Story Number One
Hedy Lamar was married six times and that’s maybe not even the tenth most interesting thing about her.
The hazard of being beautiful is that people can treat it as an unlikely oddity that you are also smart.
Marriage number one was to an Austrian arms dealer named Fritz Mandl, a man so controlling that he tried to buy up every existing print of a film she'd appeared in, a man so well-connected that some of the most influential people in Europe would sit at their dinner table.
These people would typically assume she was just decorative. But she had grown up learning about machines and technology from her father, and she missed nothing as the guests discussed torpedo guidance systems over the soup.
By 1937 she could see the writing on the wall regarding both the Nazis and Fritz. She drugged the maid, disguised herself in the maid’s uniform, took off with just a suitcase and her jewelry, talked her way onto a boat and into a Hollywood contract.
Her life is a damn good movie.
