By William Roy & Sylvain Dorange, translated by Montana Kane (Humanoids/Life Drawn)
ISBN: 978-1-59465-619-4 (PB/Digital edition)
It’s been a man’s world almost from the start, and for so very long, most roles we’ve allowed for women have been ones that benefit us. Just why are so many female heroes young, pretty, buxom and nearly naked?
…And don’t even try to mansplain away why and how we Lords of Creation settle down with a housekeeper/mother who provides fringe benefits, comfort breaks and data storage. “Honey, do I like this?” “Darling, where are my…?”
Happily, despite all our most determined efforts, women keep on being independent, resolute, optimistic, free thinking and autonomous: constantly confounding male expectations and forcing us to gaslight, denigrate, diminish or bully them back into submission… or at least ominous silence…
It doesn’t always work, but at least whenever they achieve triumphant, spectacular highs and enjoy their own lives, it’s on their own terms – at least until some guy finds a way to make them regret it…
Let’s see an example of that as it happened to one of the most important human beings in modern history. Hedy Lamarr: La plus belle femme du monde was released in 2018: a superbly engaging, vividly realised passion project by writer, artist and documentarian William Roy (De Père en FIV, Freud, Le moment venu) and multi-disciplined illustrator Sylvain Dorange (For Justice: The Serge & Beate Klarsfeld Story, Gisèle Halimi – Une jeunesse tunisienne, Un conte de l’Estaque, Les Promeneurs du Temps, Psychotique). It quickly became one of the most important biographies of recent times. You can even read it in English or online…
Delivered in non-sequential snippets and clippings, it all slots together like a puzzle to show how, as a Viennese youngster, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler developed two life-long passions: acting and learning how things worked. The latter obsession came thanks to her beloved father Emil, a progressive, forward-looking banker who shared at every opportunity a profound love of knowledge and tinkering with his beautiful child …
Concerned by the uninvited attention their daughter’s looks were garnering, Hedwig’s parents decided to never comment on her appearance. However, as she grew from pretty child to ravishing young woman, those looks inevitably shaped her world.
As a teenager one passion dominated: so much so that the model student began taking unsanctioned truant days to pursue acting – especially in the burgeoning, high-tech film business. When her parents learned of the school absences, they granted her leeway to explore those options. Hedwig initially sought to become a script girl, but once again her beauty took her to a different destination and one moment as an “extra” opened up a whole new world…
Emil loved how she shared his fascination with how things worked, but primarily he just wanted her to be happy. Thus, Hedwig learned to roll with life’s punches – and in later life there were many – but was generally supported in her wild endeavours. She never realised how the acting lessons her father willingly paid for would lead to her becoming a notorious, global figure of infamy after a highly sexualised nude scene in 1933 drama Extase…
Just as the film was being banned in Austria, neighbouring Germany welcomed a new Chancellor. Adolf Hitler would affect the girl’s life in unimaginable ways…
Retreating from celluloid to a life of stage acting, Hedwig was pursued by astoundingly rich manufacturer and businessman Friedrich “Fritz” Mantel. Dazzled by wealth, rapt attention, and honied words, she eventually married him.
Despite her Jewish ancestry, as the wife of Mussolini’s best friend and the Third Reich’s favourite arms dealer/munitions supplier, Hedwig spent the early years of Nazism cushioned from a growing horror. Hosting dinner parties for human monsters whilst incessantly, invisibly overhearing fascinating details about the new weapons hubby was pioneering quickly paled, and Mantel’s obsessive possessiveness and controlling behaviour soon made her realise the liaison was a huge mistake.
Whilst displaying his trophy wife like a prize, and bedecking her with jewels and gems, Mantel had spent a fortune buying up and destroying every print of Extase. No man would ever cast lascivious eyes on his property ever again…
Increasingly terrified, Hedwig crafted a plan and escaped her marriage, eventually landing in London in 1937. At that time American movie mogul Louis B. Mayer – supreme dictator of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios – was there to scout out sophisticated European film talent fleeing growing social unrest…
Like so many women and girls maturing in that era, Hedwig learned to be suspicious of authority and men in powerful positions: to keep her secrets to herself whenever possible. She probably always sought assured security and never believed she had it, even at the top of a wildly fluctuating showbiz career. At least inventing kept her grounded and allowed her to find an escape that was purely personal. Mayer was a lifeline, but he too came with conditions…
In 1938, Hedy Lamarr began her tenure as a Screen Goddess with the movie Algiers. Mayer had her billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world” and changed her name to evoke that of deceased silent movie star Barbara La Marr. According to this version of her story, he also never stopped urging her to enhance her bust…
A wash of films followed, of remarkably varying quality, but work, acclaim, marriage and the heady social whirl wasn’t a satisfying existence. When war came, Hedy was eager to help. It coincided with her first meeting engineering marvel/millionaire playboy Howard Hughes. He wasn’t as impressed as others by her looks, but wanted to hear all about her inventions…
Almost as notorious as any role she played, Hedy knew many men, but had few male friends. Foremost of those she did persist with was George Carl Antheil, a “piano prodigy” who had first outraged the musical establishment in 1924 with his Ballet Mechanique score.
The Dadaist work was delivered by player-pianos working in synch with airplane engines, and Antheil had meticulously cut out the player rolls of each instrument personally, in a monumental feat of pre-computer coding and programming…
Antheil was also an acclaimed and published endocrinologist who supported his family by composing Hollywood film music, and first met Hedy Lamarr during another of her fruitless, pointless searches for a safe way to embiggen her boobs…
In the course of their friendship they discussed German torpedoes and – recalling past dinner conversations amongst Nazi bigwigs – Hedy had an idea that would have shortened the war; and did change the way all humanity communicates…
Typically, Lamarr and Antheil’s un-jammable torpedo was poo-poohed and rejected by the US Navy and a congressional committee who were astonished to notice that the project had no actual Male Scientists attached to it. It’s a good thing the inventors had every bit of the work, concept and attendant programming patented…
One admiral did helpfully suggest that she could serve her country best by selling war bonds, so she did, in record-breaking amounts…
Years passed, husbands and families came and went, and Hedy’s career devolved from megastar to TV guest celebrity to self-imposed exile. In 1960 she got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and six years later an autobiography she maintained she never wrote was released. It pretty much trashed what was left of her reputation.
It all turned around for her in 1996, when her son Anthony Loder was contacted by representatives of the burgeoning telecommunications industry. They really needed to speak to the inventors – and patent-holders – of a frequency-hopping system devised to protect torpedoes from being jammed. It was also the absolute best way to connect multiple electronic devices via radio waves”. We call it wi-fi these days…
This is an emphatic, empathetic dramatisation of a much-told tale and an inevitable, inescapable theme, but Hedy Lamarr: An Incredible Life shows not that resilience pays off, or that it all works out in the end, but that remarkable achievements cannot be buried or diminished…
After all, how many gullible kids tricked into getting their baps out change the entire world, all of human culture and get an asteroid and a quantum telescope named after them, let alone get awarded an anniversary goggle doodle and inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame, and are interred in a National Honorary grave?
Admit it, though, it was the bit about her baps that made you sit up and pay attention, right?
The struggle continues…
© 2018 La Boîte à Bulles. All Rights Reserved. This edition © 2018 Humanoids, Inc., Los Angeles (USA).