For a woman who had such a fascinating life, The Only Woman in the Room seemed like Hedy Lamarr “light.” It’s a short book, a quick read. It’s hard to keep in mind that it is a novel since it’s written in the first person.
There is so much of Hedy Lamarr’s history that deserves expansion: her childhood in Vienna, the only child of successful Jewish parents; her immediate success on Austrian stage and screen; her marriage at 19 to an Austrian arms dealer to the fascists; her escape from her overbearing husband to the U.S., and subsequent success at MGM. Perhaps most important is how she developed a patented scientific discovery involving shifting radio frequencies and torpedoes/missiles. Last, but not least, what led her to six more marriages?
Subsequent to reading The Only Woman in the Room, I did look at her first movie, Ecstasy, which runs about 75 minutes with no more than 20 lines of dialogue. It is referred to as an “art” movie, and the blocking and cinematography does seem advanced. But the movie is dull, even the few nude scenes of Hedy as a nubile teen-ager. Then I realized this was way too much time to spend on a subject of so little relevance to me, especially when there is so little information about how she and George Antheil, an avant-garde composer, developed their frequency hopping guidance system, adopted by the U.S. military three years after the Lamarr-Antheil patent expired.
Recommended for a light read about an interesting woman.
