drove us to the ferry slip after our visit but also arranged to provide me with a copy of the Mark 14 torpedo manual. Meredith Peterson of the Congressional Research Service located a Washington-based researcher for me, Andrew Marchesseault, who skillfully assembled a large file of George and Boski Antheil writings and correspondence at the Library of Congress. John Adams was kind enough to answer several musical questions. Gerd Zillner at the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna confirmed Frederick Kiesler’s distant relationship to Hedy. Claudette Allison organized permissions with her usual skill.

Gerry Howard has been my supportive and collegial editor at Doubleday, his assistant, Hannah Wood, a patient, thorough hunter of photographs, rights, and permissions.

Ginger Rhodes read every word, more than once.

Notes

ONE: A CHARMING AUSTRIAN GIRL