June 12, 2026 • 56 mins
Georgia covers actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr and Karen tells the story of tennis champion Billie Jean King and the Battle of the Sexes.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
He Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia hertstart.
That's Karen Kilgariff, And this is a very special episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's right. This is a bonus episode, surprise.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right. It means you're getting more stories. You didn't
earn it, but you deserve it.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So this episode is presented by Hyundai. That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Thank you Hyundai for making this storytelling bonus happen.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
So for today's theme for this bonus episode, we thought
it'd be fine to connect our stories through a shared thread.
Both of them feature people who were innovators, pioneers and
just generally ahead of their time.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yes, people who saw things differently and acted on it,
that's right. And our women.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So thank you Hyundai for this bonus episode. Thanks for listening,
and let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Let's do it all right.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm excited about the theme of this because it's a
story I've always wanted to cover. It is about a
really incredible innovator and a woman who is, by all,
what's the word accounts a badass? Thank you. So today's
story is about an actress who is known as the
most beautiful woman in the world for decades. Her name
was synonymous with beauty, glamour, and sex appeal. She was
(01:23):
even said to be the inspiration for both catwomen, Women
and Women, Catwoman Everywhere and snow White Oh Wow. And
over those same decades, while everyone knew her name, virtually
no one knew that she invented the necessary precursor to
some of the most ubiquitous technology that we use today,
including Wi Fi and Bluetooth. This is the story of
legendary screen actress and equally legendary inventor Hetty Lamar.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's such a cool opportunity to be able to talk
about her. Yeah, but I truly think she is one
of the most perfect looking women.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It's ridiculous, like this movie. I watched the Bombshell the
Headed Lamar Story documentary, and like, every time you see
her on screen, your breath is taken away at how
gorgeous she is.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
But then the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Then there's a brain as well. She's a very complicated woman.
And the main source I use for the story is
a twenty seventeen American Master's documentary called Bombshell the Hetty
Lamar Story, and the rest of the sources can be
found in the show notes. So Hetty is born head
Vig bring that name back, I mean Hedwig Ava Maria Keisler.
She's born in nineteen fourteen in Venice, Austria, Nope, in Vienna, Austria.
(02:28):
Her parents are both born Jewish, but it seems like
she's raised not very religious or both kind of more
or less secular, which is really common in Vienna at
the time, and it seems like that was the place
to be in that time period, post World War One,
pre World War II and all the atrocities, like this
place was it. Both of her parents had come from
humble roots but had gotten good educations, and her father
(02:50):
is the manager of a major bank in Vienna, and
so Hetti has a really close, loving relationship with him,
and he really like you know, wants her to get
her education and is very like you know, supportive of that.
So one day, when she's five years old, Hetty takes
her music box apart and then successfully puts it back together.
I never could do that second part.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It's fun to take things apart, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
And this sparks a lifelong interest in engineering. So her
father walks her around Vienna and points out all the technology,
the street cars, the electric cables and explains to her
how they work, and so she's just super smart right
off the bat. She grows up in a part of
Vienna that's heavily populated with artists and intellectuals, many of
whom are Jewish, but also secular, and this means it's
(03:32):
a fairly progressive society. Nudity and sexuality in the arts
isn't really taboo, you know, like Cabaret.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Think of that musical.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's generally agreed upon that if Hetty had
been less beautiful, maybe she would have become a scientist.
But she grows up in this art's focused culture, and
because as a teenager she starts to become incredibly gorgeous
that she just has to become a model and be
in movies almost like, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Should we see a picture of her? Yes, I mean
so beautiful, it's crazy. She looks like Elizabeth Taylor meets
Vivian Lee.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah, those perfect kind of petit faces.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So, God bless anyone that can do with part down
the center. It cannot be me.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's amazing. Hetty is very good at being on film,
and somewhat a wild teenager, she enjoys all this attention.
When she's sixteen, she walks into one of the biggest
movie studios in Vienna and within days.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
She's getting roles in movies. It's that easy back then.
I mean, when you're hot, Yeah, you're that beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
When Hetty's just eighteen years old, in nineteen thirty three,
she stars in a movie called Ecstasy, which is about
a board housewife who has a sexual awakening, and this
film kind of follows her for the rest of her life.
It includes a wide shot of her running naked in
the woods, a topless moment, and a close up of
her face while she's basically having an orgasm, which is
(04:58):
just like unheard of and so scandalous to everyone outside
of this society that's just, you know, really progressive. This,
of course, is way too much for American audiences. You know,
they yank at their pearls. The film is banned in
America because of the sex, and it's banned in Nazi
Germany because Hetty's Jewish. So this film gets a lot
(05:20):
of attention, and it seems like Hetty had a bad
experience on set as well, so it's just kind of
it sucks, like you wonder what her life would have
been like if she hadn't done this specific film. In
nineteen thirty four, right after shooting this movie Ecstasy, Hetty,
who is nineteen, marries an Austrian munitions baron name Fritz Mandel.
So Fritz is older, he's divorced, he like wants this
(05:43):
beautiful woman on his arm, essentially nineteen year old. He
sells weapons to the Nazis and is extraordinarily wealthy, but
he's also Jewish. But he comes from this along line
of munitions barons, right, so what do you do? So
Hitler won't personally associate with him, but it's kind of
gray area in the beginning of Hitler's regime.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Well, yeah, I mean there's plenty of how many companies
that still exist today exist because they did exactly that
thing right with Hitler, right crazy and used slave labor.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
All that's totally so. As you might expect from an
arms dealer to the Nazis. Fritz is not the nicest man.
He's extremely jealous and possessive of Hetty. He instructs household
staff to listen in on her phone calls anytime she
says the word acting. They tell he have to tell him,
and she gets you know, in trouble, she's expected to
look nice at dinner parties and do little else, and
(06:36):
she does attend some meetings with him if he needs
her to look good on his arm, and these meetings
she learns a bit about torpedoes and how they work,
so she's still like chasing, you know, knowledge, even though
it's kind of being banned from her life. She learns
that torpedoes need to be guided by radio frequencies, but
that this makes them detectable to enemies who can jam
(06:58):
those frequencies. She can't stop think about this idea and
how one might evade detection by changing frequencies quickly enough.
But her husband isn't interested in her thoughts on the matter.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It's all yap, yap yeap to him.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, so you can imagine like if she had gone
to college and gone to school and got an education
in engineering and science, you know, she would have gone
on to do even bigger things. But she figured it
out on her own. She stays married to Fritz for
about three years. Then her father dies of a heart
attack and it's just completely devastating to Hetty. So she's like,
I got to get out of this life, this isn't
(07:31):
where I'm supposed to be. She's watched after so carefully
that she has to actually have plan an escape from
the home, and she does this. First she sows all
of her jewelry into the lining of her coat, and
then one night she hires a maid who looks like her.
One night, she puts sleeping powder in the maid's tea
(07:52):
and basically like puts her to bed, takes the maid's outfit,
puts it on, and takes off in the night.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Thank you so much for her coat up like this.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, you want to be like good for her, but
it's also the maid. It's just like wakes up in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Do we know for a fact that the maid wasn't
in on it.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I mean maybe she was like, yeah, I'll do it. Dang,
put me out.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Red flag for your job number one. You look exactly
like the lady interviewing you. Right, don't do it.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And you get sleepy around her all the time. So
she rides off into the night on her bicycle and
escapes her abusive marriage at just twenty one. She flees
to London, where she lives with some family friends, and
then one night she goes to a movie and sees
the MGM Lion at the beginning of the movie, and
she's just impressed with the movie and she's like, I
want to do that, So she tries to get a
(08:38):
job with that studio. And as we know, the studio
is headed by Louis B. Mayer, so it's metrical to
Mayor and he's actually in town in London at the
time for a short visit and he's trying to recruit
European actors who are fleeing the Nazis. Many of them
don't speak great English and are desperate to get out
of Europe, so he's able to sign them with like
(08:59):
really toy contracts. I mean, that's dark. It's so dark.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
He's Jewish himself, and he's you know, I mean, I'm
sure there's a justification in some ways, but like, at
least I'm doing something.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Absolutely you could be looked at in different ways, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Why not just a nice contract? This is the way
of the future. I'm positive it's gonna pare it. Oh,
just that people get into that position. They're like, we're
going to do some nice contract.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Everyone's going to be happy.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
They're going to be able to buy a house after that.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
No, one's going to feel used.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
They're gonna love it, and they're gonna love the arts.
It's gonna be worth it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Hetty's offered one of these contracts. It's not as bad
because she's already been a movie and stuff. It's one
hundred and twenty five dollars a week is what she's offered,
which in today's money.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
This was in the thirties. Yeah, six hundred dollars a
week and ninety seven, so that's a lot of money
a week. That's like union rate totally. But it's not
enough for her.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
She's like, I'm actually talented and beautiful and have experienced,
but she does want the job, so she storms out
and like leaves an impression that way, and then finds
out that Mayor will be leaving London on the specific ship,
the SS Normandy, So she books a one way ticket
on that ship and then make sure to run into
him throughout.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
All she has to do. She's a hot lady.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
She puts on her tennis clothes and her bathing suit
and just happens to walk.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
By him all the time, and a nice red lip.
She's done and done.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
One night, she enters the dining room and her you know,
beautiful clothes that she had already and her beautiful face
and walks in and then everyone turns to stare at her.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Stop pause, look at the ceiling. Yeah, imagine yourself on
the ceiling.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Knows it like God?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
That feeling.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, And so he offers her a contract for five
hundred dollars a week. By the end of.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
The trip, he ups it by two hundred.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
It was one twenty five and now it's five hundred
h which is eleven five hundred and eighty eight dollars
in today's money a week.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. Hell yeah, So it works.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Okay, great, And he and his wife come up with
her name because she needs a fancy name. So it's
Hetty Lamar, after a different Actressy that tragically died, and
Lamar means the sea. So Hetty Lamar.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Okay, because they're at the sea.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I don't know, it's pretty good. Hetty finds her footing
in a film called Algiers, in which she plays a
glamorous jewel thief, which should we take a look at
another photo.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No brag, but those are the eyebrows I had in
the nineties. You can tell the remnants are still there.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
But man pencil thin.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
We went that thin in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Imagine she looked that good with thin eyebrows, what she'd
look like with normal eyebrows even better.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
She had those big, tall, laminated ones.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Tat it on Okay. In nineteen thirty nine, when she's
twenty three, she marries a screenwriter named Jean Marky and
they adopt a son together. She ends up having a
lot of marriages, and it's one of those sad stories
like you know, Marilyn Monroe, where they just never seem
to work.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's such a weird time for women in marriage, though,
because she's making eleven thousand dollars a week, right, so
she doesn't need to be doing anything. She probably has to.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, and it seems like this dude that she married,
everyone was like him, and she was like, he's nice
to meaniize me with my dad. He immediately starts cheating.
Like she even tries to make the right you know,
not some fancy actor, not a munitions farn a smart.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Guy, a writer. This is a safe bet, you fool.
They're the worst every time. Yeah, true, they're the worst
every time.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Every man is entitled. It's on some level. So he
starts dating other actresses, and the marriage ends. In nineteen forty.
Heady now has a huge year with MGM, first appearing
in the movie Boomtown, which is a massive hit, and
she starts in several more movies that year, working under
that brutal studio system that we've heard so much about.
But she's just working her butt off, and in order
(12:45):
to perform for long hours, she's given amphetamines it's you know,
the usual, the usual, and then given sleeping pills at
night to help her sleep, but she doesn't sleep. She
goes home and works on inventions. She has an invention
like desk in her house nice where she has all
her like science things, and has one in her studio
(13:06):
on set as well where she can go and tinker
between takes because she wants to do science stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
After her marriage to Jane fails, Hetty, she starts dating
Howard Hughes yea the aviation tycoon. Do you know a
lot about him?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I mean I watched The Aviator, so I know everything
Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But
incredible innovator, serious mental illness, right that kind of went unchecked.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think so, Yeah, she says he's a quote, very
strange man. But they do get along really well. Give
us I know, they said something like he's a bad lover,
and I'm like, what does that means?
Speaker 1 (13:41):
That mean on what level? There's so many levels where
he could be. He keeps making airplane noises just the
whole time.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Right, But they do get along intellectually. He's, you know,
someone she can talk to about science and interesting things
like that, and he gives her access to his workforce
of scientists for whatever invention she wants to make. And
in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She
takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these
square wings, and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And
(14:10):
so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish
and sketches out a drawing of what the two would
look like as a plane, and that kind of becomes
the plane that we know today. Like he uses this shit,
and he calls her a genius.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
She is a genius. It sounds like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Throughout her adulthood, she's always tinkering with chemistry and with ideas.
