Hedwig was beautiful and married to a man she didn’t love. Fritz was an arms merchant and deeply possessive of his trophy wife.
At their home in Austria, Hedwig was a fly on the wall at more than a few dinner parties, listening quietly as important men discussed with her husband evolving technologies that would change the complexion of modern warfare. Fritz’s guests were intelligent and influential. Some were physicists. Some were inventors. Many were fascists. Many were Nazis.
Hedwig didn’t care for fascists, or Nazis. She didn’t like them in her house or at her table — and she hated the fact that her husband was selling them weapons. And so, as one more dinner party approached, Hedwig selected from her vast wardrobe the most glamorous evening gown that she could find. She adorned herself with every piece of expensive jewelry she owned. She smiled sweetly during the appetizer and listened attentively during the main course. Just before dessert, she went off to powder her nose. She never returned.
The next morning, a stunning woman arrived in Paris by train. After that, it was your basic Hollywood fairy tale: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was “discovered” by the movie mogul Louis B. Mayer. A year later, she was starring opposite Clark Gable. By then, she had a new name to go with her new address in Hollywood. By 1941, she was widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in the world.
In fact, Hedwig was so gorgeous that she was deemed “too beautiful to speak” — and was given very little dialogue on the big screen. Once, when asked to explain the secret of being glamorous, Hedwig said, “That ’s easy. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”
But Hedwig wasn’t stupid. Far from it. Among other things, she was an amateur inventor, a woman who spent most of her free time at home hunched over her drafting table. Her big idea was a thing she’d been tinkering with in response to the Germans, who were targeting cruise ships in the Atlantic, murdering hundreds of civilians.
Hedwig had read that the Allies were unable to sink German U-boats because the Germans had figured out how to jam the torpedoes’ radio frequencies. She recalled a scientist at one of those dinner parties in Vienna. He had been talking to Fritz about the untapped potential of radio waves in the context of modern warfare.
Now Hedwig wondered,“What if a single radio signal could hop randomly from one frequency to another? How would the Nazis block that?”
The question was ingenious, and so was the answer.
She developed the technology, patented it, and offered it to the navy free of charge. But the US military had a hard time believing the most beautiful woman in the world had come up with the solution to a problem that they themselves hadn’t been able to solve. The navy wasn’t interested in her idea. In fact, Hedwig was told that if she really wanted to help the war effort, she would need to use the assets for which she was best known.
Hedwig was disappointed, but she knew that she did have the assets in question, and she was eager to contribute — to help, in any way, to win the war. So, to raise money for war bonds, she began selling kisses. In a single night, she raised $7 million, just by “standing still and looking stupid.” Over time, she raised $25 million. In today’s money, that’s more than $220 million.
If the story had ended right here, it still would have made a good headline: “The most beautiful girl in the world fights off Nazis with kisses!” But Hedwig’s story was far from over. During a very anxious week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, her technology was finally employed — and it worked. Big time.
Hedwig was given no thanks or acknowledgment. Nor did she ask for any. But let’s be absolutely clear about the enormousness of the idea she had patented: Not only did “radio hopping” change the face of national security; it led directly to the development of our modern-day satellite communications system, and a handy bit of technology we know as “Wi-Fi.” Without her invention, I could have never researched her life at 37,000 feet and shared her story with you — the story of a beautiful girl who knew which assets mattered most. A movie star named . . . Hedy Lamarr.
***
I’m 12 years old, sitting in a darkened theater with my 18-year-old cousin, who has smuggled me into my first R-rated movie. On the screen, a group of cowboys are huddled around a campfire. They’re finishing their evening meal when one of them farts. I’m not sure how to react, and neither, it seems, are the adults around me. This sort of thing happened in the Boy Scouts all the time, but uninhibited farting on the big screen? It was so unexpected.
Moments after the first fart, another follows, and another after that. Soon all of the men around the campfire are farting and I’m dying — laughing nervously at first and then so much that it hurts. As the grown-ups around me begin to laugh, too, my mirth escalates ever further. So does my cousin’s. Soon tears run down our faces, and I can feel the Junior Mints in my belly threatening a hasty exit.
The movie was Blazing Saddles, and the first time I saw it I laughed through the entire thing. I laughed when Alex Karras punched the horse. I laughed when Cleavon Little asked, “Where all the white women at?” I even laughed at jokes I didn’t get. I very nearly peed myself when Hedley Lamarr, played to perfection by Harvey Korman, became more and more exasperated over people’s tendency to call him “Hedy.”
“It’s Hedley,” he said over and over again. “Not Hedy, Hedley!”
