by Athena Lathos
Hedy Lamarr Gives Out Pin-up Photos
(of herself) to her grandchildren for Christmas, because she thinks they’re the best gifts she has to offer. By the time she wraps the photos in green and gold paper, she is something like 82 years old, her face stretched taut like a canvas over a frame. The artists, of course, are the best plastic surgeons in Los Angeles County. When she wakes from anesthesia, they cradle her bloodied cheeks like the heads of newborn infants, beaming.
Hedy will not give her grandchildren bicycles, or candy canes, or a Tickle Me Elmo, the best-selling toy in 1996. She will not give them the lab notes associated with the following inventions: 1) the alka-seltzer-like tablet that transforms water into soda, or 2) the spread spectrum technology considered the mother of cellular communication. Instead, she will give them one studio portrait each of the woman from Ziegfeld Girl and White Cargo. Perhaps this is because the United States Navy has already laughed in her face, or perhaps because Lucille Ball—a stranger she once held in her arms—continues to mock her on late-night television, allowing America to do the same.
A little-known secret: Hedy once approached Lucy when she saw the comedian openly sobbing on an MGM backlot, explaining through tears that her career was dead and over.
I’m washed up, she said, I’m not going to make good as an actress.
You are, Hedy whispered, keep the faith. And she took Lucy’s face in her hands, brushing her curls back into their places.
I am...Tondelayo! Lucy cried not long after, swaying her hips on The Danny Thomas Show. And she forgot her friend entirely, cackling like a crone to a sea of clapping hands.
1997: The Electronic Frontier Foundation Recognizes Hedy Lamarr for her scientific achievements. She does not attend the ceremony.
Hedy once said, Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
But she also said, How can you judge when you have had as many lives as I have had? At that, the life of standing still and looking stupid was over. In fact, it had become clear in her mind that most of her lives were by that time long over.
But she could still not stop herself from naming them all.
1914-2000: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Fifteen Poses
In Hedwig Kiesler’s first life, she was a child in Vienna. There, she played piano like a lady and starred in a play called The Weaker Sex.
In her second life, in the span of one evening, she escaped Austria, the Nazis, and her husband, Friedrich Mandl, an arms manufacturer who kept her as a pet. Friedrich Mandl’s biography describes her as a “beautiful actress”—an apparently objective and historical fact. In her third, she took the long trip to America, where she gave up the sounds of her Jewish name.
A well-known secret: she became the exclusive property of Metro Goldwyn Mayer before her feet even touched the shore. Hedy held tightly to the promise and glitter of this new self—a woman/American/actress/commodity—as she signed each page of the contract on the table. La mar: the sea. An invocation.
In her fourth life, she emerged as golden as a curtain rope, dipped in the glow of her first major films. This Hedy had been an actress before. She knew what she was doing. But when “Miracle Max” Jacobson arrived on set to shoot her up with his vitamins, her eyes went wide with vigor and she became someone else altogether. Now she could stay up all night if she wanted to. She could scream like a wraith without shame.
In her fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth lives, Hedy was a different wife for five American husbands. Hedy Kiesler Markey. Hedy Kiesler Loder. Hedy Kiesler Stauffer. Hedy Kiesler Lee. Hedy Kiesler Boies. Each of these husbands had highly separate fantasies. Sometimes she catered to their expectations. Other times, she slept.
In her tenth life, she was a mother. She lived one long, blue eternity navigating what this means. This Hedy knew love more profoundly than before, but she didn’t know what to do with it watching her like this, lying so still in the cup of her hands.
#11: Hedy lived and died within the confines of a simple narrative. The story went like this: She adopted a child and that child left her, choosing to live with someone else.
Certainly, she had been a mother before. But not one who (like a goddess of myth) had lost a contest of suitability—of generosity and fortitude and martyrdom and tenderness. So this Hedy became something cool and indifferent, if only just to meet the next version of herself. If only just to hold the dull weight of that departure.
#12: Hedy emerged at dawn from the bottom of a bottle, weary and slanted like Venus from the clamshell. I once gave out kisses worth twenty-five grand, she thought to herself on these solitary mornings, tracing whorls of shower steam as they rose from her feet. They held the Western Front with little presses of my mouth.
#13: Lately, it seemed that every quantity of powder Hedy set aside for herself ended up stuck in her hair, rounding itself into a shape like a pearl. These pearls persisted longer than she was willing to admit, knotting themselves into each dark strand until she did not remember that they had once been foreign objects.
Any art teacher can tell you that in Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting, the body of Venus is “anatomically improbable,” her stance physically impossible. In those days, it’s true that Hedy found her own body, her own stance, increasingly unreal. She lived in varied states of wakefulness and sometimes-quiet rage.
#14: In this life, the most necessary, she forgot all the others. And on January 19th, at the start of a new century, she died of heart failure. Interestingly, the Viennese sculpture erected in her memory does not look like a woman at all, but instead like a DNA nucleotide blasted wide open, its spread-out base pairs pierced with thick needles.
A now-known truth: There was (and is) a fifteenth life—the hours Hedy Lamarr spent “tinkering” at dusk. This Hedy lived and worked as if her body was superfluous, bent still as a vulture over each failed design. Each night methodical, linear, bright; each morning strung precisely—ever just so—poised like a bead on a livewire of knowing.
2012: A Young Engineer Begins Her Studies
and becomes my friend. Like Hedy, she is brave and talented and Jewish. Like Hedy, she is beautiful, but I’ll whisper that now as I tell you her story. I’ll say it like a secret so it won’t become a curse.
One night, my friend and I confess our problems with eating. I tell her my fear that my problems aren’t bad enough—at least not bad enough anymore—to merit further concern. At this point, I eat three square meals a day. My face is no longer drawn and bloodless. Whenever the specter of restriction tempts me once again, suffused with its strange and nostalgic softness, all I can think about is that long line of bodies: sheathed in their thin, floral medical gowns, suffering more than I ever did.
I heard, I said quietly, by way of example, that some girls want to look like Holocaust victims.
I know, my friend replied, and looked down at her hands.
NOTES & REFERENCES
This piece in its entire was inspired by and based upon the beautiful documentary Bombshell (2017), directed by Alexandra Dean. The interaction between Hedy and Lucille Ball was derived from an interview with Dean currently viewable on a website called Cinema Sentries.
The portion of the piece that references Hedy’s fundraising efforts during World War II is the following, taken from a biographical entry in the Encyclopedia of World Biography: “A poll of Columbia University male undergraduates ranked Lamarr as the actress they would most like to be marooned with on an island, and in 1942 Lamarr participated in the World War II mobilization effort by offering to kiss any man who would purchase $25,000 in War Bonds.”
The interpretation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, as well as the phrase “anatomically improbable” was taken from the Wikipedia article about the painting (as of 11/17/19).
Athena Lathos is a writer and library worker. Her poem "Reading Donna Haraway in Avery Park" can be found in the Oregon Poetry Association's anthology of prize-winning poems, Verseweavers, and her essay "I Applied for 200 Jobs and All I Got Was This Moderate-Severe Depression" was chosen as an Editor's Pick on Longreads.