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By the start of World War II, they were two of the most accomplished talents in Hollywood. Leading lady Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and composer George Antheil had earned a reputation as “the bad boy of music.”  What brought them together in 1940 was that timeless urge to preserve one’s youth and enhance one’s natural beauty, but what emerged from their work was a secret communications system that Lamarr and Antheil hoped would defeat the Nazis.

It didn’t work out that way: The patent they received—No. 2292387—simply gathered dust in the U.S. Patent Office until it expired in 1959. But three years later, the U.S. military put their concept to use during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And ultimately, the two unlikely pioneers’ work on “frequency hopping” would be recognized as a precursor to the “spread-spectrum” wireless communications used in cellular phones, global positioning systems and Wi-Fi technology today.

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9, 1913, in Vienna; her father was a well-to-do Jewish banker and her mother was a concert pianist. Sent to finishing school in Switzerland, she grew into a strikingly beautiful teen and began making small German and Austrian films. In 1932, she starred in the Czechoslovakian film Ecstasy—which was quickly banned in Austria for the starlet’s nudity and for a scene in which her facial expressions, in closeup, suggested that she was experiencing something akin to the film’s title.

In 1933, she married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy Jewish arms manufacturer 13 years her senior who converted to Catholicism so he could do business with Nazi industrialists and other fascist regimes. Mandl hosted grand parties at the couple’s home, where, she would later note, both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were guests. Lamarr would later claim that Mandl kept her virtually locked away in their castle home, only bringing her to business meetings because of her skill at mathematics. In these meetings, she said, she learned about military and radio technologies. After four years of marriage, Lamarr escaped Austria and fled to Paris, where she obtained a divorce and eventually met Louis B. Mayer, the American film producer with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Mayer signed the young Austrian beauty and helped her find the screen name Hedy Lamarr. She immediately began starring in films such as Algiers, Boom Town and White Cargo, cast opposite the biggest actors of the day, including Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and John Garfield.  MGM was in what became known as its Golden Age, and Mayer promoted Lamarr as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Yet despite her unquestionable beauty, Lamarr thought there was room for improvement.  At a dinner party in Hollywood, she met George Antheil, a dashing and diminutive composer  renowned in both classical and avant-garde music. Born in 1900 and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, Antheil had been a child prodigy. After studying piano both in the United States and Europe, he spent the early 1920s in Paris, where he counted Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway as friends.

By the mid-1930s, Antheil had landed in Hollywood, composing dozens of scores for some of the great filmmakers of the time, including Cecil B. DeMille. He’d also written a mystery novel, Death in the Dark, as well as a series of articles for Esquire magazine. In one of those articles, “The Glandbook for the Questing Male,” he wrote that a woman’s healthy pituitary gland might enhance the size and shape of her breasts. Lamarr was taken with the idea, and after meeting Antheil, she went to him for advice on enlarging her bust without surgery, Richard Rhodes writes in his recent book, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. 

At some point, their conversation veered from breast enlargement to torpedoes, and the use of radio control to guide them toward their targets. (At the time, torpedoes were generally free-running devices.) Clearly, Lamarr had gained some understanding of weaponry during her first marriage. She was aware that radio transmission on one frequency could be easily jammed or intercepted—but she reasoned that if homing signals could be sent over multiple radio frequencies between the transmitter and the receiver, the enemy would perceive them only as a random series of blips on any one frequency. The actress had envisioned a system of “frequency hopping.”  The challenge was how to synchronize the pattern of frequencies between transmitter and receiver.

Anthiel was no stranger to weaponry himself; he had worked as a United States munitions inspector. Moreover, he had written Ballet Mecanique, which called for the synchronization of 16 player pianos.  With radio signals hopping about different frequencies like notes on a piano, Lamarr and Anthiel believed they could create a jam-proof homing system for torpedoes. Their system involved two motor-driven rolls, like those on a player piano, installed in the transmitter and aboard the torpedo and synchronized through 88 frequencies—matching the number of keys on a piano.

