There’s a ghost in the car. A flash of red lipstick in the rearview, the small wind of batted eyelashes. Austrian Alps seem to loom out the window, just past the plains, and the frozen telephone poles look for a moment like Hollywood palm trees. The highway is empty, and the steering wheel moves itself. A green warning blinks on the dash screen as invisible fingers jab me from the seat cushion, then another flash of red. The Cadillac CT6’s Super Cruise system wants me to quit daydreaming and look at the road.

This story originally appeared in the March/April 2020 issue of Road & Track.

SYD CUMMINGS

I’m in Nebraska on a cold January day, traveling with photographer Syd Cummings in a black Cadillac to test the car’s semi-autonomous driving. To see if a new piece of machinery can pilot itself back to its origins. Back to when a forgotten discovery and a glamorous Hollywood starlet put into motion the technology that might eventually replace us behind the wheel. The CT6 looks black-tie and moneyed with its chrome grille and delicate Art Deco wheels. The weather we’re driving through is decidedly unglamorous, light snow and a wind so cold you can feel it through the windows. Thankfully, the CT6 has a heated steering wheel that I keep resting my hands on, even though Super Cruise doesn’t require the action to keep the car moving.

The CT6 is on the way out of Cadillac’s lineup, but Super Cruise will stay on in upcoming models. Using a combination of radar, cameras, GPS, and an internal mapping system, the CT6 can accelerate, brake, steer, and even avoid pedestrians without human input. The driver does have to stay ready to intervene should the vehicle lose its train of thought, and while other carmakers ensure attention by requiring light hand pressure on the steering wheel, Cadillac does the same with a dash-mounted facial-recognition camera. When I grew distracted by ectoplasmic imaginings, the car noted my inattention, blinking and vibrating until I returned focus to the road. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) classifies automated driving systems by level, delineating by the amount of required human interaction and the car’s behavior in an emergency. At the bottom, Level One, are systems like adaptive cruise control. Level Five is fully automated, a machine that can, the SAE says, “drive everywhere in all conditions.” Cadillac’s Super Cruise system is among the more sophisticated available. “It’s sort of in between Level Two and Level Three,” said Jason Torchinsky, author of Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving.

In the CT6, if I hadn’t returned my attention to the camera, the car would have slowed to a stop. Better than crashing into a wall, but not ideal on a busy freeway. “People really don’t understand how basic these systems are,” Torchinsky told me. “In the future, maybe all the cars will be connected via WiFi, talking to each other, and that could really change how we see driving. For now, I don’t really understand the point of Level Two. I mean, what are you supposed to do while you wait to take back control?”

I know the feeling. It’s odd to be driving and yet not. Hard to keep the mind from wandering when it isn’t fully on the task at hand. I’ve always liked the physicality of being the pilot, the connection of feet, hands, eyes, and mind. I know many people eagerly await self-driving cars, ready for the technology to reach a point where they can recline the seat and take a nap on a trip or commute. Maybe that will be great, but in the meantime, in the semi-state, I’m bored. I feel useless. I don’t know what to do with my hands and feet. My job is just to sit here and make intense eye contact with a camera.

Since I don’t need to do any driving, I might as well play medium. Knock once if you’re there, spirit. Knock twice if you’re ready to talk, Hedy.

That’s her name, my ephemeral passenger. Hedy Lamarr. She was once billed as “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” and that bored her. She wanted to fight Nazis, and to be taken seriously for her technical knowledge and creativity. She wanted control.

SYD CUMMINGS

Lamarr, born in 1914 as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was the only daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna on the cusp of World War II. She was smart and spoiled, a curious daydreamer, and terribly pretty—which, it turns out, can also just be terrible. In the 2018 PBS documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, Lamarr described herself as a child prone to such imaginative internal journeys that she would stare off into space. “People must have thought there was something wrong with me.”

In Nebraska, on that highway, I heard her voice echo in my head, crackly, as if on an old radio. “I was different. Maybe I came from a different planet. I don’t know.” Lamarr was dreamy but also impatient, excelling at languages and musical instruments. Her father encouraged her to mentally disassemble the machines and technologies around her, to understand how they worked. She would come home and take apart her music boxes and toys, then reassemble them. Despite being curious and clever, she was not a great student, prone to skipping class, and according to one biographer, running away from finishing school.

