Hedy Lamarr’s Moodiness – Part 2

This is taken from Jean Pierre Aumont’s autobiography “Sun and Shadow.”  Hedy met Jean Pierre Aumont after she attained a divorce from John Loder and was looking for her fourth husband. I don’t know much about their relationship except for the fact that there was one. And I’m not a huge fan of Mr. Aumont but I am very well aware that Hedy Lamarr is not the easiest person on earth to live with, especially if you’re just normal people. Plus, she was then already a mother of two children, facing with the unsuccessfulness of her new movie, Dishonored Lady, not knowing that Samson and Delilah, her biggest success was still right ahead. Jean Pierre, like many men, was attracted very much to her beauty but got panic over her temper. So read about his engagement to the most beautiful woman of the century so you can understand why they couldn’t make it!

beautiful as she was, the moodiness of the Austrian star began to worry me

“During dinner she pressed one of her knees, the lovelier of the two, against mine…

The following week, we were engaged.

I gave her a diamond ring and told my father, who had arrived in the States, to fly out to meet his future daughter in law. The marriage had been planned for the beginning of July.

But, beautiful as she was, the moodiness of the Austrian star began to worry me. One evening, when we were driving back from a concert, I braked a little too quickly. Hedy became hysterical, claiming that I had purposely tried to throw her against the windshield because I was jealous of her beauty…

The day my father arrived,  I went to meet him at the airport. Realizing that his arrival in some way made my engagement official, I was suddenly seized with panic.

“You take care of her” I said with cowardice unbefitting a gentleman, “I’ve had enough.” I jumped on the first plane for San Franciso, leaving the poor man standing there with his mouth open. I wasn’t yet mature enough to handle a Tyrolian temptress already three times divorced and nursing in her personality all the complexes and insecurities of our old Europe.

I returned to Hollywood. Hedy threw our ring in my face, and walked out.”

>> next part: Married to John Loder.

Hedy Lamarr’s Moodiness – Part 1

Do you know that Hedy Lamarr had a fierily temperamental character that was completely opposite of her heavenly look? Somehow many men got intimidated of her because she was both extremely intelligent and too moody to handle. Let’s look at how many of the men in her life talked about this aspect of Hedy. The first part of today I’ll focus on actor John Fraser’s personal experience with Hedy when they filmed The Loves of Three Queens together in 1953.

In his autobiography Close up:an actor telling tales, John Fraser dedicated one chapter to talk about the filming of The Loves of Three Queens where he played Drago, a loyal friend of queen Geneviève (Hedy Lamarr) who died while fighting to protect her honor. At first it was the problem of Hedy’s disapproving of what she had to wear in the movie. She screamed in anger:

“How can they sick me in that Ball Gown! I need scarlet! Or lilac to go with my eyes…They want to ruin my career. I’ll look like Doris Day before she was a virgin! I’m going to walk off this picture. Walk it off. Just like that. Just leave. Get on a plane tomorrow. Frankie will fix everything. I’m not sticking around here to have my future flushed down the john…”

She seemed to be talking to herself at this point, then she even got very temperamental though John and many people had assured Hedy that she would look wonderful in anything, anything! Because she was the most beautiful woman.

She didn’t seem to listen. She just immersed herself in her own thoughts. This made John think she must be seriously mentally disturbed. In the end, he had to raise his voice a little,

“Hedy, don’t walk off the picture. They’ll listen alright when we start working. You see, everything will turn out fine.”

Everything did not turn out fine. Hedy didn’t speak anything. She was, again, deep in her own thoughts regardless of the presence of John Fraser. Then he said, “she bent her lovely gaze on me without speaking for quite two minutes. She then said in a gentle voice, extremely lucidly, “Who are you, you little flea, to tell me what to do?”. Then she just left.

The 40 year old but still ravishing Hedy Lamarr, as queen Geneviève de Brabant

John Fraser was too young and unprepared before a big star he didn’t know what to do. What came next was that the scenes with Hedy and him turned out to be so difficult and heavy because Hedy refused to talk to him for she thought he didn’t treat her with enough respect. Even her relationship with Edgar Ulmer, who was also from Austria thus naturally everyone expected a warm relationship between Hedy and him, was becoming more and more bitter. Edgar, who had directed Hedy in The Strange Woman had to walk off the filming because Hedy was “beyond unbearable”. Note that he was one director who never walked off while filming before.

The ending scene when queen Geneviève reconciled with her husband after 5 years apart

John Fraser was just glad when the filming was over and he would not want to work with a big star again soon. But in conclusion, he said in defense of Hedy:

“Hedy Lamarr was never a normal person. Not only she was considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, she was one  of the patent holders of the idea of “frequency hopping” communications. This revolutionary concepts is now used in everything from mobile phones to military satellites to jam-resistance radar. She was worshiped for both her beauty and scientific genius”

>> Next: Hedy Lamarr’s Moodiness – Part 2: Engaged to Jean Pierre Aumont.

“I should probably sell my life story to Ted Turner”

Refreshed after a swim in the pool at her apartment complex in Miami, Hedy Lamarr picked up her telephone and politely, but firmly, turned down a request for an interview in person. She also declined to let us send a photographer. “I still look good, though,” she added during a lengthy phone chat.

Lamarr is hardly a recluse. She spends evenings playing cards with friends and watching movies on her VCR. “Jimmy Stewart just wrote me a picture card–‘To a wonderful gift,’ it said. And Rex Reed wants me to go to a party with him tonight. He’s in town.”

The daughter of a prominent Viennese banker, Lamarr (née Hedwig Kiesler) grew up a self-described enfant terrible. She gained notoriety while still a teenager for running through the woods naked in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy. Shortly afterwards, she married wealthy arms manufacturer Fritz Mandl. They shared a 25-room hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps, were chauffeured around in one of nine cars and dined off gold plates. Lamarr broke off the marriage after three years. “I couldn’t be an object,” she says, sounding rebellious and spry at age 75, “so I walked out.”

An older Hedy Lamarr relaxing by the pool

After abandoning Vienna in 1937, she met film mogul Louis B. Mayer in London. Mayer paid her $500 to sign a seven-year contract with MGM, shipped her to Hollywood and rechristened her Hedy Lamarr. At her peak, in the Forties, she earned as much as $250,000 a picture, starring in such films as White Cargo, Samson and Delilah and Comrade X. Over two decades, she appeared in 25 films, starring with such immortals as Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy.

In 1942 Lamarr patented an antijamming radio and gave it to the U.S. government as her contribution to the war effort. But her patent wasn’t her only contribution. During the war, she raised $7 million in a single evening selling war bonds. She also pursued other ideas for inventions. Howard Hughes once lent her a pair of chemists to help her develop a bouillon-like cube which, when mixed with water, would create a soft drink similar to Coca-Cola. “It was a flop,” she says with a laugh.

Over the years she married and divorced six husbands, a tact which, in the end, left her poorer. “You couldn’t live with a person, in those days, without being married,” she says. In a playful sendup of Greta Garbo’s oft misquoted line, Lamarr, who spoke to FORBES before Garbo’s death last month, said, “I didn’t vant to be alone.”

Lamarr today lives comfortably, if not in grand style, in a one-bedroom apartment, supported by Social Security and a pension from the Screen Actors Guild. “I should probably sell my life story to Ted Turner,” says the film goddess-inventor-patriot, “because it’s unbelievable.”