Why is this so funny? I have no idea. It just is. I ask my cousin who Hedy Lamarr is, but he’s laughing too hard to answer. He laughs so hard a snot bubble explodes from his left nostril — and that sends me into another spasm of uncontrollable giggling. Before long, we’re both on our hands and knees, gasping for breath, laughing ourselves sick for reasons we can’t even articulate — and every time that we think we’ve recovered, Harvey Korman says the magic words that set us off again: “Not Hedy, Hedley!”
When I get home, I tell my father about this hysterical character, Hedley Lamarr.
“Not Hedley,” he says. “Hedy.”
“Wait, what? There’s a real person called Hedy Lamarr?”
“Sure,” he says. “Hedy Lamarr is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Really? Do you have a picture?”
“No,” my mother yells from the kitchen. “Your father doesn’t have a picture of Hedy Lamarr!”
My father turns back to his newspaper, neither confirming nor denying.
“What does she look like?” I ask.
“She looks like your mother,” he says, a little louder than necessary. “Now go split some wood. You’ll feel better.”
Out in the garden, ax in hand, I still have questions. Why don’t I know who the most beautiful girl in the world is? How can I be 12 years old and still be so . . . uninformed?
Today I’d google her and see for myself. But back then, Hedy’s ingenious invention had not yet led to the development of Wi-Fi. So I had to wait until Monday, when I could avail myself of the services of our county library. There, under a fog of disapproval emanating from the librarian who assisted me, I perused a stack of books about Hollywood starlets from days gone by.
There she was: Hedy Lamarr.
Wow! She was indeed “a looker,” as my grandfather would say. Sure enough, the caption identified Hedy as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” It gave the date and the place of her birth. But there was no mention of anything else, except for lists of the films she’d appeared in and the men she had dated. And so, aside from that random reference in Blazing Saddles, that was the only thing that I’d know about Hedy Lamarr until I did google her, 45 years later at 37,000 feet. Only then did I learn about the person she really had been — or at least the person the internet says she was.
Quick digression: My friend Alex is a wreck of a man but one heck of a writer. He dropped by the other day to see how this book was coming along.
“You tell me,” I said, handing him a stack of pages.
Alex claims to know what he’s doing, and there’s evidence to suggest he might be right. After reading a couple of chapters, he stopped. “If you do this right,” he said, “there’ll come a time when your book starts talking to you. When that happens, you should listen.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. Fish don’t fly. Books don’t talk. Then again, maybe they do. So, I’m beginning to wonder if any of these stories are all the way finished. Consider I chose to begin my book with a story about Mel Brooks.
When I started it, I wanted to pay tribute to the man who’d made me laugh harder than I’d ever laughed before. With the help of Hedy Lamarr’s invention, I googled him and learned that, once upon a time, the man who wrote, directed, and starred in the funniest movie I’ve ever seen had climbed a utility pole in the Ardennes, hooked up a loudspeaker, and played a song by a Jewish singer to a forest filled with Nazis. This struck me as a story worth sharing. Picture him there, up at the top of that pole. The moon is out. The woods are full of Nazi sharpshooters. And there’s Brooks: he might as well have a bull’s-eye on his back, and he’s doing it all for a joke. That’s brave and brilliant and also dumb. Smart-stupid, like most of his movies.
As I pictured the scene, I saw the same sensibility that informed every frame of Blazing Saddles — the movie that led me to Hedy Lamarr. Googling her (thanks to Mel Brooks), I learned that this “most beautiful woman in the world” was also a brilliant inventor. This struck me as a story worth sharing for a number of reasons, chief among them the undeniable fact that I wouldn’t have been able to write these stories without her invention.
Maybe this was what Alex was talking about? Maybe here the book was talking back — and what it was telling me sounded a lot like “Keep digging.”
And so I did, and late one night, I learned that Hedy Lamarr sued Mel Brooks when Blazing Saddles came out. She was upset that her name — or something close to it — was being used without her permission.
I guess I can’t really blame her. Hedy’s first husband treated her like an object. The studios treated her like horseflesh. The US government treated her like a punk. Maybe she’d had enough. Maybe the thought of people laughing at the mention of her name — or something close to it — was too much to bear.
Here’s the kicker, though: Mel Brooks would have prevailed in court. In fact, he could have countersued Hedy and won. But guess what he did instead? He paid her. The funniest man in the world wrote a check to the most beautiful woman in the world because, as he put it, “She’s given us so much.”
“Pay her whatever she needs,” Brooks said. “Send her my love, and tell her where I live.”
The interview’s out there, online. You can see it for yourself. Go ahead, google it.
Mike Rowe is best known as the executive producer and host of the hit shows Dirty Jobs, Somebody’s Gotta Do It, and Returning the Favor. He also hosts the podcast The Way I Heard It, available at mikerowe.com/podcast, and has written a new book by that name, from which this essay is adapted, available at mikerowe.com/book.