Consulting with an electrical engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology, the two inventors worked out the details of their invention in their spare time. Antheil continued to compose film scores, and Lamarr, at 26, was acting in Ziegfeld Girl alongside Jimmy Stewart and Judy Garland. They submitted their patent proposal for a “Secret Communication System” in 1941, and that October the New York Times reported that Lamarr (using her married name at the time, Hedy Kiesler Markey) had invented a device that was so “red hot” and vital to national defense “that government officials will not allow publication of its details,” only that it was related to “remote control of apparatus employed in warfare.”

After they were awarded their patent on August 11, 1942, they donated it to the U.S. Navy—a patriotic gesture to help win the war. But Navy researchers, believing that a piano-like mechanism would be too cumbersome to install in a torpedo, didn’t take their frequency-hopping concept very seriously. Instead, Lamarr was encouraged to support the war effort by helping to sell war bonds, and she did: Under an arrangement in which she would kiss anyone who purchased $25,000 worth of bonds, she sold $7 million worth in one night.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that engineers from Sylvania Electronics Systems Division began experimenting with ideas documented in Lamarr and Antheil’s system. Instead of a mechanical device for frequency-hopping, engineers developed electronic means for use in the spread-spectrum technology deployed during the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962. By then, Lamarr and Antheil’s patent had expired and he had died of a heart attack.

It is impossible to know exactly how much Lamarr and Antheil’s invention influenced the development of the spread-spectrum technology that forms the backbone of wireless communications today. What can be said is that the actress and the composer never received a dime from their patent, they had developed an idea that was ahead of its time.

Later years would not be so kind to Hedy Lamarr.  “Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was married and divorced six times, and as movie offers began to dwindle, her finances did, too. She was arrested in 1966 for shoplifting at a Los Angeles department store. She had plastic surgery that her son, Anthony Loder, said left her looking like “a Frankenstein.”  She became angry, reclusive and litigious. She once sued Mel Brooks and the producers of Blazing Saddles for naming a character in that film “Hedley Lamarr,” and she sued the Corel Corporation for using an image of her on its  software packaging.  Both suits were settled out of court. She ended up living in a modest house in Orlando, Florida, where she died in 2000, at the age of 86.

Hedy Lamarr has a star on the Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but in 1998, she received an award uncommon for stars of the silver screen.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation named her and George Antheil the winners of that year’s Pioneer Award, recognizing their “significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-based communications.”

“It’s about time,” she was reported to have said.

Sources

Books: Richard Rhodes, Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Doubleday, 2011. Hedy Lamarr, Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, Fawcett, 1967.  Asoke K. Talukder, Hasan Ahmed, Roopa R. Yavagal, Mobile Computing: Technology, Applications and Service Creation, Tata McGraw Hill, 2010.  Steve Silverman, Einstein’s Refrigerator and Other Stories From the Flip Side of History, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001.  Rob Walters, Spread Spectrum: Hedy Lamarr and the Mobile Phone,” ebook published by Satin via Rob’s Book Shop, 2010.  Stephen Michael Shearer, Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr, Macmillan ebook, 2010.

Articles: “Hedy Lamarr Inventor,” New York Times, October 1, 1941. “Hop, Skip and a Jump: Remembering Hedy Lamar” (sic) by Jennifer Ouelette, Scientific American, January 9, 2012.  “From Film Star to Frequency-Hopping Inventor,” by Donald Christiansen, Today’s Engineer, April, 2012, http://www.todaysengineer.org/2012/Apr/backscatter.asp   “Secret Communications System: The Fascinating Story of the Lamarr/Antheil Spread-Spectrum Patent,” by Chris Beaumont, http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture7/hedy/pat2/index.html  “The Birth of Spread Spectrum,” by Anna Couey, http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture7/hedy/lemarr.htm  “Hedy Lamarr Biography: Hedy’s Folly by Richard Rhodes (Review), by Liesl Schillinger, The Daily Beast, November 21, 2011.  “Glamour and Munitions: A Screen Siren’s Wartime Ingenuity,” by Dwight Garner, New York Times, December 13, 2011.  “Unlikely Characters,” by Terry K., http://terry-kidd.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html   “Mechanical Dreams Come True,” by Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, June 9, 2008.  “Secret Communication System, Patent 2,292,387, United States Patent Office,  http://www.google.com/patents?id=R4BYAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

