I never cared much about how I look. It’s hard for me to understand people who highly value what they look like above other aspects of life. I know we live in a culture where a physically attractive person is afforded more advantages in life and is often assumed to be more competent, more likeable and more trustworthy. It’s an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?
In our culture we see this “halo effect” happen especially with celebrities and politicians. In my career in human resources, we had to guard against the halo effect (cognitive bias basing your opinion of a person on one positive trait rather than the sum of all objective circumstances at hand). I remember interviewing many attractive and outgoing, friendly, and likeable candidates I would love to be around all day. But when I looked past the superficial attraction, they simply weren’t qualified to be successful at the job for which I interviewed them.
Before this post goes too far afield, let me bring it back to its original idea…the life of Hedy Lamarr. Few people think of anyone coming out of Hollywood as more than just a pretty face. Look at how many celebrities have lives that are very public train wrecks. But I recently ran across a Facebook post about Hedy Lamarr that intrigued me.
Once called the most beautiful woman in the world, the post detailed how Hedy Lamarr had been married 6 times, had escaped her first husband, an extremely controlling arms dealer who sold weapons to the Nazis by disguising herself as a maid and fleeing to Paris. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1914, her birth name was Hedwig Kiesler. By the time she married Husband #1 at age 18 she’d already been a film star in a controversial 1933 film called Ecstasy featuring nudity and a close-up of her face during alleged orgasm. The film was “obscene and immoral’, denounced by the Pope, banned in Germany and blocked by the United States Customs Service from entering the country.
In 1937, after her divorce, she met Louis B Mayer, head of MGM Studios, in London. Mayer was scouting Europe for talent. Hedy Kiesler initially turned down Mayer’s offer of $125 per week but booked herself on the same transatlantic ocean liner returning Mayer to the United States. By the end of the crossing, Mayer was so impressed with her they agreed to a contract worth several times the original offer. He persuaded her to change her name to Hedy Lamarr on a suggestion from his wife who admired silent film star Barbara La Marr. The name change was to distance her from the scandal of her European film career.
It was Mayer who began promoting Lamarr, in 1938, as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” She was teamed with the biggest male leads of the day in scores of films. She played the archetypal glamorous seductress with an exotic accent.
It seems acting bored Lamarr though, and according to her son, tinkering with inventions helped her escape from all the Hollywood stuff she never did enjoy. She set aside a room in her house, outfitted it with a drafting table and a whole wall of engineering books. Though she left formal education at the age of 15, she had a keen intellect and interest in how things worked….or why they didn’t. At night she sat in that room and invented. Someone once described her as a lonely immigrant channeling her inner Thomas Edison.
Hedy Lamarr and Howard Hughes were romantically involved, but their true connection was love of invention. While Hughes was trying to increase the speed of his airplanes, Lamarr studied books on the fastest birds and fish. She designed a new wing shape for his airplanes based on what she learned about the wings and fins in her books. Hughes called her a genius.
Lamarr invented a tablet that dissolved in water to create a flavored, carbonated drink, a better tissue box and a different kind of traffic light. But the invention for which she, and composer and pianist friend George Antheil, are most well-known is that of radio frequency hopping. Patent #2292387A, a Secret Communication System, was issued to Hedy (under her legal name at the time, Hedy Kiesler Markey) and George for a devise that prevented the jamming of torpedo navigation systems.
According to an article published on Military.com, the Navy not only said they were not interested (bullshit!), they classified the design as top secret and seized the patent, considering her “an alien with ties to a foreign adversarial power.” The US Military suggested she would be put to better use using her celebrity to raise money for war bonds. Which she did.
In fact, as we know now, frequency hopping technology had a lot of merit. The Navy controlled the patent after they seized it and began using the technology on ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Today it is the underlying basis for what is known as spread spectrum technology, the foundation for wireless communications like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellphones and GPS. Neither Hedy nor George ever received a dime from the invention.
Lamarr became a recluse later in life and died in 2000 at age 85 in Florida. She and George Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014. Forbes Magazine Reporter Fleming Meeks conducted an audio recorded interview with Lamarr in 1990. For whatever reason that interview was never heard or written about until PBS began making a documentary titled Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story for their American Masters Series.
In that interview Hedy Lamarr laughingly said “I was different, I guess. Maybe I came from a different planet. Who knows? But whatever it is, inventions are easy for me to do.” Later, in the same interview she states, “The brains of people are so much more interesting than their looks, I think.”
I agree.
Forget what people look like. Listen to what they say, how they act, what their character is. Then make your judgement. Lots of them will surprise you.
P.S. I’m back in Florida. It’s good to be home.
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