"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
"Improving things comes naturally to me."
"I win because I learned years ago that scared money always loses. I never care, so I win."
"I was the highest-priced and most important star in Hollywood, but I was 'difficult'."
In 1937, a twenty-two-year-old Viennese actress walked out on the third-richest man in Austria — a fascist-connected arms magnate who kept her as a trophy, controlled her movements, and had tried to buy up every print of her scandalous first film — slipping away, by the standard account, disguised as her own maid, with what jewelry she could carry. A few weeks later, in London, Louis B. Mayer made her an offer of $125 per week, which she rejected outright – the destitute refugee saying no to the biggest man in Hollywood – before boarding the same Normandie as Mayer, and spent the trip making sure she was so dazzling that when the ship reached New York, Mayer doubled his offer to $500 a week and gave her the name Hedy Lamarr. She had negotiated her own stardom, at sea, without anything, through demonstration and negotiation. The world would spend the next sixty years remembering her as an image, for her extraordinary looks, but it was the least of her. Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was closest to LIE — the enterprising intelligence — with a distinct accent on Se and additional weakness of Fi.
What her main cognition type doing, most evenings, was improving things — her own very telling phrase. Every item she turned her attention to is a practical betterment aimed at a real-world result. An improved traffic stoplight. A tablet that fizzed a glass of water into cola. A faster wing for Hughes's planes — produced by buying a book of fish and a book of birds, finding the fastest of each, and combining the fins with the wings, a piece of applied bio-engineering audacious enough that Hughes, no flatterer, told her: "You're a genius." This is less ILE and more LIE-style innovation: the practical intelligence that looks at any already working thing and sees the faster, cheaper, better version — and it points directly at the base function. Her inventions were all aimed at real-world results and functional enhancement, and she lacked substantial theoretical interests, being, at her core, quite a practical person.
In the summer of 1940, by her collaborator George Antheil's testimony, Lamarr told him "she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state", and that she was seriously considering quitting MGM to offer herself to the National Inventors' Council in Washington. What she offered instead was an idea drawn from her years at the arms dealer's dinner table: radio-guided torpedoes failed because their guidance signal could be found and jammed — but a signal that kept changing frequencies, transmitter and receiver hopping together in a synchronized pattern, could never be caught. Antheil, who had once tried to synchronize sixteen player pianos, supplied the mechanism — paired piano rolls, eighty-eight frequencies for the piano's eighty-eight keys — and in 1942 they patented the Secret Communication System and gave it to the U.S. Navy for nothing. When the Navy shelved it, she did not mount a promotional campaign: there was no market to build for a classified patent donated to the government. She redirected the same practical energy to the instrument that was available — and became one of the most formidable war-bond sellers in America, raising millions in single appearances, retail patriotism executed with a saleswoman's efficiency. In 1946, when the studio system "didn't want movie stars producing their own films — especially the women," she simply founded a production company and made three.
She was, perhaps, more confornational and less diplomatic then your average LIE. She sued readily and without embarrassment — including, notably, over Mel Brooks's parody "Hedley Lamarr" joke in a film, and won a settlement. Even the sad late-life shoplifting arrests, her biographer judged, were at bottom sport — the transgressive thrill-seeking of a bored old lioness ("they don't mind," she told the arresting officer, "I always write them a check afterwards"). This type of audacity is slightly more SLE than LIE or ILE-style.
"Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid" is, besides being a joke, is a reflection of her high-energy and love of risk (which, for LIE/SLE combination, must be one of the highest in the socion). She badly wanted to do things and be recognized for it. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation finally called in 1997 with the Pioneer Award, her son Anthony Loder asked what she would say. The reply was the businesswoman closing out a long-overdue account in three words: "Well, it's about time."
She paid its full price for both Si and Fi weakenesses. Six marriages, all failed — the relational register never mastered. And the final decades were the collapse of self-maintenance the type risks when the enterprise runs out (especially with emotivism and rationality blurred): reclusive in Florida, ravaged by the cosmetic surgeries, litigating with the world by telephone. She did build and manage a substantial career for decades, so the enterprise faculty was real and volatile, but take a LIE's field of action away, and what boredom does to that engine is not gentle.
But the posterity verdict, in the end, closed in her favor. The pretty face that was supposed to be her whole story ("the most beautiful woman in the world") turned out to be marginal to it, the idea sketched at her invention table with now runs through every phone on earth. She was in the improving business, after all.
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