NP Re: Hedy Lamarr War Criminal?

[davemarc]

> 
> Hedy Lamar created a guidance system that vastly improved the accuracy of
> American torpedoes in WWII.  The system featured a very rapid alternation
> of frequencies that was next to impossible to jam.  She was assisted in
> this effort by the American composer George Antheil.  Some of you may be
> familiar with Antheil who was a protege of Ezra Pound's (see Pound's
> ``Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony'') and was widely known throughout
> Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as the ``Bad Boy of Music.''  After the
> political situation in Europe deteriorated, Antheil came home to the USA
> and found work in Hollywood as a very succesful film composer.  He and
> Lamar were close friends who shared an interest in electronics.  As I
> understand it, Lamar's first husband was an electronics expert and she
> picked up many ideas from him.  

According to Katz's Film Encyclopedia, the Vienna-born Hedy Lamarr, a.k.a.
Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was the daughter of a banker. Her first husband
was "Austrian munitions magnate Fritz Mandl, who sought to buy up all
existing prints of [Gustav Machaty's notorious film Extase, in which she
appears nude], but she divorced him before he completed his mission and the
film was released time and again in theaters the world over."  Her second
marriage, to producer/screenwriter Gene Markey, a veteran of WWI and WWII,
lasted from 1939-40.  Her third marriage, to actor John Loder, who had
"served with the 15th Hussars as a second lieutenant in Gallipoli" during
WWI, lasted much longer--from 1943-47.  During that time he appeared in the
film The Hairy Ape, a war crime in itself.

George Antheil's most famous film score, for Fernand Leger's Ballet
mecanique, called for the use of airplane propellers, among other unusual
"musical instruments."

So the connections are clear.

davemarc