By nineteen forty, World War two is in full swing,
although America has not yet entered and Hetty's mother has
escaped Vienna Ann is living in London, so Hetty's trying
to get her mom from London, which still isn't safe
for her to the US. But it's incredibly dangerous for
(14:46):
those ships that are crossing to America because German U
boats can and will torpedo civilian ships making that crossing.
So you have that issue, and then also supply ships
are being torpedoed and sunk, and it's kind of at
the point where we're losing the war because we can't
get the supplies, we can't get you know, people out
of there in time. So Hetty comes up with this
(15:08):
idea that she had had of frequency hopping, with help
from a professor at cal Tech and Pasadena, guiding the
torpedoes with frequencies that constantly change, they can't be jammed.
So she meets a composer named George Antyle, and together
they come up with a way to make this frequency
hopping system work, inspired by a method George has used
(15:29):
and figured out of synchronizing player pianos. So you know,
when you see the leg dashes that are all the
way across the line, so if those are in secret order,
then if they jam the radio frequency, it doesn't matter
only jamming it for this you know, amount of time,
because it's hopping so often, so you can't jam the
whole thing, okay, And so that way they're easier to
(15:50):
always control.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yeah, like a player piano, they just keep going right.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
So George and Hetty patent this idea. They present it
to the Navy, but it's rejected being impractical. They kind
of laugh them off, and it was like, what do
you think. This isn't a player piano, it's a torpedo.
And then also Hetty is from Austria, and so they
also seize the patent because it's the property. They say,
I'm an enemy alien. Oh yeah, she's not from here.
(16:17):
They think she could be a spy. She's made this
patent and tried to give it to them, and they're like, no.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
We'll get you right, And then it's like yeah, now
we're onto you, or it's like right, you're onto me
the person who came and gave you this.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Idea, and you know, she's not American enough for them.
But then they're also like, hey, can you use your
good looks and celebrity to sell war bonds?
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And she does I mean, imagine how many ideas and
inventions and things have been lost at time because the
kind of patriarchy in this system just couldn't entertain the
idea of a woman having a good idea. Yeah, just
a real loss yeah, or had too.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Much of an ego to like agree and allow it.
It's frustrating. Can we have our own planet? Please? No,
thank you, that sounds right, thank you. In nineteen forty three,
Hetty marries a British actor named John Loder. They are
together until nineteen forty seven. They have two children. Everyone
says he's really dull compared to her vivaciousness and intelligence.
(17:18):
So then she has another brief marriage after that.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
But what I like the way you said that, Like,
because everyone said he was dull, She's like, fahine, I'll
divorce him, get somebody else.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And so Hetty has a bumpy relationship with Louis B.
Mayor I think a lot of actresses probably did, and
she gets a reputation for being difficult, yeah, because she
doesn't let people push her around. So in the late
forties she produces two movies on her own, which is
pretty much unheard of at the time. But she's not
getting the parts she wants, and so she does it herself,
which pisses off Mayor even more. And in nineteen forty
(17:51):
nine she does get the movie Samson and Delilah. It's
a massive hit. It renews her career. And then right
after that she produces and stars in the Love of
Three Queens and it's just this huge expensive production that
she undertakes. It doesn't get a distribution and she loses
a lot of money from it. At this point, she's
kind of struggling financially. So in nineteen fifty two, when
(18:13):
she's thirty eight, she marries an oil tycoon named w.
Howard Lee, which is like she kind of is like,
this is my life now, she can I need to
support my children.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
You're going to hit that money button if it is
within your reach.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, And she like has to move to Texas with him,
and it sounds almost like a green Acre's kind of.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Not sit the movie star and get her to move
back to tex Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
She does become a strange from her first child, the
adopted son she had with Jean, her second husband. He
goes off to boarding school and ultimately kind of is
taken in by another family and so it's kind of
not spoken of anymore. This is kind of sad, and
so eventually Hetty's marriage to the Texan Lee also fails,
and she has two other short marriages after that. Fifty
(19:00):
two shorts to struggle more profoundly with her mental health
and with substance abuse, which of course had been introduced
to her by professionals at the MGM studio in the
late fifties and sixties. When she's in her forties. This
all takes a huge toll, and she has several breakdowns.
In the sixties, she also becomes a patient of doctor
Max Jacobson aka Doctor feel Good, who I actually covered
(19:22):
in episode three forty nine. I was surprised to hear that.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Anne was relatively recently.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, it's called a bit of stew twenty twenty two.
That's not recently. Oh okay, I don't know where my
brain was at the time.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
That we were on zoom. That was like the blank years.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, we should skip that and rewind, just skip the
whole pairent tend it never happened. Yeah. So he does
this evil thing where he tells people that he's injecting
them with a vitamin shot, vitamin B to pep you
up and it's just myth yeah, and gets all these
people addicted to meth. So Hetty's behavior in the sixties
and seventies becomes very erratic and unstable. It's hard on
(19:59):
her kids, but her daughter says, quote, now I can
be forgiving of that erratic behavior because she was a
victim of the very system that made her famous. And
she's actually arrested for shoplifting in nineteen sixty six in
this weird like one own a writer style way that
it's like did she or didn't she? She gets acquitted,
but it definitely tarnishes her reputation.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I mean, it's that kind of shoplifting where it's like
you don't need anything, right, and you're clearly doing it
for like the dopamine his.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Right, or she had a bunch of money on her too.
It's like, was it a misunderstanding it could have been yeah,
or did she just like walk out thinking I'm Hetty Lamar,
I must have like a tab.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Open a right exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
You don't do things for yourself like that back then.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I think the one own a writer want it reminded
me of like when somebody is a star back then
that level of a star where literally everyone does everything
for you.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Gives you whatever you want all the time.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
As she gets older, she starts to struggle with her identity.
She's always been appreciated primarily for her beauty, and now
that it's starting to fade, you know, through her eyes.
She starts to get cosmetic proceed and in fact she
dictates to the surgeon how she thinks the procedure should
be done, and she ends up making plastic surgery. She
(21:08):
advances it by being like, you should do the incision here,
you should do the incision here. Here's where you should
hide this, Here's where you should enhance this. And she
actually looks amazing even after she's gotten some work done.
I mean, she looks, in today's standards, incredible. But of
course this press is still relentless, still photographs her every
time she leaves the house. It's kind of just worst
(21:30):
case scenario. All the bad stories you hear from back
then happens to her, and she becomes reclusive, and she
starts to look less and less like herself the more
procedure she gets. So in the eighties, when she's in
her seventies, Hetty struggles more, especially as her money starts
to run out, but she returns to thinking about her
original frequency hopping patent, and she's pretty sure it's been used,
(21:51):
and so if you use the patent, you have to
pay for it. Yeah, that's kind of the understanding when
you file the patent. That's something about, Yeah, if the
US government uses it, they have to pay you for it.
And she knows that by the sixties, during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, the Navy had been using frequency hopping, so
this would mean that they had used it before her patent.
(22:12):
It had expired in nineteen fifty nine, but she expects
that they had used it before, which would mean it
hadn't expired yet, and so she is owed money. So
in nineteen ninety, when Hetty's seventy five, a reporter named
Fleming Meeks, who works at Forbes at the time, is
talking with his father, who's an astrophysicist at MIT, and
his father tells him he had just learned something interesting
(22:33):
from a colleague that actress Henny Lamar had been a
brilliant and prolific inventor. So Fleming the journalist is hooked
on this idea and he tracks Hetty down. He coaxes
her out of her shell by sending her a bouquet
of roses. He kind of sweet talks her and then
gets this long interview with her on tape which you
can hear in the documentary, where she talks about all
(22:54):
of her inventions, her life, all the incredible things she's
been through, how she feels about them, and she talks
about her suspicions that the Navy had used her patent.
So the article runs that year and it's the first
time the public ever finds out about Hedge Lamar's inventions.
You know, she had been keeping it to herself. Over
the course of the nineties and into two thousands, frequency
(23:15):
hopping is being used for an explosion of technologies that
we now use all the time. GPS is a big one,
Wi Fi, Bluetooth. Hetty's idea is at the foundation of
this technology. Do we have a photo of the plans?
Because I know Karen loves scientist.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There you go, oh, I love a blueprint.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Here's a blueprint. What you will?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
This is her just like as she's filming and then
in her dressing room, she's like, just some thoughts. What
a genius you know?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And that's just one of very many. So our most
secure military communications are done with a satellite system that
was built using Hetty's patent, though the patent had long expired.
In nineteen ninety seven, the Navy, Millstar, which is a
satellite communications company, and Lockheed Martin want to present Hetty
with an award for all her work, but she declines.
(24:07):
Appearing at the ceremony. She's kind of a recluse and
won't leave her house, and so her son accepts the
award for her, and she says, quote, I am happy
that this invention has been so successful. I appreciate your
acknowledgment of you honoring me, and it was not done
in vain. Thank you end quote, so it's kind of
all she gets. Hetty dies peacefully in the year two thousand,
(24:28):
at the age of eighty five, without ever knowing for
sure if her patent had been used before it expired.
Had It's only after that a military contractor says that
he was handed Hetty's patent by a Navy official in
nineteen fifty five and asked to see if it was
good for anything, so he didn't know it was her patent.
(24:49):
This was four years before the patent had expired. So
just like she had thought it had been used, he
used it actually to create something called a Sonobuoie. You
know what that is. It's a booy that communicates securely
with aircraft. Sure, it's just it was used. Yea. He
had been unaware of the patent implications or that Hetty
had not been paid, and only comes to light when
(25:10):
he creates a website explicitly thanking Hetty Lamar for her
inventions and says, without you and this invention, we would
have never been able to create that initial secure communication system.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Wow. So she was right all along, confirmed from the inside.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
That's right. So that is the story of Hetty Lamar,
who was a great beauty of course, but also more
importantly an innovator and an inventor.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Wow. I love that. That's incredible. So this story begins
on September nineteenth, nineteen seventy three. A twenty nine year
old Southern California woman sits alone in the Astrodome's nosebleed section.
She's here to study the building because tomorrow she'll be competing.
(25:54):
She's looking at the incredibly high ceilings, the intense lighting,
and she tries to imagine the booming sound of the
packed house that will be there the next day. Ben
she looks down toward the floor level and sees herself
facing off with her competitor in front of millions of people,
knowing that this isn't an ordinary match. Everything is actually
(26:14):
on the line. This is the story of the cultural
moment when legendary athlete, feminist, and LGBTQ plus icon Billy
Jean King wins the Battle of the Sex's tennis match. Hell, yeah,
do you know about this?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
No? I know the story not very well. Okay, I'm excited.
Let me get to the details.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Okay. So the sources used in the show today are
Billy Jean King's autobiography it's called All In, and her
website billyjenking dot com. We went to the source, got it,
But there are other ones and they're in our show notes.
So Billy Jean Moffatt, which is her maiden name, is
born in Long Beach, California, in nineteen forty three, and
as she grows up, she discovers her love for sports
(26:53):
like softball and basketball, but she doesn't pick up tennis
until she's a preteen, when her friend sus and asks
if she wants to come with her for a lesson
at Long Beaches Virginia Country Club. Did you know there
are country clubs down in Long Beach? No? I didn't either,
So her friend and their family are members. Billy Jean
is not a member of this or any other country club.
(27:15):
Her family self described blue collar family. Her dad's fireman,
her mom is a homemaker. So tennis is basically a
sport that she's just not been exposed to. It's basically
at this time for the elite, so the secret, secret sport.
And according to her for this first lesson, Billy Jeane
is not good at tennis, but something clicks inside her
(27:36):
and later on she's going to write quote, I like
the variety and mental challenge. I liked being able to
hit the ball over and over. Tennis fascinated me from
the first day I played with Susan using a borrowed
racket end quote. So she is obviously as a natural
aptitude for the game. She's very competitive, she's always working
to improve, and because of this she starts to win
(27:58):
a lot. But it is nineteen fifty five, so even
though Billy Jean is proving herself on the court, she's
treated very differently than the young male athletes that she
competes around. When she's just twelve years old, she goes
to the exclusive Los Angeles Tennis Club Have you ever
been there either? And she's wearing a pair of shorts
her mother made for her, and she's told those shorts
(28:20):
are in violation of the club's dress code for girls
and women, which requires them to wear either a tennis
dress or a tennis skirt. Gross. So then later, when
the other tennis players gather for a group photo, she
is excluded from that photo. Another time, also at the
Los Angeles Tennis Club, they have lunch arranged for the
(28:41):
top ranked players, which Billy Jean should be involved with.