For Lawrence Oates, the race to the South Pole had a portentous start. Just two days after the Terra Nova Expedition left New Zealand in November 1910, a violent storm killed two of the 19 ponies in Oates’s care and nearly sank the ship. His journey ended almost two years later, when he stepped out of a tent and into the teeth of an Antarctic blizzard after uttering ten words that would bring tears of pride to mourning Britons. During the long months in between, Oates’s concern for the ponies paralleled his growing disillusionment with the expedition’s leader, Robert Falcon Scott.

Oates had paid one thousand pounds for the privilege of joining Scott on an expedition that was supposed to combine exploration with scientific research. It quickly became a race to the South Pole after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, already at sea with a crew aboard the Fram, abruptly changed his announced plan to go to the North Pole. “BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC—AMUNDSEN,” read the telegram he sent to Scott. It was clear that Amundsen would leave the collecting of rock specimens and penguin eggs to the Brits; he wanted simply to arrive first at the pole and return home to claim glory on the lecture circuit.

Born in 1880 to a wealthy English family, Lawrence Oates attended Eton before serving as a junior officer in the Second Boer War.  A gunshot wound in a skirmish that earned Oates the nickname “Never Surrender” shattered his thigh, leaving his left leg an inch shorter than his right.

Still, Robert Scott wanted Oates along for the expedition, but once Oates made it to New Zealand, he was startled to see that a crew member (who knew dogs but not horses) had already purchased ponies in Manchuria for five pounds apiece. They were “the greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen,” Oates said. From past expeditions, Scott had deduced that white or gray ponies were stronger than darker horses, though there was no scientific evidence for that. When Oates told him that the Manchurian ponies were unfit for the expedition, Scott bristled and disagreed. Oates seethed and stormed away.

Inspecting the supplies, Oates quickly surmised that there was not enough fodder, so he bought two extra tons with his own money and smuggled the feed aboard the Terra Nova. When, to great fanfare, Scott and his crew set off from New Zealand for Antarctica on November 29, 1910, Oates was already questioning the expedition in letters home to his mother: “If he [Amundsen] gets to the Pole first we shall come home with our tails between our legs and make no mistake. I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves all that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc. etc. is rot and if we fail it will only make us look more foolish.” Oates went on to praise Amundsen for planning to use dogs and skis rather than walking beside horses. “If Scott does anything silly such as underfeeding his ponies he will be beaten as sure as death.”

After a harrowingly slow journey through pack ice, the Terra Nova arrived at Ross Island in Antarctica on January 4, 1911. The men unloaded and set up base at Camp Evans, as some crew members set off in February on an excursion in the Bay of Whales, off the Ross Ice Shelf—where they caught sight of Amundsen’s Fram at anchor. The next morning they saw Amundsen himself, crossing the ice at a blistering pace on his dog sled as he readied his animals for an assault on the South Pole, some 900 miles away. Scott’s men had had nothing but trouble with their own dogs, and their ponies could only plod along on the depot-laying journeys they were making to store supplies for the pole run.

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The Chicago Bulls and their fans watched in horror as their star guard, Derek Rose collapsed on the floor toward the end of a recent playoff game against the Philadelphia  76ers. Just days later, the New York Yankees and their fans watched Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history, fall to the ground while shagging fly balls before the start of a game in Kansas City. Both athletes suffered torn anterior cruciate ligaments in their knees, putting their futures and their teams’ prospects in doubt. Sportswriters called the injuries “tragic.”

Of course, both injuries were shocking, but “tragic” might be better reserved for matters of life and death and athletic contests gone awry—such as a confrontation that took place more than 90 years ago in New York, in the heat of a pennant race, when a scrappy Cleveland Indians shortstop stepped into the batter’s box against a no-nonsense Yankees pitcher.

