Veteranscribe's Blog

Three cheers – no, make that three times three times three cheers – for Diane von Furstenberg and Robert F. Smith.  They are the principal actors in two recent good-news stories about America.  Let’s tune out the political stink-bombers and the nabobs of negativity, and let’s listen to them.

Mr. Smith

Mr. Smith, a graduate of Morehouse College and its 2019 commencement speaker, announced to the school’s graduates that he would pay off their student loans. That will take an estimated $40 million of his multi-billion dollar personal fortune that he amassed in a career in investment banking.

Ms Von Furstenberg, daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, came to America at age 22 with a baby in her womb and a suitcase full of dresses that she hoped to sell. DVF-branded goods now sell in 70 countries. She chaired the recently-concluded fund-raising campaign that brought in $100 million for a new museum of the Statue of Liberty.

The immediate beneficiaries of Mr. Smith’s gift are the graduating seniors. No longer saddled with loan payments, they will be free to launch their careers, build their own fortunes, and start their families.  I’m sure that all those young people have said “thank you,” but the proof of their sincerity will lie in how well they go and do what he advises.

He prefaced his message by saying that his contributions would put a little fuel in the bus, and continued,

“You don’t want to just be on the bus. You want to own it and drive it and pick up as many people as you can… [by your doing so, the United States become a place where access to education is determined by] “the fierceness of your intellect…Be intentional about the words you speak, how you define yourself, the people you spend time with.”

In thinking about Smith’s extraordinary generosity, I was reminded of the Gospel passage in Luke 17, the story about Jesus healing ten lepers who called out to him from the side of the road.  The ten went to show themselves to the priests as he instructed, and they were cured. Only one of them, a Samaritan, returned to thank him.

“Were not all ten cleansed?” Jesus asked. “Where then are the other nine? Was no one found except this foreigner to return and give glory to God?”

Then Jesus said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well!”

Let me suggest that these newly-minted Morehouse graduates will show their own gratitude, will become like this Samaritan and be truly well, if they heed what Mr. Smith says. Then will his gift’s benefits multiply without end; it will become, as I’m sure he hopes, a gift to the country that was so good to him.  It’s up to them now.

Ms. von Furstenberg

The fruits of Ms von Furstenberg’s charitable endeavors will go to a much broader audience.

Somewhere between three and four million people visit the Statue of Liberty every year.  The expanded museum will, in the words of a Wall Street Journal editorial, give those visitors “a richer insight into the beacon of freedom’s place in American history and culture.”

In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar magazine, she suggested that Lady Liberty is a reminder to all people of the friendships between nations. Not necessarily, she adds, friendship between the governments of nations:

“…not their leaders, their people. The Statue of Liberty was given to us by the people of France to commemorate the centennial of the American Revolution at a time when they were disappointed by their own political situation. The French Revolution started not long after the American Revolution, but the result was very different: the Terror, and then Napoléon and the Second Empire. So the French looked to America as this utopic democracy.”

As to why she agreed to chair the fund-raising drive and to use her connections to the world’s rich and famous, von Furstenberg points to a passage in her own book about her life. That passage quoted her mother: “God has saved my life so that I can give you life. By giving you life, you gave me my life back. You are my torch, my flag of freedom.”

“…I was lucky and privileged to become the woman I wanted to be. Now that I’m older, I would like to spend the rest of my life using my voice, my knowledge, my connections—anything I have—to help all women become the women they want to be.”

So once again, praise and thanks for these two great Americans. Both of them are doing good after having done well; they’re examples of people who have realized the much-clichéd “American Dream.”

To bring up another overly familiar term, are they “giving back?” I must say that I don’t particularly like that way of looking at things.  To me, anyway, it suggests a direct return of a favor, a repayment of a debt, a quid-pro-quo.

Perhaps that’s true here, in a broad sense. They’re giving something back to the country that allowed their talents to blossom and them to earn their fortunes. But I prefer to think of what Mr. Smith and Ms von Furstenberg are doing is simply expressing their gratitude.  It’s gratitude for the opportunity to be the best that each of them could be.

