“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.”