Book Review: Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes
Hedy Lamarr had a face for the movies and a brain for radio encryption
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Hedy’s Folly:
The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr,
the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
By Richard Rhodes
Doubleday; 261 pages; $26.95
The first thing most people recall about Hedy Lamarr is that she was “the most beautiful woman in the world.” It’s a label that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer attached to the Austrian native after she came to Hollywood in 1937. (Around that time, young Hedwig Kiesler was given the screen name Lamarr, not knowing it was the surname of another Mayer ingénue who had become a heroin addict and died about a decade earlier.) Mayer’s hyperbole plagued Lamarr for much of her life. She often played down her beauty, saying anyone can be glamorous if they “stand still and look stupid.”