We still don’t see enough of that gratitude nowadays, just as they didn’t see much of it in the biblical times depicted in the gospel of Luke.

So I say again, three times three times three cheers.

Elizabeth Taylor – classic beauty

In March of 2019, there was a spate of paid Facebook postings that depicted three or four celebrities and the question “Cup and Conversation with…?”  You were supposed to click on the most appealing of the prospective interlocutors.

That Facebook campaign was most likely a clickbait thing, probably targeting women because most of the time the celebs depicted were deceased dreamboat males.  But I must say that it got me thinking. If I had to name four people with whom I’d love to have coffee and a chat, of course they’d be women. One of them would be Elizabeth Taylor. Another would be Hedy Lamarr.

Okay, stop right there. I know what you’re thinking, and there’s more to the story than that. Really, there is.  How can there not be? Neither of them is a redhead. But I’ll explain.  I’m taking Truman Capote’s recommendations on the first of those wonderful women.  As for my reasons for including Ms Lamarr, neé Hedwig Kiesler, read my earlier blog post here.

How I would have loved to do coffee, or lunch, or whatever, with either of them. It would have been nice to have been able to count either of them among my friends.

Additionally, I like the way Capote thinks about the company of women in general.  I’ve been reading Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote.  In it there’s a piece titled “Self-Portrait,” a Q&A that reads like a magazine interview.  In a lengthy response to “How do you like best to occupy your spare time?” he states,

“Many people say they hate to lunch…[it] altogether spoils their day. It makes mine. There are some men I enjoy lunching with, but by and large I prefer beautiful, or at least extremely attractive, alert, and au courant women.”

After naming several such ladies, he continues, “But I don’t think that any woman deserves full marks until she attains and maintains qualities of style and appearance and amusing good sense beyond the point of easy youthful beguilement.”

All righty, then.  Truman and I do see eye-to-eye.

Truman Capote

It’s right after that when Capote first mentions Liz Taylor. He names several more women who had distinguished themselves in their lives and careers, then points out that they are all private citizens rather than public characters whose trade is “allure.”

Taylor and Garbo are two such public characters.  He depicts Garbo as “an ultimately selfish and tiresome woman;” Taylor, however, is “a sensitive, self-educated lady with a tough but essentially innocent attitude – if you sleep with a guy, gosh, that means you have to marry him!”

I suppose if that wasn’t enough to whet my appetite for more insight into the ravishingly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, I could also fall back on what my mother once said about her: “I wouldn’t cross the street to meet that tramp.” Up until then, I’d always thought that a tramp was one of those homeless guys that we also called hoboes. I never knew a woman could be one.

Sorry, Ma. It’s quite clear that Elizabeth Taylor was anything but a tramp. Truman Capote was an acerbic, exacting observer of human nature, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He skewered many of the beautiful people in his writings, but Liz was not one of them.  So I’ll take his word for it. One of his essays tells of their friendship that blossomed after a number of casual meetings and finally, one of those lengthy lunch dates.

Of Ms Taylor’s love life, he points out that the two worst things that had happened to her were the death of her third (of an eventual eight) husband, Mike Todd, and her subsequent marriage to the “singer” Eddie Fisher. That latter marriage was an event “almost as unsuitable as Mrs. Kennedy’s Grecian nuptials.” Ouch!

Taylor as Gloria Wandrous in “Butterfield 8”

Capote learned that despite her liberal use of four-letter words, Liz was “in various areas a moralist, quite a strict one, almost Calvinist.” She hated having to play Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8, saying “I don’t like that girl. I don’t like what she stands for. The sleazy emptiness of her. The men.The sleeping around.”

Yikes. Liz actually sounds like my mom there. She didn’t like tramps either. But she was under contract to John O’Hara and she had to do the movie. She played the tramp and won an Academy Award. As one reviewer on IMDB put it:

“Much of this movie is cheap psychobabble, but Taylor smolders with a raw sensuality that you would never guess she had in her. You knew she was strong, beautiful, and flawed, but you never knew she could be all three and still be able to act with that much cleavage. The unfortunate thing about this movie is that there are other people in it.”

