GRAND THEFT AUTO BIOGRAPHY – It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie
I love you, yes I do, I love youIf you break my heart I’ll dieSo be sure it’s trueWhen you say I love youIt’s a sin to tell a lieBe sure it’s true when you say I love youIt’s a sin to tell a lieMillions of hearts have been brokenJust...
Comrade X
In Comrade X, you were allowed to express your intellect, but under an assumed male name: Thompson: You don’t look like Theodore to me Hedy: I was named at the Workers’ Council Thompson: Somebody didn’t have his glasses on. Hedy: It is not glasses. It is the law. ...
I. Warhol’s Hedy: A Spliced Life
Ronald Tavel writes about the experience of having Andy Warhol transmogrify his script, Hedy, into a Factory production. He characterizes his script as “the celluloid saga with which I protested the taking of the actress into custody” (259). His “protest,” however,...
III. Warhol’s Hedy: Trial and Error (Mostly Error)
SCENE 2 Scene 2: “The Arrest Indeterminable Mary, as a store dick (!) busts Hedy [for shoplifting]; but I had to intrude onto the set, crawling all the way, to tap the dumb Ingrid on the leg and remind her what to do. This crawl beneath camera-level intrigued...
Image Capture–and Release!
Grand Theft Identity:Hedy Lamarr Sues Corel Misnamed and often miscast, you would come to lament: “My face has been my misfortune. It has attracted six unsuccessful marriage partners. It has attracted all the wrong people into my boudoir for five...
Indefensible
In Dishonored Lady, you get to play the maiden-in-psychological-distress role, too bound up in knots even to defend yourself. Like Ophelia, “as one incapable of her own distress.” Tavel and Warhol put your Montez stand-in in the same predicament:...
FUNCTION #8. RECONFIGURE: White Cargo
Z Note There is support for low-resolution “proxy” images. Hollywood often treated you like a posable doll. All too often, many of your roles involved suicide efforts or, in White Cargo, you played the role of a femme fatale, forced at the end to drink poison....
A Codemaker, Codebreaker War
Even the comics of the day replicated coded formats… The Submariner is captured by German spies, under suspicion of being a spy himself. . . Will he be rescued in time, before he’s found out? Or killed before he can convey the secret of their coding...
Hedy/Dickinson Connector
Hedy Lamarr and Emily Dickinson: Two Women Who Never Had Full Control of their Own Lives’ Courses… Emily Dickinson, so unacknowledged in her own life time,writes about being a female poet not fully in controlof her own life and craft. Her...
Patent Falsehoods
From the ghostwriters’ grand theft auto biography to Corel’s theft of your image to Warhol’s camp version of your life, you have had to endure all sorts of “infringements”. . . Reclaiming… Corel’s lawyers trotted out a number...
Secrecy (The L’Imitation Game)
How secret was the Secret Communication System? Why so little mention of it by Hedy for so long? Was it only to preserve her Hollywood image? Did the government confiscate it, as some argue, given that she was classified as an alien? The following exchanges from The...
Candy Darling
Caption: AFTER MANY ILLEGAL HORMONE TREATMENTS, CANDY DARLING DIES OF CANCER IN 1975. (Harron 152) She was featured prominently in I Shot Andy Warhol. The opening of Ecstasy alludes to Wilson’s Forever Feminine. With his strong ties to hormone producers, Dr. Wilson...
Career Counseling
In Dishonored Lady, after a failed suicide attempt, you end up on a psychiatrist’s couch. He advises you to leave your unsatisfying role as a high-powered fashion editor and to pursue your love of painting. Not terribly bad advice, but you still end up playing second...
Griffin Lamarr Interview
Featured on the Merv Griffin Show, you finally had the chance to clear the air about Ecstasy and the infamous swimming scene: Griffin [on arriving in America amid the Ecstasy buzz]: “You really came over here with a bang.” Well, I didn’t know they...
PITCHING THE PITUITARY
Antheil, a self-proclaimed expert on glandular “science,” brags about his acumen: “If the lady offers you some of her history, she will be telling you with every breath to exactly what glandular type she belongs.” “Hedy Wants You to Pitch Her...
Buttons
I am bombarded yet… I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe… —Adrienne Rich (“Planetarium”) Have you ever felt left out...
Script Commando
Ronald Tavel, on Warhol’s treatment of his movie script, Hedy: “This was the second moving camera film… and I hated it when I first saw it because it came very close to destroying my script, the way he moved the camera, but I loved it for what he did....
Inventor
You announced your intention to join the National Inventors Council. “They could just have me around, and ask me questions.” Unfortunately, you were persuaded by Antheil to help the war effort by trading on your celebrity, raising $7,000,000 in a one-day kissing...
Couple Bust
“SCUM will couple-bust—barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them...
