Book Review

The title caught my eye:  “The Only Woman in the Room”.  The main character was even more intriguing:  Hedy Kiesler, later known as the famous actress Hedy Lamarr.

In this historical novel set in the 1930s and 40s by Marie Benedict, Hedy was (often) the only woman.  She was an only child of Jewish parents living in Austria, the young wife of an abusive husband, a lone woman at dinner parties where men plotted war, an advocate for her acting career, and the sole inventor of technology that (could have) helped the Allies during WWII.  Benedict did a masterful job of providing details about these solo roles and setting Hedy’s life within the larger political atmosphere of Austria before and after the start of WWII.  Though Benedict discussed Hedy’s acting life in Austria and the US, the bulk of this novel focused on Hedy’s life as a young wife, survivor, and inventor.    

Benedict hinted at the importance of Hedy’s beauty by including a picture of her on the inside front and back cover of the book.  Hedy is stunning and also attracted men with her flawless figure.  As narrator, Hedy admitted using her beauty as a tool to exert power over men in her private life and theatrical audiences in her professional life.

Hedy felt attracted to her future husband, Fritz Mandl, because he seemed interested in her opinions, did not appear intimidated by her beauty, and was publicly recognized as a powerful man.  With Fritz as the owner of a weapons business and as a close associate of several powerful Austrian politicians, Hedy and her parents hoped Fritz would protect them from growing anti-Semitism and the threat of war with Hitler. 

Unfortunately, Fritz fooled them and only revealed the full extent of his physical and verbal abuses after their marriage.  Over time, Fritz reduced Hedy to a beautiful object and an example of his wealth and power.  At dinner parties hosted by her husband, Hedy learned that he sold weapons to Hitler and of Hitler’s plans to completely remove Jews from Austria and Germany.  However, she did not reveal this knowledge to anyone in Austria before she left because she feared peoples’ opinions of her. 

One major section of the book ended abruptly.  In August 1937, Hedy made a second attempt to escape from her husband.  Benedict provided such a rich and suspenseful description of Hedy’s escape that it read like a movie script, complete with a cast of characters, costumes, and an escape car.  However, her escape tale lost momentum when Benedict simply revealed that Hedy made it out of Austria to Paris then London.  How?  Then, the next chapter simply began with her standing on an ocean liner bound for London and being introduced to the film studio head Louis B. Mayer.  Again, how?      

After she arrived in the US and the Nazis torpedoed a ship full of children, Hedy became involved in the war effort by raising money.  She also attempted to have a larger impact on the war by using her knowledge of science and German military plans.  Hedy recalled hearing about a weapons problem of the German military at the dinner parties hosted by her husband when she still lived in Austria.  The Germans had developed a remote-control system to transmit information between the ships, planes, and torpedoes but this system used radio signals which could be jammed by the enemy.  Hedy understood the nature of this problem because her father had discussed science, along with other academic subjects, with her when she was a child.      

In September 1940, Hedy met the composer George Antheil at a party and they entertained themselves by playing the piano, each alternating after the other.  Subsequently, she had an idea:  radio signals could also alternate by skipping frequency to frequency as they were sent to torpedoes so that the enemy could not find and then jam them.  Hedy, with George’s knowledge of pianos and composing, built a machine to enable this skipping.  They submitted the invention to the National Inventors Council which in turn a sent letter to the US Navy (with a copy to Hedy and George) that the Navy should consider their invention for military use.  In an April 1942 meeting, the Navy informed Hedy and George that they rejected Hedy’s idea because they did not want to tell their troops a woman had invented it.  On this note, the book ends. 

For me, some descriptions of Hedy’s personal and professional life experiences in this book could serve as the basis for a movie because Benedict wrote with such visually appealing details.  With Hedy narrating this book, however, the reader also learns about her thoughts and emotional growth, which are more difficult to convey in a movie.  Before reading this book, I knew that Hedy had become a successful American actress during and after WWII and therefore had survived it.  However, the book was so well written that my knowledge of her later success was suspended until the end of the book. 

Benedict made the convincing point that Hedy’s world refused to see past her beautiful face and slim figure and therefore could not consider that her invention might have helped the war effort.  This book presented one woman’s experience of WWII and showed, in the end, that she survived, on her own.