But it's just for the boys. So Billy Jean and
her mom eat bag lunches outside on a bench. Oh yeah,
but wherever Billy Jean plays tennis, sexism and double standards follow.
One of her teachers dos points off of her grades because,
as they say, quote, Billy Gene occasionally takes advantage of
(29:03):
her superior ability during recess tennis games.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Oh my god, Yeah, she's upsetting boys by being too good.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
At Yeah, they get real upset.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Oh about the sports.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
She will later write about it, saying quote pursuing your
goals as a girl or a woman often meant being
pricked and dogged by slights like that, and so she
had to get used to it from a very young age.
But as she enters her teen she's becoming aware of
how other people are completely shut out of certain spaces,
like the many tournaments that she competes in that are
(29:35):
hosted at whites only country clubs. She writes in her autobiography, quote,
I wondered how the people of color around me felt
when I was young. I'd seen photos of how the
Little Rock nine students had to walk past an angry
white mob to desegregate their Arkansas school in nineteen fifty seven,
or how six year old Ruby Bridges still had to
be escorted daily by four federal marshals to attend classes
(29:57):
at her previously all white New Orleans school. I knew
the stories of how ALTHEA. Gibson and Jackie Robinson broke
the color barriers in their respective sports, tennis and baseball.
End quote. So growing up with this backdrop of the
civil rights movement, it imprints a huge sense of justice
on Billy jan King. She will write, quote, even if
you're not a born activist life can damn sure make
(30:20):
you one. Wow. The older I got, the more I
aspired to There wasn't just unrest in the world around us.
There was a storm gathering inside of me. End quote.
I totally remember this culturally, even though I was three
years old when it happened, so it's too young, but
I think it kind of lived on for at least
the next decade, but I seem to remember like the
(30:42):
vibe of it. Ultimately, Billy Jing King, as she began
to fight for women's rights, had to fight publicly against
really chauvinistic men about.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Those right, not just fighting it in tennis, it's you're
fighting the entire world society.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
You're like, yeah, you become the face of a fight
like that, which is a lot of pressure. Billy Jean
graduates high school in nineteen sixty one, and just weeks later,
at seventeen years old, she and nineteen year old Karen
Haunts when the women's doubles at Wimbledon, and they are
the youngest who ever do it, and they still are
to this day.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Holy shit, Yeah, seventeen.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Seventeen and nineteen, they just go in and like destroy
with this win. Billy begins to shoot up the ranks
of competitive tennis. She becomes the number three player in
the United States. By nineteen sixty six, when she's just
twenty three years old, she's the top ranked female tennis
player in the world. She wins Wimbledon's women's singles for
(31:39):
the next three years in a row. In nineteen sixty seven,
she wins what will be the precursor to the US Open,
which are the US Nationals, and the next year she
wins the Australian Open, so she's dominating nice. In between
all of those gigantic wins, she marries a law student
named Larry King, no relation to Larry King, but if
(32:00):
this was like a young Larry King, pre suspenders Larry King.
So Larry supports Billy Jean's career wholeheartedly. But the tournament's
circuit is tough and it's undeniably discriminatory two women athletes,
most notably Billy Jean and her female peers, are routinely
paid less prize money than their male counterparts. So in
(32:20):
nineteen seventy, twenty seven year old Billy Jean makes a move.
She and eight other female tennis players symbolically accept a
one dollar contract to join the Virginia Slims Tour. Wow,
So Virginia Slims, infinamous ladies skinny cigarette right that we
all know and love, decides to start a tennis tour
with women only. It's a nineteen cities stop tennis tournament
(32:43):
that travels across the United States, and the cash prizes
for the top athletes are all for just the women. Basically,
they just get their own kind of like prize bank
and give it to themselves.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Got it.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
These athletes still plan on playing the marquee tournaments of
the year, like the US Open and Wimbleton, but by
leaving the traditional tournament circuit, they're putting their careers and
their reputations in this intensely male dominated sports world at stake.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Well, it makes sense to what They're like, you're not
going to pay us an f We're going to go
somewhere else. We'll get paid.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
See how much money you lose because we're not here anymore.
Right And if you don't think we're that important, we
only deserve you know, a tenth of the pod, then
let's see what happens. It's a huge move, and it's
that kind of thing. It can't be kind of underlined
enough how it was not happening. It had not you know,
very few other places where women asserting themselves in those situations.
(33:37):
So now, in addition to playing top notch tennis, these
women have to work basically their asses off promoting the
Virginia Slims Tour, making sure there's butts and seats so
they sell so then they have the big prize tournament
to be competing for. In some cities, Billy Jean and
our fellow athletes hand out free tickets to random pedestrians
on the street, hoping they'll come and watch and basically
(33:59):
get in interested in women's tennis, and these efforts actually
pay off, with thousands of spectators showing up in every city,
proving to male stakeholders that there is real public interest
in women's sports. She must be so proud today watching
season after season these teams take off and these female
athletes just become more and more in the public eye.
(34:20):
It's very cool that she's around to see it. All
the while, Billy Jean King continues shattering the norms. In
nineteen seventy, she makes history as the first female tennis
player to earn more than one hundred thousand dollars in
prize money in a single season. Wow, do you want
to guess how much that isn't today's eight hundred ninety
four thousand, eight hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
I mean, it's over.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
You just won, so okay, so nice one, thank you,
but don't celebrate too soon, because the gender pay gap
still exists. Just two years later, Billy Jean wins the
US Open and has paid fifteen thousand dollars less in
prize money than the male winner. But instead of planning,
instead of whining, it just fuels her. She appears before
(35:05):
Congress fighting for the passing of Title nine, which bans
sex based discrimination in schools that receive federal dollars. So
she goes to the root of this discrimination.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It's like not even specific to her and her career
at that point. It's like, here's where it began for me,
and here's where it begins for so many young girls.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, let's fucking kick it. Let's get out of the
fucking way.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And this passes in nineteen seventy two, and it remains
the law of the land today. Although they chip chip
chip away, they sure do. I didn't know this this
is so compelling to me. In nineteen seventy three, Billy
Jean King forms the Women's Tennis Association. Wow, so Jay,
she just gets hurt.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
You know what I'm gonna do now?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Yeah, She's like, we got to tighten this stuff up.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I have no excuse for my laziness.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Listen, you do three podcasts a week. It's not easy,
thank you. It's fishing for that w and you got it.
Women's Tennis Association is responsible for, among other things, the
fact that women get equal pay at the US Open. Now,
that was one of the first things that after they
came into the world, they started fighting for that, and
the US Open basically gave in the year that that
(36:15):
discussion started, like basically immediately. And so the US Open
was the first major tournament of any sport to award
the same prize money to male and female competitors. And
for a time like that, it was a huge trailblazing
victory for the equal rights of women. But you know,
when women are making progress in the world, there's always
going to be an old bowling bag of a man
(36:35):
who's going to cry about it, Isn't there.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
An old bowling bag of a man?
Speaker 1 (36:40):
And in this story, there is a true villain. A
lot of people there are theories that this was kind
of pr yes, yes, churned up for press with a
photos we will. But the thing that's funny, I'll show
you that bowling bag for sure. What's funny about this
is that it was such a part of the culture
of women yet get back into the kitchen type.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Of stutal in man for Mars. Women are from being Yeah, this.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Ex tennis player whose career ended in nineteen thirty nine, Jesus,
a man by the name of Bobby Riggs. He starts
talking about when all of this kind of movement happens.
Anytime that he's like interviewed or talking, he does a
lot of what they call when you play the X
something games exposition games. What's the word I'm looking for
(37:24):
X games now, exhibition thank you? Exhibition games. Okay, his
career had basically turned to playing exhibition games. Right, He's
like the Harlem Globetrotters of tess But I don't think
he was good like the Harlem Globetrotters. I mean those
guys back and rocked. This guy I think was just
around and had a big mouth, got it and so.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
That's all you have to do to be a man
these days and to be successful.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
That's right around these days, have those big day. It's
pretty much how it is. So he just starts just
spouting inflammatory sexist comments about women's tennis and the fight
for will pay in the sport, right, because she's making progress.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Shut the fuck up, dude.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
His two big ones that he did were he said
women's tennis quote stinks. You can see some pretty legs,
but it's night and day compared to the men's game. Wow,
it's just very standard.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Another time he's quoted as saying a women's place is
in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and not necessarily in
that order.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Gross dude.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Right, let's take a look at Bobby Riggs.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh what's he looks like a fucking what's his name,
Austin Powers.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
He's absolutely awestin power. Oh, oh my god. I wonder
if Mike Myers did that on purpose, because it really
is that kind of I really picture it's a characature
of a man who's like commenting on then you have
to respond simply because you won't stop doing it.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Right, But it's also like you're commenting on women like
you're some kind of prize.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Dude. It's like the concept of I decide other people's value,
but I don't have to.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Do anything to make myself appealing in any way.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I stopped playing tennis thirty two years ago, but I'm
going to talk about how you shouldn't be playing totally. Okay.
So he's just fanning the flames of showvidism for attention
and relevance. It's not a hard thing to do. It
never has been, especially as the women's movement is looming
into the seitgeist and men are very much put out
by this concept of equality. They do not like it,
(39:23):
never way of what. According to a quote from Billy
Jean in a BBC dot Com article, she says that
Bobby Riggs followed her around for two years, challenging her
to play against him. Yeah, then he asks her to
play on Mother's Day nineteen seventy three, and in that
offer he refers to her as quote the leading women's
liver of tennis. End quote, Billy Jean says, I'm sorry,
(39:47):
I don't know who you are. No, that's not true. Actually,
Billy Jean King was always super classy. When she talked
about Bobby Riggs, she was like, he's a hero of mine.
He's one of the greats of tennis. Wow, not in
this you know, when this kind of thing comes up,
but in general she had always looked up to him
as like a hero of tennis. So it's really gross
(40:09):
some thing.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
It just starts harassing her.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, and kind of being like, oh, you think you're
so big, we'll play against me a man.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
He's harassing and stalking her and playing it off like
it's a game, like a playful flirtation.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Right. Basically, she just always says no and kind of
leave me alone. So he challenges a different top ranked
female tennis player to this match on Mother's Day in
nineteen seventy three. That player's name is Margaret Court. She's
considered one of the best to ever play the game,
but she had just been returning to competitive play after
taking a year off to have a baby. She agrees
(40:43):
to play Bobby Riggs, not realizing how big of a
spectacle he's planning on making it. So on May thirteenth,
nineteen seventy three, with thirty five hundred spectators watching courtside
and another ten million watching from home, Bobby beats Margaret
Court decisively in six' one six'. Two game he plays,
(41:04):
a soft slow type, of tennis and it totally throws
off the way, she plays which is like, hard hitting.
Fast moving this match will become known as The Quote mother's.
Day massacre but you just got to think of these
like male sports reporters who were just sitting. There, WAITING
yeah i would be surprised to learn that there was
any kind of equanimity in. This reporting, absolutely so everybody
(41:26):
watches THIS, on Tv And billy jean, does too and as,
she does she immediately understands what the stakes of this are.
