Hedy's Folly (Rhodes)

Discussion Questions
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Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Hedy's Folly:

1. Author Richard Rhodes has evoked a powerful sense of time and place for Vienna and Paris during the 1920s and '30s. What struck you most about either of those two societies? What, for instance, was Vienna like during Hedwig Kiesler's growing-up years, especially for someone of her talent and ambition? How did her childhood shape Hedy, the woman she would become?

2. What was young George Antheil attempting to express with his style of musical composition? Why did he want to distance his work from the lush Romanticism of the previous generation? Why did he refer to his pieces as "Mechanisms"? How would you have reacted had you been at a performance of his avant-garde creations? In what way could you say that Antheil's purusits prefigured his development of weapons guidance technology?

3. Discuss the increasing brutality of Germany as it headed into the Nazi era. What was the nature of Fritz Mandl's (Hedy's husband) involvement with the rising fascists?

4. What was behind Lamarr's decision to leave her husband and to run off with only a suitcase of clothes and handful of jewels?

5. Rhodes claims that Hedy was no intellectual but rather a "tinkerer." How do you explain her ability to absorb and later recall the complex, detailed information on weapons systems that she picked up while listening around the edges of conversations at parties she hosted? How did her abilities and Antheil's unusual musical interests hook up to create their torpedo guidance system?

6. Rhodes writes that "Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and bring order to a world she thought chaotic." Was that truly her motivation? Is it true for most inventors?

7. If you have a technical bent, describe the nature of the spread-spectrum guidance system which Lamarr and Antheil invented during World War II. Can you explain how it helped point the way toward remote controls, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the cordless phones we take for granted today?

8. Why did the U.S. Navy dismiss Lamarr and Antheil's findings? One reviewer writes that he himself was first taken aback at the thought of Lamarr patenting a weapons system, saying it was like "being told that Ali MacGraw developed the science behind napalm." Was there (is there still) a sort of prejudice at work—or simply a set of realistic expectations as to where scientific capabilities reside? Might there be other reasons why the duo's invention was ignored for so many years?

9. A number of reviewers have remarked that, as biographies go, Rhodes's work offers little indepth character analysis of either Hedy Lamarr or George Antheil—and that the author is not really terribly interested in his two subjects. Do you agree or disagree?

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