Yes, Elizabeth Taylor was a damn fine actress and much more than a pretty face. But she was also a brainiac, as Capote found out that day. He goes on to state his surprise at how well-read she was:

“…not that she made anything of it, or posed as an intellectual, but clearly she cared about books and, in haphazard style, had absorbed a large number of them.  And she discussed them with considerable understanding of the literary process; all in all, it made one wonder about the men in her life, with the exception of Mike Todd…Nicky Hilton, Michael Wilding, Mr. Fisher – what on earth did this very alert and swift-minded young woman find to talk to them about?”

He lets Liz herself answer that one. She told him, “Well one doesn’t always fry the fish one wants to fry. Some of the men I’ve really liked really didn’t like women.”

Illustrating this point, further, Capote mentions a later meeting he had with Taylor and Fisher, whom Capote disdainfully dubbed “The Busboy.” Eddie was sitting on a couch, rubbing his eyes in frustration. He complained “It’s all that reading. That thing you tell me I gotta read. I’ve tried. I can’t get through it somehow.”

Taylor turned to Capote and explained, “He means To Kill a Mockingbird. It just came out. I think it’s a really lovely book.”

There’s a good deal more about Elizabeth Taylor that’s downright appealing. It makes me wish we could somehow have been friends, and not just lunch companions.  She didn’t seem at all like a fair-weather type. She took  friendship seriously – not something that I would associate with the cutthroat world of show business.

Montgomery Clift

Liz stood by another old friend, Montgomery Clift, while his life was slowly unraveling with substance abuse. She briefly salvaged his career by insisting that he play opposite her in Suddenly, Last Summer. It turned out to be his last good performance.  By 1966, Clift was considered unemployable. Liz got him one more role. She put her salary for the planned film Reflections in a Golden Eye, up as insurance in order for him to co-star with her.  But Clift died before the film was made, and Marlon Brando got the role.

Some years later, when she was married to Richard Burton, they were leaving a Broadway play by car. A large and rowdy crowd of fans swarmed all over the car and kept it from moving.  One guy climbed onto the hood, fell off, and was kicked by police horses. Burton was amused by it all, saying that the rabble was just “enthusiastic.” Not as far as Liz was concerned.  She was afraid that someone could be seriously hurt. To her, they were there

“To see a pair of sinful freaks. For God’s sake, Richard, don’t you realize the only reason this is happening is because they think we’re sinners and freaks?”

Taylor and Burton were married to each other and divorced from each other twice. With their constant squabbling, they were always fodder for the tabloids.  But there still had to be something special between them.

Taylor and Burton in “Cleopatra”

Capote was with them one evening. Burton had left the room to go fetch some more champagne.  Capote wrote that her enthusiasm for her husband “illuminated the room like a mass of Japanese lanterns.” Then she said,

“Oh, we quarrel. But at least he’s worth quarreling with. He’s really brilliant. He’s read everything and I can talk to him – there’s nothing I can’t talk to him about. All his friends…Emlyn Williams told him he was a fool to marry me. He was a great actor. Could be a great actor. And I was nothing. A movie star.

“But the most important thing is what happens between a man and a woman who love each other. Or any two people who love each other.”

I would say that Elizabeth Taylor truly “got it.” What a formidable, remarkable woman she was. Can you now see why I’d love to have a cup and conversation with her?  And would you care to join us?

Book Review and Reflection

I speak of geniuses. That’s as good a way as any to review and discuss a book about Leonardo da Vinci.

So let’s start with Bill Belichick. He’s a genius of his sport, and he has a lot in common with Leonardo, a prolific, incomparable polymath who once finished a job application letter to the ruler of Milan with “Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible.” No kidding, as he later showed with Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

I’m not kidding about Bill either. Even though Joe Montana, the storied Notre Dame and San Francisco 49er quarterback, said that nobody in football should be called a genius because “a genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

Actually, no.  A genius is a guy like Leonard da Vinci and Bill Belichick.

