Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff. Lauren
Speaker 1: Vogelbaum here. Famed actress and the Hollywood bombshell Hetty Lamar
Speaker 1: once said, any girl can be glamorous. All you have
Speaker 1: to do is stand still and look stupid. In those
Speaker 1: two short sentences, she managed to call gender stereotypes, beauty ideals,
Speaker 1: and Hollywood artifice into question, using a hint of humor
Speaker 1: to make meaningful social commentary. In a sense, this succinct
Speaker 1: SoundBite offers more insight into Lamar's life and legacy than
Speaker 1: any headshot or publicity photo ever could. But understanding the
Speaker 1: context of the film star's words provides even more meaning
Speaker 1: into the boundary breaking successes and unexpected influence she continues
Speaker 1: to have more than two decades after her death. She
Speaker 1: was born with the name hedvig Eva Maria Kis on
Speaker 1: November ninth of nineteen fourteen in Austria. She took an
Speaker 1: early interest in the performing arts, but seemed equally enchanted
Speaker 1: with science and engineering. For the article this episode is
Speaker 1: based on How Stuff Works. Spoke via email with Alexandra Dean,
Speaker 1: director of the documentary A Bombshell. The Hetty Lamar Story
Speaker 1: she said Hetty Lamar grew up in a wealthy, middle
Speaker 1: class family in Vienna, where she learned classical piano and
Speaker 1: enjoyed ballet, opera and chemistry. She left tinkering with her
Speaker 1: gadgets and took part her music box and smashed a
Speaker 1: light bulb to see how it worked. She became an
Speaker 1: actress because she thought it would be more fun than school,
Speaker 1: so she forged a note from her mother allowing her
Speaker 1: ten hours away from classes, and she went to her
Speaker 1: first audition. At seventeen years old. Lamar scored her first
Speaker 1: film role. She was already turning heads for her stunning
Speaker 1: good looks, something that would both serve and arguably hinder
Speaker 1: her cess Hostiff Works also spoke via email with Vincent Brooke,
Speaker 1: an author and UCLA Media Studies lecturer. He said she
Speaker 1: was too beautiful for her own good. Her glamour queen
Speaker 1: sex goddess persona kept her from being seen for the brilliant,
Speaker 1: complex person that she was. Lamar wed Austrian munitions dealer
Speaker 1: Fritz Mandel in nineteen thirty three, but the marriage didn't
Speaker 1: last long. She later said of the union, I knew
Speaker 1: very soon that I could never be an actress. While
Speaker 1: I was his wife. He was the absolute monarch in
Speaker 1: his marriage. I was like a doll. I was like
Speaker 1: a thing, some object of art which had to be
Speaker 1: guarded and imprisoned, having no mind, no life of its own.
Speaker 1: During their marriage, Lamar was often spotted on Mandell's arm
Speaker 1: as he kept company with friends and business partners, many
Speaker 1: of whom had alleged ties to the Nazi Party. By
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven, Mamamarr had had enough and fled her marriage,
Speaker 1: her former life, and all ties to Austria. She headed
Speaker 1: to London and soon signed a contract with Hollywood's Metro
Speaker 1: Goldwyn Mayer Studio under the name that we know her
Speaker 1: by today. Her first American film, Algiers, kicked her career
Speaker 1: into high gear, and soon Lamar was a household name.
Speaker 1: She was reportedly the model for Disney's Snow White and
Speaker 1: the inspiration for DC Comics Catwoman. In the early years
Speaker 1: of her newfound fame, Lamar made a hobby of invention
Speaker 1: and of dating some of Hollywood's most famous and infamous men,
Speaker 1: including Howard Hughes. The pilot and businessman reportedly took Lamar
Speaker 1: along to tour airplane factories and asked for Lamar's input
Speaker 1: on aviation design and theory, but it wasn't until nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two that Lamar's innovative thinking inspired an unprecedented invention.
Speaker 1: In collaboration with composer George Antil, Lamar came up with
Speaker 1: an all electronic device that minimized the jamming of radio signals.
