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113 9 The Rather Unfeminine Occupation of Inventor Hedy was condemned to watch the battle in Europe from the distance of America. Like so many other émigrés, she threw herself into the war effort; in her case, serving in the Hollywood Canteen and selling war bonds. It also meant using the intellectual property she had taken with her from Mandl’s castle, but we’ll return to that. The Hollywood Canteen was set up in autumn of 1942 on Cahuenga Boulevard, just off Sunset, by Bette Davis and John Garfield, after the latter had been turned down for war service. Inspired by New York’s Stage Door canteen, it was decorated in the style of a New England barn, and entertained upwards of three thousand soldiers every night. Some hitched in from camps fifty miles away, some were heading to the war, others returning. Their hosts, be it Bing Crosby, Basil Rathbone, Eddie Cantor, or Fred MacMurray, kept the show rolling: “Fellows, we hate to do this, but a thousand of your buddies are outside, waiting to see the show. We’re going to ask all of you who have been here an hour or so to leave now, so they can come in.” Once indoors, an array of celebrities, from Abbot and Costello to Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford, dished out food, danced with the troops, and scrubbed the floors. A passing soldier could ask Betty Grable to dance, while her husband, Harry James, played in the orchestra. Newsreel footage shows a smiling Hedy signing autographs and giving a shy young soldier a kiss. Indeed for her and other high-profile Germans and Austrians, notably Marlene Dietrich, this was a chance to remind their hosts where their allegiances lay. “I constantly worked at the Canteen and I worked hard,” Hedy remembered. “Some nights I signed so many autographs I thought my arm would drop off, but I 114 Hedy Lamarr couldn’t resist those boys, and, in the end, I was able to dance with pleasure.”1 Hedy also actively participated in the national war bonds drive. Along with her old friend Greer Garson and others such as Irene Dunne and Ronald Colman, she was one of the headliners in the Stars over America tour. Hedy visited sixteen cities in ten days and is credited with selling $25 million in bonds. In one day alone, according to most accounts, she sold $7 million worth of bonds. Titus Haffa, a Chicago businessman, made the headlines by suggesting that he would buy a $25,000 war bond if Hedy kissed him; later he reneged, saying that he would kiss her if she bought a bond to that tune.2 Hedy was welcomed to New York’s City Hall by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and feted up and down the country. Next she headed a drive to persuade everyone at MGM to write friends in the service . The press reported that 2,144 letters had been mailed since she started her campaign. Hedy also unintentionally lent her name to a gadget designed to create confusion in public spaces and thus facilitate the escape of a spy. The “Hedy” was a firecracker, which, when lit, made the sound of a falling bomb and sent crowds running for cover. Its inventor so named it because he said Hedy Lamarr triggered panic among men wherever she went.3 In an equally bizarre use of her name, Hedy became the subject of a short story in which she and a G.I. capture Adolf Hitler. Penned by Ben Hecht for Collier’s magazine and published in 1943, “The Doughboy’s Dream” was later distributed as a pamphlet for the American troops. Hecht was unhappy with the end result, which he rightly considered to be poorly written; what is of greater interest now is less its hackneyed dream narrative than what it reveals about Hedy’s position as a wartime icon. The story is composed as if it were a script for the stage or screen and is set in a regimental camp. One of the privates, Cookie Johnson , has fallen into an exhausted sleep from which he is woken by his sergeant, who sends him to a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt. The president entrusts him with a mission to fly that night to Germany and bring back Adolf Hitler; traveling with him as his companion will be Hedy Lamarr. On the airplane, the beautiful Hedy confides to Cookie that she has loved him since the...

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