The Indians were in first place, a half-game ahead of the Yankees on August 16, 1920, when they arrived at the Polo Grounds, the home the Yankees shared with the New York Giants until Yankee Stadium was built three years later. It was the start of a three-game series on a dark and drizzly Monday afternoon in Harlem. On the mound for the Yankees was right-hander Carl Mays, the ace of the staff, hoping to notch his 100th career win. Mays, a spitballer (legal at the time), threw with an awkward submarine motion, bending his torso to the right and releasing the ball close to the ground—he sometimes scraped his knuckles in the dirt. Right-handed submariners tend to give right-handed batters the most trouble because their pitches will curve in toward the batter, jamming him at the last moment. Mays, one baseball magazine noted, looked “like a cross between an octopus and a bowler” on the mound. “He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find, generally until along about 5 o’clock, when the hitters get accustomed to it—and when the game is about over.”

Mays had good control for a submariner, but he also was known as a “headhunter” who was not shy about brushing batters, especially right-handers, off the plate; he was consistently among the American League leaders in hit batsmen. His feud with Detroit Tigers great Ty Cobb was particularly intense: In one game, he threw at the cantankerous “Georgia Peach” every time he came to bat, prompting Cobb to throw his bat at Mays, Mays to call Cobb a “yellow dog,” the umpires to separate the two as they tried to trade blows, and Mays to hit Cobb on the wrist with his next pitch. In another game, Cobb laid a bunt down the first-base line so he could spike Mays when the pitcher covered the base.

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What brought them together in Milwaukee—Theodore Roosevelt and his would-be killer, John Flammang Schrank—on that cool night in October of 1912, was their differing opinions on whether any man should serve three terms in office as president of the United States. And what saved Roosevelt were the things he carried—a steel eyeglass case and a 50-page manuscript of his speech—tucked close to his chest, which absorbed the force of Schrank’s bullet and prevented a lethal wound. Roosevelt would carry the slug from Schrank’s .38-caliber revolver in his chest for the remaining six years of his life, a violent but proud reminder of the strenuous and dangerous life that he lived with such brio.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt had become the nation’s youngest president, at age 42, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. He assumed office at a time when militant anarchists were claiming responsibility for a wave of bombings across the globe and the assassination of numerous heads of state. John Schrank was not one of them, however.

Born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1876, Schrank came to the United States with his parents at the age of nine, settling in New York’s Lower East Side. His parents soon died, and Schrank moved in with an aunt and uncle and worked in the family biergarten. Tragedy was never far from his life. He was supposed to accompany his 19-year-old sweetheart, Emily Ziegler, on a St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran German Church outing aboard the General Slocum steamboat in June of 1904, but he’d been unable to get anyone to take his shift at the family tavern. More than 1,000 passengers, mostly Germans from the Lower East Side, were killed when the Slocum caught fire off Manhattan. Schrank later identified the charred remains of Ziegler’s body, and according to newspaper accounts at the time, he “appeared wild-eyed at the Morgue.”

Schrank’s aunt and uncle died within a year of each other, beginning in 1910. Schrank, in his 30s, took the deaths very hard; according to the funeral director, he was more like an adopted son to them, and while he inherited their belongings and business, the soft-spoken nephew “brooded and was abstracted continually” after their deaths. Their bodies cremated, Schrank never claimed their ashes, quickly sold off the properties, and eventually found himself living in a cheap hotel over a saloon on Canal Street.

In his hotel room, Schrank kept pictures of four presidents on his walls—Lincoln, Grant, Garfield and Roosevelt—men whom, Schrank told acquaintances, he admired, despite having no serious political interests.  And it was in this room that Schrank was known to drink beer and stare in silence for hours at the faces of the four presidents.

After Theodore Roosevelt had completed his second term in office, in 1908, the former president went off on a tour of Europe and Africa.  The Republican Party, Roosevelt believed, was in good hands, with his friend William Howard Taft in office to maintain the progressive policies that Roosevelt had become known for.

When Roosevelt returned from his tour, he’d come under the impression that Taft was betraying his progressive legacy. Alarmed, Roosevelt decided he would challenge Taft for the Republican nomination, referring to his once close friend as “fathead” and “flubdub.” By the summer of 1912, it looked as though Roosevelt might actually win. Roosevelt was livid to learn, however, that parliamentary irregularities in the primary gave the sitting president an advantage in acquiring delegates. Crying thief, Roosevelt decided instead to form a third party—on the “Bull Moose” ticket—to seek a third term as president.

