Posted on 12/20/2011 9:27:15 PM PST by Tex-Con-Man
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Hedy Lamarr avoided the celebrity party circuit, preferring small gatherings with close friends. At home she set up a drafting table and devoted her downtime to inventions, including a bouillon-like cube that when mixed with water would produce an instant soft drink. It was at a dinner at the home of the actress Janet Gaynor in 1940 that she met George Antheil.
According to Antheil’s autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music,” Hedy requested the meeting because she had read one of his Esquire articles about glands. This was Hollywood, and the most beautiful woman in the world was concerned about her breast size. Could Mr. Antheil help? A friendship began that evening, kindled by the encounter of two imaginative and inventive minds...
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What drew Rhodes to the twin story of the Bad Boy of Music and “the most beautiful woman in the world” was their invention of a radio-controlled “spread spectrum” torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.
That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Antheil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for “out of the box” problem solving.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
All the women mentioned were beautiful, but don’t forget Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, Debra Kerr, Ann Baxter etc. Betty Grable was a looker and on Posters in many young soldier’s lockers during WWII. During the 1940’s and early ‘50s most of the famous Movie stars were stand outs—both Women and Men! The Men were so Handsome and masculine. The Women were very beautiful ; each of them were very different. Now so many of both sexes seem to look too much alike.
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