Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr

Hedy’s life was so multi-faceted that I think it’s impossible to write one book to satisfy everyone. You can see from reading these reviews that what one person loved about the book another hated. I’ll just add my opinions.

I bought this book hoping for detail on Hedy Lamarr as an inventor. I wanted to know more about her ideas, her collaborations, and how she moved through life with these two very different personas.

The book did have some of this information, but for me it was too buried. Every movie she was in is described in detail, including every actor and actress she worked alongside. It was way more “Hollywood” information than I wanted to flip through and not enough of the technical detail.

I do feel like I got a better sense of her background and who she really was, but ultimately this isn’t the book I was looking for.

I have not read any of the other Hedy Lamarr biographies out there to compare this to, but I am very happy with this one. I, like others, have been in awe of her beauty, making her seem almost unreal. But the whole person shone through in these pages. From her carefree youth, adoring her father to marrying her cold husband, who supplied ammunitions to the Germans and then she was off to Hollywood for her illustrious movie career. She was an underrated actress who had an intellectual mind, thus inventing the technology for most of our wireless communication and defense mechanisms in war today. If you only have time for one book about Hedy Lamarr, this should be the one. Youre drawn into the world of a three-dimensional lady who only wanted to love and be loved for herself, though no one ever got past the beauty of her face. Therein lies the focus.

Shearer does a fine job of trying to make sense of a woman of vast contradictions: a born engineer who also believed in astrology, a beautiful woman who felt trapped by her beauty but who had disastrous plastic surgery to keep her beautiful, a loving mother who essentially abandoned one of her children, and in constant need of money yet she’d misplace thousands of dollars in jewelry.

Shearer showcases all these contradictions, and Lamarr emerges as a complex, interesting, flawed yet oddly likable woman. His review of her film career and the inability of MGM to do for her what they did for Greer Garson was quite interesting – essentially, even though her films did quite well, MGM needed Lamarr to be a bigger box office star than she turned out to be. Who knew?

Add the entire spread spectrum story, with a genuine Lamarr patent, her best-selling pseudo-autobiography that was as scurrilous and false as the Shulman biography of Harlow, the shoplifting nightmare and the recognition of her work and renewed attention to her after decades out of the limelight, and Shearer ties it all together soberly and truthfully.

Every other sentence is telling you how beautiful she was…well giving her that it is really clear she was an absolute piece of work. She seemed to have tried to sue everyone for just about anything (she was also sued many times mostly because of her better then you ways) , She was a women that thought she could just walk into a store and take what ever she wanted (above the normal person walking up to the counter and paying for her items) and of course it was never her fault when caught stealing. Glad I read the book because it cleared up a ton of misconceptions I had of Hedy Lamarr being something special….oh and by the way other then being a messed up person she was beautiful (from what I see today 50% of High School girls put her to shame in the looks department).

Such an interesting person. This was an insight into Ms. Lamarr’s life. I was hoping it would talk more about her scientific interests and inventions. If you want to know all about every movie she made and every lawsuit she was involved in, this is a great book. It also has some good pictures.

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