And were and at a time when female athletes are
fighting for respect, and recognition not to mention equal pay and,
equal sponsorships this loss plays right into the hands of
the naysayers and the performative chauvinists and the people who,
(41:49):
are like we have an excuse not to give. You
Money So Billy jean king reaches out to The Gloating
bobby riggs, AND says i will. Play you they then
begin to Promote this battle of the sexes tennis. Match
Relentlessly billy jean is quoted, as, Saying quote i'm taking
this match. VERY seriously i love TO win i welcome
the responsibility and. The pressure bobby had better, be ready
(42:12):
and according to THAT same, Bbc article bobby turned up
to a practice session wearing a shirt with two circles
cut out where his nipples were and Joked That Billy
jean king would look better in it. Than. Him ewow the,
next day in the final, news conference a Direct Speaking
Billy jean king calls him. A Creep bobby riggs asks
(42:33):
her to take. It back she looks him straight in
the eye, and says. Creep stands that is a. Good
comeback so a few, months Later on, september twentieth nineteen,
Seventy Three Billy jean king goes head to Head Against
bobby riggs and it's a. Perfect storm bobby's gloating sexis
blather has now been repeatedly aimed Directly At billy jean
(42:55):
who's not just a tennis player but a public face
of the, women's movement and this has expanded from a
pop culture tennis match to a referendum on the validity
of the. Women's movement they name It the battle Of,
the sexes and more than thirty thousand people show up
At the astrodome to.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Watch It astro is that the one that you see It,
IN Texas, Us, see okay it's Not in la.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
A night. It, is yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
You're, right WELL look i never. SAID listen i.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Did never we can't pretend to be sports fans just
because we're talking.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
About, sports Astrodome The, STAPLES center i, don't know very.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Similar places so thirty thousand people around that area go,
to watch ninety million watch it. From home holy sh
it's almost how many people listen to. THIS podcast, i mean,
and again apologies to all ninety million. Of you this
match sets an all time record for tennis watching and
it's still held to. This day it will be one
(43:56):
of the most watched sporting events of all. Time, period
yes because it's really kicking up all the vibes of
like early seventies politics essentially about so much more. Than
so they have these. Insane entrances it's almost goes into like. Professional,
Wrestling Wow Billy jean king is carried onto the court
(44:16):
by shirtless men in one of those beds with four
men at each of amanity, that well there WAS a
pr person, that, said oh you're, a feminist you're not
going to, Do this and, she went what are you
TALKING about i love, this idea like jumped up. Onto it,
she's like let's play this thing. For, her Meanwhile When
bobby riggs, comes out he's. Being pulled there's nothing not
(44:37):
problematic about everything about. This thing we can all, assume
that but just to, state it he's being pulled on
a rickshaw by WOMEN in t shirts that Bear The
Sugar daddy. Candy logo and he's got an endorsement Deal
With Sugar daddy. Candy bro so that's a whole candy company,
that's like we're on the.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Dude's side can you imagine being his kid and, being,
like oh this is. So embarrassing my dad is. So
embarrassing it's.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So goofy but then at the, same time there's just
so many people who, are, like yeah, you know we
need to teach those women. A, Lesson yeah so what's
great is that they meet and they present gifts to.
Each other, you know it's like kind of. Opening salvo
bobby Wearing A sugar daddy Sweatsuit Gives billy jean An
Oversized sugar. Daddy lollipop And Because bobby riggs has proclaimed
(45:27):
in the press over and over that he is proud
to be a. Male Chauveness Pig billy jean gives him,
a piglet a, live piglet. And photos let's see them. Being, carried.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Oh he's in, a rickshaw he's in a little.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Rich on those are the sugar daddy women that are.
Pushing it but Then, here's oh she. Looks incredible is't that?
The best so she's got more Of a cleopatra. Thing
going but.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Also the woman standing next to her with a fucking.
Tight perm he's got a sign that just says.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
BYE bye i know what kind of time traveler woman? Is,
that seriously because That's A Billie jean. King shirt she's on.
Her side it's, like bye there's Some go bobby goes in,
the background because you it's. Like wrestling it's totally wrestling boys. Against,
girls yeah so it's kind. Of GREAT and i love
that she's such a smart woman and, she's like you
can't cast me as the Serious. Ballbusting friday that's not What,
(46:19):
THIS yeah i get what.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
This is she's like being playful, about, it yeah which
is a great way to like make an inroad and show.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
You're, smart yeah here's, a piglet. Go, Away, yeah now
you have to take care of. A. Pig okay the
enormous social and psychological weight of this cultural event lands
Squarely On billy jean's shoulders as the, game begins so
she does falter a little Bit like bobby. Scores First
Then billy jean hits a ball out, of bounds so.
(46:47):
She stops she gives herself a, pep talk and she
basically pulls out her. A game she will later write
quote for all the pre match Hype about, bobby's skills many,
FOLKS forgot i was a versatile shot and a Shrewd, Tactician,
toouck Yeah now i'm trying, different shots seeing. What works
I'm making bobby work for every point and. Hell yeah
(47:09):
so she basically that, same Feeling which i'm sure Happened To,
margaret court came of, like no this, really matters but
instead of like, tightening up she allowed. And perfection, she, allowed,
like hey he's going to get some, points whatever and
she learned, from it yeah And. Adjusted yeah and then,
she's like WHAT do i need to? Be? Doing not
HOW do i need to? Be? Defending yeah so in,
(47:31):
the end they play five, full sets which is what
only men did. Back then women played three and men.
Played Five billy jean Decisively Blows bobby riggs away in
consecutive sets and wins one hundred thousand dollars. Grand prize that,
Is incredible she'll, later, SAY quote i thought it would
set us back fifty YEARS if i didn't win. That
(47:51):
match it would ruin the women's tennis tour and affect
all women's. Self, ESTEEM god i mean so.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Much pressure she had so much more to lose, than him.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
So much it was just a dumb joke.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
To, Him yeah but then for her to realize, halfway
through not even in, the beginning, Like oh i'm actually better?
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Than?
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Him what WHY am?
Speaker 1 (48:10):
I nervous his last game was in nineteen. Thirty nine
he had to stop playing tennis Because Of World. War
two what a nice what a nice feeling to, be
like oh wait, A, Second yes i've. Got, This yeah
i've got this. Fucking easy i'm not going to put
the ball places and make that little guy, looks stupid
make that little wig. Come off do you want to
take a look at her Winning this battle of? The?
(48:32):
Sexeses please what?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
She did she had a great night, that night.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
And there's the astrodome look at how full.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
It is it's so.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Crazy crazy oh got to. Be, there yeah time machine fighting.
For girls, oh sorry we're. Mid quote to beat a
fifty five year old guy was no thrill. For me
the thrill was exposing a lot of new people.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
To tennis amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
End quote so then she's also just being a. Business
woman it's, an opportunity a. Big opportunity the fan. For
around the match introduces countless new people to the previously
elite's only sport. Of tennis it's a major evolution for
women in, sports overall and the power of this win
will persist. FOR decades i, MEAN truly i could not
(49:15):
have been conscious of. This HAPPENING and i absolutely knew
all about this as a. Young girl same AND yeah
i wasn't. Born, yet yeah like. Much, later yeah it
really set us up for terrible disappointment for the nineties and.
Two Thousands Billy jean king will, later say Quote our
battle Of the sexes match helped to advance the game
of tennis and. Women everywhere. End quote now there are
(49:39):
people out there who try to Say That bobby riggs
through the match because he needed, the money because he
owed the mafia so much money, with gambling which is
Of Course Billy jan king calls those, rumors ridiculous and they.
Are ridiculous he was a fifty five year old man
playing a woman at the top of. Her game he
would later go on to say that he completely, underestimated,
(50:01):
her wow and did not realize how fast. She, was
basically he's just. A fraud but she also talks about
him after, the fact like they. Stayed friends she did
not get got by him. Any way she treated him
like the joke he was treating, her as and they
actually were able to stay friends to the point where
(50:24):
she talked to him the night before he died and
he told her he. Loved. Her. Wow yeah so it
was a private relationship that was very different than the
results of what the culture kind of reacted to in.
This game.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Got it, THAT'S nice, i know.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Isn't it because she's the bigger she gets to be
the bigger person because, she's, like yeah destroyed you, so
wonderful we can. Be Friends Billy jean king's cultural influence
is of. Course undeniable she's Won Twelve grand slam. Singles
titles she's been inducted Into The International tennis Hall, of
fame she was Awarded The french Legion. Of honor she
became the first female commissioner in professional sports after co
(51:00):
establishing the Mixed Gender World Team TENNIS, league wow and
her fight on the tennis court was memorialized on film
in the twenty Seventeen movie battle Of, the Sexes Where
emma stone. Played her and just so, everyone knows if
you don't know What A grand, slam is that's when
you Win The, australian Open The, French open wimbledon AND
The us open all in the. Same, Year jesus so you.
(51:22):
Go slam that's A Very williams sisters kind of thing. To.
Do Cool billy jean is also just as well known
for her advocacy work FOR the lgbtq plus community and
being That It's, pride month that's also one of the
REASONS that i did. This story she was not a
lot of people. Know this she was outed by an
(51:42):
ex lover in the early eighties when nobody. Was out
the people managing her career at the time begged her
to deny that she. Was, gay instead she held a
press conference and, confirmed it becoming one of the First
famous american athletes to be out as a lesbian that
is incredible or out. At. All. Yeah yeah and, Since
(52:03):
Then Billy jan king has talked at length about how
confusing and painful this part of her life. Initially was
there was no one. To, follow ye like. VERY few
i shouldn't say. No one there was some people out
there in, the culture but in the kind of like
show business she was.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
In totally she was a.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
True trailblazer, once again she, has, Said quote i've always
thought about. FUTURE generations i promised myself AT twelve i
would try to be number ONE so i could help
the world be a. Better place twelve, Years old oh.
MY god i wanted to be able to influence and do.
Those things. End quote in two thousand, And Nine President
barack Obama Presents Billy jan king WITH The Us presidential
(52:41):
Medal of freedom, and, says quote what we honor are
not simply Her Twelve grand. Slam titles she did it,
twelve Times twelve.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Grand, slams, yeah one.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
One hundred and one, doubles titles and sixty seven. Singles
titles and then, he said, Pretty Good. Billy jean it's
hard to do a Quote From barack obama because he
likes to do, side commentary it's so sad that he's
gone from. Our lives we honor what she calls all
the off the, court stuff what she did to broaden
(53:11):
the reach of, the game to change how women athletes
and women everywhere of, you themselves and to give everyone
regardless of gender or, sexual orientation including my, two daughters
a chance, to compete both on the court and. In
Life As billy jean, once said we should never ever
underestimate the, human spirit nor should We Underestimate Billy jean
(53:32):
king's spirit. End, quote today eighty two Year Old Billy
jean king is among history's most. Iconic athletes as she
continues to inspire generations of young people and promote the
rights of. People everywhere she's never forgotten the joy that
she felt playing tennis for the very. First time, she,
SAID quote i just love hitting a. Tennis ball it's
(53:54):
just that's. A book there's NO way i could have
gotten through all the pressures on and off the COURT
if i hadn't. LOVED it i love it. End quote
and that's the story of The Legendary Billy. Jean king that.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
WAS amazing i LOVE that i got the feeling, that
DAY and i wonder if the woman the tennis player
Who Lost, Margaret, COURT like i wonder if do you
think they did it on purpose to kind of like hype,
it up because if it had just been, them first
it wouldn't have had the hype that.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
It. DID completely, i mean that's. Absolutely possible the fact
that any. OF this i love the idea that this
would have been like a let's fight for women's equity, and,
sports ye or let's fight for, women's tennis or let's
get out there and give them a chance to. Prove
themselves it just seems so unlikely in like nineteen. Seventy
THREE but i think answering this kind, of, like oh
(54:43):
you think boys are better, Than girls like it's this
playground fight that's just been going on for, so long
and she stepped up and, was like, sounds good let's,
do this and then just. Trounced him. Love, it yeah
that was such a fun episode of fucking. BADASS women,
i know all these superstars that we all get to,
be there they get to be. Our, heroes yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Let's let's try to, emulate them, you guys and do
stuff for the.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
Greater good let's be perfectly gorgeous in the face and
perfectly great at tennis. Sounds great. Hurry up that wraps
up this special bonus episode Presented. By hyundai thank you
so much, for listening and thank You to hundai for
making this. Episode possible stay sexy and don't. Get, Murdered,
Goodbye elvis do you Want? To cookie this has been
(55:36):
an exactly.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Right production our senior Producer Is molly smith and our
associate Producer Is.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Tessa hughes our Editor Is. Aristotle lascevedo this episode was
Mixed By. Leona squalacci our Researchers are mary McGlashan And.
Ali elkin email your Hometowns To My favorite murder at
gmail dot com and follow the Show on Instagram At My.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
Favorite murder Listen To My favorite murder On the, iHeartRadio
App apple podcasts or wherever you get.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Your podcasts and now you Can Watch My favorite Murder
on netflix and when, you're there hit the double thumbs
up and the remind.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
Me buttons that's the best way you can support. Our,
show goodbye
He Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia hertstart.
