Hedy Lamarr: Tartar woman or Hollywood bombshell?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]The Tartar woman was the key feature of a civilization that went to war for free.

[00:00:07]Centuries later, modern governments had erased Tartaria and its war model in favor of a permanent war industry that allowed a country's men to pay for war rather than fight in it.

[00:00:21]This model was perfected in Hollywood through epic war films and a quirky producer who would later become a high-level defense contractor.

[00:00:31]The film industry began by replacing the Tartar woman with metaphorical bombshells.

[00:00:38]Eventually, Hollywood exported munitions a bit more literally.

[00:00:59]The first two major directors of Hollywood were D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, both Freemasons.

[00:01:07]They had been initiated at different lodges in New York before coming to Hollywood just before the start of World War I.

[00:01:14]Masons are a modern offshoot of the Knights Templar, the bankers of medieval Europe who were in the habit of funding wars like the Crusades.

[00:01:24]The Templars were also a Catholic religious order, and the Catholics, being Romans, are well-known for implementing the Greco-Roman corporate body structure into the church.

[00:01:36]According to Wikipedia, the order arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.

[00:01:46]Fast forward to the Masonic presence in the early decades of Hollywood.

[00:01:51]The Bank of America was formed in 1923 from a series of bank mergers in Los Angeles, and it was a bank that financed all the early film studios.

[00:02:02]Its advisory board was full of well-documented Freemasons, including DeMille, Griffith, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Will Rogers, and Wallace Beery.

[00:02:17]What this means is that war-funding financiers were entrenched in Hollywood, which explains Hollywood's habit of publicizing, promoting, glamorizing, and glorifying war.

[00:02:35]In 1921, the Wall Street firm Merrill Lynch had acquired Pathé Exchange, a studio that produced war footage reels shown in theaters before the feature film.

[00:02:47]This made Pathé Exchange the first Hollywood studio controlled by a Wall Street firm.

[00:02:53]And that company was the primary media outlet providing war news to the American public.

[00:03:00]According to Ben Urwand, the Hollywood studios had been in Germany for decades before World War II. Urwand said the following in an interview, "In 1933, the Germans passed a law that prevented all foreign businesses operating in Germany from withdrawing their reichsmarks and turning them into foreign currency.

[00:03:23]What Paramount of 20th Century Fox did was they took the money from the proceeds from their films.

[00:03:30]They invested those reichsmarks in German cameramen, and they bought German film stock.

[00:03:36]And they shot images of the nationalistic events in Germany, and they made these newsreels, which were screened in Germany.

[00:03:46]The newsreels were essentially pro-Nazi in content.

[00:03:50]They then sent that footage back to Hollywood, and that footage was reshaped so that newsreels were made not pro-Nazi in tone, but neutral in tone, which showed what was happening in Germany.

[00:04:03]And those newsreels were then sold all around the world.

[00:04:07]This way, Paramount and 20th Century Fox recouped their profits through the sale of these newsreels.

[00:04:16]You might think this wasn't propaganda at all, expressing only neutral positions on the war. But another propagandic purpose of newsreels was simply to normalize war, keeping it front and center in the public's awareness. That's what the Hollywood-produced Pathe newsreels on war were doing in the 1920s, when the US wasn't directly involved in any war itself.

[00:04:42]Erwand continues, "But MGM didn't make newsreels in Germany, and as the decade progressed, the studio was unable to export its money, and was steadily accruing a German bank account full of reichsmarks.

[00:04:56]And in December 1938, [snorts] 1 month after Kristallnacht, MGM comes to an arrangement with the German government, whereby it can export its money only if it invests in German firms that are producing German armaments. And that is how MGM exported its profits from December 1938 onwards, by investing in the production of German armaments."

[00:05:22]The head of MGM was Louis B. Mayer, a Freemason mentioned earlier.

[00:05:28]But while the Freemasons and bankers used Hollywood to normalize and invest in war, others would come to this town specifically to expand the war industry that Eisenhower warned was becoming a permanent fixture.

[00:05:49]In 1926, the Lockheed Aircraft Company that would eventually merge into Lockheed Martin was founded in Hollywood, establishing hangars in Burbank a year later.

[00:06:01]Jack Northrop, who would later form two Northrop corporations in Los Angeles, the latter merging into Northrop Grumman, began his aviation career at Lockheed's earlier firm in San Francisco.

[00:06:14]He then moved to Douglas Aircraft Company, later McDonnell Douglas, in Santa Monica, and then back to Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank.

[00:06:24]The quirky aviator Howard Hughes arrived in Hollywood the same year Lockheed Aircraft set up shop, 1926.

[00:06:33]Hughes first established the Multicolor Studio on Romaine, but later used that office space for Hughes Aircraft.

[00:06:41]And so, a major swath of the military-industrial complex was being built inside a network of garages, hangars, and film studios clustered around Hollywood.