Collection

You’ll have to forgive the hazy details of her early life. Lamarr sued the co-authors of her 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, calling it fiction. The title references one of her first movies, a 1933 Czech film in which she swims naked, and perhaps more shocking, appears to have a highly satisfying sex scene. She later said her wide eyes and breathy gasps were the product of the director poking her with a pin, but the results were convincing enough to get the movie banned in America (sex!) and in Germany (sexy Jews!). The shadow of Ecstasy followed Lamarr for the rest of her life. A shame, since it was ahead of its time, depicting a woman with agency over her decisions.

My ghost groans and rattles her chains. I’m messing up her story. Maybe it’s all the electronic interference from the car. If we were to have something of hers, a belonging of some sort, that might help me channel her message. I ask Syd to navigate, and although her phone has lost signal, the Cadillac’s WiFi makes it easy to get to Lincoln, Nebraska. A 1958 Cadillac that Lamarr bought new rests there, in the Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed. If I open the car’s massive door and slide behind its delicate blue steering wheel, will I be able to feel her presence?

Let’s go back to Austria. Lamarr was making waves in films and on stage. She was lovely and young and very soon married to a rich, older man, Friedrich Mandl—an arms merchant who, despite being Jewish, worked with fascists and Nazis. Should you be tempted to like him anyway, know that he was also cruel to Hedy, jealous and controlling. She soon regretted allowing herself to be shackled. “I was a thing… an object... no mind, no life of its own,” she said later. While married to Mandl, Hedy attended dinner parties with weapons engineers from Italy and Germany. The men discussed torpedoes and airplanes and the difficulties of secret radio communications, never worrying that Lamarr was in the room. What could a pretty girl know of munitions and codes? She would go back to her room and write notes on what she remembered, something to think about during the boring days as a trophy wife.

Lamarr escaped Mandl. How is unclear—possibly on a bicycle, possibly by drugging a maid who looked like her—but what is known for certain is that she left with a few fine gowns and as many jewels as she could sew into her coat lining. She fled to London, where she turned down a stingy job offer from Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM Studios, then cleverly booked passage to New York on his ship. He saw her turn heads every evening in the dining room, and he eventually offered her a much better contract. In the films and TV appearances, she winks and dimples and smolders, both charming and dangerous. It’s not hard to see why Mayer marketed her as the most beautiful woman in the world. He also had her change her name, as the Germanic-sounding Mandl and Kiesler weren’t likely to win favor with American audiences. Hedy Mandl boarded the ship and Hedy Lamarr disembarked.

In Hollywood, Lamarr set to work becoming an American, starting with English lessons. Her first film there was a remake of the French Pepe Le Moko, called Algiers (1938), opposite Charles Boyer. Toward the end, the leading man asks her, as she twinkles with diamonds, “What did you do before the jewels?”

“I wanted them,” she answered. What do any of us do before we achieve something? Hedy wanted more than jewels and seductress roles. She wanted to use her brain, and to keep Hitler from invading America as he had her beloved Austria. Lamarr caught the eye of airplane magnate Howard Hughes, first for obvious reasons, then for her interest in aeronautics and chemistry. “I got a book of birds and a book of fish, and I found the fastest bird and the fastest fish,” she once said. She was telling the story of how she suggested swept-back airplane wings to Hughes, for improved speed. “He said, ‘Hedy, you’re a genius.’”

Hughes responded by supplying Lamarr with a portable chemistry set and the support of his scientists for her projects. When the Germans torpedoed a ship full of refugees, killing 77 children, Lamarr was haunted by the loss. She knew from her time at Mandl’s dinner parties that German submarines were able to avoid and deflect most Allied torpedoes, and she wanted to improve the Navy’s control systems. She found a willing partner in avant-garde composer George Antheil. Antheil and Lamarr each had friends and family in Europe, and both were passionate about their adopted country. Lamarr went so far as to offer the pair’s services to the newly formed National Inventors Council in Washington, but the answer that came back suggested that the little lady could do more selling war bonds than scribbling on graph paper.