That's Karen Kilgariff, And this is a very special episode.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
That's right. This is a bonus episode, surprise.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right. It means you're getting more stories. You didn't
earn it, but you deserve it.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
So this episode is presented by Hyundai. That's right.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Thank you Hyundai for making this storytelling bonus happen.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
So for today's theme for this bonus episode, we thought
it'd be fine to connect our stories through a shared thread.
Both of them feature people who were innovators, pioneers and
just generally ahead of their time.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yes, people who saw things differently and acted on it,
that's right. And our women.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So thank you Hyundai for this bonus episode. Thanks for listening,
and let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Let's do it all right.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I'm excited about the theme of this because it's a
story I've always wanted to cover. It is about a
really incredible innovator and a woman who is, by all,
what's the word accounts a badass? Thank you. So today's
story is about an actress who is known as the
most beautiful woman in the world for decades. Her name
was synonymous with beauty, glamour, and sex appeal. She was
(01:23):
even said to be the inspiration for both catwomen, Women
and Women, Catwoman Everywhere and snow White Oh Wow. And
over those same decades, while everyone knew her name, virtually
no one knew that she invented the necessary precursor to
some of the most ubiquitous technology that we use today,
including Wi Fi and Bluetooth. This is the story of
legendary screen actress and equally legendary inventor Hetty Lamar.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
It's such a cool opportunity to be able to talk
about her. Yeah, but I truly think she is one
of the most perfect looking women.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It's ridiculous, like this movie. I watched the Bombshell the
Headed Lamar Story documentary, and like, every time you see
her on screen, your breath is taken away at how
gorgeous she is.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
But then the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Then there's a brain as well. She's a very complicated woman.
And the main source I use for the story is
a twenty seventeen American Master's documentary called Bombshell the Hetty
Lamar Story, and the rest of the sources can be
found in the show notes. So Hetty is born head
Vig bring that name back, I mean Hedwig Ava Maria Keisler.
She's born in nineteen fourteen in Venice, Austria, Nope, in Vienna, Austria.
(02:28):
Her parents are both born Jewish, but it seems like
she's raised not very religious or both kind of more
or less secular, which is really common in Vienna at
the time, and it seems like that was the place
to be in that time period, post World War One,
pre World War II and all the atrocities, like this
place was it. Both of her parents had come from
humble roots but had gotten good educations, and her father
(02:50):
is the manager of a major bank in Vienna, and
so Hetti has a really close, loving relationship with him,
and he really like you know, wants her to get
her education and is very like you know, supportive of that.
So one day, when she's five years old, Hetty takes
her music box apart and then successfully puts it back together.
I never could do that second part.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
It's fun to take things apart, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
And this sparks a lifelong interest in engineering. So her
father walks her around Vienna and points out all the technology,
the street cars, the electric cables and explains to her
how they work, and so she's just super smart right
off the bat. She grows up in a part of
Vienna that's heavily populated with artists and intellectuals, many of
whom are Jewish, but also secular, and this means it's
(03:32):
a fairly progressive society. Nudity and sexuality in the arts
isn't really taboo, you know, like Cabaret.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Think of that musical.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's generally agreed upon that if Hetty had
been less beautiful, maybe she would have become a scientist.
But she grows up in this art's focused culture, and
because as a teenager she starts to become incredibly gorgeous
that she just has to become a model and be
in movies almost like, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Should we see a picture of her? Yes, I mean
so beautiful, it's crazy. She looks like Elizabeth Taylor meets
Vivian Lee.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Yeah, those perfect kind of petit faces.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So, God bless anyone that can do with part down
the center. It cannot be me.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's amazing. Hetty is very good at being on film,
and somewhat a wild teenager, she enjoys all this attention.
When she's sixteen, she walks into one of the biggest
movie studios in Vienna and within days.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
She's getting roles in movies. It's that easy back then.
I mean, when you're hot, Yeah, you're that beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
When Hetty's just eighteen years old, in nineteen thirty three,
she stars in a movie called Ecstasy, which is about
a board housewife who has a sexual awakening, and this
film kind of follows her for the rest of her life.
It includes a wide shot of her running naked in
the woods, a topless moment, and a close up of
her face while she's basically having an orgasm, which is
(04:58):
just like unheard of and so scandalous to everyone outside
of this society that's just, you know, really progressive. This,
of course, is way too much for American audiences. You know,
they yank at their pearls. The film is banned in
America because of the sex, and it's banned in Nazi
Germany because Hetty's Jewish. So this film gets a lot
(05:20):
of attention, and it seems like Hetty had a bad
experience on set as well, so it's just kind of
it sucks, like you wonder what her life would have
been like if she hadn't done this specific film. In
nineteen thirty four, right after shooting this movie Ecstasy, Hetty,
who is nineteen, marries an Austrian munitions baron name Fritz Mandel.
So Fritz is older, he's divorced, he like wants this
(05:43):
beautiful woman on his arm, essentially nineteen year old. He
sells weapons to the Nazis and is extraordinarily wealthy, but
he's also Jewish. But he comes from this along line
of munitions barons, right, so what do you do? So
Hitler won't personally associate with him, but it's kind of
gray area in the beginning of Hitler's regime.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Well, yeah, I mean there's plenty of how many companies
that still exist today exist because they did exactly that
thing right with Hitler, right crazy and used slave labor.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
All that's totally so. As you might expect from an
arms dealer to the Nazis. Fritz is not the nicest man.
He's extremely jealous and possessive of Hetty. He instructs household
staff to listen in on her phone calls anytime she
says the word acting. They tell he have to tell him,
and she gets you know, in trouble, she's expected to
look nice at dinner parties and do little else, and
(06:36):
she does attend some meetings with him if he needs
her to look good on his arm, and these meetings
she learns a bit about torpedoes and how they work,
so she's still like chasing, you know, knowledge, even though
it's kind of being banned from her life. She learns
that torpedoes need to be guided by radio frequencies, but
that this makes them detectable to enemies who can jam
(06:58):
those frequencies. She can't stop think about this idea and
how one might evade detection by changing frequencies quickly enough.
But her husband isn't interested in her thoughts on the matter.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It's all yap, yap yeap to him.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, so you can imagine like if she had gone
to college and gone to school and got an education
in engineering and science, you know, she would have gone
on to do even bigger things. But she figured it
out on her own. She stays married to Fritz for
about three years. Then her father dies of a heart
attack and it's just completely devastating to Hetty. So she's like,
I got to get out of this life, this isn't
(07:31):
where I'm supposed to be. She's watched after so carefully
that she has to actually have plan an escape from
the home, and she does this. First she sows all
of her jewelry into the lining of her coat, and
then one night she hires a maid who looks like her.
One night, she puts sleeping powder in the maid's tea
(07:52):
and basically like puts her to bed, takes the maid's outfit,
puts it on, and takes off in the night.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Thank you so much for her coat up like this.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, you want to be like good for her, but
it's also the maid. It's just like wakes up in
the morning.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Do we know for a fact that the maid wasn't
in on it.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
I mean maybe she was like, yeah, I'll do it. Dang,
put me out.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Red flag for your job number one. You look exactly
like the lady interviewing you. Right, don't do it.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
And you get sleepy around her all the time. So
she rides off into the night on her bicycle and
escapes her abusive marriage at just twenty one. She flees
to London, where she lives with some family friends, and
then one night she goes to a movie and sees
the MGM Lion at the beginning of the movie, and
she's just impressed with the movie and she's like, I
want to do that, So she tries to get a
(08:38):
job with that studio. And as we know, the studio
is headed by Louis B. Mayer, so it's metrical to
Mayor and he's actually in town in London at the
time for a short visit and he's trying to recruit
European actors who are fleeing the Nazis. Many of them
don't speak great English and are desperate to get out
of Europe, so he's able to sign them with like
(08:59):
really toy contracts. I mean, that's dark. It's so dark.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
He's Jewish himself, and he's you know, I mean, I'm
sure there's a justification in some ways, but like, at
least I'm doing something.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Absolutely you could be looked at in different ways, for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Why not just a nice contract? This is the way
of the future. I'm positive it's gonna pare it. Oh,
just that people get into that position. They're like, we're
going to do some nice contract.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Everyone's going to be happy.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
They're going to be able to buy a house after that.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
No, one's going to feel used.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
They're gonna love it, and they're gonna love the arts.
It's gonna be worth it.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Hetty's offered one of these contracts. It's not as bad
because she's already been a movie and stuff. It's one
hundred and twenty five dollars a week is what she's offered,
which in today's money.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
This was in the thirties. Yeah, six hundred dollars a
week and ninety seven, so that's a lot of money
a week. That's like union rate totally. But it's not
enough for her.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
She's like, I'm actually talented and beautiful and have experienced,
but she does want the job, so she storms out
and like leaves an impression that way, and then finds
out that Mayor will be leaving London on the specific ship,
the SS Normandy, So she books a one way ticket
on that ship and then make sure to run into
him throughout.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
All she has to do. She's a hot lady.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
She puts on her tennis clothes and her bathing suit
and just happens to walk.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
By him all the time, and a nice red lip.
She's done and done.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
One night, she enters the dining room and her you know,
beautiful clothes that she had already and her beautiful face
and walks in and then everyone turns to stare at her.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Stop pause, look at the ceiling. Yeah, imagine yourself on
the ceiling.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Knows it like God?
Speaker 1 (10:38):
That feeling.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, And so he offers her a contract for five
hundred dollars a week. By the end of.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
The trip, he ups it by two hundred.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
It was one twenty five and now it's five hundred
h which is eleven five hundred and eighty eight dollars
in today's money a week.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah. Hell yeah, So it works.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Okay, great, And he and his wife come up with
her name because she needs a fancy name. So it's
Hetty Lamar, after a different Actressy that tragically died, and
Lamar means the sea. So Hetty Lamar.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Okay, because they're at the sea.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
I don't know, it's pretty good. Hetty finds her footing
in a film called Algiers, in which she plays a
glamorous jewel thief, which should we take a look at
another photo.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
No brag, but those are the eyebrows I had in
the nineties. You can tell the remnants are still there.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
But man pencil thin.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
We went that thin in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Imagine she looked that good with thin eyebrows, what she'd
look like with normal eyebrows even better.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
She had those big, tall, laminated ones.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Tat it on Okay. In nineteen thirty nine, when she's
twenty three, she marries a screenwriter named Jean Marky and
they adopt a son together. She ends up having a
lot of marriages, and it's one of those sad stories
like you know, Marilyn Monroe, where they just never seem
to work.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's such a weird time for women in marriage, though,
because she's making eleven thousand dollars a week, right, so
she doesn't need to be doing anything. She probably has to.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, and it seems like this dude that she married,
everyone was like him, and she was like, he's nice
to meaniize me with my dad. He immediately starts cheating.
Like she even tries to make the right you know,
not some fancy actor, not a munitions farn a smart.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Guy, a writer. This is a safe bet, you fool.
They're the worst every time. Yeah, true, they're the worst
every time.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Every man is entitled. It's on some level. So he
starts dating other actresses, and the marriage ends. In nineteen forty.
Heady now has a huge year with MGM, first appearing
in the movie Boomtown, which is a massive hit, and
she starts in several more movies that year, working under
that brutal studio system that we've heard so much about.
But she's just working her butt off, and in order
(12:45):
to perform for long hours, she's given amphetamines it's you know,
the usual, the usual, and then given sleeping pills at
night to help her sleep, but she doesn't sleep. She
goes home and works on inventions. She has an invention
like desk in her house nice where she has all
her like science things, and has one in her studio
(13:06):
on set as well where she can go and tinker
between takes because she wants to do science stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
After her marriage to Jane fails, Hetty, she starts dating
Howard Hughes yea the aviation tycoon. Do you know a
lot about him?
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I mean I watched The Aviator, so I know everything
Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But
incredible innovator, serious mental illness, right that kind of went unchecked.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think so, Yeah, she says he's a quote, very
strange man. But they do get along really well. Give
us I know, they said something like he's a bad lover,
and I'm like, what does that means?
Speaker 1 (13:41):
That mean on what level? There's so many levels where
he could be. He keeps making airplane noises just the
whole time.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Right, But they do get along intellectually. He's, you know,
someone she can talk to about science and interesting things
like that, and he gives her access to his workforce
of scientists for whatever invention she wants to make. And
in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. She
takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these
square wings, and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And
(14:10):
so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish
and sketches out a drawing of what the two would
look like as a plane, and that kind of becomes
the plane that we know today. Like he uses this shit,
and he calls her a genius.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
She is a genius. It sounds like, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Throughout her adulthood, she's always tinkering with chemistry and with ideas.
