Hedy Lamarr Was Super-Scorped

Triple Scorpio Hedy Lamarr was a Golden Era Hollywood icon who also invented the protocols that drive Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as several military applications.

It was barely even acknowledged until relatively recently. As Alexandra Dean, the director of Bombshell – a doco about Lamarr’s fascinating life – noted, many great inventors and scientists have been erased from the culture purely because ‘they didn’t seem like an inventor.’

In actual fact, Hedy Lamarr didn’t fit any classification. If good-looking women are generally acknowledged to – even now – have difficulty being taken seriously for their brains and other contributions, how would someone as ludicrously beautiful as Lamarr have presented in the 1930s?

The woman had an electronics laboratory in the corner of her living room, liked nude swimming in lakes, resolutely mixed up her own perfume and – like the Piscean Elizabeth Taylor – was notorious for her swearing aka ‘bad language.’ 

Her acting talents were kindly called ‘static’ and as one cameraman put it 

“She thought she knew it all and was forever telling you what to do. She was beautiful – she had great skin texture – but I don’t recall anybody saying they enjoyed shooting her. She never came alive, except to keep making damned uncouth remarks to the people I had around me.”

But guess what? She was a genius and born with not only the Sun, Mercury (Retrograde) and Mars in Scorpio, but an exact Saturn-Pluto conjunction in her 12th house, close to the Cancerian Ascendant.

People with Pluto Rising generally project a planet-load of charisma yet they’re not really attached to it: they’re given to deep ruminations and gigantic, all-absorbing creative or scientific projects. Saturn and Pluto reinforce one another and the alignment was at the potent Zero degrees of Cancer-Kataka.

Her Moon – the chart ruler – was exact conjunct Neptune in Leo and I imagine most people related to her through the glamors she cast without even trying. She was an electronics and radiofrequency wonk who did not look the way people playing that role are ‘supposed’ to look.

Saturn-Pluto in her 12th, along with the Scorpio Sun, Mercury and Mars bestowed enormous antifragility and resourcefulness. Lamarr was raised in privileged surroundings and well-educated but as the female scion of a wealthy Jewish banking family, just barely escaped Europe in her early 20s.

She wasn’t fleeing the Nazis, as such, but rather the brutal munitions manufacturer she’d married at the age of 18. He was 33, the third richest man in Austria and all his friends were fascists. His first marriage had ended after six weeks and while Hedi lasted longer, she fled in a disguise, taking whatever jewels and money she could hide within her coat seams and so on.

She also, evidently, took some of the documents that later allowed her to develop a radio guidance system for Allied torpedos, the precursor to Bluetooth et al. 

It seems as if she was too wild, weird and beautiful to slot into post-War America or even Europe. She cursed the allure that she said kept drawing her unhappy relationships and marriages, burned through all her money and when asked for her beauty tips by the media said she used the gritty substance that mechanics used on cars.

It could have been true – she had Venus in Sagittarius, the epitome of nonchalance. But sadly, as it began to fade, she savagely mourned the beauty she’d spent decades deriding. Lamarr hid away in her by now much more humble abode, refusing to see anyone she knew from ‘before.’

She was clearly ahead of her time and if she’d been welcomed into the scientific community or more widely acknowledged for attributes unrelated to her looks, who knows? She could have thrived on for longer and developed even more out-there inventions!