# Frequency *A Biography of Hedy Lamarr* — Legendary Biographies No. 017 - **Subject:** Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr) - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 197 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 197 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-055-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-201-4) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/017-frequency.html ## About this book She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna on November 9, 1914. She fled her first husband — the Austrian arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl, who had hosted Mussolini and Hitler at their hunting lodge — by drugging the cook, climbing out a bathroom window, and boarding a ship to London in 1937. Louis B. Mayer signed her in his MGM cabin across the Atlantic. By 1942 she was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. She was also, that year, the co-inventor — with the composer George Antheil — of a frequency-hopping anti-jamming torpedo guidance system that the U.S. Patent Office granted under patent 2,292,387. Donovan Hadley's biography opens with the Mandl marriage and the MGM contract, follows the arc through the Algiers (1938) debut and the Samson and Delilah (1949) Cecil B. DeMille peak, the patent and the Navy filing it in a forgotten drawer, the 1953 Hollywood blacklist near-miss, the post-MGM years of plastic-surgery, the 1991 Florida shoplifting arrest, the Florida years of phone-call-only friendships, the 1997 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, and the death at her Casselberry house in 2000 at eighty-five. What emerges is a portrait of an Austrian movie star whose patent the Navy ignored for sixteen years and whose frequency-hopping principle every cellphone in the room you are reading this in now uses. ## Contents 1. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World 2. Vienna Before the Fall 3. The Arms Dealer's Wife 4. Escape 5. The MGM Machine 6. The Dinner at the Adrians' 7. The Navy Says No 8. Samson and Delilah 9. The Technology That Changed the World 10. Six Husbands 11. The Face in the Mirror 12. Reclusion 13. Corrosive Silence 14. Recognition 15. Signal and Silence 16. The Audiotapes 17. The Inventor's Notebook 18. The Long Look ## Questions **Who is Frequency about?** Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Frequency — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,535 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 197 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.