Page 17 - CinemaRecord #11R.pdf

Stewart was so sure of his piloting skills that during a bombing mission deep into enemy territory, he broke
military rules to steer off course from a division leader who had made a wrong turn. "At first, there was a very
severe critique", remembered Mr Potts. "Later, he was exonerated and praised for hav_ing the judgment to do
the right thing." ..

Stewart's Hollywood fame was not allowed to intrude into his military life. Reporters who ventured to the base
were told there was no Jimmy Stewart there - only a Captain Jim Stewart, who was not available. Fourteen
years later, while serving in the reserves, Stewart was promoted a final time to brigadier-general, given the
honor by the U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower.

Stewart left the service on his 60th birthday as the highest-ranking entertainer in the military. The ceremony
was private and dignified, just as he always was.

Lamarr's Legacy Arts & Entertainment, Melbourne Herald Sun, 17/3/97

Hedy Lamarr was more than just a war-time pin up.

The next time you pick up a cellular phone, give a brief thought to the woman who first patented some bf its
technology 55 years ago- "the most beautiful girl in the world", actress Hedy Lamarr. There was more to the
sultry brunette star of such hits as Samson and Delilah than just the pin-up image. Lamarr had such an inquiring
intellect and an engineering bent that she is about to get an award from US techno-wizards.

To trace the story of Lamarr's invention, it's necessary to hark back to 1933, when the Vienna-born 19 year-old,
already famous for her sexy film Ecstasy - became the trophy wife of Austrian armament manufacturer, Fritz
Mandl, in a marriage arranged by her parents. "I was a kind of slave. When we were in Italy, I couldn t even go
swimming without him being there," she says.

After four years of marriage, with Mandl increasingly involved in deals with the Nazis, Lamarr knew she must
escape. She drugged the maid assigned to guard her, crawled out a window and made her way to London. But
she never forgot the course she'd been given in advanced weaponry at the side of the first of her six husbands.
Filled with an abiding hatred of the Nazis and a strong sense of patriotism for her adopted country, she searched
for ways to help the war effort.

In 1941, she met composer George Antheil in Hollywood. Even In the midst of the glitter and pomp, she was full
of ideas, including one on the radio control of torpedoes. She'd sat with Mandl as he reviewed films of field tests
on torpedo systems, and now her mind began to explore ways to circumvent the jamming that kept the US from
using radio-controlled missiles against the Germans. As one of her sons, Anthony Loder, recalls, she and
Antheil "were sitting at the piano one day when she said 'Hey, look, we're talking to each other and we're
changing all the time."

Fired up with the possibilities, they set to work. A radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to block.
But what if the signal jumped frequencies? Anyone trying to listen in or jam it would hear only random noise, like
a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver were hopping in synch, the message would
come through loud and clear. The idea was Lamarr's, but Antheil suggested using piano rolls to make sure both
sides were in synch. Their patent for a secret communication system was granted on August 11, 1942.

But the Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clock-work mechanism controlled by paper tape too cumber-
some. Three years after the patent expired, the pair's ideas were used in secure military communication sys-
tems installed on US ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962. Anthony Loder has written a screenplay about what
he sees as his mother's essentially tragic life. Neither she nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the
commercialisation of their patent, though it is cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology.

Now 84 (by most accounts, although she says she is 82), she lives simply and in seclusion. "She's been
forgotten. But she contributed so much to an older generation,:· her son says. On Wednesday, Lamarr and
Antheil will be honored for "blazing new trails on the electronic frontier' at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy
conference in San Francisco. Her son will accept the award on her behalf.