Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film

A Filthy, Nauseating Story

204 16 A Filthy, Nauseating Story The eventual publication of Hedy’s long-planned autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, devolved into the first in a series of court cases involving the star. Hedy’s encounters with American courts were many and legendary . It is hard to know just why she resorted to litigation so frequently : was she driven by a faith in the fairness of the courts or was she unable to negotiate conflict without third-party intervention? Undoubtedly, her high-handed approach to settling debts—not paying invoices—resulted in numerous court appearances. Several of these were for outstanding bills in the thousands of dollars. On the odd occasion— such as when her friend Lois Ross thought she was stepping into the washroom in Hedy’s house but instead found herself falling down a steep staircase to the cellar—Hedy was the defendant. In this latter instance, Lois Ross lost her case. Hedy’s disregard for the law was as remarkable as her frequent recourse to it. To take one example among many, after her divorce from Boies, Hedy entered a court battle with the Arrowhead Savings and Loan Association over the ownership of her home at 9550 Hidden Valley Road in Coldwater Canyon. The Association alleged that she had received a $65,000 loan for the property but had never completed the purchase . In other words, she was living in a house for which she had received a loan but that she had never bought. In Ecstasy and Me, Hedy recalls a conversation with Cecil B. DeMille. Asked what her favorite scenes through the years had been, she answered diplomatically that she most preferred the love scene in Samson and Delilah. “Then I told him the truth. I told him I thought several of my appearances in court contributed most to my satisfaction . . . Everyone acts all the time. I was my most natural and most convincing in court.”1 It’s no wonder that, in later life, her favorite TV show was Judge Judy. A Filthy, Nauseating Story 205 More publicity would result from her dealings with the publishers of Ecstasy and Me. When in 1939 Nathaniel West asked his publisher, the wit Bennett Cerf, about the sales for his latest book, The Day of the Locust, Cerf informed his protégé that in the last two weeks, they had sold exactly twenty-two copies. “By God,” Cerf declared, “if I ever publish another Hollywood book, it will have to be My 39 Ways of Making Love by Hedy Lamarr.”2 Ecstasy and Me would have pleased Cerf, as indeed would its book’s publication history. The latter weaves in and out of another of Hedy’s brushes with the law, and an equally notorious one: the first of the star’s shoplifting charges. These events, taken together, mark the point where Hedy’s reputation shifted from one reflecting a lingering respect and even sympathy for her declining career, to one where she became an object of accumulating disbelief that bordered on ridicule. These events also indicate that her mental balance, which was always delicate, was tipping in the wrong direction. The sequence of Hedy’s court appearances are as follows: In 1965, Hedy signed a $200,000 contract with Bartholemew House, a subsidiary of the Bartell Media Corporation, to publish her autobiography. Bartholemew hired two ghostwriters, Leo Guild and Cy Rice, for the project. Hedy recorded fifty hours of interviews with Rice, and Guild wrote the book using the interviews. In fact, as early as January 1959, Hedy told the press that she was writing her autobiography, to be called Ecstasy and Me. In late 1965, Hedy was becoming increasingly thin and nervous. Anxious about her finances, she was hoping the autobiography would bring in the money she needed. She worried that she would lose her home and there would be nowhere for her family to stay when they visited . The prospect of making her first film in twelve years (Picture Mommy Dead) was adding to her stress. These anxieties filtered into her writing: I have to pause at this critical phase of my private life and career which took place fifteen years ago. Today, I am a woman over fifty with no money for the next meal, and children that I am unable to help. I recently suffered the extreme indignity of being “exposed” by a reporter. Thus my children, friends, and former fans were treated to a feature story about an old “dishwater blonde” has-been...