A genius is made, not born. A genius is an imaginative synthesizer of art and science. A genius is a lifetime autodidact, because there’s always more to learn. A genius can draw analogies, discern underlying similarities, and apply lessons from vastly different fields to his own.  That’s my big takeaway from Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Leonardo.

Nobody in the history of the world did a better job of all that genius-making than Leonardo da Vinci. Though this post is primarily about that book and about him, I think a side trip into a brief comparison with Belichick is instructive.

The post-Super Bowl issue of Sports Illustrated had a lengthy piece on Belichick, as you might expect. One of its anecdotes immediately reminded me of several similar ones about Da Vinci. Their minds operated in exactly the same way.

In 2000, the reticent, grumpy Belichick had met Lenny Clarke, the loud and uncouth lowbrow comedian, on an airplane flight. They became buds, unlikely as that sounds. Four years and two Super Bowl victories later, Bill asked if he could visit the set of Clarke’s tv show, Rescue Me.

Belichick showed up at 5 a.m. and spent the entire day, notebook and Blackberry in hand, taking notes and asking questions like “When do the lighting guys come in? Who is the boss? How many guys work for him?”

At lunch, comedian and show co-star Dennis Leary asked Belichick why all the questions.  “Fascination,” was the answer. “It’s about the process.”

I don’t know exactly what lessons Bill Belichick learned that day, but I’m positive he found something about putting on a television show that he could apply to his work of directing a football organization. “Do your job,” remember? It’s not just the players on game day. It’s everybody, all year round. The process brings about the execution. Bill, like Leonardo, is a lifetime learner, an observer of the real world who looks for something of value wherever he goes.

Now to da Vinci’s biography. The book has so many examples of Leonardo’s relentless search for knowledge and his creative application of that knowledge, it’s impossible to list them all here.  I’ll just cite a few, after mentioning the many fields of scientific study that Leonardo da Vinci pursued almost obsessively throughout his life.

He did his learning mostly by observation and hands-on experimenting, but also by consulting with experts and by reading.  He was the perfect autodidact.

Those fields of study include: anatomy, the heart, birds, fossils, water flows, optics, geometry, botany, geology, geography, military weaponry, engineering, architecture, and flying machines.

The Ideal Man

Consider Leonardo’s drawing of “Vitruvian Man.” This spread-eagled, perfectly proportioned man rests within both a circle and a square.  His name comes from Vitruvius, a military engineer and architect who lived in the first century CE. Vitruvius once wrote that the layout of a religious temple should have precise relationships, exactly like those of a well-shaped man. So, what was a well-shaped man? Leonardo decided to determine that.

As it happened, Leonardo had also been working on the design of a bell tower for a cathedral in Milan. Squares and circles, from his favored discipline of geometry, both figured prominently in the design of the church’s floor plan. He used them in the drawing, in which the outstretched arms of the man extended to the ends of the church’s transepts.  As he worked on it, Leonardo brought in his own observations of anatomy; for example, Vitruvius thought that a man’s height was six times the length of his foot. Through his dissections and drawings of cadavers, Leonardo realized that the proportion was seven times, not six.

The drawing, in Isaacson’s description, “embodies a moment when art and science combines to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe.  It also symbolizes an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity, value, and rational agency of humans and individuals. Inside the square and the circle we can see the essence of Leonardo da Vinci, and the essence of ourselves, standing naked at the intersection of the earthly and the cosmic.”

A rather flowery summation, but I like it.

The Penis

A bit more on anatomy – Leonardo celebrated both beauty and function. Vitruvian Man’s proportions also required that “The root of the penis (il membra virile) is at half the height of the man.” The man’s genitals are at the exact center of the square.  Il membra virile was apparently a favorite subject for Leonardo, as his little essay On the Penis indicates:

“The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without permission of the owner. Whether he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise, and often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it.  Therefore it appears that this creature possesses a life and intelligence separate from the man. Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it, always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony.”

Such an assessment had to come from both observation and experience. Another thing about the handsome, dashing Leonardo…he never had a lady friend, but unlike his rival Michelangelo, who was also gay, he was not ashamed of his own sexual desires. Rather, he was amused by them. Like his relentless quest for learning, they were a source of joy, insight, and satisfaction.

