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. ...
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:...
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...
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...
FUNCTION#10. TRAPS: Mandl / Hollywood
Once, ducking from Mandl’s surveillance momentarily, you hid in one of the rooms of a peepshow brothel—only to have to choose between being a participant in the show or facing Mandl’s wrath. What followed was “the strangest love-making any girl ever had” (23). A...
Still Lifes
Although you patented the lively, dynamic science of frequency hopping, directors and the Hollywood Image Machine often conspired to keep you in your “place.” We protest. . . The “widespread lack of self-confidence brought about by the father system that...