By nineteen forty, World War two is in full swing,
although America has not yet entered and Hetty's mother has
escaped Vienna Ann is living in London, so Hetty's trying
to get her mom from London, which still isn't safe
for her to the US. But it's incredibly dangerous for
(14:46):
those ships that are crossing to America because German U
boats can and will torpedo civilian ships making that crossing.
So you have that issue, and then also supply ships
are being torpedoed and sunk, and it's kind of at
the point where we're losing the war because we can't
get the supplies, we can't get you know, people out
of there in time. So Hetty comes up with this
(15:08):
idea that she had had of frequency hopping, with help
from a professor at cal Tech and Pasadena, guiding the
torpedoes with frequencies that constantly change, they can't be jammed.
So she meets a composer named George Antyle, and together
they come up with a way to make this frequency
hopping system work, inspired by a method George has used
(15:29):
and figured out of synchronizing player pianos. So you know,
when you see the leg dashes that are all the
way across the line, so if those are in secret order,
then if they jam the radio frequency, it doesn't matter
only jamming it for this you know, amount of time,
because it's hopping so often, so you can't jam the
whole thing, okay, And so that way they're easier to
(15:50):
always control.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Yeah, like a player piano, they just keep going right.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
So George and Hetty patent this idea. They present it
to the Navy, but it's rejected being impractical. They kind
of laugh them off, and it was like, what do
you think. This isn't a player piano, it's a torpedo.
And then also Hetty is from Austria, and so they
also seize the patent because it's the property. They say,
I'm an enemy alien. Oh yeah, she's not from here.
(16:17):
They think she could be a spy. She's made this
patent and tried to give it to them, and they're like, no.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
We'll get you right, And then it's like yeah, now
we're onto you, or it's like right, you're onto me
the person who came and gave you this.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Idea, and you know, she's not American enough for them.
But then they're also like, hey, can you use your
good looks and celebrity to sell war bonds?
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And she does I mean, imagine how many ideas and
inventions and things have been lost at time because the
kind of patriarchy in this system just couldn't entertain the
idea of a woman having a good idea. Yeah, just
a real loss yeah, or had too.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Much of an ego to like agree and allow it.
It's frustrating. Can we have our own planet? Please? No,
thank you, that sounds right, thank you. In nineteen forty three,
Hetty marries a British actor named John Loder. They are
together until nineteen forty seven. They have two children. Everyone
says he's really dull compared to her vivaciousness and intelligence.
(17:18):
So then she has another brief marriage after that.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
But what I like the way you said that, Like,
because everyone said he was dull, She's like, fahine, I'll
divorce him, get somebody else.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
And so Hetty has a bumpy relationship with Louis B.
Mayor I think a lot of actresses probably did, and
she gets a reputation for being difficult, yeah, because she
doesn't let people push her around. So in the late
forties she produces two movies on her own, which is
pretty much unheard of at the time. But she's not
getting the parts she wants, and so she does it herself,
which pisses off Mayor even more. And in nineteen forty
(17:51):
nine she does get the movie Samson and Delilah. It's
a massive hit. It renews her career. And then right
after that she produces and stars in the Love of
Three Queens and it's just this huge expensive production that
she undertakes. It doesn't get a distribution and she loses
a lot of money from it. At this point, she's
kind of struggling financially. So in nineteen fifty two, when
(18:13):
she's thirty eight, she marries an oil tycoon named w.
Howard Lee, which is like she kind of is like,
this is my life now, she can I need to
support my children.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
You're going to hit that money button if it is
within your reach.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yeah, And she like has to move to Texas with him,
and it sounds almost like a green Acre's kind of.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Not sit the movie star and get her to move
back to tex Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
She does become a strange from her first child, the
adopted son she had with Jean, her second husband. He
goes off to boarding school and ultimately kind of is
taken in by another family and so it's kind of
not spoken of anymore. This is kind of sad, and
so eventually Hetty's marriage to the Texan Lee also fails,
and she has two other short marriages after that. Fifty
(19:00):
two shorts to struggle more profoundly with her mental health
and with substance abuse, which of course had been introduced
to her by professionals at the MGM studio in the
late fifties and sixties. When she's in her forties. This
all takes a huge toll, and she has several breakdowns.
In the sixties, she also becomes a patient of doctor
Max Jacobson aka Doctor feel Good, who I actually covered
(19:22):
in episode three forty nine. I was surprised to hear that.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Anne was relatively recently.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, it's called a bit of stew twenty twenty two.
That's not recently. Oh okay, I don't know where my
brain was at the time.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
That we were on zoom. That was like the blank years.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, we should skip that and rewind, just skip the
whole pairent tend it never happened. Yeah. So he does
this evil thing where he tells people that he's injecting
them with a vitamin shot, vitamin B to pep you
up and it's just myth yeah, and gets all these
people addicted to meth. So Hetty's behavior in the sixties
and seventies becomes very erratic and unstable. It's hard on
(19:59):
her kids, but her daughter says, quote, now I can
be forgiving of that erratic behavior because she was a
victim of the very system that made her famous. And
she's actually arrested for shoplifting in nineteen sixty six in
this weird like one own a writer style way that
it's like did she or didn't she? She gets acquitted,
but it definitely tarnishes her reputation.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
I mean, it's that kind of shoplifting where it's like
you don't need anything, right, and you're clearly doing it
for like the dopamine his.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Right, or she had a bunch of money on her too.
It's like, was it a misunderstanding it could have been yeah,
or did she just like walk out thinking I'm Hetty Lamar,
I must have like a tab.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Open a right exactly.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
You don't do things for yourself like that back then.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
I think the one own a writer want it reminded
me of like when somebody is a star back then
that level of a star where literally everyone does everything
for you.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Gives you whatever you want all the time.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
As she gets older, she starts to struggle with her identity.
She's always been appreciated primarily for her beauty, and now
that it's starting to fade, you know, through her eyes.
She starts to get cosmetic proceed and in fact she
dictates to the surgeon how she thinks the procedure should
be done, and she ends up making plastic surgery. She
(21:08):
advances it by being like, you should do the incision here,
you should do the incision here. Here's where you should
hide this, Here's where you should enhance this. And she
actually looks amazing even after she's gotten some work done.
I mean, she looks, in today's standards, incredible. But of
course this press is still relentless, still photographs her every
time she leaves the house. It's kind of just worst
(21:30):
case scenario. All the bad stories you hear from back
then happens to her, and she becomes reclusive, and she
starts to look less and less like herself the more
procedure she gets. So in the eighties, when she's in
her seventies, Hetty struggles more, especially as her money starts
to run out, but she returns to thinking about her
original frequency hopping patent, and she's pretty sure it's been used,
(21:51):
and so if you use the patent, you have to
pay for it. Yeah, that's kind of the understanding when
you file the patent. That's something about, Yeah, if the
US government uses it, they have to pay you for it.
And she knows that by the sixties, during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, the Navy had been using frequency hopping, so
this would mean that they had used it before her patent.
(22:12):
It had expired in nineteen fifty nine, but she expects
that they had used it before, which would mean it
hadn't expired yet, and so she is owed money. So
in nineteen ninety, when Hetty's seventy five, a reporter named
Fleming Meeks, who works at Forbes at the time, is
talking with his father, who's an astrophysicist at MIT, and
his father tells him he had just learned something interesting
(22:33):
from a colleague that actress Henny Lamar had been a
brilliant and prolific inventor. So Fleming the journalist is hooked
on this idea and he tracks Hetty down. He coaxes
her out of her shell by sending her a bouquet
of roses. He kind of sweet talks her and then
gets this long interview with her on tape which you
can hear in the documentary, where she talks about all
(22:54):
of her inventions, her life, all the incredible things she's
been through, how she feels about them, and she talks
about her suspicions that the Navy had used her patent.
So the article runs that year and it's the first
time the public ever finds out about Hedge Lamar's inventions.
You know, she had been keeping it to herself. Over
the course of the nineties and into two thousands, frequency
(23:15):
hopping is being used for an explosion of technologies that
we now use all the time. GPS is a big one,
Wi Fi, Bluetooth. Hetty's idea is at the foundation of
this technology. Do we have a photo of the plans?
Because I know Karen loves scientist.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
There you go, oh, I love a blueprint.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Here's a blueprint. What you will?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
This is her just like as she's filming and then
in her dressing room, she's like, just some thoughts. What
a genius you know?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And that's just one of very many. So our most
secure military communications are done with a satellite system that
was built using Hetty's patent, though the patent had long expired.
In nineteen ninety seven, the Navy, Millstar, which is a
satellite communications company, and Lockheed Martin want to present Hetty
with an award for all her work, but she declines.
(24:07):
Appearing at the ceremony. She's kind of a recluse and
won't leave her house, and so her son accepts the
award for her, and she says, quote, I am happy
that this invention has been so successful. I appreciate your
acknowledgment of you honoring me, and it was not done
in vain. Thank you end quote, so it's kind of
all she gets. Hetty dies peacefully in the year two thousand,
(24:28):
at the age of eighty five, without ever knowing for
sure if her patent had been used before it expired.
Had It's only after that a military contractor says that
he was handed Hetty's patent by a Navy official in
nineteen fifty five and asked to see if it was
good for anything, so he didn't know it was her patent.
(24:49):
This was four years before the patent had expired. So
just like she had thought it had been used, he
used it actually to create something called a Sonobuoie. You
know what that is. It's a booy that communicates securely
with aircraft. Sure, it's just it was used. Yea. He
had been unaware of the patent implications or that Hetty
had not been paid, and only comes to light when
(25:10):
he creates a website explicitly thanking Hetty Lamar for her
inventions and says, without you and this invention, we would
have never been able to create that initial secure communication system.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Wow. So she was right all along, confirmed from the inside.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
That's right. So that is the story of Hetty Lamar,
who was a great beauty of course, but also more
importantly an innovator and an inventor.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Wow. I love that. That's incredible. So this story begins
on September nineteenth, nineteen seventy three. A twenty nine year
old Southern California woman sits alone in the Astrodome's nosebleed section.
She's here to study the building because tomorrow she'll be competing.
(25:54):
She's looking at the incredibly high ceilings, the intense lighting,
and she tries to imagine the booming sound of the
packed house that will be there the next day. Ben
she looks down toward the floor level and sees herself
facing off with her competitor in front of millions of people,
knowing that this isn't an ordinary match. Everything is actually
(26:14):
on the line. This is the story of the cultural
moment when legendary athlete, feminist, and LGBTQ plus icon Billy
Jean King wins the Battle of the Sex's tennis match. Hell, yeah,
do you know about this?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
No? I know the story not very well. Okay, I'm excited.
Let me get to the details.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Okay. So the sources used in the show today are
Billy Jean King's autobiography it's called All In, and her
website billyjenking dot com. We went to the source, got it,
But there are other ones and they're in our show notes.
So Billy Jean Moffatt, which is her maiden name, is
born in Long Beach, California, in nineteen forty three, and
as she grows up, she discovers her love for sports
(26:53):
like softball and basketball, but she doesn't pick up tennis
until she's a preteen, when her friend sus and asks
if she wants to come with her for a lesson
at Long Beaches Virginia Country Club. Did you know there
are country clubs down in Long Beach? No? I didn't either,
So her friend and their family are members. Billy Jean
is not a member of this or any other country club.
(27:15):
Her family self described blue collar family. Her dad's fireman,
her mom is a homemaker. So tennis is basically a
sport that she's just not been exposed to. It's basically
at this time for the elite, so the secret, secret sport.
And according to her for this first lesson, Billy Jeane
is not good at tennis, but something clicks inside her
(27:36):
and later on she's going to write quote, I like
the variety and mental challenge. I liked being able to
hit the ball over and over. Tennis fascinated me from
the first day I played with Susan using a borrowed
racket end quote. So she is obviously as a natural
aptitude for the game. She's very competitive, she's always working
to improve, and because of this she starts to win
(27:58):
a lot. But it is nineteen fifty five, so even
though Billy Jean is proving herself on the court, she's
treated very differently than the young male athletes that she
competes around. When she's just twelve years old, she goes
to the exclusive Los Angeles Tennis Club Have you ever
been there either? And she's wearing a pair of shorts
her mother made for her, and she's told those shorts
(28:20):
are in violation of the club's dress code for girls
and women, which requires them to wear either a tennis
dress or a tennis skirt. Gross. So then later, when
the other tennis players gather for a group photo, she
is excluded from that photo. Another time, also at the
Los Angeles Tennis Club, they have lunch arranged for the
(28:41):
top ranked players, which Billy Jean should be involved with.
