Hedy Lamarr Trivia Quiz

Answer: Vienna, Austria

Show business ran in her family: her mother Gertrud was a pianist. (Her father, Emil, was a bank director.) Coming of age just as the Great Depression began, Hedy was bored with school and dropped out at 16 to work as a production assistant in the movies. After a few years and several bit parts, she starred in her first -- and most scandalous -- film.

Answer: Eva leaves her cruel husband and returns to her father's home, where she finds true love with a younger man. But then the two men meet . . .

"Ecstasy" was internationally notorious not for its uninventive plot, but for its very explicit scenes of its young star. Eva first meets her lover while swimming in a mountain lake, wearing no other costume than what God gave her; the movie's long shots of her form were considered incredibly shocking. And then there was the issue of the scenes between the young bride and her lover: although only their faces were shown, they were supposed to evoke an act that had never before been depicted in a mainstream film. (Lamarr later recalled that the director poked her with a pin to prompt the expressions he wanted.) No wonder that the film was banned in the United States! (It did show there years later -- heavily cut.)

Answer: Arms manufacturing

Mandl chaired the Austrian arms manufacturer Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik, which had been founded by his father. He was famously possessive of his young bride, taking her everywhere with him; she thus learned a great deal about his company and its techniques, which served her well after her flight to America.

In 1938 -- the year after Hedy's successful escape from his household -- the Austrian government seized Mandl's company and property, prompting him to flee to South America, where he founded another arms manufacturing company. Throughout World War II, the tabloid press accused him of continuing to provide weapons and money laundering services to the Nazis he had fled, though these charges were later shown to be baseless.

Answer: She drugged the maid who had been hired to watch her, donned a maid's uniform, and walked out through the service entrance.

Mandl hated knowing that his wife had appeared unclad in the movies; he spent some $300,000 (in 1930s money!) trying to purchase and destroy all the existing prints of "Ecstasy." He failed, but that didn't stop him from trying to control her in other aspects, from watching her whenever she went swimming to hiring help to keep her a virtual prisoner in their home.

When she finally succeeded in escaping him, she lost no time filing for divorce. The match had been arranged by her parents; sadly, Lamarr would not do much better when choosing her own husbands.

Answer: Barbara LaMarr, a star of silent films who had tragically died young

Barbara LaMarr (1896-1926), billed as "The Girl Who Is Too Beautiful," made an explosive Hollywood debut in 1920. She wrote six screenplays and appeared in 27 films, including one of the first movie versions of "The Three Musketeers." The life was hard on her: in her twenty-nine years of life she married five times, became addicted to heroin, and finally succumbed to a combination of tuberculosis and nephritis.

Of the other choices, Mirabeau Lamar (1798-1859) and Joseph Rucker Lamar (1857-1916) had lived sufficiently before Lamarr's immigration that they likely never crossed either her mind or Mayer's. LaMarr Hoyt (1955-), far too young to have affected the decision, did play for the Chicago White Sox (winning the American League Cy Young Award in 1983), but was suspended for drug abuse in 1987, killing his career. He had nothing to do with the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, in which eight players received lifetime bans from baseball for throwing the World Series.

Answer: "Casablanca"

To be fair to Lamarr, it was not entirely her decision to turn down the role of Ilsa Lund: MGM was not eager to let her make a Warner Brothers movie. This gave her an excuse to avoid a film she thought risky; she was nervous about the fact that the script was still being finalized.

Ironically, the makers of "Casablanca" were attempting to reproduce the look and feel of Lamarr's 1938 hit "Algiers" -- this is reportedly why the movie was renamed after a city. (Its original title was "Everybody Comes to Rick's.") Ingrid Bergman played Ilsa Lund, a role that made her a star; another of her successful early roles was another Lamarr reject, the female lead in "Gaslight" (1944).

Answer: Torpedo guidance systems

Lamarr and Antheil knew that torpedoes were far more accurate when they could be guided from the ship via radio -- but these transmissions could easily be jammed by the enemy. If the transmission frequency was constantly changing in a way unknown to the foe, however, the jammers wouldn't be able to keep up. Their clever idea was to borrow from player pianos: piano rolls could be used to synchronize the frequency hopping in both the torpedo's receiver and the ship's transmitter.

Their invention was not destined for use in World War II: it languished until 1962, when the patent had long expired. (Antheil blamed this on the use of piano terminology in the patent: he pictured military researchers bemused at the thought of putting a player piano into a torpedo.) Now, of course, spread spectrum is one of the foundations of modern communications -- who can imagine the modern economy without cell phones? Not many movie stars receive this kind of credit!

Answer: Delilah in "Samson and Delilah"

The story of Samson and Delilah is simple and powerful. Samson, the physically strong man who judges Israel, is feared by the Philistines, who use his lover Delilah to discover the secret of his strength. (It's all in a good head of hair, apparently.) Blinded, bound, and desperate for revenge, Samson literally brings down the house in the final act.

Lamarr -- beautiful, exotic, mysterious -- was widely regarded as perfect for the role. DeMille reportedly hand-collected some 1900 peacock feathers for the train of one of her elaborate costumes -- and then had the feathers retouched to add more color! No wonder the film, which cost a then-amazing $3 million to make, received Oscars for color costumes and color set direction.

"The Ten Commandments" (1923, 1956) and "King of Kings" (1927) really were DeMille Bible epics, but Lamarr was not involved in those films.

Answer: "Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman"

The sensational stories in "Ecstasy and Me" -- titled after her very first film -- certainly returned Lamarr to the public eye, but not in a way that she found very pleasing. She had just received plenty of bad publicity as a criminal defendant, and the titillating tales in her autobiography just made things worse.

In fact, she was so angry about the book that she sued its publisher (Bartholomew House) for $9.6 million, on the grounds that ghostwriters Leo Guild and Sy Rice had simply made up most of the anecdotes contained therein.

The book, she said, was "fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous, and obscene," and she sought to stop its publication. She was unsuccessful.

Answer: Shoplifting

The 1965 charge was made public just before the scandal of "Ecstasy and Me" (as discussed in Question 9); Lamarr was eventually cleared, but she still lost a minor role (in "Picture Mommy Dead") and some public support. In 1991, while shopping with friends in Florida, Lamarr walked out of the store with $21.98 in unpurchased goods. She argued through her lawyer that it was a case of forgetfulness -- after all, she had paid for all the other things in her shopping basket! -- but pleaded no contest in order to avoid tabloid attention in court.

Lamarr's suit against Corel was settled out of court; Corel received the rights to use her image for five years. The illustration had appeared on the CorelDraw package as an example of what their vector drawing could do. I'm sure it's just coincidence that they chose a gorgeous movie star for this purpose, instead of, say, a mosquito.

Lamarr died alone and in her sleep in Altamonte Springs, Florida, in January 2000. Even her death was tabloid fodder: her eldest son was not mentioned in the will and wound up suing her estate (he later dropped his suit in exchange for a tidy sum). She never received much recognition in her lifetime for her world-changing patent.

Hedy Lamarr, nee Hedwig Kiesler, was brilliant, beautiful, bold, and professionally successful. But even for a movie star, happiness can be heartbreakingly elusive.