[00:06:54]Hughes wanted to make movies with a large inheritance from his family's tool business.

[00:07:00]Where the Freemasons and bankers used Hollywood to normalize the corporate structure that funded war, Hughes was part of the move discussed earlier, portraying war as hell.

[00:07:11]He also played a big role in dismantling the legacy of the Tarzan woman, as he was the producer of The Conqueror.

[00:07:19]However, that was much later, in the 1950s.

[00:07:23]His early career in Hollywood was focused on two things: making movies and aviation technology.

[00:07:31]He formed the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, and rented hangar space from Lockheed in Burbank.

[00:07:39]By 1939, Hughes had a controlling interest in TWA.

[00:07:44]And he placed the largest aircraft order in history at the time with Lockheed, buying 40 Constellations for TWA at $18 million.

[00:07:55]The two companies, Hughes and Lockheed, would play prominent roles in the American military-industrial complex for the next 50 years.

[00:08:10]One of the first movies Hughes produced was called Two Arabian Nights. And the Tartar-Arab aesthetic was clearly a thing in 1920s Hollywood.

[00:08:21]According to Chat GPT, Orientalist fantasies were very fashionable in Europe at the time.

[00:08:28]And this trend had also fueled the costume of Mata Hari, who dressed as an exotic Middle Eastern dancer, but was really a Dutch woman named Margaretha Zelle, accused of being a German spy.

[00:08:42]The Tartar-Arab aesthetic was further exploited in Rudolph Valentino's 1921 hit movie The Sheik, about an Englishman who masquerades as an Arab sheik.

[00:08:54]The fake palm trees used in the movie ended up as scenery for the Coconut Grove nightclub at Hollywood's Ambassador Hotel, along with exotic Moorish arches and Middle Eastern decorations.

[00:09:07]Further capitalizing on that exotic aesthetic was the film Two Arabian Nights. Like John Wayne as Temujin would 20 years later, the two soldiers in this movie fall for an exotic ruler's daughter.

[00:09:22]Hollywood was not the first to link Tartars and Arabs. Adam Smith mentions Tartars 31 times in Wealth of Nations, and in eight of those references, he pairs them with Arabs, always in that order, treating them as parallel examples of the same self-sufficient shepherd warrior civilization.

[00:09:41]The Arab princess is the same archetype as the Tartar woman in The Conqueror and the same combined shorthand that Smith had made in his argument regarding the costs of war.

[00:09:53]The Tartar Arab woman had needed no protection and went into battle herself, but Hughes would portray both a Tartar and an Arab woman as no more than prizes for soldiers to claim.

[00:10:06]The Arab princess Mirza in Two Arabian Nights and the Tartar woman Bortai in The Conqueror were regal, quiet, dark, and exotic beauties, but Hollywood was becoming known for the brash, blonde, and loud bombshell, a symbol that shows up in another Hughes movie called Hell's Angels.

[00:10:28]This film, released in 1930, was impressive in its cinematography of dog-fighting aircraft, but as propaganda, it performed a specific and important task, convincing the public that war was hell and well beyond the capabilities of ordinary men.

[00:10:45]This is established early in the film when war is declared and the character Carl says, "I'm not a soldier. I couldn't kill anyone.

[00:10:54]They couldn't make me do that, could they?"

[00:10:58]When the budding hero Roy enlists, I've enlisted, Monty, in the Royal Flying Corps.

[00:11:04]You're a fool, Roy.

[00:11:06]his brother Monty tells him he's a fool.

[00:11:10]All three boys enter World War I and all three die without ever acquiring the status of a true war hero.

[00:11:17]And spoiler alert, if you're planning to watch Hell's Angels, Roy and Monty are sentenced to death for breaking the rules of engagement, but before that happens, Roy shoots his brother Monty in the back to conceal his cowardice.

[00:11:33]Karl, having gone home to Germany to fight for them, is killed by his own company to lighten the weight of their Zeppelin.

[00:11:41]It really is a hell they're walking into.

[00:11:44]This is not how we were taught to identify war propaganda.

[00:11:49]On the surface, war movies usually encourage young men to enlist. And who would want to enlist in something like this?

[00:11:57]The deeper function of Hughes' films was quite different. And that's because in Hughes' eyes, war was fought with technology, not men.

[00:12:07]And the government contracts that paid for that technology were far more valuable than increased enlistment.

[00:12:14]The message Hell's Angels was actually delivering was much more useful to Hughes. You don't have to enlist in this hellish experience, as long as you support the war effort and help pay for the technology.

[00:12:27]And Hughes hoped those war revenue tax dollars would eventually land in his pocket.

[00:12:35]Jean Harlow's character of Helen is the blonde bombshell, and bombshells, like the munitions they represent, are dangerous.

[00:12:44]Helen is a flirty tease who gets drunk and gets physical with all sorts of GIs.

[00:12:50]When the almost hero Roy finally sees this, he reacts by breaking military rules and ultimately gets himself killed.