Schrank had known of Roosevelt since the former president had been New York’s police commissioner in 1895.  He’d admired Roosevelt’s presidency.  “Then I began to think seriously of him as a menace to his country,” Schrank later told police. “I looked upon his plan to start a third party as a danger to the country; my knowledge of history, gained through much reading, convinced me that Colonel Roosevelt was engaged in a dangerous undertaking.  I was convinced that if he was defeated at the Fall election he would again cry ‘Thief’ and that his action would plunge the country into a bloody civil war.”

Then John Schrank had the dream that would turn his thoughts into action. “I had a dream in which ex-President McKinley appeared to me,” Schrank told police. “I was told by McKinley in this dream that it was not [Leon] Czolgosz who murdered him, but Roosevelt.”  McKinley, in Schrank’s dream, pointed to Roosevelt and said, “This is my murderer. Avenge my death!”  The dead president, Schrank said, “told me that his blood was on Roosevelt’s hands, and that Roosevelt had killed him so that he might become President.”

The dream impressed Schrank, more than any words he had read in the newspapers, and he became “more convinced than ever that I should free the country from the menace of Roosevelt’s ambition.”

After moving to the rundown White Hotel on Canal Street, Schrank bought a revolver and set out on an ambitious tour through the South and Midwest, following Roosevelt from city to city, looking for the opportunity to kill him. But Roosevelt made it difficult, altering his arrival plans and slipping in and out of train stations using entrances “other than the one at which I had stationed myself.”

Traveling under the name of Walter Roos, Schrank decided to head to Milwaukee, where he planned more carefully, settling on ambushing Roosevelt at the entrance of his hotel, the Gilpatrick, as the candidate left to make a speech that evening at the Milwaukee Auditorium, three blocks away. Waiting calmly in the lobby with a crowd that had spilled onto the street, Schrank heard the cheer, then moved toward the candidate’s waiting car just as Roosevelt appeared in the lobby.  It was 8 p.m.

Pushing through the crowd, Roosevelt made it to the car alongside his campaign advisers, stood on the floorboard and turned to acknowledge his admirers with a wave of his hat when Schrank pushed forward and raised his revolver. Already seated in the car, Albert H. Martin, Roosevelt’s secretary and a former football player, caught a glimpse of metal in the air and leapt from the vehicle.

“Everything seemed to happen at once,” Martin recalled. “There was a flash, the sound of a shot, and I was on the ground with the man. I threw one arm around his neck and held him fast.  At the same time I caught his gun hand with my free hand and wrenched the revolver from him.”

Schrank strugged for a moment, “acting like a madman,” Martin noted, until the crowd set upon the would-be assassin and began to beat him, amid cries of, “Lynch him…kill him!”  Martin managed to lift Schrank to his feet and hold him before Roosevelt.

“Don’t hurt the poor creature,” Roosevelt said, on his feet again and not yet aware that he’d been shot.

Someone in the crowd asked if he’d been hurt. “Oh, no,” Roosevelt said, smiling.  “Missed me that time. I’m not hurt a bit.”

Martin and some police rescued Schrank from the angry crowd while Roosevelt and his advisers continued on, by automobile, to the auditorium.  On the way, an escort observed a bullet hole in Roosevelt’s army overcoat, and Roosevelt touched it, finding blood on his fingertips. Despite efforts to persuade him to seek medical attention, Roosevelt was adamant that he speak to the people of Wisconsin, even if he died while doing so.

He took the podium to great cheering, then spoke softly to the thousands in attendance.  “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

Roosevelt went on to speak of the importance of the Progressive movement.  He said he did not know the man who shot him, but that he was a coward and that the untruths printed in newspapers, on behalf of his opponents, had incited “weak and vicious minds” to acts of violence.

“Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap…. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the ‘Havenots’ arraigned against the creed of the ‘Haves.’ When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history.”

The crowd alternatively roared and pleaded with him to rest. To the side, Roosevelt’s advisers tried to persuade him to cut his speech short. Roosevelt would have none of it.

