Hollywood’s Darkest Bombshell

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Hedy Lamarr adopted a baby boy in 1939 only to abandon him a decade later. Their twisted family drama was like something out of a film noir, but the chilling story behind their estrangement only came out after Lamarr’s death. Hedy Lamarr was often called the most beautiful woman in the world. Really, she was much more than just a pretty face. There was her illustrious Hollywood career and her second act as the mastermind behind the groundbreaking technology that led to the invention of Wi-Fi. With all that, you’d hardly think she’d have enough time for such a scandalous personal life, but this brilliant bombshell also had a dark side.

Hedy Lamarr began life as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, born in Vienna in 1914, the only daughter to an upper-class family. From a very young age, she knew she wanted to act, and she wouldn’t let anything or anyone stop her. Before she even turned 18, she moved to Berlin to immerse herself in the film scene. There, she got her first big film role at the age of 18. It was so scandalous that it caused an immediate outcry. The movie was called “Ecstasy,” and it was supposedly the first mainstream film to depict a sex scene. The controversy intensified when the press reported that Lamarr had been 17 when the infamous scene was filmed.

When she accepted the role, her parents had insisted that one of them should accompany her on set. She didn’t want to appear unprofessional or immature by rocking up to set with her parents, so she promised them that an actor she’d worked with would act as a chaperone. However, she had a more scandalous reason for not wanting her family to come: she had a secret lover in Prague where the film was being shot. Lamarr appeared on the set of “Ecstasy” raring to go, but she was in for a shock. The director demanded that she strip for a scene where her character skinny dips. She said no and threatened to quit, but the director shot back that she’d be financially responsible for the cost of the scenes they’d already filmed. He then claimed they’d only use long shots where her body would be barely visible. He was lying. They used a telephoto lens to capture close-ups of her, and later, when she saw the finished product, she was incredibly upset. But the worst was yet to come.

What’s worse than being manipulated by a predatory director or having your first film banned in multiple countries? Your mother and father attending a screening of the aforementioned film. Lamarr tried to tell them it was artistic, but when they saw the infamous nude scenes, they stormed out of the theater. When Lamarr went back to Vienna, she got the role of Empress Elisabeth in a play, which attracted some unwanted attention from a sinister suitor. His name was Fritz Mandl, and he came from a wealthy family of arms dealers. He was older, already had a divorce under his belt, and he was also a fascist. Lamarr wasn’t interested, but that didn’t stop him. Mandl did everything in his power to get Lamarr’s attention, but she kept on rejecting him. However, over the course of these interactions, something changed. Lamarr found herself attracted to his power, intelligence, and charm, and before long had fallen in love. The pair got engaged, and like any 18-year-old bride, Lamarr expected a fairy tale ending. Instead, she would only get a complete horror show.

Mandl was jealous and controlling, and had servants eavesdrop on her calls. If she mentioned the words “pictures” or “acting,” he’d fly into a rage. Hedy Lamarr tried twice to escape her life in what she called her “prison of gold,” but with her husband’s immense power and constant surveillance of her, both attempts failed. Then one afternoon, tragedy struck: Lamarr’s father died suddenly of a massive heart attack. Lamarr said that after the loss of her father, she only wore black and couldn’t bear to look at any other color. On top of that, she was completely unable to face other people; she was basically a zombie. Then, after a year, it was like the haze suddenly lifted, and she knew she had to make a drastic change. Life was too short to let her tyrannical husband reign over her for a moment more, so she fled with what she could. There was one ultimate destination: Hollywood. But first, she stopped in London, and it was there where she met a man who would change her life.

Lamarr ended up in London at the same time as another powerful man: Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM Studios. And he’d seen Lamarr before in a very scandalous place. That’s right, Mayer had seen “Ecstasy,” and it definitely colored his opinion of her. Thinking she was no more than a desperate wannabe, he made an offer of $125 a week if she came to Los Angeles. Well, that just wasn’t enough for Lamarr, so she came up with a plan. She’d heard that Mayer and his wife were heading back to the states aboard the Normandie, a sleek French liner. So, she bought a one-way ticket. With Mayer on board as her captive audience, she planned to prove to him that she was more than just a Hollywood hopeful with loose morals. And that’s what she did. By the end of the trip, he’d offered her $500 a week. Not only that, his wife Margaret Mayer helped her come up with a stage name that would distance her from Hedwig Kiesler, the star of “Ecstasy.” She borrowed from the tragic screen siren Barbara La Marr, who had died at 29 from complications of her drug addiction. Oh, great.

