Director Alexandra Dean
The narrative is predominantly told in Hedy’s own purring, European-accented voice, made possible by the newly discovered interview recordings of ex-Forbes journalist Flemming Meeks, who had been sitting on the tapes for 25 years. Dean tells me over a call from New York how she felt when she discovered the lost tapes. “Euphoria, it was like euphoria. I had been having the experience that you have when you know something is not going well at work, and you’re up at night with your head pounding and your heart pounding, knowing that you’re doing something wrong. And the thing that I was doing wrong at that time was that I wasn’t telling the story through Hedy’s voice.” Dean trusted her instincts and rallied the team at Reframed Pictures to look for more material. “We basically started the world’s biggest treasure hunt.”
Lamarr’s son Anthony provided a glut of further material. Dean says she was “incredibly lucky as a journalist or documentarian to stumble upon somebody in a family who just feels that it is their duty or obligation to gather every bit of evidence.” He kept floor-to-ceiling boxes of carefully archived photographs, magazines and letters – never translated from German, but “all numbered beautifully in folders.” The documentary is alsonarrated by Lamarr’s family,friends and fans including German-American actress Diane Kruger, Mel Brooks and Robert Osborne.
There are enervating new discoveries here about Lamarr’s life and times. Her connection with the infamous New York physician Max Jacobson, aka “Dr Feelgood”, was well known. He treated the great and good of the day, from Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman to Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Nelson Rockefeller, Liz Taylor, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams. What wasn’t well known was the fact that his so-called “vitamin B12 shots” were in fact amphetamines; at the time picture studios regularly controlled their talent with a co*cktail of uppers and downers. Evidence of Lamarr’s erratic behaviour and wild mood swings rang alarm bells for Dean.