Speaker 1: Dean explained during World War Two, Hetty's mother was trapped
Speaker 1: in Vienna, and since she was Jewish, she was in
Speaker 1: great danger. Hetty already lived in Hollywood and was helping
Speaker 1: her mother escape to America. She got as far as London,
Speaker 1: but it was not safe across the Atlantic because every
Speaker 1: American ship was getting blown up by the Nazis. Hetty
Speaker 1: was terrified her mother would die in the London blps,
Speaker 1: and so every night she worked on inventing a remote
Speaker 1: controlled torpedo so advanced that it would be able to
Speaker 1: hunt down and blow up every Nazi submarine in the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: thus securing safe passage to the US. To make sure
Speaker 1: the Nazis couldn't hack the radio signal for her torpedo
Speaker 1: and send it back to blow up the Allied ship
Speaker 1: that launched it, she created a secret communication system that
Speaker 1: couldn't be hacked. This secret communications system utilized changing radio
Speaker 1: frequently to prevent enemies from decoding messages. A Multiple radio
Speaker 1: frequencies were used to broadcast a radio signal which changed
Speaker 1: frequencies at split second intervals in an apparently random manner.
Speaker 1: To anyone listening, it would just sound like noise, but
Speaker 1: the signal would be clear if both the sender and
Speaker 1: receiver hopped frequencies at the same time. Although the technology
Speaker 1: was never used in wartime, it wound up playing a
Speaker 1: critical role in communication methods throughout the decades. She gave
Speaker 1: the patent to the US Navy. It saw its first
Speaker 1: use during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is one of
Speaker 1: the inventions that made technology like Wi Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth,
Speaker 1: as well as devices like cell phones possible. However, by
Speaker 1: the time it was implemented, her patent had expired, meaning
Speaker 1: Lamar never received a penny for her invention. Dean said,
Speaker 1: even though many inventors and scientists had heard the rumor
Speaker 1: that one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars had invented a
Speaker 1: secret communication system, most of them thought it was an
Speaker 1: urban legend and told me so. Hetty had never told
Speaker 1: her story to the public before, and most people who
Speaker 1: heard it dismissed it as too outlandish to be true.
Speaker 1: Robert Price, the top historian of secret communications, was the
Speaker 1: only scientist to ask Hetty directly if she came up
Speaker 1: with the invention, but when she told him that she did,
Speaker 1: he thought it was a lie and didn't record her
Speaker 1: answer in his history of the invention. Instead, he told
Speaker 1: everyone she was a spy who stole the invention from
Speaker 1: the Nazis. While she wasn't able to achieve critical acclaim
Speaker 1: or recognition for her technical aptitude, Lamar continued to see
Speaker 1: success in Hollywood, but her career began to decline in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, and she experienced strife in her personal
Speaker 1: life through six marriages, two arrests, and a host of
Speaker 1: substance abuse issues. A well after her retirement and her
Speaker 1: retreat from the spotlight, however, Lamar finally received acknowledgment for
Speaker 1: her achievements off screen. In nineteen ninety seven, the Electronic
Speaker 1: Frontier Foundation jointly awarded Lamar and Antyle with their Pioneer Award,
Speaker 1: and Lamar also became the first woman to receive the
Speaker 1: Invention Convention's Bulby Mass Spirit of Achievement Award. She was
Speaker 1: posthumously inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Although Lamar died in the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: her legacy has lived on through film and the belated
Speaker 1: recognition of her technological contributions, and according to Dean, she
Speaker 1: was so much more than the silver screen star who
Speaker 1: turned heads and detracted audiences. Dean said, when I first
Speaker 1: listened to Hetty's voice on tape, I was bowled over
Speaker 1: by her sense of humor. She's so funny and quirky.
Speaker 1: The first thing she said on the tape was I
Speaker 1: think I'll be able to control people after my death,
Speaker 1: And sometimes I think she meant to scare whomever listened
Speaker 1: to the tape and set out to tell her story.
Speaker 1: I was tickled by that idea, as she also said
Speaker 1: she knew what she had done in her life, she
Speaker 1: didn't need anyone to believe her. I loved that sense
Speaker 1: that she alone could give herself that recognition for her
Speaker 1: gargantuan achievement. Today's episode is based on the article how
Speaker 1: Hollywood's screen siren Hetty Lamar helped pioneer Wi Fi and
Speaker 1: GPS on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Michelle Constantinofsky.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
Speaker 1: Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For
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