FILM BEAUTY WAS BRAINS BEHIND COMMUNICATIONS BREAKTHROUGH.

Byline: Elizabeth Weise Associated Press 

The next time you pick up a cellular phone, give a brief thought to the improbable woman who first patented some of its underlying technology 55 years ago: actress Hedy Lamarr, then often called ``the most beautiful girl in the world.''

The sultry, sophisticated, dark-haired star of hits such as ``Samson and Delilah'' was the racy stuff of dreams for hundreds of thousands of men who marched off to war.

But there's another side to this pinup image. The pouting, sensuous star had an inquiring intellect and an engineering bent that in another era might have taken her not to Hollywood, but to MIT.

And though she never received an Oscar for her acting, she is about to get an award from the nation's techno-wizards, who have adopted her as one of their own.

To trace the story of Lamarr's invention, it is necessary to hark back to 1933, when the Vienna-born 19-year-old - already famous for her sexy film ``Ecstasy'' - became the trophy wife of Austrian armament manufacturer Fritz Mandl in a marriage arranged by her parents.

``I was a kind of slave. When we were in Italy, I couldn't even go swimming without him being there,'' she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press, the first interview she has granted in 20 years.

Mandl kept her by his side as he attended hundreds of dinners and meetings with arms developers, builders and buyers. But the young Lamarr didn't just play the role of gracious hostess, she also listened and learned.

After four years with Mandl, in which he was increasingly involved in deals with the Nazis, Lamarr knew she must escape. She drugged the maid assigned to guard her, crawled out a window and made her way to London, where she worked on her new language.

She appeared there on the stage until MGM's Louis B. Mayer offered her a shot at stardom in Hollywood, where she got a movie contract and a new name. She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler.

But she didn't forget the immersion course she'd been given in advanced weaponry at the side of the first of her six husbands. Filled with an abiding hatred of the Nazis and a strong sense of patriotism for her adopted country, she searched for ways to help the war effort.

In 1941, she met composer George Antheil at a Hollywood party. Dubbed ``the bad boy of music,'' Antheil composed avant-garde, mechanistic symphonies and ballets.

``Hedy didn't suffer fools gladly. George Antheil was not only a musician, but a formidable enough intellect that she could hold an intelligent conversation with him,'' said Dave Hughes, a Colorado researcher whose work for

the National Science Foundation on wireless communication is based, in part, on the technology Lamarr envisioned more than a half-century ago.

Lamarr wanted to work at the newly established National Inventors Council in Washington, D.C., but was told she could do more for the fight against the Nazis by using her star status to sell war bonds.

But that wasn't enough for her. An intuitive tinkerer, Lamarr has always been ``interested in everything,'' she said.

``When I was a little girl, just 4 years old, I remember my father had a gold watch, and I asked: Why does this in front go around, how does this work?''

Even in the midst of the glitter and pomp of Hollywood, she was full of ideas, including one on the radio control of torpedoes. She'd sat with Mandl as he reviewed films of field tests on torpedo systems. Her mind began to explore ways to circumvent the jamming that kept the United States from using radio-controlled missiles against the Germans.

As one of her sons, Anthony Loder, recalls, she and Antheil ``were sitting at the piano one day, and he was hitting some keys and she was following him, and she said, `Hey, look; we're talking to each other, and we're changing all the time.' ''

Fired up with the possibilities, they set to work the next day.

``We were sitting on the floor figuring the whole thing out,'' she said from her home in Florida.

A simple radio signal sent to control a torpedo was too easy to block. But what if the signal hopped from frequency to frequency at split-second intervals? Anyone trying to listen in or jam it would hear only random noise, like a radio dial being spun. But if both the sender and the receiver where hopping in synchronization, the message would come through loud and clear.

The idea was Lamarr's, but Antheil, whose compositions had featured up to 14 player pianos playing simultaneously, suggested using piano rolls to make sure both sides were synchronized.

Their patent for a ``Secret Communication System'' was granted Aug. 11, 1942.

``I read the patent,'' said Franklin Antonio, chief technical officer of the cellular phone maker Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego. ``You don't usually think of movie stars as having brains, but she sure did.''

In fact, it was a brilliant idea - so brilliant that it was years ahead of its time.

``I always am,'' Lamarr said.

In fact, the Navy declared Antheil's notion of using a clockwork mechanism, controlled by paper tape, too cumbersome to be implemented. It would take another 20 years and the invention of the transistor for the concept to be realized. Three years after the patent expired, the pair's ideas were used in secure military communication systems installed on U.S. ships sent to blockade Cuba in 1962.

But it was with the widespread availability of fast, cheap and small computer chips that the concept of spread spectrum really came into its own. It's still used by the military, including the U.S. government's Milstar defense communications satellite system, as well as for wireless Internet transmission and in many of the newer cellular phones.

By an odd twist of fate, Lamarr's son Anthony owns a Los Angeles-based phone store.

``It's in every other phone system I sell,'' he said.

Anthony Loder has written a screenplay about what he sees as his mother's essentially tragic life. Neither she nor Antheil ever received royalty payments for the commercialization of their patent, though it is cited as the underlying patent for frequency-changing technology. Now 84 by most accounts, although she says she is 82, Lamarr lives simply and in seclusion.

Hughes launched a campaign to get Lamarr and Antheil honored with an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The cause was taken up by engineers who knew her name not from her days in Hollywood, but from its association with an important patent. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was inundated with a blizzard of e-mail seconding the nomination.

So on Wednesday, Lamarr and Antheil will be honored with an award for ``blazing new trails on the electronic frontier.'' Her son will accept it on her behalf at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in San Francisco.

Lamarr still doesn't suffer fools gladly. Informed she won the award, her reaction was blunt.

``It's about time.''

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PHOTO Hedy Lamarr

Earns science award