The radiant beauty of Hedy Lamarr

“I am never satisfied. I didn’t do one thing sooner than I’m bubbling inside to do another, ”said Hedy Lamarr, the Mermaid of the Golden Age.

And do what Lamarr did. The gorgeous star of the classic understands Alger and Samson and Delilah more than the label given to her, “the most beautiful woman in the world”. Married six times, she is a pioneering actress, producer, impresario. ski resort, painter, art collector and revolutionary inventor whose key innovations are meticulously listed as Pulitzer Prize winners Richard rhodes2012 book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Revolutionary Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

However, it was another book that would change Lamarr’s life. Ecstasy and me: my life as a woman, written by Cy Rice and Leo Guild (who is also the ghostwriter of the infamous Barbara Payton All I’m Not Ashamed of), was released in 1966 and became an instant bestseller.

Based on 50 hours of recorded conversations with the eccentric and vulnerable Lamarr, ecstasy and me is a strangely gripping chronicle of how women have been gendered, downplayed, and trivialized throughout history. Although classified as an autobiography, the book begins with a male psychologist claiming that Lamarr’s gender identity is “completely unaffected by the moral standards of contemporary culture.” Our modern pretends to be tolerable, ”and has been nauseous ever since.

Mournful and passionate encounters with a Roger corman Pornography and sexual trauma disguised as sex are central to this supposed autobiography, although it is sometimes broken, oddly enough, because of transcripts of conversations Lamarr taps with a psychiatrist. Standard Hollywood gossip is mixed – sometimes crude, sometimes benevolent portrayals of everyone from Judy Garland to Clark Gable to Ingrid Bergman – and unnecessary phrases. like “Why Americans doubt the bidet, I’ll never know.” They are the last word in cleanliness. “

End of 2010 Belle: The Life of Hedy Lamarr, biographer Stephen michael shearer wrote that people close to Lamarr thought some of the stories in the story made no sense ecstasy and me were both precise, Lamarr’s own voice breaking through the sensational confusion at times. But they also think the weird sex stories are pure lies. The reader feels that while Lamarr may have said the things she is quoted for, statements made when she was perhaps grown up should not be taken at face value. No wonder Lamarr sued unsuccessfully in an attempt to block the post. ecstasy and me, which she describes as “Fiction, false, vulgar, scandalous, defamatory and obscene”. As she told Merv Griffin in 1969, “This is not my book.”

Little doll

Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, in 1914, to an assimilated Jewish family. In Hedy’s madness, Rhodes paints a captivating picture of Lamarr’s young artistic and intellectual Vienna, exploring the forces that will shape it (and making readers want to go back in time). While Lamarr’s devout mother feared that her beautiful, bright and tough only child would be spoiled, her father, Emil, a famous banker, pampered and took care of her. his precious daughter. “He made me realize that I had to make my own decisions, shape my own personality, reflect on my own thoughts,” Lamarr later recalled, according to Rhodes.

ecstasy and me Lamarr’s description of his teenage years was a tumultuous and traumatic time of attempted rape, terrible sexual abuse at a boarding school, and an adulterous relationship with her friend’s father that created “countless” orgasms. However, it cannot be mentioned that as a teenager she studied mechanics and became an intrepid self-promoter and advocate of repertory theater Max Reinhardt.