“My friends are a little more nervous than I am,” he said. “Don’t you waste any sympathy on me. I have had an A-1 time in my life and I am having it now.”

Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour. Then he was rushed to the Johnston Emergency Hospital, where six surgeons prepared him on an operating table. Roosevelt insisted they were taking the wound, between the collar bone and the lower rib, too seriously. After they proved unable to locate the bullet, he was transported to a Chicago hospital, where X-rays helped surgeons see that it had lodged where it couldn’t do further damage. They chose not to remove it.

All of the candidates agreed to suspend their stumping out of respect for the former president’s injury. After he came back, he beat Taft in the popular vote—but both men lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who carried 40 states to victory.

John Flammang Schrank pled guilty, believing that Roosevelt, having survived, might forgive him. But the former barman was sent off to the Central State Mental Hopsital in Waupun, Wisconsin, where he was not permitted to receive any visitors, and he died there in 1943, at age 67.

“I am sorry I have caused all this trouble for the good people of Milwaukee and Wisconsin,” Schrank said shortly after the assassination attempt, “but I am not sorry that I carried out my plan.”

Sources

Books: A Passion to Lead: Theodore Roosevelt in his own Words, Edited by Laura Ross, Sterling Signature, 2012.  Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris, Random House, 2010. It Happened in Wisconsin, by Michael Bie, Morris Book Publishing, 2007. Buckeye Presidents: Ohioans in the White House, Edited by Phillip Weeks, Kent State University Press, 2003.

Articles: “Attempt Made to Kill Roosevelt,” Boston Globe, October 15, 1912. “Crank Tries to Murder Roosevelt: Will Live,” Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1912. “Shrank Brooded, But Seemed Sane,” New York Times, October 16, 1912. “Martin Tells of His Leap,” New York Times, October 15, 1912. “Long on Trail of Roosevelt,” Boston Daily Globe, October 15, 1912. “Bullet in Right Breast, Doctors Say Wound is Not Serious,” New York Times, October 15, 1912. “Oct 14 2012 (sic) TIH Program. John Schrank Transcript,” Campaign History Blog, Ken Davy interview with Adam Green and Ariel Garneau, October 27, 2010. http://usatodayinhistory.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/oct-14-2012-tih-program-john-schrank-transcript/

Americans had seen nothing like it before—not in their own living rooms. Three years before the Army-McCarthy hearings and 22 years before Watergate, the Kefauver Committee hearings in the winter of 1951 brought a parade of gamblers, hoodlums, crooked sheriffs and organized-crime figures out from the shadows to sit and testify before the white-hot lights and television cameras. Housewives were glued to their sets day after day, while in barrooms and cafeterias, men gathered on their lunch breaks to witness the proceedings. Stores and offices across the country piped in day-long radio broadcasts. Colorful criminals, sweating and tapping their fingers nervously, seemed to step off the set of Hollywood gangster movies, speaking in broken English, under oath, about their activities. Some just sat in stony silence, refusing, as one witness said, to “criminate” themselves.

All of it came courtesy of a deliberate-speaking, endlessly polite Southern senator in horn-rimmed glasses named Estes T. Kefauver.  Chairing the Senate Committee to Investigate Crime and Interstate Commerce, the Tennessee Democrat organized a barnstorming tour across the country, handing down subpoenas from New York to New Orleans to Detroit to Los Angeles and sweeping into local courtrooms to expose thugs, politicians and corrupt law enforcement agents. The tour began quietly in January of 1951, but by February, in a serene postwar America where house and apartment doors were not always locked, “Kefauver Fever” gripped the nation, and the perception of a ubiquitous underground crime wave added to the country’s anxieties over communism and nuclear confrontation during the Cold War.

