Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story Page #4

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"You're a genius."

- You did?

- Yep.

Yeah.

Very strange person that was.

Very brilliant.

But very misunderstood as well.

She invented,

during that period,

a tablet that would fizz up

and make a cola.

I had two chemists Howard

Hughes gave me to do that.

You know, during the war

nobody had Coca-Cola

and I wanted to compress it

into a cube

so that servicemen

and factory people,

all they had to

have was water and put it in.

But I didn't realize

that every state

has different

strengths of water,

so it dissolved on the bottom,

on top, in the middle.

It was one of my boo boos.

I didn't do that right.

But I don't have to work

on ideas.

They come naturally.

What must have been going

through the mind

of this young woman.

She's become

a huge international film star.

But at the very same time,

her country,

the past as she has known it,

has been eliminated.

In 1940,

the war was raging in Europe

and the United States

was a neutral country,

and Hitler

was basically taking over

all of Western Europe

and threatening

to take over Great Britain.

If only I could do something.

Oh, darling,

you've done so much already.

You almost made me forget

about being afraid.

Oh, I am afraid now.

She did have a secret.

When Hedy arrived

at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,

Louis B. Mayer specifically

ordered all of his stars

not to talk about

their religious backgrounds.

People would say,

"You're Jewish,"

and I'm like, "No,"

and I called Mom and said,

"Mom, are we Jewish,"

and she said,

"Don't be ridiculous."

I never heard the word "Jewish"

from my mother's lips.

The Jewish part of her,

she just left behind.

She was probably afraid

for many reasons.

And I could feel it,

I could see that

she was protecting herself.

I became a manicurist.

That's how I met Hedy.

I told her that I survived

the war with camps

and running for my life.

We talked about

what was going on

and how I come to America.

I find myself

on an American ship.

I was shaking with fear

because we heard noises.

We were attacked

by the Nazi submarines.

I remember saying,

"Oh, dear God,

please don't kill me now,

let me see America."

At the time,

Hedy's mother was preparing

to make the treacherous

Atlantic crossing herself.

She'd fled Austria

and gotten as far as London

where she and Hedy

were able to write each other.

"Mommy, my mind

is so preoccupied

and I would love it

if you could come immediately

since the times,

they are very uncertain.

I have been listening

to the radio day and night

for over a week,

and I've gotten

barely any sleep."

Vivid pictures

of a naval action

have just been released.

One day,

in the summer of 1940,

a shipload of children

was torpedoed.

All hands lost

including 83 children.

At the time,

the German U-boats

were on the verge

of winning the war.

They seemed to be unsinkable

because they easily

outmaneuvered

the outdated British torpedoes.

In times of crisis,

most of us feel powerless,

but a few discover

in themselves

unexpected strength.

And Hedy being Hedy,

she said,

"I'm gonna do something

about that."

So, in this article, Hedy says,

"I got the idea

for my invention

when I tried to think

of some way

to even the balance

for the British.

A radio-controlled torpedo

I thought would do it."

A torpedo launched

on a given trajectory

might need to be changed,

redirected.

You want, ideally,

your launching boat

to communicate

with the torpedo.

The problem is you can't control

radio communications.

They're not secure.

Your enemy, if they're smart,

finds the frequency with which

you're talking to the torpedo

and jams it.

Jamming.

The Germans fill the air

with radio interference.

She came up with the idea

of a secret way

of guiding that torpedo

to the target

that couldn't be interrupted,

that couldn't be jammed,

that couldn't be messed with.

It was secret.

Instead of just one transmit

frequency communicating,

she said, "What if we changed

those frequencies constantly

in sync with each other?"

Frequency hopping.

You couldn't jam it

because you'd only jam

a split second of it

in a single frequency.

So, frequency change,

frequency hop,

frequency hop, frequency hop.

That concept,

secure radio communications,

was brilliant.

Now there are various versions

of how she came up

with her profoundly

original idea.

One theory is

that she stole it.

The man who championed

that idea was an engineer

who once interviewed her

named Robert Price.

Robert Price was a pioneer

in secret communications,

and he gave me his number

and I called him up.

She's an inventor

but I don't know in what sense

exactly she is an inventor.

If I want to be harsh

I would say she was

a plagiarizer, you understand?

Hedy's first husband

was Austria's leading

munitions manufacturer.

Robert Price said to me

that he thought

that she just smuggled the idea

out of her husband's board room.

In fact, he called her

the Mata Hari of World War Il,

the most notorious spy

who seduced men

and got all kinds of secrets

out of them.

The engineers at Mandl's firm

might just have known

about the frequency hopping.

Is that how you were aware

of frequency hopping?

No. What, my husband?

No. Nobody did that...

invent that before.

I mean, I know what I did.

I don't care

what other people say about me.

The record is very clear

that the Germans

had not come across the idea

that would be

Hedy's signal contribution,

what she called

"frequency hopping."

I don't think she was a spy.

It was so obvious.

I mean they shot torpedoes

in all directions

and never hit the target,

so I invented

something that does.

I mean, I can't explain.

I have an inventive mind.

I think Hedy got her idea

from a curious coincidence

that, in 1939,

the Philco Radio Company

produced

a new top-of-the-line

remote control.

There's a new gadget

just out, see?

You dial your station here

and you hear it over there.

- Well, where are the wires?

- There ain't any wires.

That's the trick.

We know Hedy was interested

in the remote control

and how it worked

because the device is sketched

in the invention notebooks.

In here is all the evidence

of my mother's invention.

It's this.

She dialed in a radio station

and she said,

"If we hop around frequencies,

just like I'm hopping

around radio stations

on this dialer,

when I transmit this information

to the torpedo,

we can make it totally secret."

So the Philco magic box

probably inspired

the whole thing.

The fact that she understands

this frequency component

of the signal

and how that changes

is, I mean, genius in a way.

I mean, we know Thomas Edison

was not an engineer.

You don't have to have

eight years

of a graduate degree

in engineering

in order to come up

with something new.

In the inventing process,

there is a moment

of high lucidity,

of clear thinking.

In the case of Hedy,

she had this lucid moment

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