ART + CULTURE: Beauty Icon

Beauty Icon

Immigrant. Inventor. Icon. A look at the life of Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood’s reigning queen of film and fashion in the 1930s and 1940s.

BY FRED W. WRIGHT JR.

She was a Hollywood publicist’s dream client. She stepped off the train in Los Angeles already proclaimed “the most beautiful girl in the world.” In five days of railroad riding, Hedy Lamarr had transformed herself from “well-dressed Euro-chic” emigre from Austria to a contract actor for Louis B. Mayer.

While turmoil was building in Europe, Lamarr took the U.S. by storm. It was 1933 and while her command of English was still poor, her control of her looks and her ability to give photographers, fashion designers, and stage and film directors a look unrivaled were already in place.

She arrived, ready, she thought, for a Hollywood career as a “smartly dressed, attractive young woman wearing a light-colored, conservative, threequarter-length skirt and matching jacket, bearing a small corsage of flowers. On her shoulder-length dark tresses, she wore a stylish, late-1930s beret.”

So writes Stephen Michael Shearer, the author of his second book on the Hollywood celebrity, Glamour and Style – The Beauty of Hedy Lamarr. This lush look at the woman who came to be known for her beauty as much, if not more so, as for her acting, is published by Lyons Press as a true coffee table project. There are more than 300 photographs, mostly black and white, scattered throughout the 395 pages.

Nearly every page has a photograph of the actress; some pages have several. Many are head shots, showing the unsmiling pose of a woman who speaks with her eyes rather than her lips. Each image is carefully identified and annotated. In fact, there is an abundance of end notes at the back of the volume reflecting Shearer’s passion for sourcing all his facts. He often quotes from his previous book on the star, Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr (2010) and from the actress’ own supposedly tell-all memoir, Ecstasy (1966).

This is not to say that Shearer’s book is not rich with tasty tidbits of the 1930s and 1940s, both in Europe and in the U.S., for anyone living a lavish and privileged lifestyle. These are the people others gossip about and, as Shearer notes, “In the era of Hedy Lamarr, facts belie fiction in many ways… Facts, fiction and legend all blend together.”

That is what makes the many facets of Lamarr in this book so compelling. They can be judged on face value, from the numerous color cover images from such bygone celebrity magazines as Click, Pic, Silver Screen, Photoplay and even Match. Many images are very posed, but there are also candid shots from her pre-Lamarr days and other shots paired with one of her U.S. costars like Charles Boyer. We see the changing styles of dress, makeup, fashion, jewelry and even the tilt of her head, all echoes of the era.

They all speak of Lamarr’s chameleon-like nature, her ability to not only look the part in a film or stage play but also in life.

A Minneapolis author, also an actor and former model, Shearer has penned two previous highly regarded film biographies: Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life (2006) and Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star (2015).

Even after writing his first book on Lamarr, Shearer said, “I realized there was much more to her.”

But bringing this second Hedy Lamarr book to print was a journey– and a lesson to writers not to give up. Times change. Shearer’s first proposal for a coffee table look at Lamarr was rejected, he said. He was told she did not have a Gone with the Wind-type film, so there wasn’t enough interest. But a few years later, Shearer participated in a PBS documentary on Lamarr and fashion of the 1930s and 1940s.

“A whole new wave of interest grew for Lamarr,” Shearer recalled. The publisher now “wanted me to do this glamour book project I wanted to do all along.

“She wasn’t a fashion icon or Audrey (Hepburn) in a little black dress,” Shearer said. All anyone has to do is look at Lamarr’s U.S. film, Algiers (1938). “One can be very impressed how Hedy wore fashion and also the fashion that was designed (for her) by studio fashion designers.”

The persona of Lamarr’s marriage to fine fashion design came to an apex in the 1949 Cecil B. DeMille production Samson and Delilah, when costume designer Edith Head won one of her eight Academy Awards for dressing Lamarr and co-star Victor Mature.

Between 1938 and 1958, Lamarr made more than 20 films in the U.S. Some have stayed available through streaming media services and even a few rerun cable channels. Titles that stand out include Boom Town (1940), Comrade X (1940), Tortilla Flat (1942), Copper Canyon (1950) and My Favorite Spy (1951).

There were other motivations beyond fashion and style to produce a second book on Lamarr. As a child, she was taught several languages by her mother, Shearer writes, but English was not one of them. But by the 1940s, with her adopted country in the throes of a world war, after years in the U.S., Lamarr was on the road participating in U.S. War Bond drives.

“She sold more war bonds in one day than any star in all four war bond drives, Shearer stated. “She spoke from the heart,” Shearer said. “No script.” Lamarr had learned English by 1943. Newsreel footage of the bond drive, with her candor and passion of purpose, makes her “more beautiful than she would ever be in film because of her sincerity. There’s a warmth, a glow.”

There was another fascinating aspect of Hedy Lamarr – her brains. She was always curious, always tinkering with technology. She nurtured new and innovative technologies that would prove the seeds for such 20th century everyday devices as Bluetooth, GPS, cordless phones and cell phones. Thus, with Hedy Lamarr’s film career virtually over by the 1950s (and she would live until 2000), Shearer ends his homage to Lamarr with a final chapter on the milestones her mind brought to the world, not her body.

[Sidebar] Also by Shearer

Time has been kind to another of Shearer’s works. A portion of his Patricia Neal book has been turned into a British-produced feature film, To Olivia. It’s the story of Neal, her husband Roald Dahl and the tragic death of their 7-year-old daughter to measles. The film, released earlier this year, is directed by John Hay and stars Hugh Bonneville as Roald Dahl, Keeley Hawes as Patricia Neal, Sam Heughan as Paul Newman and Geoff rey Palmer as Archbishop Geoff rey Fisher. (This is Palmer’s last film; he died a month after completing his role.)

FRED. W. WRIGHT JR. Is a full-time freelance writer based in Seminole, Fla. He writes on a wide range of subjects, from business to film, health to stress, history to senior citizens. His work has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Tampa Bay Times, National Geographic Traveler, Variety, and Florida Trend, among others.