Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a young Austrian Jewish woman, born in 1914. She grew up in a well-to-do family with a doting father who taught her critical thinking and scientific methodology. She was very smart but also beautiful. In her youth, she was attracted to acting, first in motion pictures and then in the theater.
The story starts in 1933, when Hedy was just 19 years old. While on stage playing an Austrian empress, a mystery suiter showered her with elaborate displays of roses night after night after the performances. It turns out the suiter was Austrian arms manufacturer Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl, who was at the time Austria’s richest man. Not only was he a businessman, but also well connected at the highest level of Austrian politics. At that time, Hitler had just come to power in Germany and his antisemitic policies were feared in Austria. When Fritz proposed marriage, Hedy’s parents advised her to accept, both to not upset a powerful man by refusing his wishes, but also to be a protector to Jews. They sensed that they might need it.
Very quickly, starting even during the wedding preparations, Hedy realized that her future husband was extremely possessive, jealous and both emotionally and physically abusive. She had sold her life to protect her family. While married to Fritz, however, she was exposed to high level discussions about arms developments, including shortcomings and problems with guidance systems for torpedoes. Posing as a demure wife, never speaking, she was always the only woman in the room, but the listened very carefully and learned.
Eventually her outwardly opulent life became an unbearable prison, and she escaped to America. There she restarted her acting career, taking on the name of Hedy Lamarr, in order not to seem Jewish. There was strong antisemitism in Hollywood during the 1930s. She quickly became a movie star.
But that also was not enough for her. In an effort to help the American military with its lacking guidance technology for torpedoes, she and composer George Antheil developed a frequency-hopping communication system intended to help prevent enemy interference with radio-guided torpedoes. Their patented work later became an important precursor to technologies used in modern wireless communications.
The book The Only Woman in the Room is based on Hedy Lamarr’s life, but the author fictionalizes dialogue, private thoughts, motivations, and many scenes, so you should not read it as a literal biography.
Her actual life was even more colorful than is depicted in the book. If you are interested, you can look up her Wikipedia entry here. She was married a whopping six times and divorced every time. She was even arrested several times for (believe it or not) shoplifting. Eventually she passed away at age 85 in Florida in 2000.
Hedy later wrote an autobiography titled Ecstasy and Me ghostwritten by Leo Guild and Cy Rice. Later she disavowed the book and condemned the book’s contents as “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous and obscene,” and claimed it was “not her book.”
To supplement your reading, you might also be interested in the Wikipedia entry for Fritz Mandl, who also had a colorful life at the fringes of fascism.
