I did not particularly enjoy this book. I selected it specifically because I was interested in Hedy Lamarr as an inventor and Hollywood Starlet. I wasn't looking for a by-the-numbers celebrity biography. Rhodes won the Pulitzer for his book on the history of the atomic bomb, which signaled to me that this would be THE Hedy Lamarr Biography! Spoiler alert? It was not. It is flimsy and reductive, a total snore.
The first quarter is good (lowercase g). Hedy's upbringing and her singleminded ambition to become a film star make for good reading. Her first marriage is fascinating — she marries a mustache-twirling munitions dealer. As soon as she flees Husband #1 (the author bizarrely does not research how exactly she accomplishes this, and resorts to paraphrasing three or four of the rumors that were circulating at the time), the book splits in half and focuses on George Antheil, the bad boy of music. Hedy somehow takes a backseat in her own biography and we spend the remainder of the book with Antheil — which would be fine, had I picked up a biography on Antheil.
While the science and history of patents during WWII-era America is fascinating, the narrative quality is threadbare and scattershot. After covering the creative process between Hedy and Antheil, the book essentially ends with their patent expiring and their frequency-hopping invention languishing with the military for several decades. Very little research or explanation for why this occurs other than one mention of "sexism" and the environment of the telecommunications industry at the time.
If the reader is hoping to learn more about Hedy's film career, they'll be disappointed a second time. Hedy's decade-spanning career in Hollywood is glossed over and poorly researched. The most glaring instance of this is the author's conflation of the Adrian celestial headpiece from Ziegfeld Girl with the peacock feather gown designed by Edith Head in Samson and Delilah.
"The jeweled peacock feather headdress Hedy wore in the film," one of her biographers writes, "became her trademark." It was an Adrian concoction, high camp, and one of his last; he left MGM in September 1941 to start his own business.
The final chapter is devoted to the rest of Hedy's life post-WWII. Rhodes accomplishes this with a sequence of jump cuts that span half a century. Hedy's twilight years are reduced to a single block quote by a journalist named Robert Osborne (meant to convey that Hedy in no way led a tragic life — not that we'd be able to judge for ourselves; the biographical details are scant), a smattering of sentences devoted to how her scientific contributions received recognition in the late 90s, and a single sentence describing the scattering of her ashes in Vienna. "There she rests today, high above the wide Danube valley where Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, one with the trees and the grasses."
Hedy's Folly? Deserving a better biographer.