George Antheil had traveled far from his early cacophonous avant-garde work. He might well have said of his life, as of his music, that he had come home.
The birth of her daughter, Denise, in 1945 had left Hedy with psychosomatic pain, for which she began seeing a Boston psychoanalyst. Flying from Hollywood to Boston for treatment “became a shuttle trip,” she remembered. Traumas emerged from earlier in her life: a schoolgirl encounter with a flasher; a workman’s sexual assault when Hedy was fourteen that she had kept secret from her parents out of shame; exposure to a frightening scar, from his rib cage to his hip, that Anthony Eden had revealed when he came aboard in swim trunks to swim with Hedy in the south of France. Two years later, “time and analysis” had helped her. “I found out who I am,” she said. Part of her problem had been the uncertainty and defensiveness she had felt in “the crisp, competitive world of Hollywood.” Even so, she was one of the few European artists who had successfully transitioned from her native culture and language to America. By 1947 she was ready to remake her life.
Believing that she could find better scripts if she had a wider range of choices, she negotiated past Louis B. Mayer’s angry possessiveness to extricate herself from MGM. Analysis had changed her, and her marriage to John Loder now felt lonely. “It was the case again,” she recalled, “where the unknown had much more allure for me than what I had now. I wanted a divorce, feeling there were other more exciting, more interesting experiences waiting for me.” First, however, she wanted another child, because she remembered the loneliness of her own childhood and hoped to spare Denise similar isolation. (She had essentially disowned James, her adopted son.) Anthony John Loder, Denise’s younger brother, was born in March 1947. Three months later Hedy divorced her third husband.
She was less successful making films on her own. “My judgment on scripts was faulty,” she concluded. “I was embarrassed… and worried.” Out of that limbo, in 1949, Cecile B. DeMille chose her to play Delilah in his costume blockbuster Samson and Delilah opposite Victor Mature. The picture premiered in New York on 21 December and broke all box-office records. Afterward, having fought with DeMille on the set about costume and character, Hedy was delighted with the seasoned director’s assessment of her. “We argued quite a bit,” he told a radio interviewer, “but I respected Hedy. She loves picture-making, it shines out of her. I had no idea Hedy was as good an actress as she turned out to be. She was fiery, yet did everything expected of her. When I was blowing up, Hedy remained calm. She had great self-confidence and self-respect. Considering her reputation and beauty, she is a most unaffected person.”
As her film roles declined in the 1950s, Hedy began working in the new medium of television, although more frequently as a celebrity guest than as an actor. By about 1970 she had given up that work as well. The careers of Hollywood stars, especially women, can be as short as the careers of professional athletes. Hedy’s career in film and television spanned more than thirty years. She estimated she had earned $30 million or more from acting—$372 million today. Financing films and submitting to voracious California community property laws across six divorces consumed most of it; she lived far more modestly in the later decades of her life than she had in her years of Hollywood stardom.
Spread-spectrum technologies emerged from government secrecy in 1976 with the publication of the electrical engineer Robert C. Dixon’s textbook Spread Spectrum Systems, which a Dixon colleague called the “first comprehensive, unclassified review of the technology” that “set the stage for increasing research into commercial applications.”
Commercialization was further encouraged by President Jimmy Carter’s inflation czar, Alfred E. Kahn, a Cornell economist best known for deregulating the U.S. airline industry while chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978. Kahn, a liberal Democrat, promoted government deregulation for economic reasons, believing that it spurred economic development—a cause later taken up with conservative ideological fervor by President Ronald Reagan. At the Federal Communications Commission between 1977 and 1981, chairman Charles D. Ferris, a Boston-born physicist and attorney, abandoned the usual FCC practice of finding a consensus with the electronics industry before changing or adding to FCC rules. Instead, in line with Carter and Kahn’s emphasis on deregulation for economic growth, Ferris looked for innovative technologies hampered by what his assistant Michael J. Marcus calls “anachronistic technical regulations.” There was a reason for the regulations, Marcus explains:
In the 1970s the spectrum technology area was highly concentrated, with only a few major manufacturers:
Western Electric was the near-exclusive supplier of the local and long distance telecommunications industry, cellular was in its experimental stage, and the regulatory status quo was rather acceptable to the small “club” of major manufacturers serving the US market, all of whom were domestic companies. While regulations prevented rapid innovation, it [sic] also generally prevented both new entrants and technological surprise from the few competitors. Products could be planned and introduced with assurances that the R&D costs could be amortized over a long sales period. It was a cozy oligarchy for the major manufacturers, but it denied the public the benefits of rapid introduction of new technologies and services just as in the parallel Bell System telecommunications monopoly.
Ferris set out to change the situation, beginning with a study the FCC commissioned, delivered in December 1980, titled Potential Use of Spread Spectrum Techniques in Non-government Applications. Its key finding: “Spread spectrum techniques offer a unique method of sharing a common band between multiple users without requiring the users to coordinate their transmissions in any way.” For technical as well as political reasons, the report raised the possibility of using what are called the ISM bands—the radio frequencies allocated to industrial, scientific, and medical uses other than communication (such as microwave ovens and equipment for medical diathermy and industrial heating)—for spread-spectrum radio. Such equipment generated radio noise that interfered with narrow-band radio transmissions, which was why it had been allocated frequency bands of its own. (They were also called the garbage bands.) Spread spectrum, however, was resistant to such interference just as it was resistant to jamming. And since radio spectrum is limited, any new technology that could be overlaid onto spectrum already assigned to other transmissions without interfering with those transmissions was of obvious benefit. Or so Ferris and Marcus hoped.
The benefits were less obvious to competing interests within both government and industry. Marcus felt as if he were advancing into a lion’s den in 1983 when he went to the National Security Agency to make his case. “It became clear,” he writes, “that some individuals at NSA hoped to keep spread spectrum off the commercial market for fear that foreign military use of the technology would complicate NSA’s signal intelligence responsibility.” Fortunately for him, the wife of the “very senior NSA official” who introduced him had just bought a new car with a scanning AM/FM radio, a technology similar to spread spectrum, which meant, he told the assembled, that “the spread spectrum Pandora’s box may already have been opened and that shutting it was probably futile.” After that fortuitous rescue, Marcus writes, opposition to civil spread spectrum within the U.S. military and intelligence communities began to fade.