Light and Pictures

Leonardo’s fascination with optics and light led him to a correct surmise about why the sky is blue, and to the explanation of the “earthshine” glow on a crescent moon.  It also informed the precision of his painting of colors in artistic works; an object lighted by reflected light is different from one illuminated by direct light, for instance.

He also understood how the human eye works; and the pupils of his subjects’ eyes display that knowledge.  They seem to follow observers around as those observers change positions. His painting technique of “sfumato,” which slightly blurred outlines and mellowed colors, both left something to the viewer’s imagination and gave a more realistic perspective of three-dimensional depth.  Sharply defined outlines, like those of Michelangelo, make paintings look flat and two-dimensional. As da Vinci wrote to art students, “Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines of borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air.”

Leonardo dissected literally hundreds of dead bodies over the course of his career. His drawings, which were unfortunately not shared widely or published, were every bit as good as those you see in the classic “Gray’s Anatomy” books.

He studied the structure of the lip muscles and used that knowledge in crafting Mona Lisa’s famous smile. He studied how the body’s joints moved the hands, arms, legs, and torso; with that knowledge he he imparted realistic action to the people in his paintings. He was acquainted with a man who happened to be a deaf mute; he studied how that man used his hands and his facial expressions to convey his inner emotions.  Check out how he applied that in The Last Supper. In that painting, Jesus has just announced to his followers, “One of you will betray me.” Note the many ways in which the apostles’ gestures and expressions tell what they feel about that bombshell.

Hydraulics of the Heart

To me, the most fascinating connection and discovery that da Vinci made was about how the aortic valve of the heart works. The heart pumps torrents of oxygenated blood out through the triangle-shaped valve opening, and somehow the little flaps of that valve immediately close up and don’t allow backflow into the chamber. How was this possible?

Go back to da Vinci’s close observations of flowing water. He took note of how river currents flow swiftly in the middle of the stream, but along the edges they flow more slowly, swirling back into little eddies and meanders.  Those swirls appear in his paintings, where streams appear in the background or flow as spiraling eddies around his subjects’ feet. They also show up as the luxurious curly locks of his subjects’ hair.

He also saw how water flowing out of a pipe moved faster in the center, but slower along the edges of the pipe because of friction and drag. Applying that to the heart valve, he wrote, “The middle of the blood that spouts up through the trials acquires much more height than that which rises up along the sides.  That slower-moving blood forms spiraling eddies, which causes the leaflets of the valve to spread out and cover the opening. He writes “The revolving blood beats against the sides of the three valves and closes them so that the blood cannot descend.”

Up until the 1960s, heart specialists thought differently.  They believed that the valve was simply pushed shut by the weight of the blood above it. Finally, about 450 years after da Vinci, researchers at Oxford used dyes and radiography to confirm that Leonardo’s description of the heart’s hydrodynamics had gotten it right. They found that “vortices produce a thrust on both the cusp and the sinus wall, and the closure of the cusps is thus steady and synchronized.”

One surgeon is quoted on the latter: “Of all the amazements that Leonardo left for the ages, this one would seem to be the most extraordinary.”

I’ll leave that decision up to you. But I do urge you to read the book. In addition to learning about da Vinci the man, you’ll discover a good deal about how life really was in Renaissance Italy, and about art history and techniques, along with many other items of interest.

Can We Ever Hope to Emulate Leonardo?

And now for a final thought and personal reflection. Isaacson closes the book with a section subtitled “Learning from Leonardo.” In it he gives several bits of advice, two of which are “Be curious, be relentlessly curious,” and “Retain a childlike sense of wonder.” To the latter he adds “We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.”

Amen to that. We’re never too old to learn, and we’re never too old to embrace and to love life, and to relish each and every day that dawns as a precious gift from God.

With Doris Matthews White, the “Queen Bee,” and many of her friends at Planting for Friends Day at Winthrop Cemetery, June 2010.

