She had moved to Florida by then, to the suburbs of Orlando, and she had largely withdrawn from public life. Her plastic surgeries had been poorly executed, and she was self-conscious about the result. She stopped giving interviews. She communicated, toward the end of her life, largely by telephone, and the people who spoke with her in those years described conversations that were simultaneously lucid and elliptical, ranging across decades of memory without any particular sequence.
Her mother, Gertrud, had joined her in Hollywood in 1942, making it out of Vienna through Lamarr’s financial support and logistical effort. What happened to Gertrud during the years when getting out of Austria was not yet impossible but was becoming so — and what resources and risks and connections Lamarr deployed to make the transit possible — is not a story that has been told in complete detail, and the full documentation, if it exists, has not been widely published. What is clear is that the mother arrived, and that this was not an automatic or easy thing.
The patent that Lamarr and Antheil had filed in 1941 was granted in 1942. Under patent law at the time, protection lasted seventeen years. In August 1959, the patent expired. George Antheil died in February of that same year — a heart attack in New York, at age fifty-eight — never having seen the technology deployed, never having received any royalties. The expiration of the patent was, in practical terms, the point at which whatever financial benefit might have come from commercial use became permanently unavailable, at least through the patent mechanism.