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4,535 words · no email, no account
No. 017 · Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
Frequency
a biography of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr)
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr)
- Shelf
- Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
- Written by
- Donovan Hadley
- Chapters
- 18 across 197 pages
- Narrated by
- Miles Ashby
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Most Beautiful Woman in the WorldRead free
- 02Vienna Before the Fall3,851 words
- 03The Arms Dealer's Wife4,157 words
- 04Escape2,733 words
- 05The MGM Machine2,853 words
- 06The Dinner at the Adrians'3,137 words
- 07The Navy Says No2,896 words
- 08Samson and Delilah2,704 words
- 09The Technology That Changed the World3,398 words
- 10Six Husbands3,021 words
- 11The Face in the Mirror3,337 words
- 12Reclusion2,826 words
- 13Corrosive Silence3,120 words
- 14Recognition3,260 words
- 15Signal and Silence3,052 words
- 16The Audiotapes3,426 words
- 17The Inventor's Notebook3,318 words
- 18The Long Look3,478 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 197 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