Hedy Lamarr had made it in Hollywood before she even stepped onto the screen. With her MGM contract under her belt, she began learning English, exercising her newfound vocabulary at glitzy parties where she was the arm candy for Hollywood playboys like Howard Hughes. Finally, six months after her arrival, she got her first part in a studio film, and it was just in time. Just as all her dreams were coming true, Hedy Lamarr received devastating news from back home. Germany had annexed Austria, leaving her mother, who’d been born Jewish, in grave danger. Luckily, Lamarr had spent her first few months in the US squirreling away her paychecks. She got her mom to the US and away from the conflict in Europe just in time to make her screen debut. Lamarr’s beauty was legendary, and it knocked audiences off their feet. The film made her into an overnight star. But still, scripts that suited her were few and far between. It was during this era that she took up a peculiar hobby. Despite her lack of formal education, she got into inventing gadgets and formulas in her spare time.

Inventing wasn’t her only pastime. Lamarr continued to attract the attention of scores of handsome Hollywood personalities. But then, just when it seemed like she might never settle down, she made a move that shocked even herself: she married movie producer Gene Markey. Around that time, Lamarr had begun proceedings to adopt a baby boy, and within a few months, she had a family. Markey gave his last name to James, the baby his wife adopted, but that’s about all he gave. They were both so busy with their careers, and Lamarr with her son, that they rarely spent time together. She thrived as a mother, but her attachment to her child also meant that the dire world events that were happening were having a brutal effect on her. Lamarr had been able to save her mother, but thoughts of the innocent children affected by the outbreak of World War II plagued her night and day. When a passenger ship of evacuees, including 90 children, was hit and sunk in 1940, Lamarr’s profound sense of grief moved her to do something.

She began to think back to the weapons she’d learned about when eavesdropping on her first husband when she’d accompany him to arms deals. She reached out to a composer friend, George Antheil, and they got to work. They came up with a technique that would help radio-controlled torpedoes, which were typically vulnerable to jamming, hit their targets. Then, they patented the invention. They sent the patent documents for their frequency-hopping spread spectrum to the US Navy, only to get hit with a brutal blow. The Navy claimed that they had no interest in using it because it was too big to fit in a torpedo. To add insult to injury, they then seized the patent as alien property since Lamarr was Austrian. She turned her attention to the war effort, where she helped sell bonds to support the Allied forces. At the same time, she also filed for divorce from Markey. Despite their whirlwind romance, all had not been well under their roof. In the court documents, Lamarr claimed that they’d spent no more than four nights together in 18 months of marriage.

Lamarr’s appearances at the Hollywood Canteen for men and women waiting to be deployed were extremely popular. During that time, she ran into an old familiar face: actor John Loder. When they’d last met in 1938, he’d been married. Now, he was freshly single, and he was just Lamarr’s type. They married in 1943. This was a golden period for Hedy Lamarr. She had a career resurgence and she was a happy newlywed. Her new husband got along particularly well with her son and adopted him. Two years into their marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Denise. But very quickly afterward, her happily ever after spun out into a living nightmare.

After the birth of her daughter, Hedy Lamarr began to experience a peculiar phenomenon: she was in terrible pain, which a doctor eventually diagnosed as psychosomatic. She began to regularly travel to Boston to see a psychoanalyst who brought up all kinds of past trauma. For two years, Lamarr underwent intense analysis, and she came out of it ready for a massive change. First, she got out of her nearly decade-long professional relationship with MGM. Then, she got pregnant again. In 1947, she gave birth to a son, Anthony, making them a family of four—at least at first. Another casualty of Lamarr’s big post-psychoanalysis life change was third husband John. It was an amicable divorce, at least. Around this time, she sent her son James off to a boarding school and receded from his life. By the time he was 11, they were barely in contact. He began to spend his time off with one of his teachers and her husband. Lamarr thought of this as a betrayal and cut off the boy, even though he was barely a teenager.

In 1949, Lamarr starred in “Samson and Delilah.” It was a huge hit and sparked another boom in her already illustrious career. The downside? Her work schedule became exhausting. She once again found herself dreaming of a fairy tale ending: a husband who would love her and help her take care of the kids and the bills. After two grueling years, she took a Mexico vacation and met a new man. Teddy Stauffer was a former bandleader and struggling restaurateur in Mexico. In contrast to John Loder, he seemed glamorous and exciting, but he had a chilling dark side. Like her first husband, he was incredibly jealous. Stauffer wouldn’t hesitate to lash out at her over any perceived slight. Lamarr made it nine months with Stauffer before filing for divorce. Lamarr’s taste in men wasn’t great, and it wasn’t getting any better.

