Hollywood's Destruction of the Mind

Hedy Lamarr's Strange Inheritance

Hollywood has always trafficked in myths of war and glory. Its most enduring fantasy is not the tidy resolution but the heroic beginning, the soldier alone on the hilltop, the inventor in a lab coat, the woman as prize or peril. It sells us survival stories in which violence is noble and genius arrives clean, complete, and male. These films do more than entertain; they teach us whom to trust, whom to credit, and what kind of mind counts as history.

Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr) came into the world with a face so flawless it split her life in two: the woman she was, and the icon others needed her to be. That schism, between brain and bone structure, between a child's curiosity and a goddess's silhouette, haunted her until her dying day. It is one of the cruelest ironies of modernity that the woman who helped invent a technology foundational to Wi-Fi, and important in GPS, was long treated as little more than an ornament. In-fact, she was one of the most important inventors of the 20th century.

Born in Vienna in 1914, Hedy, as family called her, grew up in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a world simultaneously decaying and decadent, where appearance was performance and performance, currency. Her father, Emil Kiesler, a banker with the soul of a mechanic, used city walks as informal lectures on how machines functioned. Streetcars, printing presses, even the intricacies of gears and motors, everything was worth explaining.

“He would stop to explain something to me, then say: 'Where was I?' and hunt through his open hand to find his place,” she recalled, years later. Her mother Trude, a frustrated concert pianist from Budapest, believed beauty should be cultivated but never trusted. Hedy was their only child. She was spoiled, observed, adorned, and adored, and she learned early that her body could fill a room faster than her voice.

From an early age, she was absorbed by artifice: “I had a little stage under my father’s desk where I would act out fairy tales,” she allegedly said. The theater enchanted her, not only as a space of pretense but as a mechanism of transformation. Her earliest role models were not the strong women of literature, but the shapeshifters of opera and cinema. She consumed silent films with the hungry precision of someone decoding a world. By adolescence, she could copy anyone’s walk, voice, or posture. She would, in time, become the most recognizable woman in the world.

Yet what Hedy wanted, really wanted, was to be taken seriously.

“I can excuse everything but boredom,” she wrote. “Boring people are a crime against nature.”

She was not speaking from a place of aloof superiority, but from the quiet agony of being mislabeled by history. In the film Algiers, her Hollywood debut, Hedy's entrance provoked gasps across America. According to one biographer, one woman remembered the collective inhale as Hedy's face emerged from shadow: “That’s the only time in my life I ever heard an audience gasp at a face.”

It wasn't a performance; it was an apparition. From that moment, she was no longer a woman. She was an idea. MGM dressed her in silk and photographed her in shadow, giving America its very own Cleopatra.

“Any girl can be glamorous,” she later said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

It was Louis B. Mayer who insisted she shed her past, and her name. After fleeing her suffocating marriage to Austrian arms magnate Fritz Mandl, Hedwig Kiesler booked a passage on the ship, SS Normandie, a transatlantic liner brimming with diplomats, debutantes, and moguls. She used the voyage as a stage. Each day, she paraded a succession of impeccably dressed young men past Mayer's table, an improvised drama of desirability. The message was clear: others were watching, and she had options. Mayer caved before the ship docked in New York. Apparently, he renegotiated her contract on the spot.

He also gave her a new name. The studio drew on the legend of silent film star Barbara La Marr, famed for her tragic beauty, to rechristen her Hedy Lamarr. As the film historian Jeanine Basinger would later note, she became a woman whose story no one could quite untangle, in part because Hollywood had written it for her.

Hollywood had little patience for a thinking starlet. The studio system thrived on pliable beauty, and Lamarr learned quickly to play the part. She wore Adrian gowns like armor, posed in stills that emphasized angles over expression, and followed the choreography of glamour down to the tilt of her chin. But off-screen, she created an inventor's bench in her Beverly Hills home. George Antheil, who collaborated with her during the war, later described her drawing room as filled

“with unreadable books and very useable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use.”

During the Second World War, she co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with Antheil, aiming to prevent Axis forces from jamming Allied torpedoes. The mechanism used synchronized player-piano rolls to switch radio frequencies, a stunningly analog precursor to spread-spectrum communication. Their patent, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387, was filed in 1941 and granted in 1942, credited to “Hedy Kiesler Markey” and “George Antheil.”

The Navy dismissed it. Officially, the system was ‘too bulky.’ Unofficially, as Antheil later believed, the words ‘player piano’ were enough to render it laughable to military brass. What they missed was a compact vision of non-interference that would, decades later, become the foundation for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology. According to her son Anthony, the idea had come one evening at the piano. She and Antheil had been improvising a duet when she stopped, turned to him, and said, ‘Hey, look, we’re talking to each other and we’re changing all the time.’

It was suggested that Lamarr invest her time and attention to selling war bonds since she was a celebrity. What kind of society tells a woman she must choose between being admired and being believed?

That question haunts Lamarr's legacy more than any scandal or script. Her 1966 memoir, Ecstasy and Me, ghostwritten and grotesquely embellished, reduced her to a boudoir confessional. “I remember many scenes that I should very much like to forget, with many men, some of whom were my husbands... and with women, too,” she admits early on. And yet, it is worth noting that Lamarr authorized its publication, even sued for profits after denouncing its distortions. Whether coerced or complicit, she was part of the machinery that devoured her.

The truth, when she could speak it, was piercing.

“The brains of people are more interesting than the looks,”

…she told a reporter. Few listened. A woman who had fled a fascist arms dealer, escaped Europe in disguise, navigated the misogynies of Hollywood, raised children, filed patents, and managed her own finances, this woman, whose only crime was being beautiful and clever at the same time, had been dismissed as a decorative cipher.

“My face has been my misfortune,” she said. “A mask I cannot remove.”

She spent her final years in near-seclusion, cut off from the public that had once worshiped her silhouette. Neighbors in Florida remembered her as a recluse who spoke to no one. But in 1997, long after the world had traded its torpedoes for data packets, the Electronic Frontier Foundation honored her work. She did not attend the ceremony. The applause came anyway, echoing through a digital age she had helped make possible.

Her true inheritance is not a question, for too long, we built entire systems, of culture, of science, of cinema, that could not compute a woman who looked like Hedy Lamarr and thought like her too.

Her life was not an exception. It was an indictment: of an era, an industry, and a culture so intoxicated by her face they failed to see her mind.

Stay curious

Colin

Hedy Lamarr co-invented a technology called frequency-hopping spread spectrum, originally intended as a secure communication system for guiding Allied torpedoes during World War II. The core idea was to prevent enemy interception or jamming of radio-controlled weapons by rapidly switching frequencies in a synchronized pattern between transmitter and receiver.

Specifically, the invention:

• Used a piano-roll mechanism (like those in player pianos) to coordinate frequency changes—an idea Lamarr developed with composer George Antheil.

• Was granted U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in 1942, under her married name at the time, Hedy Kiesler Markey.

• Was not adopted during the war, with the Navy dismissing it as too cumbersome, largely due to its association with a “player piano.”

• Became foundational decades later for wireless technologies including Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi, once the patent expired and the concepts were rediscovered.

In short: Hedy Lamarr helped invent the conceptual backbone of modern wireless communication, but her contribution was ignored for decades, partly because she was a woman.