Ivy Farmers gathered again last night to discuss the book Hedy’s Folly, by Richard Rhodes. The day was rain soaked, falling out of the sky in buckets along with a cacophony of thunder that surprised Ms Bean. Unlike my Buddha, she was not afraid and simply raised her ears and eyebrows as if to say, “That’s interesting!” My friend Barbara drove this time through puddles and patches of ground fog to our “meeting of the minds,” to discuss Old Hollywood celebrity, genius, and German Shepherds who routinely escape their Invisible Fence. Now their owner must appear in “Dog Court.”
Hedwig Kiesler, aka Hedy Lamarr, was one of Hollywood’s earliest film sirens. I vaguely remember seeing old black and white movies of her on late night TV before TCM. What I didn’t know is that she was an astonishingly complicated, and smart woman who escaped Vienna and the looming Nazi threat (she was Jewish) while at the same time abandoning her husband, Fritz Mandl, an extremely wealthy, and abusive Austrian arms dealer. In this book, we find that the “most beautiful woman in the world” has a brain, and that she teams up with a New Age musician, George Antheil, originally from Trenton, NJ to invent “…a radio-controlled “spread spectrum” torpedo-guidance system, for which they received a patent in 1942.”
Because Hedy was a glamorous movie star, and George was an avant garde composer, the US government did not take them seriously. However, cell phones, GPS and Blue Tooth technology today are only possible because of their unlikely collaboration and invention!
We wondered if being a beautiful and brilliant woman today poses the same challenges. I’ve heard that single Harvard women don’t like to drop the “H” bomb on unsuspecting dates. Really guys, still?
MountainMornings 