Born in 1903, Estes Kefauver studied at the University of Tennessee and at Yale University where he received his law degree in 1927.  He returned to Tennessee to practice law, taking an interest in finance and taxation, married  a Scottish woman, Nancy Pigott, and started a family that would include four children. Kefauver was elected to the House of Representatives in 1939 and re-elected four times; his support for President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation made him stand out in conservative Tennessee. Kefauver then made a bid for a Senate seat in 1948, running against E. H. Crump, the mayor of Memphis and boss of Tennessee’s Democratic Party. After Crump accused Kefauver of being a raccoon-like communist sympathizer, Kefauver calmly donned a coonskin cap for his next speech and said, “I may be a pet coon, but I’m not Boss Crump’s pet coon.”

With his new cap (which he was later depicted wearing in a portrait on the cover of Time), Kefauver was elected to the U.S. Senate and assumed office at a time when newspapers were beginning to report on extensive political corruption and government ties to organized crime. In 1950, he introduced a Senate resolution to establish a committee to investigate labor racketeering in interstate commerce.  In January of the next year, the Kefauver Committee took to the road, crisscrossing the country to ferret out likely targets who could be exposed.

Lawyers for the Committee arrived ahead of the chairman, terrifying local law enforcement as the committee drew up subpoenas and prepared for hearings to be broadcast on both television and radio. Kefauver would then arrive, as he did in the Committee’s first stop in New Orleans, and begin his questioning of, say, corrupt sheriffs, who would admit they did not exactly enforce the law when it came to gambling and prostitution in the parishes of Louisiana. “Diamond Jim” Moran, the owner of La Louisiane Restaurant in New Orleans, took advantage of the free publicity and repeatedly plugged his restaurant, which was teeming with illegal slot machines. “Food for kings,” he said.

When the Committee arrived in Detroit two weeks later, two local stations interrupted their regularly scheduled programming to cover two days of hearings featuring, as the Daily Boston Globe put it, “a parade of hoodlums of every description…[and] the records of their dealings with murderers, dope peddlers, [and] gamblers.” It was estimated that 9 out of 10 televisions had been tuned in. The general manager at WWJ-TV, where the station’s switchboard was jammed with appreciative callers, said the hearings were “the most terrific television show Detroit has ever seen.”

In St. Louis, the city’s squirming police commissioner said he couldn’t recall any details about his net worth before his life as a public official. Then the betting commissioner, James J. Carroll, refused to testify on television, stating that it was an invasion of privacy.

“This is a public hearing and anyone has a right to be here,” Kefauver told him. “Mr. Carroll, I order you to testify!”

“This whole proceeding outrages my sense of propriety,” Carroll shouted back. “I don’t expect to be made an object of ridicule as long as television is on.”

Kefauver warned Carroll that he’d be cited for contempt by the Senate, but Carroll refused to answer any questions, meandering nervously around the courtroom. The argument was captured by television cameras, as Carroll simply picked up his coat and began to walk out.

“Television,” Kefauver said calmly with a smile, “is a recognized medium of public information along with radio and newspapers. We’ve had several witnesses who seemed much less timid and experienced … I refuse to permit the arrangements for this hearing to be dictated by a witness.”

The bars and taverns in St. Louis did more business than they did when the World Series was broadcast three months earlier. But the Kefauver hearings were only beginning to capture the public’s attention. The Committee went west to Los Angeles, taking testimony from a handcuffed Allen Smiley, one of mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s former associates. Then Kefauver headed north to San Francisco, uncovering a vast pattern of illegal payouts from lobbyists to state legislators.  The hearings on the West Coast drew the largest audiences recorded in daytime television.

By the time the Kefauver Committee arrived in New York, in March of 1951, five of the city’s seven television stations were carrying live proceedings, broadcast to dozens of stations across the country.  The entire metropolitan area had become obsessed with the drama. There were “Kefauver block parties,” and attendance on Broadway wilted. For eight straight days, mobsters were dragged before the committee. None of the witnesses made the impact of Frank Costello, who started out by refusing to testify because, he said, the microphones would prohibit him from privately consulting with his attorney, sitting next to him.