I’m fortunate to have many contemporaries who live with this attitude.  But perhaps the best example is my dear and now-departed friend Doris Matthews White. She left this earth just before attaining 100 years of age.  Her days she filled with online research and banter with her hundreds of fans and admirers. She dived right into computer technology, taught herself techniques of genealogy, and discovered the life stories of relatives. One of them died at the battle of Lexington and Concord; another was captain of a privateering vessel during the Revolutionary War; and still another was a member of the court of Edward the Confessor.

Doris remained relentlessly curious and open to learning throughout her long life. To herself, she brought a wealth of knowledge. To her many friends and admirers with whom she shared that knowledge, she brought joy, appreciation, and faith that somehow all would be right with the world.

Leonardo kept much of his vast knowledge to himself. But fortunately for us, many of his notebooks have survived.

And as for that other modern-day Leonardo, Bill Belichick, he doesn’t share a whole lot of what he knows either. But you have to admit that he puts it to good use. Just ask the Kansas City Chiefs. Or Pete Carroll. Or Roger Goodell.

A Beginning in Sex and Scandal

Her early life was scandalous. She appeared naked, on the movie screen, running through the woods and swimming in a lake, the first woman ever shown in the altogether.

That was in Ecstasy, made in Czechoslovakia in 1933. She also acted out sexual climax, writhing and moaning in a bliss that would have made Meg Ryan blush. Her films were luscious cinematic forbidden fruit, banned almost everywhere. Benito Mussolini owned and treasured a personal copy of Ecstasy.

And she was beautiful. Hedwig Kiesler had a perfect face, raven hair, and a slim delicate figure. Men lusted for her. The first man to have her – that’s not the right word, nobody ever truly had her – was Friedrich Mandl, the first of her six husbands.

He was one of the richest men is Austria. She was his trophy wife. His company, Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik, sold ammunition and was the one of the leading arms makers in Europe. He was a Fascist sympathizer, supplying the war machines of anyone who’d buy his wares.

Mandl showcased Hedwig at dinners and banquets with the likes of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. She acted the part of a brainless beauty. She often said that the secret of glamor was to “stand there and look stupid.” So she did. It was a superb performance, maybe the best acting job of her career.

Hedwig Kiesler was a genius. Daughter of a Jewish banker, she had excelled in school, especially in math and science. She was born in Vienna on November 9, 1914. She quit school at 16 to study acting. In the late 1920’s Hedy was discovered and brought to Berlin by director and acting instructor Max Reinhardt. Following her training in the theater, she returned to Vienna and began to work in the film industry. She married Mandl, who was 30 years older than she, in 1933.

Eavesdropping Inside the Third Reich

When her husband and the evil dictators sat around talking shop, she sat there, looked pretty, and took it all in. She knew what they were talking about, and she knew what they were up to.

A favorite topic of Adolf Hitler was military technology, especially of the type that could control missiles and torpedoes by radio. Wireless control of weapons would be a huge jump from the hard-wired methods then in use. Wireless did come into use during the 1940s, by both Allies and Axis forces. But it was single-frequency radio, easy to monitor, detect, and jam.

According to one account, Mandl and Hitler engaged in a drunken menage à trois after a dinner party. Mandl was desperate to cement a big arms deal. The third party in the threesome was his gorgeous wife. That story is from a widely-panned book, What Almost Happened to Hedy Lamarr, and its truth is in doubt.

Even if it is true, that may or may not have been the final straw for Kiesler. As a Jew, she came to hate Nazis. She despised her husband’s business ambitions, and she did not share her thoughts about science and technology. If anything, she would share her information with the Allies who were fighting against the Nazis.

The radio-controlled guidance system for torpedoes that she heard discussed never got into production because it was too susceptible to disruption. Somewhere along the way she got the idea of distributing the guidance signal over several frequencies. This would protect it from enemy jamming. But she still had to figure out how to synchronize the transmitter and receiver. The solution would come to her later.

Hedy and Mandl

Mandl came to know how she felt about him, and he kept her locked up in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau. He had also forbade her to pursue acting, and tried to buy up all copies of Ecstasy.

