Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film

Introduction: Waxworks

1 Introduction: Waxworks On a September day in 1973, Richard Dow, a caretaker at the Hollywood Wax Museum, started his workday as usual. “I walked down the dark corridors to the back of the museum, and I reached behind a black curtain to turn on a sequence of spotlights,” he told reporters afterward. It was then that he saw the demolished figure of Madame Tussaud. “The more lights I switched on, the more damage I saw. I walked down one corridor and I tripped over the head of a mad scientist.” Now feeling more than a little uneasy, Dow started to take stock of the damage. All in all, thirteen statues had been destroyed. These included: Jean Harlow, Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward, Tyrone Power, Sony Bono, a couple of U.S. presidents, and Hedy Lamarr. “Now we’ll have to keep a security man on after hours,” mused Spoony Singh, the museum owner. “We used to have a watchman. We went through a string of them. But they complain of having to be there all alone with those wax figures. After a while some of them claimed they could see the figures moving.”1 The break-in led the museum to take stock of its silent luminaries; sadly Hedy Lamarr did not make the cut. She was melted down and later replaced by Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. If that break-in had occurred two or three decades later, the outcome for the Viennese actress, whose reputation derived from a brief, naked run through a wooded copse, followed by a swim, filmed by a longforgotten Czech director for a 1930s European art film, might have been otherwise. When Hedy Lamarr arrived in America, her reputation preceded her. Few people had seen Ecstasy, the film that had made her famous . Fewer would later remember the plot of Ecstasy or their last glimpse (depending on which version they saw) of the character played by Hedwig Kiesler, as the eighteen-year-old was then called, on the station platform in the early hours of the morning, gently kissing her sleeping lover, folding her coat under his head, and walking away from him. 2 Hedy Lamarr If art preempted life in the most curious manner in these early years of the soon-to-be renamed Hedy Lamarr, so too would there never be a shortage of stories and anecdotes to accompany her later progress through Hollywood. In the 1930s and through the war years, magazines competed to put her photograph on their covers, and gossip columnists revelled in her every move. Simultaneously, and with one voice, film critics agreed that Hedy Lamarr could not act. What did it matter, when she had been proclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world? Her last film appearance was in 1958. Subsequently, she became bestknown for a salacious autobiography (Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman), published in 1966, and for a string of legal cases, most infamously involving shoplifting. She lived out her final years as a virtual recluse, her sight seriously impaired and her once-beautiful face destroyed by plastic surgery. Since her death in 2000, and even somewhat before that, Hedy Lamarr ’s reputation has grown. To quite a large extent, this has been because of her increasing fame as an inventor; her design, with the American avant-garde composer George Antheil, for a long-range torpedo-guidance system forms the basis of our modern mobile telephone technology and also played a major part in the Cuban missile crisis. Several retrospectives of her Hollywood films have been staged, both in her hometown of Vienna and on American television. Documentaries have been produced, exploring her career, her personality, and her legacy. She is the subject of numerous Internet sites and entries. Can waxworks come alive? Why the comeback? What is now so intriguing about the pampered only child of a well-off Viennese banker and his pianist wife, and her (mis)fortunes in exile? In part, this intrigue is due to our fascination with the stories of émigrés who fled fascist Europe for America. Although she is only one of many Europeans who found refuge in Hollywood, Hedy is one of the few high-profile women to have done so on her terms, rather than as the wife or daughter of a more famous man or as the protégée of an established director. Her continued insistence on doing things on her own terms was equally remarkable, even if it contributed toward...