But it's just for the boys. So Billy Jean and
her mom eat bag lunches outside on a bench. Oh yeah,
but wherever Billy Jean plays tennis, sexism and double standards follow.
One of her teachers dos points off of her grades because,
as they say, quote, Billy Gene occasionally takes advantage of
(29:03):
her superior ability during recess tennis games.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Oh my god, Yeah, she's upsetting boys by being too good.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
At Yeah, they get real upset.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Oh about the sports.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
She will later write about it, saying quote pursuing your
goals as a girl or a woman often meant being
pricked and dogged by slights like that, and so she
had to get used to it from a very young age.
But as she enters her teen she's becoming aware of
how other people are completely shut out of certain spaces,
like the many tournaments that she competes in that are
(29:35):
hosted at whites only country clubs. She writes in her autobiography, quote,
I wondered how the people of color around me felt
when I was young. I'd seen photos of how the
Little Rock nine students had to walk past an angry
white mob to desegregate their Arkansas school in nineteen fifty seven,
or how six year old Ruby Bridges still had to
be escorted daily by four federal marshals to attend classes
(29:57):
at her previously all white New Orleans school. I knew
the stories of how ALTHEA. Gibson and Jackie Robinson broke
the color barriers in their respective sports, tennis and baseball.
End quote. So growing up with this backdrop of the
civil rights movement, it imprints a huge sense of justice
on Billy jan King. She will write, quote, even if
you're not a born activist life can damn sure make
(30:20):
you one. Wow. The older I got, the more I
aspired to There wasn't just unrest in the world around us.
There was a storm gathering inside of me. End quote.
I totally remember this culturally, even though I was three
years old when it happened, so it's too young, but
I think it kind of lived on for at least
the next decade, but I seem to remember like the
(30:42):
vibe of it. Ultimately, Billy Jing King, as she began
to fight for women's rights, had to fight publicly against
really chauvinistic men about.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Those right, not just fighting it in tennis, it's you're
fighting the entire world society.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
You're like, yeah, you become the face of a fight
like that, which is a lot of pressure. Billy Jean
graduates high school in nineteen sixty one, and just weeks later,
at seventeen years old, she and nineteen year old Karen
Haunts when the women's doubles at Wimbledon, and they are
the youngest who ever do it, and they still are
to this day.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Holy shit, Yeah, seventeen.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Seventeen and nineteen, they just go in and like destroy
with this win. Billy begins to shoot up the ranks
of competitive tennis. She becomes the number three player in
the United States. By nineteen sixty six, when she's just
twenty three years old, she's the top ranked female tennis
player in the world. She wins Wimbledon's women's singles for
(31:39):
the next three years in a row. In nineteen sixty seven,
she wins what will be the precursor to the US Open,
which are the US Nationals, and the next year she
wins the Australian Open, so she's dominating nice. In between
all of those gigantic wins, she marries a law student
named Larry King, no relation to Larry King, but if
(32:00):
this was like a young Larry King, pre suspenders Larry King.
So Larry supports Billy Jean's career wholeheartedly. But the tournament's
circuit is tough and it's undeniably discriminatory two women athletes,
most notably Billy Jean and her female peers, are routinely
paid less prize money than their male counterparts. So in
(32:20):
nineteen seventy, twenty seven year old Billy Jean makes a move.
She and eight other female tennis players symbolically accept a
one dollar contract to join the Virginia Slims Tour. Wow,
So Virginia Slims, infinamous ladies skinny cigarette right that we
all know and love, decides to start a tennis tour
with women only. It's a nineteen cities stop tennis tournament
(32:43):
that travels across the United States, and the cash prizes
for the top athletes are all for just the women. Basically,
they just get their own kind of like prize bank
and give it to themselves.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Got it.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
These athletes still plan on playing the marquee tournaments of
the year, like the US Open and Wimbleton, but by
leaving the traditional tournament circuit, they're putting their careers and
their reputations in this intensely male dominated sports world at stake.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Well, it makes sense to what They're like, you're not
going to pay us an f We're going to go
somewhere else. We'll get paid.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
See how much money you lose because we're not here anymore.
Right And if you don't think we're that important, we
only deserve you know, a tenth of the pod, then
let's see what happens. It's a huge move, and it's
that kind of thing. It can't be kind of underlined
enough how it was not happening. It had not you know,
very few other places where women asserting themselves in those situations.
(33:37):
So now, in addition to playing top notch tennis, these
women have to work basically their asses off promoting the
Virginia Slims Tour, making sure there's butts and seats so
they sell so then they have the big prize tournament
to be competing for. In some cities, Billy Jean and
our fellow athletes hand out free tickets to random pedestrians
on the street, hoping they'll come and watch and basically
(33:59):
get in interested in women's tennis, and these efforts actually
pay off, with thousands of spectators showing up in every city,
proving to male stakeholders that there is real public interest
in women's sports. She must be so proud today watching
season after season these teams take off and these female
athletes just become more and more in the public eye.
(34:20):
It's very cool that she's around to see it. All
the while, Billy Jean King continues shattering the norms. In
nineteen seventy, she makes history as the first female tennis
player to earn more than one hundred thousand dollars in
prize money in a single season. Wow, do you want
to guess how much that isn't today's eight hundred ninety
four thousand, eight hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
I mean, it's over.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
You just won, so okay, so nice one, thank you,
but don't celebrate too soon, because the gender pay gap
still exists. Just two years later, Billy Jean wins the
US Open and has paid fifteen thousand dollars less in
prize money than the male winner. But instead of planning,
instead of whining, it just fuels her. She appears before
(35:05):
Congress fighting for the passing of Title nine, which bans
sex based discrimination in schools that receive federal dollars. So
she goes to the root of this discrimination.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
It's like not even specific to her and her career
at that point. It's like, here's where it began for me,
and here's where it begins for so many young girls.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Yeah, let's fucking kick it. Let's get out of the
fucking way.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
And this passes in nineteen seventy two, and it remains
the law of the land today. Although they chip chip
chip away, they sure do. I didn't know this this
is so compelling to me. In nineteen seventy three, Billy
Jean King forms the Women's Tennis Association. Wow, so Jay,
she just gets hurt.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
You know what I'm gonna do now?
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Yeah, She's like, we got to tighten this stuff up.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I have no excuse for my laziness.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Listen, you do three podcasts a week. It's not easy,
thank you. It's fishing for that w and you got it.
Women's Tennis Association is responsible for, among other things, the
fact that women get equal pay at the US Open. Now,
that was one of the first things that after they
came into the world, they started fighting for that, and
the US Open basically gave in the year that that
(36:15):
discussion started, like basically immediately. And so the US Open
was the first major tournament of any sport to award
the same prize money to male and female competitors. And
for a time like that, it was a huge trailblazing
victory for the equal rights of women. But you know,
when women are making progress in the world, there's always
going to be an old bowling bag of a man
(36:35):
who's going to cry about it, Isn't there.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
An old bowling bag of a man?
Speaker 1 (36:40):
And in this story, there is a true villain. A
lot of people there are theories that this was kind
of pr yes, yes, churned up for press with a
photos we will. But the thing that's funny, I'll show
you that bowling bag for sure. What's funny about this
is that it was such a part of the culture
of women yet get back into the kitchen type.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Of stutal in man for Mars. Women are from being Yeah, this.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Ex tennis player whose career ended in nineteen thirty nine, Jesus,
a man by the name of Bobby Riggs. He starts
talking about when all of this kind of movement happens.
Anytime that he's like interviewed or talking, he does a
lot of what they call when you play the X
something games exposition games. What's the word I'm looking for
(37:24):
X games now, exhibition thank you? Exhibition games. Okay, his
career had basically turned to playing exhibition games. Right, He's
like the Harlem Globetrotters of tess But I don't think
he was good like the Harlem Globetrotters. I mean those
guys back and rocked. This guy I think was just
around and had a big mouth, got it and so.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
That's all you have to do to be a man
these days and to be successful.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
That's right around these days, have those big day. It's
pretty much how it is. So he just starts just
spouting inflammatory sexist comments about women's tennis and the fight
for will pay in the sport, right, because she's making progress.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Shut the fuck up, dude.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
His two big ones that he did were he said
women's tennis quote stinks. You can see some pretty legs,
but it's night and day compared to the men's game. Wow,
it's just very standard.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Another time he's quoted as saying a women's place is
in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and not necessarily in
that order.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Gross dude.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Right, let's take a look at Bobby Riggs.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh what's he looks like a fucking what's his name,
Austin Powers.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
He's absolutely awestin power. Oh, oh my god. I wonder
if Mike Myers did that on purpose, because it really
is that kind of I really picture it's a characature
of a man who's like commenting on then you have
to respond simply because you won't stop doing it.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Right, But it's also like you're commenting on women like
you're some kind of prize.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Dude. It's like the concept of I decide other people's value,
but I don't have to.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Do anything to make myself appealing in any way.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
I stopped playing tennis thirty two years ago, but I'm
going to talk about how you shouldn't be playing totally. Okay.
So he's just fanning the flames of showvidism for attention
and relevance. It's not a hard thing to do. It
never has been, especially as the women's movement is looming
into the seitgeist and men are very much put out
by this concept of equality. They do not like it,
(39:23):
never way of what. According to a quote from Billy
Jean in a BBC dot Com article, she says that
Bobby Riggs followed her around for two years, challenging her
to play against him. Yeah, then he asks her to
play on Mother's Day nineteen seventy three, and in that
offer he refers to her as quote the leading women's
liver of tennis. End quote, Billy Jean says, I'm sorry,
(39:47):
I don't know who you are. No, that's not true. Actually,
Billy Jean King was always super classy. When she talked
about Bobby Riggs, she was like, he's a hero of mine.
He's one of the greats of tennis. Wow, not in
this you know, when this kind of thing comes up,
but in general she had always looked up to him
as like a hero of tennis. So it's really gross
(40:09):
some thing.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
It just starts harassing her.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, and kind of being like, oh, you think you're
so big, we'll play against me a man.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
He's harassing and stalking her and playing it off like
it's a game, like a playful flirtation.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Right. Basically, she just always says no and kind of
leave me alone. So he challenges a different top ranked
female tennis player to this match on Mother's Day in
nineteen seventy three. That player's name is Margaret Court. She's
considered one of the best to ever play the game,
but she had just been returning to competitive play after
taking a year off to have a baby. She agrees
(40:43):
to play Bobby Riggs, not realizing how big of a
spectacle he's planning on making it. So on May thirteenth,
nineteen seventy three, with thirty five hundred spectators watching courtside
and another ten million watching from home, Bobby beats Margaret
Court decisively in six' one six'. Two game he plays,
(41:04):
a soft slow type, of tennis and it totally throws
off the way, she plays which is like, hard hitting.
Fast moving this match will become known as The Quote mother's.
Day massacre but you just got to think of these
like male sports reporters who were just sitting. There, WAITING
yeah i would be surprised to learn that there was
any kind of equanimity in. This reporting, absolutely so everybody
(41:26):
watches THIS, on Tv And billy jean, does too and as,
she does she immediately understands what the stakes of this are.
