Today’s story is about a film star and cultural icon. Someone who not only dazzled America with their looks and talent, but who also came face-to-face with the brutal reality of tyranny and did everything in their power to stop it.

This is A Hed of the Rest, the drink I have made based on the incredible life of Hollywood Starlet Hedy Lamarr. It is made with sparkling wine, cognac, amaretto, and scotch. It’s a drink as bold, posh, and complex as the woman who inspired it.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1914. She was the daughter of a well-off Jewish banker who told her to look at the world with an inquisitive mind. She listened. Even from a young age she would take apart music boxes just to see how they worked. As she grew up, she blossomed into an incredibly beautiful woman and was eventually discovered by Max Reinhardt, who encouraged the 16-year-old Hedy to become an actress. And while many men did try, it was acting that stole her heart from her very first film, Geld auf der Strasse.

Hedy’s career, however, would have to take a hiatus when she married her first husband, Fritz Mandl, a weapons dealer and Nazi sympathizer, who, as Hedy claimed, crushed her personal freedoms.

“I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife…
He was the absolute monarch in his marriage… I was like a doll.
I was like a thing, some object of art which had
to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.”
~ Hedy Lamarr

Trapped in her marriage, and to a man focused on maintaining good relations with Hitler’s regime, Hedy fled her life in Austria and emigrated to the United States. But, to make it as an actress in the 1930s, Hedy had to leave behind her Austrian-Jewish name in favor of a more “American friendly” one. And so, Ms. Hedwig Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr.

First, she looked for work in Europe, but quickly found that the most prestigious film studios at the time were in Berlin, and rampantly anti-Semitic. So Hedy looked westward. Traveling to London, she came across Louis B. Mayer of MGM studios. Unlike Max Reinhardt, Mayer didn’t take to Hedy quickly. After an initial failure to garner his attention from Mayer in London, she followed him onto an ocean liner across the Atlantic to America. Dressed to the nines, and often in his vicinity, Hedy ultimately claimed her spot in Mayer’s attention as the future star of MGM.

Hedy Lamarr was a woman with a vision. While her career on the big screen took off shortly after her arrival in Hollywood with films like Algiers (1938) and Lady of the Tropics (1939), and earned her title “the most beautiful woman in the world,” she also made major contributions to America’s political and scientific efforts.

You see, Hedy Lamarr was brilliant. A genius.

Even iconic inventor and business magnate Howard Hughes said so. She volunteered to promote the war effort by selling war bonds and attending social events in support of American troops and, in her free time, she designed new wings for Hughes’s planes by studying the wings and fins of birds and fish.

But despite everything she was already doing, she felt she could offer more. So when she learned that American submarines weren’t able to successfully target their torpedoes at Nazi U-boats, Hedy set off to create a guidance system that utilized changing frequencies called “frequency hopping”.

Teaming up with George Antheil, a musician who shared her inventive spirit, the two astonishingly accomplished their task, and even patented their work in 1942. Sadly, the invention was never adopted by the Navy would during the war. And while they did come recognize its merit and implemented the technology in the 1950s, the patent Lamarr and Antheil filed had already expired.

Believe it or not, the work Lamarr did is still being used today. In our cell phones. And GPS. And Bluetooth. And WiFi. That’s right, “the most beautiful woman in the world” should perhaps be better known the “the mother of WiFi”.

What a woman. She deserves to have a drink and a scientific building named after her. But all I have is alcohol, so let’s see about our drink.

We start with 1 oz of Scotch whisky. When I was thinking about making this cocktail for Hedy, all I could think about was the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood scene in the 30s and 40s, better known as the “golden age of Hollywood”. So, in honor of that, we will be choosing some rather posh ingredients in today’s cocktail. Something of which Hedy herself would (hopefully) approve.

Next, we add ½ oz of cognac. Now there are a lot of different cognacs, with some being very one-dimensional in flavor and others being incredibly complex. They also greatly vary in price, so which cognac you use here can make big a difference in how the drink ends up tasting. I’m using A De Fussigny Selection.

Now, so far, we have two very bold, high proof flavors in this drink, and believe me they don’t like to mix with others, so to help our otherwise isolationist drinks get with the picture, we’re going to introduce some alcoholic socialites as I like to call them. AKA: good mixers.

First, we have 1 oz of sweet Italian vermouth. The tangy fruit flavor this brings is a welcome ingredient in many cocktails, and it’s going to serve as a bridge between our two stars. We have our stars. We have a bridge. But the bridge needs a pillar to stay afloat, and for that, we’re going to bring in ¾ oz of Amaretto. Its nutty sweet flavors play really well with the smoky, woodiness of the scotch and the bright layers of the cognac. Stir her up in a cup with some ice to awaken the flavors of our bolder spirits and then pour into our champagne glass.

Now you might have noticed that this isn’t a champagne flute. I noticed that too. But, when I thought about making a drink for the Hollywood star who invented frequency hopping, I can’t help but think it deserves the kind of toast Leonardo DiCaprio gave the camera in the Great Gatsby. So I picked a glass that looked like his. It feels like the right choice.

But wait, can we really put our drink in my version of a champagne glass without some sparkling wine? No. So, our final step will be to top off our drink with some sparkling wine. I’m using Brut and this is very dry wine. There are many flavor varieties for sparkling wine, so again, the sparkling wine you choose will affect the final taste of the drink.

And there you have it, A Hed of the Rest.

Now this looks like a drink fit for the big screen, but let’s see if it’s a star. The Brut is the first thing you’ll taste, it’s dry, subtly fruity and the bubbly which is welcome since we have so many complex addictions to our drink. What the Brut lacks in fruitiness, the Vermouth makes up for with an addition of that tart flavor, and the cognac/scotch combo does a great job teaming up with the amaretto to create this layered smoky nuttiness that is certainly unique!

As you enjoy the cocktail, remember the Hollywood star who was also secretly a genius and who did all she could to take down one of the most evil regimes in human history.