[00:13:00]In the context of Hughes' films, the blonde bombshell of Hell's Angels is the antithesis of the dark Tartar woman.

[00:13:09]Instead of fighting the enemy alongside the male, she fights the male.

[00:13:16]Other actresses would step into the role of bombshell, including Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.

[00:13:23]But there was one actress whose biography was later titled Bombshell.

[00:13:28]And yet, she wasn't at all fitting that role of the platinum blonde. Instead, she was a brainy brunette named Hedy Lamarr, and she would develop a relationship with Hughes centered on munitions for war.

[00:13:47]Howard Hughes met Hedy Lamarr in the late 1930s.

[00:13:51]He dated her and was apparently so impressed with her intellect that he gave her access to his entire industrial operation at Hughes Aircraft, as well as equipment to work on designs for his planes.

[00:14:06]But Hughes wasn't the first man in her life who wanted to profit from war.

[00:14:12]Her father was Emil Kiesler, the deputy director of Wiener Bankverein, the Viennese Bank Union, one of the major banks of the Habsburg monarchy.

[00:14:23]Like most banks, this one financed war in various ways. And this poster put out by the bank encourages people to buy war bonds, to get involved in war loans.

[00:14:35]In 1927, the same year Hughes made two Arabian Nights, the bank of Hedy Lamarr's father partnered with the American investment firm of Dillon Read when that firm purchased a near controlling interest of its shares.

[00:14:51]According to Wikipedia, after World War I, they, Dillon Read, were the largest lender to Germany for reconstruction.

[00:15:00]C. Douglas Dillon, the son of Dillon Read co-founder Clarence Dillon, served as chairman of the company before serving as US Secretary of the Treasury and as US Under Secretary of State.

[00:15:13]A number of Dillon Read and Company partners served in senior roles in government, including Dillon and his right-hand man, James Forrestal, who served as Secretary of the Navy and later Secretary of Defense.

[00:15:29]During World War I, Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board, asked Dillon to be assistant chairman of the War Industries Board.

[00:15:39]And according to Google AI quoting Wikipedia, Dillon Read & Company was a major financial participant in rebuilding Germany's heavy industry, steel and chemical, during the 1920s and early 1930s, which subsequently provided the industrial base for German rearmament.

[00:15:59]Dillon Read was the poster firm for Washington's revolving door, where private corporations joined government to structure industries, remove competition, and secure contracts for the benefit of the firms they were connected to in private life.

[00:16:17]Mussolini was the dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943, using a ruling system of corporate fascism, the form of public-private partnerships that defines the role of defense contractors.

[00:16:33]Hedy Lamarr's first husband was Friedrich Mandel, and in Mandel's capacity as Austria's largest arms manufacturer, Mandel supplied munitions to Mussolini's Italy, as well as hosting him at dinner parties.

[00:16:48]Hedy was known to have attended both meetings and dinner parties with many prominent fascists of this time. She later told her collaborator, George Antheil, that she knew a good deal about munitions and various secret weapons from these very meetings. In 1942, Lamarr and Antheil filed a patent for a secret communication system, a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology for missile guidance without enemy interception.

[00:17:18]But they were hardly the first to invent this technology.

[00:17:22]The frequency hopping principle first appears in a Tesla patent from 1903.

[00:17:28]Jonathan Zenneck documented German military use of it in 1908, and the German military was using it in World War I to prevent British eavesdropping.

[00:17:38]A 1926 patent by Blackwell, Martin, and Vernam described random multi-frequency transmission for secrecy. This is exactly the kind of information Hedy Lamarr likely heard at those dinner parties, as well as in boardroom meetings.

[00:17:55]Another patent from 1932 described a system where messages are transmitted by means of a group of frequencies known to the sender and receiver alone, and alternated during transmission, which is essentially what Lamarr and Antheil patented 10 years later. The only genuinely novel element in her patent was the player piano synchronization mechanism that Antheil contributed.

[00:18:21]Robert Price, an engineer who had interviewed Lamarr, is on tape in the Bombshell documentary telling a journalist, "She's an inventor, but I don't know in what sense exactly she is an inventor.

[00:18:34]I would say she was a plagiarizer."

[00:18:38]Also quoted in Bombshell was physicist Tony Rothman of NYU.

[00:18:43]Hedy's first husband was Austria's leading munitions manufacturer. Robert Price said to me that he thought she just smuggled the idea out of her husband's boardroom. Price called her the Mata Hari of World War II.

[00:18:58]It's an interesting comparison.

[00:19:00]Hedy Lamarr expressing the Tartar Arab aesthetic wearing the mask of a Tartar woman in a documentary labeling her as a Hollywood bombshell.

[00:19:13]Many have suspected her over the years of bringing this information to Hollywood with her. She even admits to overhearing discussions containing this information. So, why did she insist that she had invented something new?

[00:19:27]That's a question we'll try to answer in the next video.