The ceremony was held on the evening of 12 March 1997 at an Electronic Frontier Foundation conference in Burlingame, outside San Francisco. Receiving the Sixth Annual Pioneer Award, Hedy spoke briefly through a recording her son had made. Dave Hughes, always resourceful, had also brought a recorder and caught the message on tape. When I visited him in Colorado Springs in 2010, he played the tape for me, and I heard Hedy’s clear, Austrian-accented voice. “In acknowledgment of your honoring me,” she said simply, “I hope you feel good as well as I feel good about it, and it was not done in vain. Thank you.”
Eighty-two at the time of that long-delayed recognition, she sounded remarkably young.
Afterword
Boski Antheil remained in Los Angeles after her husband’s death, raising their son, Peter. Over the years she worked on writing a memoir of their life together, especially their Paris days. She wrote vivid scenes, some of which I’ve quoted in this book, but never connected them into a coherent narrative. Nor did she live long enough to enjoy the rediscovery of her husband’s work, which began in the 1990s when Ballet mécanique was finally produced in something close to its original form with the aid of digital controls, some of them spread spectrum. Since then, George’s mechanical ballet has been performed in many different venues, once using robot performers. When the American composer John Adams was writing the music for his 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, and wanted to invoke the intersection of physics and war that resulted in the invention of the first atomic bombs, he intentionally scored the overture in the style of Ballet mécanique. Other Antheil works have become part of the modern classical canon.
The beginning of an essay Boski drafted in the late 1960s recalls her characteristic voice and connects her past and present:
Some time ago my son Peter, who is in his thirties, asked me when I first came to America. He is a great devotee of the Twenties and at that time he was particularly interested in vintage cars. When I told him that it was in 1927 (the occasion being the Carnegie Hall performance of George’s Ballet mécanique), he exclaimed:
“It must have been wonderful to see all the old cars!”
I couldn’t help laughing.
“But Peter, then they were new cars!”
And so it goes. Even though at times I feel like a vintage car myself, as most of my contemporaries are passing away, somehow the past seems as present to me as if it happened yesterday. It is hard for me to imagine that I am an ancient relic of the Twenties. I really don’t feel that old, unless I suddenly realize that I am talking of a period about forty to forty-five years ago.
I get along with young people very well, in fact. Especially the kids in their early twenties, as they seem to be more related to the “20’s,” more in rapport with it. In a way they are trying to do pretty much what our generation was trying to do. The after-war generation wanted to deny the existing order, disillusioned and disgusted with the bourgeois generation responsible for the 1st world war and all its middle-class values. We really wanted to start the world from scratch… and believe me, when you are very young, this seems to be a very real possibility.
Boski Antheil died in 1978, Peter Antheil in 2010.
Fritz Mandl successfully escaped Austria after the Anschluss and immigrated to Argentina, where he became an Argentine citizen and manufactured munitions and light aircraft for the dictator Juan Perón. (He also invested in a minor Hollywood film company, Gloria Pictures, although he does not seem to have attempted to cast his former wife in a film.) During World War II the British Foreign Office, concerned that U.S. business interests might collude with Mandl to monopolize the postwar South American arms trade, set out to smear the Austrian parvenu as a Nazi sympathizer.
“To neutralize Mandl,” writes a Canadian historian, “British diplomats adroitly manipulated the FBI and the anti-Mandl faction of the [U.S.] State Department; these Americans in turn manipulated public and official opinion in the United States. The campaign was successfuclass="underline" by mid-1945, Mandl had been swept from the board.” After a 1955 treaty between the Western powers and the Soviet Union restored Austria to sovereignty, he returned to his native country and reclaimed his Hirtenberg empire, supplying the Austrian army and, later, such clients as Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, and the United Arab Emirates. He died in 1977, roundly despised but seemingly possessed of a golden passport.
Hedy continued to receive honors after the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. The Austrian Association of Patent Holders and Inventors awarded her its Viktor Kaplan Medal in 1998. An exhibition, Hommage à Hedy Lamarr, toured Austria in 1999.
“Hedy’s fondness for invention remained with her until the end,” writes her biographer Ruth Barton. “She had a proposal for a new kind of traffic stoplight and some modifications to the design of the Concorde [the Anglo-French supersonic passenger airliner that flew from 1976 to 2003]. There were plans for a device to aid movement-impaired people to get in and out of the bath, a fluorescent dog collar, and a skin-tautening technique based on the principle of the accordion. To the end of her days, she could perform devastatingly complex card tricks.”
Her last residence was a three-bedroom house in Casselberry, Florida, north of Orlando. She moved there in October 1999. That same month, in Vanity Fair, she answered a “Proust questionnaire”—an old European parlor game that the magazine had revived. Her idea of perfect happiness, she answered, was “living a very private life,” her real-life heroes Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. She was happiest “between marriages.” Her favorite fictional hero was the scofflaw child Bart Simpson of the television cartoon series The Simpsons, and like Bart her motto was, “Do not take things too seriously.”
Hedy’s final goal in life was to live into the new millennium. As with movie stardom, wartime fund-raising, and pioneering invention, she persevered and achieved what she set out to do; she died alone at home in Florida, in her sleep, on the night of 19 January 2000. She was eighty-five years old. She left her children an estate valued at $3 million, most of it won in court settlements against corporations that tried to exploit her name and image and through shrewd stock investments. Her son Anthony carried her cremated remains back to Austria, as she had requested, and scattered them in the Vienna Woods on the slope of a hill overlooking her native city. There she rests today, high above the wide Danube valley where Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, one with the trees and the grasses.
Acknowledgments
This book emerged from discussions at meetings of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation book committee and with Sloan programs vice president Doron Weber. A grant from the foundation supported the work of research.
Hedy Lamarr’s daughter, Denise Loder-DeLuca, was generous with her time and enthusiasm. Sheila Weller introduced us. Hedy’s son, Anthony Loder, scanned vital documents for me and reviewed them with me at a time of grave illness. I value their confidence and hope that the result warrants it.
Nino Amarena, inventor, electrical engineer, and man for all seasons, tutored me in hydrogen peroxide technology, radio control, frequency hopping, the pleasures and frustrations of invention, and much more. His knowledge and guidance have been invaluable.