And were and at a time when female athletes are
fighting for respect, and recognition not to mention equal pay and,
equal sponsorships this loss plays right into the hands of
the naysayers and the performative chauvinists and the people who,
(41:49):
are like we have an excuse not to give. You
Money So Billy jean king reaches out to The Gloating
bobby riggs, AND says i will. Play you they then
begin to Promote this battle of the sexes tennis. Match
Relentlessly billy jean is quoted, as, Saying quote i'm taking
this match. VERY seriously i love TO win i welcome
the responsibility and. The pressure bobby had better, be ready
(42:12):
and according to THAT same, Bbc article bobby turned up
to a practice session wearing a shirt with two circles
cut out where his nipples were and Joked That Billy
jean king would look better in it. Than. Him ewow the,
next day in the final, news conference a Direct Speaking
Billy jean king calls him. A Creep bobby riggs asks
(42:33):
her to take. It back she looks him straight in
the eye, and says. Creep stands that is a. Good
comeback so a few, months Later on, september twentieth nineteen,
Seventy Three Billy jean king goes head to Head Against
bobby riggs and it's a. Perfect storm bobby's gloating sexis
blather has now been repeatedly aimed Directly At billy jean
(42:55):
who's not just a tennis player but a public face
of the, women's movement and this has expanded from a
pop culture tennis match to a referendum on the validity
of the. Women's movement they name It the battle Of,
the sexes and more than thirty thousand people show up
At the astrodome to.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Watch It astro is that the one that you see It,
IN Texas, Us, see okay it's Not in la.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
A night. It, is yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
You're, right WELL look i never. SAID listen i.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Did never we can't pretend to be sports fans just
because we're talking.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
About, sports Astrodome The, STAPLES center i, don't know very.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Similar places so thirty thousand people around that area go,
to watch ninety million watch it. From home holy sh
it's almost how many people listen to. THIS podcast, i mean,
and again apologies to all ninety million. Of you this
match sets an all time record for tennis watching and
it's still held to. This day it will be one
(43:56):
of the most watched sporting events of all. Time, period
yes because it's really kicking up all the vibes of
like early seventies politics essentially about so much more. Than
so they have these. Insane entrances it's almost goes into like. Professional,
Wrestling Wow Billy jean king is carried onto the court
(44:16):
by shirtless men in one of those beds with four
men at each of amanity, that well there WAS a
pr person, that, said oh you're, a feminist you're not
going to, Do this and, she went what are you
TALKING about i love, this idea like jumped up. Onto it,
she's like let's play this thing. For, her Meanwhile When
bobby riggs, comes out he's. Being pulled there's nothing not
(44:37):
problematic about everything about. This thing we can all, assume
that but just to, state it he's being pulled on
a rickshaw by WOMEN in t shirts that Bear The
Sugar daddy. Candy logo and he's got an endorsement Deal
With Sugar daddy. Candy bro so that's a whole candy company,
that's like we're on the.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
Dude's side can you imagine being his kid and, being,
like oh this is. So embarrassing my dad is. So
embarrassing it's.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
So goofy but then at the, same time there's just
so many people who, are, like yeah, you know we
need to teach those women. A, Lesson yeah so what's
great is that they meet and they present gifts to.
Each other, you know it's like kind of. Opening salvo
bobby Wearing A sugar daddy Sweatsuit Gives billy jean An
Oversized sugar. Daddy lollipop And Because bobby riggs has proclaimed
(45:27):
in the press over and over that he is proud
to be a. Male Chauveness Pig billy jean gives him,
a piglet a, live piglet. And photos let's see them. Being, carried.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Oh he's in, a rickshaw he's in a little.
Speaker 1 (45:42):
Rich on those are the sugar daddy women that are.
Pushing it but Then, here's oh she. Looks incredible is't that?
The best so she's got more Of a cleopatra. Thing
going but.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Also the woman standing next to her with a fucking.
Tight perm he's got a sign that just says.
Speaker 1 (45:56):
BYE bye i know what kind of time traveler woman? Is,
that seriously because That's A Billie jean. King shirt she's on.
Her side it's, like bye there's Some go bobby goes in,
the background because you it's. Like wrestling it's totally wrestling boys. Against,
girls yeah so it's kind. Of GREAT and i love
that she's such a smart woman and, she's like you
can't cast me as the Serious. Ballbusting friday that's not What,
(46:19):
THIS yeah i get what.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
This is she's like being playful, about, it yeah which
is a great way to like make an inroad and show.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
You're, smart yeah here's, a piglet. Go, Away, yeah now
you have to take care of. A. Pig okay the
enormous social and psychological weight of this cultural event lands
Squarely On billy jean's shoulders as the, game begins so
she does falter a little Bit like bobby. Scores First
Then billy jean hits a ball out, of bounds so.
(46:47):
She stops she gives herself a, pep talk and she
basically pulls out her. A game she will later write
quote for all the pre match Hype about, bobby's skills many,
FOLKS forgot i was a versatile shot and a Shrewd, Tactician,
toouck Yeah now i'm trying, different shots seeing. What works
I'm making bobby work for every point and. Hell yeah
(47:09):
so she basically that, same Feeling which i'm sure Happened To,
margaret court came of, like no this, really matters but
instead of like, tightening up she allowed. And perfection, she, allowed,
like hey he's going to get some, points whatever and
she learned, from it yeah And. Adjusted yeah and then,
she's like WHAT do i need to? Be? Doing not
HOW do i need to? Be? Defending yeah so in,
(47:31):
the end they play five, full sets which is what
only men did. Back then women played three and men.
Played Five billy jean Decisively Blows bobby riggs away in
consecutive sets and wins one hundred thousand dollars. Grand prize that,
Is incredible she'll, later, SAY quote i thought it would
set us back fifty YEARS if i didn't win. That
(47:51):
match it would ruin the women's tennis tour and affect
all women's. Self, ESTEEM god i mean so.
Speaker 2 (47:58):
Much pressure she had so much more to lose, than him.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
So much it was just a dumb joke.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
To, Him yeah but then for her to realize, halfway
through not even in, the beginning, Like oh i'm actually better?
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Than?
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Him what WHY am?
Speaker 1 (48:10):
I nervous his last game was in nineteen. Thirty nine
he had to stop playing tennis Because Of World. War
two what a nice what a nice feeling to, be
like oh wait, A, Second yes i've. Got, This yeah
i've got this. Fucking easy i'm not going to put
the ball places and make that little guy, looks stupid
make that little wig. Come off do you want to
take a look at her Winning this battle of? The?
(48:32):
Sexeses please what?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
She did she had a great night, that night.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
And there's the astrodome look at how full.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
It is it's so.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Crazy crazy oh got to. Be, there yeah time machine fighting.
For girls, oh sorry we're. Mid quote to beat a
fifty five year old guy was no thrill. For me
the thrill was exposing a lot of new people.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
To tennis amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
End quote so then she's also just being a. Business
woman it's, an opportunity a. Big opportunity the fan. For
around the match introduces countless new people to the previously
elite's only sport. Of tennis it's a major evolution for
women in, sports overall and the power of this win
will persist. FOR decades i, MEAN truly i could not
(49:15):
have been conscious of. This HAPPENING and i absolutely knew
all about this as a. Young girl same AND yeah
i wasn't. Born, yet yeah like. Much, later yeah it
really set us up for terrible disappointment for the nineties and.
Two Thousands Billy jean king will, later say Quote our
battle Of the sexes match helped to advance the game
of tennis and. Women everywhere. End quote now there are
(49:39):
people out there who try to Say That bobby riggs
through the match because he needed, the money because he
owed the mafia so much money, with gambling which is
Of Course Billy jan king calls those, rumors ridiculous and they.
Are ridiculous he was a fifty five year old man
playing a woman at the top of. Her game he
would later go on to say that he completely, underestimated,
(50:01):
her wow and did not realize how fast. She, was
basically he's just. A fraud but she also talks about
him after, the fact like they. Stayed friends she did
not get got by him. Any way she treated him
like the joke he was treating, her as and they
actually were able to stay friends to the point where
(50:24):
she talked to him the night before he died and
he told her he. Loved. Her. Wow yeah so it
was a private relationship that was very different than the
results of what the culture kind of reacted to in.
This game.
Speaker 2 (50:36):
Got it, THAT'S nice, i know.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Isn't it because she's the bigger she gets to be
the bigger person because, she's, like yeah destroyed you, so
wonderful we can. Be Friends Billy jean king's cultural influence
is of. Course undeniable she's Won Twelve grand slam. Singles
titles she's been inducted Into The International tennis Hall, of
fame she was Awarded The french Legion. Of honor she
became the first female commissioner in professional sports after co
(51:00):
establishing the Mixed Gender World Team TENNIS, league wow and
her fight on the tennis court was memorialized on film
in the twenty Seventeen movie battle Of, the Sexes Where
emma stone. Played her and just so, everyone knows if
you don't know What A grand, slam is that's when
you Win The, australian Open The, French open wimbledon AND
The us open all in the. Same, Year jesus so you.
(51:22):
Go slam that's A Very williams sisters kind of thing. To.
Do Cool billy jean is also just as well known
for her advocacy work FOR the lgbtq plus community and
being That It's, pride month that's also one of the
REASONS that i did. This story she was not a
lot of people. Know this she was outed by an
(51:42):
ex lover in the early eighties when nobody. Was out
the people managing her career at the time begged her
to deny that she. Was, gay instead she held a
press conference and, confirmed it becoming one of the First
famous american athletes to be out as a lesbian that
is incredible or out. At. All. Yeah yeah and, Since
(52:03):
Then Billy jan king has talked at length about how
confusing and painful this part of her life. Initially was
there was no one. To, follow ye like. VERY few
i shouldn't say. No one there was some people out
there in, the culture but in the kind of like
show business she was.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
In totally she was a.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
True trailblazer, once again she, has, Said quote i've always
thought about. FUTURE generations i promised myself AT twelve i
would try to be number ONE so i could help
the world be a. Better place twelve, Years old oh.
MY god i wanted to be able to influence and do.
Those things. End quote in two thousand, And Nine President
barack Obama Presents Billy jan king WITH The Us presidential
(52:41):
Medal of freedom, and, says quote what we honor are
not simply Her Twelve grand. Slam titles she did it,
twelve Times twelve.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Grand, slams, yeah one.
Speaker 1 (52:51):
One hundred and one, doubles titles and sixty seven. Singles
titles and then, he said, Pretty Good. Billy jean it's
hard to do a Quote From barack obama because he
likes to do, side commentary it's so sad that he's
gone from. Our lives we honor what she calls all
the off the, court stuff what she did to broaden
(53:11):
the reach of, the game to change how women athletes
and women everywhere of, you themselves and to give everyone
regardless of gender or, sexual orientation including my, two daughters
a chance, to compete both on the court and. In
Life As billy jean, once said we should never ever
underestimate the, human spirit nor should We Underestimate Billy jean
(53:32):
king's spirit. End, quote today eighty two Year Old Billy
jean king is among history's most. Iconic athletes as she
continues to inspire generations of young people and promote the
rights of. People everywhere she's never forgotten the joy that
she felt playing tennis for the very. First time, she,
SAID quote i just love hitting a. Tennis ball it's
(53:54):
just that's. A book there's NO way i could have
gotten through all the pressures on and off the COURT
if i hadn't. LOVED it i love it. End quote
and that's the story of The Legendary Billy. Jean king that.
Speaker 2 (54:05):
WAS amazing i LOVE that i got the feeling, that
DAY and i wonder if the woman the tennis player
Who Lost, Margaret, COURT like i wonder if do you
think they did it on purpose to kind of like hype,
it up because if it had just been, them first
it wouldn't have had the hype that.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
It. DID completely, i mean that's. Absolutely possible the fact
that any. OF this i love the idea that this
would have been like a let's fight for women's equity, and,
sports ye or let's fight for, women's tennis or let's
get out there and give them a chance to. Prove
themselves it just seems so unlikely in like nineteen. Seventy
THREE but i think answering this kind, of, like oh
(54:43):
you think boys are better, Than girls like it's this
playground fight that's just been going on for, so long
and she stepped up and, was like, sounds good let's,
do this and then just. Trounced him. Love, it yeah
that was such a fun episode of fucking. BADASS women,
i know all these superstars that we all get to,
be there they get to be. Our, heroes yeah.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Let's let's try to, emulate them, you guys and do
stuff for the.
Speaker 1 (55:07):
Greater good let's be perfectly gorgeous in the face and
perfectly great at tennis. Sounds great. Hurry up that wraps
up this special bonus episode Presented. By hyundai thank you
so much, for listening and thank You to hundai for
making this. Episode possible stay sexy and don't. Get, Murdered,
Goodbye elvis do you Want? To cookie this has been
(55:36):
an exactly.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Right production our senior Producer Is molly smith and our
associate Producer Is.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Tessa hughes our Editor Is. Aristotle lascevedo this episode was
Mixed By. Leona squalacci our Researchers are mary McGlashan And.
Ali elkin email your Hometowns To My favorite murder at
gmail dot com and follow the Show on Instagram At My.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
Favorite murder Listen To My favorite murder On the, iHeartRadio
App apple podcasts or wherever you get.
Speaker 1 (55:58):
Your podcasts and now you Can Watch My favorite Murder
on netflix and when, you're there hit the double thumbs
up and the remind.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
Me buttons that's the best way you can support. Our,
show goodbye
Hosts And Creators
Georgia Hardstark
Karen Kilgariff
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