A beautiful mind

 

Until a few years ago, if you'd said the name Hedy Lamarr to me I'd have vaguely recalled a beautiful Hollywood actress of black and white movie days, and a running gag in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.  Then I listened to the opening track of Findlay Napier's excellent album, VIP : Very Interesting Persons.  The title is 'Hedy Lamarr', the melody memorable, the lyrics simple.  

"You know your place, You're just another pretty face."

"Every time the lights shine down, you disappear"

"If only they'd seen beyond that silver screen."

The sleeve notes hint at the person behind the image, saying she invented the process which became Bluetooth and WiFi.  Clearly there was much, much more to Ms Lamarr than my scanty knowledge even hinted at.  So I did a bit of reading, watched a documentary, and felt sad for the frustrations she must have suffered in her life.

Lamarr, originally Hedwig Kiesler from Vienna, was once touted as the most beautiful woman in the world, a big name Hollywood star who never really got the roles her thespian talents deserved.  She achieved a major success as Delilah to Victor Mature's Sampson in 1949, but was mostly typecast as the femme fatale because of her East European accent and astonishing beauty (and her refusal to have sex with the powerful men who dominated the industry).  As the Napier lyric says, "too beautiful".

Bored with the limited demands acting made on her, she frequently turned to inventing.  Early in World War 2 she and composer George Antheil came up with a radio guidance technology for naval torpedoes that would be impossible for the enemy to jam.  But it wasn't adopted, partly because the  insular military was guilty of not-invented-here syndrome, partly because a (mere) woman was involved in it's origins.   Their invention would eventually be adopted in the fifties, and became the basis for the aforementioned protocols we all use now in our everyday lives.  She and George were finally, posthumously, inducted into the national Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

There is so much more to the remarkable Lamarr's life, but those frustrations I mentioned must have a huge influence on the way she saw the world.  Would such a major talent have had greater recognition in today's world?  Hollywood is still misogynistic at times, as the #MeToo revelations have shown, but has still seen huge improvements since the forties and fifties where the stars were so much more closely controlled by the studios.  It isn't hard to imagine Lamarr becoming a much bigger name, and a director, in the twenty first century.  And that the intellectual resources and access to collaborators the internet can provide would have seen her practical imagination and inventiveness able to thrive.  A modern Hedy could find it easier to overcome those frustrations.

Lamarr is largely remembered as a beautiful face, a beautiful body, a beautiful woman.  Findlay and others are doing their bit to have her best known for having a beautiful mind.