Lamarr’s next relationship was with an actor whose name she changed to Sam in her memoirs, and it was so twisted it’s impossible to forget. He was obsessive and violent towards her, but all of that was nothing compared to the surprise that he spent months working on. One night, when Lamarr refused to go to bed with him, he pulled out a life-sized plastic doll he’d fashioned to look just like her. He then made her watch as he made love to the doll. By this point, it’s a wonder she wasn’t pining for Nazi-occupied Austria.

When Lamarr decided that she wanted to produce a film, she attracted a number of potential financiers, but as you can imagine, they had ulterior motives. And one of them actually managed to make his way into her heart. While their film never made it to screens, their romance was much more successful. Hedy Lamarr and W. Howard Lee tied the knot in 1953. She gave up acting and moved to his home in Houston. Lamarr and Lee made it six years—a personal record for her—before filing for divorce. In the courtroom, Lee didn’t hold back from exposing the dark side of their marriage. He claimed that Lamarr was violent with him, and she claimed the same about him. Lamarr made the ill-advised decision to fire all three of her lawyers in one fell swoop, and that’s when she found another lawyer in Los Angeles, and history repeated itself. Like Howard Lee, Lamarr’s new lawyer had ulterior motives. Lewis J. Boies, her divorce attorney, became Lamarr’s sixth and final husband. Thank God Lamarr divorced Boies after two years, claiming that she’d spent half a million of her own fortune on him and that he was abusive in public and private.

The frequency-hopping spread system was Lamarr’s most successful invention, but it wasn’t her only one. Her most notorious invention was a powder tablet meant to turn any glass of water into a delicious soda pop, also referred to as a cola bouillon cube. This one was not as successful. In the 60s, the Navy finally adopted an updated version of the technology that Lamarr and Antheil had invented. In the years that followed, she received scores of accolades and awards for the frequency-hopping spread spectrum, an invention that would later be used to develop all kinds of wireless communication technology, including Wi-Fi.

In the final decades of her life, Hedy Lamarr began to recede more and more from public view, and the reason why is heartbreaking. As she aged, she turned to plastic surgery to preserve her looks. Unfortunately, they weren’t all successes, and a series of botched procedures left the most beautiful woman in the world disfigured. This caused Lamarr to sink deeper into seclusion, and in the final years of her life, she refused to see most people, including her own children. Instead, she kept up contact exclusively on the phone. She died peacefully at home at the age of 85. Her son Anthony brought her ashes back to her beloved home of Vienna and spread them in the forest. It was a peaceful end for a woman with such a jaw-droppingly dramatic life, but some of her most well-kept secrets only emerged after her passing.

One of the most passed-around stories about Lamarr was her legendary escape from her first husband. Back in the 30s, Lamarr tried and failed twice to leave the tyrannical Fritz Mandl, but after the death of her father, she refused to accept failure again. So, she came up with a plan. She began to listen more closely when Mandl, an arms dealer, held meetings with diplomats and world leaders. She knew that blackmailing him with knowledge of state secrets would be one way to make sure he couldn’t drag her back in. In Lamarr’s version of the story, she dressed herself as the maid and fled Mandl’s home. She boarded a train for Paris, where she quickly filed for divorce before fleeing again to London. In another version of the tale, Lamarr convinced her husband to let her wear every piece of jewelry she owned to dinner one night, only to slip out the back of the restaurant with a small fortune’s worth of trinkets on her person. That story was closer to the truth, which Lamarr did eventually reveal.

Her relationship with her son James had been fraught. He began acting out as a child, and by the time he was a teen, they were essentially estranged. But none of that could have prepared him for the bombshell that came out shortly after Lamarr’s death. In 2001, after his mother’s passing, he unearthed a copy of his original birth certificate, and the contents shocked him. James had grown up thinking that he’d been adopted by Lamarr, but he was, in fact, her biological child. For 61 years, she hadn’t let on to him that they were related. But perhaps even more jaw-dropping than that was the matter of his father. It seems like Lamarr’s third marriage to John Loder was really her attempt to fix a past mistake and turn it into a happily ever after. She and Loder had an affair in 1938 when he was still with his first wife. Lamarr had gotten pregnant, and fearing for her career, had covered up the birth of her son James Lamarr Loder. The man who’d adopted him when he was four years old was actually his biological father. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for more videos.