Hedy did both, raising $25 million for the war effort. Back in Hollywood, she worked with Antheil, trying to prevent the Germans from jamming radio signals. The breakthrough came after an evening of playing piano duets. The two had been switching songs, following the other’s lead from tune to tune. Lamarr called Antheil later that night: “George, I’ve got it.” A transmitter and receiver, she suggested, could be programmed to switch radio frequencies quickly and at short intervals. Even if an enemy picked up a piece of a signal, they wouldn’t guess which frequency came next. Antheil’s experience with player pianos led to the idea of controlling both elements with a paper roll— a kind of early punch card. They called the practice frequency-hopping; their patent was approved in 1942.

The Navy never looked into the patent during the war. Antheil said he assumed it was because the first guy who read it saw the reference to player pianos, then imagined packaging a concert instrument inside a torpedo. (In reality, the control rolls could be as small as a pocket watch.) Lamarr and Antheil moved on. By the time their invention saw use, helping create secure communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the patent had expired, and the two were not informed of its new life.

Antheil died in 1959, but Lamarr lived until the year 2000, long enough to see the world reconfigured by the technology in U.S. patent # 2292387A. Frequency-hopping—moving small bits of information quickly across multiple bandwidths—formed the basis for what is now called Spread Spectrum Technology. The practice makes it possible to have a mobile-phone conversation in a room containing another cellphone, or for your phone to receive GPS coordinates from spacecraft. Or for Syd to connect her phone to the Cadillac, and for the car to connect to an ever-changing set of maps in order to move us down the road on its own. Lamarr didn’t invent the process, but the patent bearing her name is cited more than 65 times in later patents, from such companies as RCA, Northrop, Sony, and Microsoft.

As is often the case with people of extremes, Lamarr’s outstanding qualities did not make life easier. At MGM, she quickly became known as “difficult,” a term often synonymous with standing up for yourself. She was cast in mediocre movies, and she made poor choices in her personal life. She eventually sued MGM and left to produce movies on her own, a bold move that nearly resulted in bankruptcy. She built a small ski chalet in a quaint spot in Colorado called Aspen. She married and divorced often, lawsuit-happy and unhappy, and like many stars of her era, she suffered from years of studio-supported amphetamine use.

There are few things Hollywood likes more than mocking the women it once desired. Take the 1969 appearance on The Merv Griffin Show, where host Griffin asks an obviously irritated—yet still gracious—Hedy about those old nude scenes. Can you imagine being 55 years old, having invented a secret radio code, having worked on airplanes with Howard Hughes and kickstarted the Aspen ski-resort community, and a talk-show host asks you about some dumb sex scene you did almost 40 years ago? Even Mel Brooks, a big Lamarr fan, poked fun at her in his 1974 film Blazing Saddles. “It’s Hedley,” Harvey Korman’s character hisses, before another character makes a joke about lawsuits. Lamarr sued Brooks, and they settled out of court.

In the meantime, electronics developments were catching up to the patent. Cellphones were born. Your parents got a Garmin, and then you got Google Maps. You could connect your phone to your ear via Bluetooth, and to your car the same way, all thanks to Lamarr’s work. In 1990, a Forbes writer named Fleming Meeks interviewed Hedy about her invention. “Never any money, never even a thank-you,” she told him. Finally, in 1997, Lamarr and Antheil jointly received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and Lamarr became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Spirit of Achievement Award. In 2014, 14 years after her death, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

SYD CUMMINGS

As I researched this story, I kept finding articles that took little digs at Lamarr, praising her beauty while dismissing her acting. Discussing her invention, but always in the same line as a mention of her first ex-husband—the inference being that she parroted the work from someone else. In a PBS podcast I listened to—through a Bluetooth connection, naturally—Bombshell director Alexandra Dean recalled how multiple engineers believed Lamarr was a spy, that it made more sense for a beautiful woman to have stolen a man’s idea than come up with it on her own. Even today, the idea of a scientist resembling a goddess chafes against our ideas of who creates the world, and who merely decorates it.

“I know what I did,” Lamarr says, in a tired voice, on one of Fleming Meeks’s tapes. In Nebraska, in Hedy’s Fleetwood, at the end of a long drive through cold and quiet country, I lean back against the seat and look in the dark rearview mirror. “I believe you,” I say, to the empty air. “I believe you.”



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