Maybe we should call the cell phone the Lamarr or Tondelayo, as with the slang from the '40s, when the telephone was dubbed the Ameche

Tondelayo

In my book, she was a hell-of-a-lot better to watch and listen to than Garbo. m/r

Moment of Ecstasy :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn
On the Town
November 8, 2014

One hundred years ago this coming week - November 9th 1914 - Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in the Hapsburg capital of Vienna. She became a silver-screen siren in the Hollywood Golden Age, and a co-inventor of the most ubiquitous technology of the 21st century:

In 2000, the day after she died, the newspapers were pretty much in agreement: Hedy Lamarr couldn't act. Well, I wouldn't say that. A few years back, I got to see the famous Ecstasy, the 1933 film in which Miss Lamarr skips nude through the woods, her sun-dappled form twinkling midst the foliage like a gamboling fawn. She does the backstroke across a translucent lake. Better than Esther Williams, I'd say….

She was The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships (1954) and the mouth that launched a thousand quips. Her big line inWhite Cargo (1942) - the one about the jungle seductress who ensnares British plantation chappies in colonial Africa – was:

I [long pause] am Tondelayo.

… But Hedy was a star in an age when stars were still allowed to be mysterious. Who knows what she was really like? Her book Ecstasy And Me: My Life As A Woman (1966) was a corker, complete with a little light lesbianism. Hedy stuff, indeed. But Hedy Lamarr sapphically inclined was bound to be too good to be true - like the story about Sinatra coming home and finding Ava Gardner in bed with Lana Turner. Hedy sued her ghostwriter for peddling a lot of sleazy fiction. Indeed, she acquired quite a taste for litigation, suing over the use of her image in commercials and an alleged rape in Los Angeles. She was twice stopped for shoplifting, but the charges never went anywhere. In 1941, a conversation with the composer George Antheil about how to enlarge her bosom led the two of them to invent the "spread-spectrum" radio system that, in the Eighties, became a cornerstone of cell-phone technology, and later WiFi and Bluetooth. Cool. If you're going to have two strings to your bow, faking orgasm and inventing cell phones are one hell of a spread spectrum.

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