Kefauver arranged a compromise. The television cameras would not show his face, but focus only on his hands.  Never mind that newsreel cameras captured Costello’s entire face and body as he spoke—the highlights of which were shown on newscasts later that evening. On live television, the cameras zoomed in on the mobster’s meaty hands as he nervously fingered the eyeglasses resting on the table, or moved to dab a handkerchief to his off-screen face as he dodged question after question, making him appear all the more sinister to daytime viewers. When asked by the Committee to name one thing he’d done for his country, Costello snapped, “Paid my tax!” The Los Angeles Times said it was “the greatest TV show television has ever aired,” and Variety estimated that ratings were “among the highest ever achieved” to that time.

Costello was a tough act to follow, but Kefauver found the star of the show in Virginia Hill Hauser—an Alabama-born former waitress and moll to the late Bugsy Siegel. Wearing a mink cape, silk gloves, and a large hat, and with the presence of a movie star, Hauser strutted into the U.S. Courthouse in Foley Square. She wasn’t about to let some stuffy senators from Washington, D.C. rough her up the way they had Costello.

In a defiant tone and her nasal voice, Hauser regaled the Committee with remarkable stories of friendships with “fellas” who gave her gifts and money. But as to how those men came into their money, Hauser said, she didn’t know “anything about anybody.” She and Bugsy had had a fight in a Las Vegas hotel, she said, after “I hit a girl at the Flamingo and he told me I wasn’t a lady.”

When she finished, she had to fight her way past the throng of scribes, slapping one female reporter in the face and cursing the photographers. “I hope the atom bomb falls on every one of you,” she shouted as she left the building. Hauser soon after hopped on a plane and fled the country to evade a tax evasion charge by the Internal Revenue Service.

After seeing Hauser’s appearance at the hearings, the columnist Walter Winchell contemplated the seemingly timeless paradox of reality television when he wrote, “When the chic Virginia Hill unfolded her amazing life story, many a young girl must have wondered: who really knows best?  Mother or Virginia Hill?  After doing all the things called wrong, there she was on top of the world, with a beautiful home in Miami Beach and a handsome husband and baby!”

The hearings made Estes Kefauver so popular that he decided to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1952. Remarkably, Kefauver beat the incumbent, Harry S. Truman, in the New Hampshire primary, leading Truman to abandon his campaign for renomination. Although Kefauver won the majority of Democratic primaries, he lost the nomination to Adlai Stevenson, who then lost the general election to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And even though Kefauver ran as Stevenson’s vice presidential candidate in the Democrats’ losing 1956 bid, it was the crime hearings that would cement the Tennessee senator’s legacy.

The Committee ultimately produced an 11,000-page report and exposed millions of Americans to organized crime for the first time. But in fact, the Kefauver hearings had little impact in the cities the Committee visited: He and his men swept in and then just as quickly swept out, leaving behind titillating news coverage and an unforgettable  television experience. The Committee’s recommendations on how to clean up organized crime were largely ignored, and the crime syndicates went back to business as usual, often with the same shadowy characters from the hearings still in control.

Sources:

Articles: “Frank Costello’s Hands: Film, Television and the Kefauver Crime Hearings,” by Thomas Doherty, Film History, Volume 10, No. 3,  1998.  “Hearings to Recall Earlier Investigations in Same Setting: McCarthy and Kefauver,” by John Chadwick, The Lewiston Daily Sun, May 13, 1973.  “Remembering Estes Kefauver,” by Theodore Brown, Jr. and Robert B. Allen, The Progressive Populist, 1996, http://www.populist.com/96.10.kefauver.html. “’Outraged’ Over Video at Hearing, Carroll, Bet Expert, Defies Senators,” by William M. Blair, New York Times, February 25, 1951. “Sheriff’s Ex-Wife Tells Senators How He Accumulated $150,000,” New York Times, January 27, 1951.  “Crime Attracts 1,000,000 TV Fans,” by John Crosby, Daily Boston Globe, March 4, 1951. “Costello Defies Senators, Walks Out of Hearing Here; Faces Arrest on Contempt,” by James A. Hagerty, New York Times, March 16, 1951. “Slain ‘Bugsy’ Siegel’s ‘Girl Friend’ Steals Senate Crime Inquiry Show,” by Emanuel Perlmutter, New York Times,  March 16, 1951.  “Senator Kefauver Wows ‘Em on TV,” by John Crosby, New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1951.