Whether they did or not, the record doesn’t reveal. By summer, Antheil was prepared to explain to Bullitt what he believed had gone wrong, an explanation worth quoting at length:
Hedy and I spent a lot of time—and money—designing and perfecting [our torpedo]. It was then sent in—and it actually reached Kettering, who was very enthusiastic about it and recommended it to the Navy.
But it was turned down at the Navy.
Now, Bill, I don’t carp at that; God is my witness that if our Navy has something better than the Antheil-Lamarr radio torpedo no one would be happier than I. Honestly.
But it’s the way they turned it down.
They said that the mechanism we proposed was “too bulky to be incorporated in the average torpedo.”
Now, if there’s one single criticism they could not, nor should not have made, it was THAT one.
Our fundamental two mechanisms—both being completely, or semi-electrical—can be made so small THAT THEY CAN BE FITTED INSIDE OF DOLLAR WATCHES!
I know (or I think I know) why they said that. In our patent, Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that a certain part of it worked not unlike the fundamental mechanism of a player piano. Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-hatted gentlemen in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words “player piano.”
“My God!” I can see [them] saying. “We can’t put a player piano into a torpedo!”
Or so it would appear. Remember that Kettering—who is quite a genius along the line of torpedoes—recommended it.
Our invention—had it been accepted—would enable a plane far above to steer a torpedo or A WHOLE FLEET OF TORPEDOES—against an enemy squadron, correcting and re-correcting their rudders from a single steering wheel in the plane—AND the enemy fleet could not POSSIBLY “jam” or “smear” this control. (This latter feature is our main contribution to already known and tested elements of the so-far useless radio controlled torpedo.)
The U.S. Patent Office had a better opinion of Hedy and George’s invention than did the U.S. Navy. On 11 August 1942, it issued the two inventors U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. Curiously, Hedy had filed not under her current legal name of Lamarr but disguised, as it were, as Hedy Kiesler Markey, as if she were determined not to allow her celebrity to influence the judgment of the patent examiners either way.
When the Navy acquired the patent to a technology it had formally rejected is a question that can’t be answered until the National Inventors Council records are opened; they have remained off-limits now for decades on the grounds that they contain proprietary information. The Navy as well kept the technology secret for the next forty years, one reason Hedy and George’s contribution long went uncelebrated.
After the patent was awarded, Antheil wrote to Bullitt again, complaining about the Navy’s rejection of his and Hedy’s inventions. Bullitt’s influence had declined sharply in Washington, however. He had dreamed of becoming secretary of state. Antheil had even encouraged him to think of running for president as Roosevelt’s successor. But Bullitt had destroyed his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt the previous year by pressing Roosevelt to dismiss Bullitt’s archrival Sumner Welles, whom the Secret Service had reported drunkenly propositioning a series of annoyed African-American Pullman porters on a late-night train trip from Huntsville, Alabama, to Washington. Bullitt, writes George Kennan, “unquestionably dealt to his relationship with FDR a blow from which it was never fully to recover. Welles was a close personal friend of the Roosevelt family. The President never fully forgave Bullitt for what he regarded as an uncharitable personal vendetta—a vendetta pursued not just in this one highly unpleasant interview in the White House but in statements to other people which were not long in reaching the Presidential ears.”
Beset with troubles, Bullitt had no influence to spare for George Antheil. “I am sorry you feel so frustrated about your torpedo idea,” he responded on 25 August, “and wish I could do something to help you. I have, however, referred your idea to the proper people here and will take it up again. I am still learning the Navy from the ground up and, at the moment, can do nothing more.”
By then, both Hedy and George had given up trying to change the Navy’s mind. They had both moved on. Antheil settled in at Manhattan Beach to write symphonies; he composed his Third Symphony, he told Bullitt, “during the anxious days of midsummer 1942”—anxious because the Germans and the Japanese were on the advance and the Allies on the defensive in those early months of American engagement in the war—and began his Fourth Symphony that year as well. Boski said later that the new work had been her husband’s creative “rebirth.” His Tragic Symphony followed, as well as less ambitious compositions. Between 1940 and 1946, Antheil wrote no movie music at all, supporting his family by working behind the scenes as a news analyst for the journalists Manchester Boddy and John Nesbitt, employment which had followed from his book and articles predicting with remarkable accuracy the course of the war.
Hedy’s war work took a more public direction, appropriately for a celebrity. Antheil had advised her at the outset of their partnership that she would serve the nation better selling war bonds than inventing. So had the Navy when it rejected the Secret Communication System. Evidently, Hedy decided to prove just how successful a salesperson she could be. While effectively out on strike from MGM in a salary dispute, she campaigned nationally with other movie stars to sell war bonds to raise money for the war. War bonds allowed ordinary citizens to feel they were helping with the fight while controlling inflation by removing money from circulation. They were sold in denominations from $18.95 ($260 today) up to $1,000 ($14,000 today), with ten-cent-savings-stamp books available to those who couldn’t afford to buy an entire bond at once.
At the beginning of September 1942, at a luncheon in Philadelphia with a $5,000-war-bond minimum, Hedy told the group of businessmen and labor and social leaders to “chip in and help Uncle Sam win this war,” adding, “I am just a plain gold-digger for Uncle Sam. I’m here to help win the war. I think you’re here to see what that Lamarr dame looks like.” Then, in what the New York Times reporter on the scene called “a serious tone,” she went on:
We should be here for the same purpose. What you think Hedy Lamarr looks like doesn’t worry me as much as what Hirohito and Hitler are doing. Every time you dig in your pocketbooks you tell those two rotten men the Yanks are coming. Let’s make the end of the war come soon. Don’t think about what the other fellow is doing. You buy bonds!
And they did, $4,547,350 worth ($62,344,000 today) among them, with another $2,250,000 ($30,847,000) pledged at a “victory show” Hedy headlined at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music that evening. Two days later, the Times reported, she knocked them dead in Newark:
NEWARK, N.J., Sept. 4—Hedy Lamarr, motion-picture star, took Newark by storm when she arrived here today to urge the purchase of war bonds. More than 7,000 persons blocked her path when she emerged from the Robert Treat Hotel and, later, in Military Park, it took more than a score of policemen to control a crowd estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000.
Several women fainted. Hundreds of camera fans took pictures of the Hollywood celebrity.
When Miss Lamarr rode along Broad Street in a jeep, bus passengers stood up to wave, motorists honked their horns and many youths attempted to reach her conveyance on bicycles. The crowds were too large to permit many direct sales of bonds, but a score of women volunteers experienced no trouble in obtaining signed pledges.