In 1937, Hedwig escaped by drugging her maid and sneaking out of the castle wearing the maid’s clothes. She sold her jewelry to finance a trip to London.

Hedwig made it out of Austria just in time. Hitler annexed the country in 1938 and took over Mandl’s business. Mandl was half-Jewish, so being an arms supplier to the Third Reich was no help to him. He had to flee to Argentina, where he eventually became an adviser to Juan Peron.

Into the Movies

In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with the Hollywood film titan Louis B. Mayer. He knew of her, of course, and he too was captivated by her beauty. On the voyage to America she signed a long-term contract and became one of MGM’s biggest stars of the time.

Hedy and Paul Henreid in “The Conspirators”

She was in more than 20 films, costarring with Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Bob Hope, Paul Henreid, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy and others. Algiers, White Cargo, and Samson and Delilah were among her biggest screen successes. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the lead in both Casablanca and Gaslight.

She made and spent, by some accounts, at least $30 million. The mansion used in filming The Sound of Music in 1965 belonged to her at the time. Her film career went into decline after Samson and Delilah in 1949.

Film fame and the showbiz scene didn’t do it all for Hedy Lamarr. She didn’t care much for the world of glitz, parties, and paparazzi. She wanted more. She wanted use her money, power, and formidable intellect to defeat the Nazis. She found an ally in composer/musician George Antheil.

Her Only True Partner

George Antheil

Antheil was an interesting individual too. His 1945 autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music, was a best seller. He was born in New Jersey in 1900 and showed promise as a musician and composer. He lived in Paris, and then in Berlin, from 1923 to 1933 when he returned to America. He also wrote books and a nationally syndicated advice column, wrote regularly for Music World and Esquire, and was a major figure in American ballet.

Antheil made his way to Hollywood to write musical scores for movies. He thought that the movie industry was hostile to modern music, however, and had little personal regard for Hollywood. He also saw Nazism for what it was. One of his magazine articles, “The Shape of the War to Come,” accurately predicted both the outbreak and eventual outcome of World War II. He joined up with Oscar Hammerstein and others in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Antheil and Lamarr were ideological soul mates. But that’s not what brought them together initially. He also claimed to be an expert on female endocrinology. He had written a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on “glandular effects” on their appearance. They had titles like “The Glandbook for the Questing Male” and another on “glandular criminology” titled “Every Man His Own Detective.”

Lamarr first sought out Antheil for help in “augmenting her upper torso,” as one web site nicely puts it. She had him over for dinner after scrawling her phone number in lipstick on his windshield after leaving a party. He suggested glandular extracts of some sort, but their talk evidently turned to technology and how it might be used to fight Hitler. Perhaps technology talk was unavoidable; she had a drafting table in her living room.

Antheil’s most famous musical work was the thoroughly avant-garde Ballet Mechanique. The work’s orchestration first called for 16 player pianos, along with two regular pianos, xylophones, electric bells, propellers, siren, and bass drums. It was hard to keep so many player pianos synchronized, so he scaled it back to a single set of piano rolls and augmented the regular pianos with several additional instruments. It produced an entirely new brand of stereophonic sound.

The Technological Breakthrough and Patent

Antheil’s expertise with player pianos was just what Hedy Lamarr needed. She wanted to design a system of controlling torpedoes that would also be hard or impossible for the enemy to jam. Single-frequency radio control was vulnerable to jamming, as she knew. If they could find a way to “change the channel” at random intervals, the torpedoes could make their way to the target.

Hedy incorporated Antheil’s method for synchronizing his player pianos. The coordination of frequency signals was done with paper player-piano rolls. Then she was able to synchronize the frequency changes between a weapon’s receiver and its transmitter. This “frequency hopping” used a piano roll to make random changes over 88 frequencies. It was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for a “Secret Communication System” was granted to Antheil and Hedy Kiesler Markey, which was Kiesler’s married name at the time. They turned the patent rights over to the U.S. Navy, and unfortunately they never made any money from their brilliant invention.

The Navy did not end up building radio-controlled torpedoes. They might not have taken the idea seriously; after all, it came from a gorgeous woman and a flaky musician. There were also some big additional hurdles to overcome before such a system could be used with waterborne ordnance. The Navy did ask her to use her good looks to sell War Bonds, though. She agreed, and bestowed kisses for a purchase price of $50,000.

But the Navy did use Lamarr’s system beginning in 1950. It first controlled sonobuoys, the floating listening posts that detect submarines. In the sixties, it was used for secure ship-to-ship communications during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. Reconnaissance drones used in Vietnam also employed frequency hopping.

Every time you dial your cell phone, take a call on it, or log onto the Internet, you can thank Hedy Lamarr. Her invention, conceived to fight the Nazis and now called “spread spectrum,” is the foundation of all wireless communication.

“Long-term evolution,” or “LTE,” technology, is just an extension of Hedy and George’s frequency-hopping. Spread spectrum is also the key element in anti-jamming devices used in the government’s $25 billion Milstar system. Milstar satellites control all the intercontinental missiles in U.S. weapons arsenal.

Dozens of “citing patents” owned by the likes of Sony, AT&T, and Seagate now appear on the Patent Office page for Hedy Lamarr’s Secret Communication System. The latest of them was filed in 2009.

After the Glamor Fled

Micro Times magazine with coverage of Lamarr’s achievements in technology

The last half of this remarkable woman’s life was not happy. True, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr her a long-overdue award for her work in 1996. Her son Anthony Loder accepted it for her because she no longer appeared in public. She also received the prestigious Austrian Academy of Science Award from her native country.

All six of Hedy’s marriages ended in divorce. Some of her quotes about her experiences there are revealing:

“I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.”

“Perhaps my problem in marriage–and it is the problem of many women–was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage.”

“I have not been that wise. Health I have taken for granted. Love I have demanded, perhaps too much and too often. As for money, I have only realized its true worth when I didn’t have it.”

Lamarr’s last movie appearance was in 1958. Her eye-candy roles had never required much acting anyway. She was usually cast as the mysterious and ravishing femme fatale. She’d often been called the most beautiful woman in the world. But when other, younger stars came along, she had fewer and fewer opportunities. She underwent plastic surgery that didn’t help. She had money problems and was twice arrested for shoplifting.

She also launched a number of lawsuits. These included going after Mel Brooks for his silly “That’s Hedley Lamarr!” in Blazing Saddles, and suing Corel Draw for using her image on packages. Both suits were settled out of court. She also wrote an autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, in the 1960s, and ended up suing the publisher.

Hedy lived her final years in seclusion in Florida, her eyesight failing and out of touch with the world that her scientific genius has helped immeasurably. She died in 2000 and was cremated. At her request, her ashes were scattered in the Vienna Woods of her native land.

I Wish I’d Known Her

Anthony Loder once said that his mother never got the chance to grow old gracefully. He also stated that he wished she had talked more to him. There was so much he never was able to ask her. She was frequently on the phone with show-business people, he remarked – Greta Garbo, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Mayer, and many others. I wonder, though, if she ever truly revealed herself to another person. Much of what ought to be known about her remains hidden.

One of the greatest satisfactions I get in my work is to hear someone say, “You captured him (or her) in that article.” When I can discover and tell of things that should be known about people, I feel that I’ve done a good deed, both for my subject and for posterity.

How I wish I’d had the opportunity to capture the fabulous Hedy Lamarr. Yes, she was a rich and pampered glamor girl, and we have too many of them. Much of her biography reads like a supermarket tabloid.

But there was so much more to Hedy. She saw monstrous evil. She looked it in the face and escaped its clutches. She made it out of Adolf Hitler’s world, and could have lived an opulent and decadent life. But she decided to do something about the evil she’d seen.

There had to be enormous goodness in her soul, enormous strength in her character. I doubt that anyone was ever allowed to see that goodness and strength for what they were, and then to tell her entire story. We’re the poorer for it.

This blog post is the best I can do for her and for you, dear reader. Danke schoen, Hedwig Kiesler. Sie möge in Frieden ruhen.