Legacy and Advocacy Work

This is exactly right . While the world watches the stars at the FIFA World Cup, Hyundai has its eyes on the next generation of talent, the future soccer stars who are already turning heads at age fourteen because Next doesn't wait for an invitation, and Hyundai doesn't either. Hyundai has always moved the future within reach. Hyundai did it by making advanced safety standard on every vehicle, and by engineering EVs with ultra fast charging capabilities, and Hyundai continues doing it every day because the future isn't some far off concept, it's already here. Next starts now, Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye Hello and welcome. My favorite murder. That's Georgia Hartstart. That's Karen Kilgareth. And this is a very special episode. That's right. This is a bonus episode , surprise. That's right. It means you're getting more stories. You didn't earn it, but you deserve it. So this episode is presented by Hyundai. That's right, thank you, Hyundai for making this storytelling bonus happen. So for today's theme for this bonus episode, we thought it would be fun to connect our stories through a shared thread . Both of them feature people who were innovators, pioneers, and just generally ahead of their time. Yes, people who saw things differently and acted on it. That's right. And our women. So thank you Hyundai for this bonus episode. Thanks for listening and let's get into it. Let's do it. All right, I'm excited about the theme of this because it's a story I 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, glamor, and sex appeal. She was even said to be the inspiration for both catwoman, women and women, cat woman 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 WiFi and Bluetooth. This is the story of legendary screen actress and equally legendary inventor, Hetty Lamar. 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. It's ridiculous. Like this movie I watch ed the bomb shell, the Hetty Lamar story documentary, and like every time you see her on screen, your breath is taken away at how gorgeous she is. But then the brain. 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 Hedwig, bring that name back. I mean, Hedwig Ava Maria Keysler. She's born in nineteen fourteen in Venice, Austria. Nope, in Vienna, Austria. 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 I, pre World War two, 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 is the manager of a major bank in Vienna . And so Hetty 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, Hett tiakes her music box apart and then successfully puts it back together . I never could do that second part of it. Yeah, it's fun to take things apart. That's for sure. And this sparks a lifelong interest in engineering. So her father walks her around Vienna and points out all the technology, the streetcars, 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 a fairly progressive society. Nudity and sexuality in the arts isn't really taboo . You know, like cabaret, think of that musical 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 arts 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, should we see a picture of her? Yes, so let's everybody knows . I mean so beautiful. It's crazy. She looks like Elizabeth Taylor meets Vivian Lee . Yes, exactly. Yeah. Those perfect kind of pitite faces. Yeah. So God bless anyone that can do a part down the center. It cannot be me. It's amazing. Hetty is very good at being on film and somewhat 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, she's getting roles in movies. Was that easy back then. I mean, when you're hot, yeah. Yeah, that beautiful. 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 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 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 named Fritz Mandel. So Fritz is older, he's divorced. He like wants this beautiful woman on his arm, essentially nineteen year old . He sells weapons to the Nazis and is extraordinarily wealth y, but he's also Jewish . But he comes from this long 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 regim e. Well, yeah, I mean, there's plenty of how many companies that still exist today exist because they did exactly that thing with Hitler. Right. Crazy and used slave labor, all that stuff. 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 any time she says the word acting, he tell her 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 she does attend some meetings with him if he needs her to look good on his arm. And at these meetings, she learns a bit about torped oes and how they work. So she's still like chasing 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 those frequencies. She can't stop thinking 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. It's all yap, yap, yep to him. Yeah. So you can imagine like if she had gone to college, gone to school, gotten 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 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 sews 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 and basically like puts her to bed, takes the maid's outfit, puts it on and takes off in the night. Thank you so much. With her coat up like this, you than sok much. Yeah . You want to be like good for her, but it's also the maid is just like wakes up in the morning. Do we know for a fact that the maid wasn't in on it? I mean, maybe she was like, yeah, I'll do it. Put me out. Red flag for your job number one, you look exactly like the lady interviewing you. Right. Don't do it. 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 job with that stud io. And as we know, the studio is headed by Louis B. Mayer. So it's Metro Golden 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 really predatory contracts. I mean that's dark. It's so dark 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. Absolutely. You could be looked at in different ways for sure. Why not just a nice contract? This is the way of the future. I'm positive . It's gonna hear it. Oh, just that people get into that position. They're like, We're going to do some nice contracts. Everyone's gonna be happy. They're gonna be able to buy a house after this. No one's gonna feel used. They're going to love it and they're going to love the arts . It's gonna be worth it . Hetty's offered one of these contracts. It's not as bad because she's already been in a movie and stuff. It's one hundred twenty five dollars a week is what she's offered, which in today's money . This was in the thirties? . six hundred dollars a week. two thousand eight hundred and ninety seven. So that's a lot of money over . That's like union rate. Totally . But it's not enough for her. 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 makes sure to run into him throughout all she has to do, she's a hot lady. She puts on her tennis clothes and her bathing suit and just happens to walk by him all the time. And a nice red lip done and done. 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. Stop, pause, look at the ceiling . Yeah . Imagine yourself on the ceiling. She knows it. Like, God, that feeling . Yeah . And so he offers her a contract for five hundred dollars a week by the end of the trip. He upset by two hundred . It was one hundred twenty five and now it's five hundred. Which is eleven thousand five hundred and eighty eight dollars in today's money a week. Yeah, hell yeah. So it works. 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 actress who had tragically died and Lamar means the sea. So hetty Lamar. Okay, because we're at the sea. Yeah, I don't know. It's pretty good While the world watches the stars at the Fever World Cup this summer, Hyundai has its eyes on the next generation of talent. The future soccer stars who are already turning heads at age fourteen, making plays that end up on everyone's feed, scoring from angles that don't make sense, rewriting record books that barely had time to gather dust. Because Next doesn't wait for an invitation, and Hyundai doesn't either. Hyundai has always moved the future within reach. Hyundai did it by making advanced safety standard on every vehicle. Hyundai did it by engineering EVs with ultra fast charging capability, and Hyundai continues doing it every day. From robotics that change how people live to young athletes changing the game, the future isn't some far off concept. It's already here. Next starts now. Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye . 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? No brag, but those are the eyebrows I had in the nineties. You can tell the remnants are still there, but man cilin. They went that thin in the nineties. Imagine she looked that good with thin eyebrows, what she'd look like with normal eyebrows even better. She had those big tall laminated ones tatted on . Okay . In nineteen thirty nine, when she's twenty three, she marries a screenwriter named Jean Markie 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. It's such a weird time for women in marriage though, ' sheC'asuse making eleven thousand dollars a week. Right. So she doesn't need to be doing anything. She probably has to. Yeah. And it seems like this dude that she married him was like him, and she was like, he's nice to me. You remind me of my dad. Immediately starts cheating . Like she even tries to make the right, you know, not some fancy actor not a munitions fan . A smart guy, a writer. This is a safe bet. You fool. No. They're the worst every time. They're the worst every time. Every man is entitled, it's on some level. So he starts dating other actresses and the marriage ends. In nineteen forty, Hetty now has a huge year with MGM first appearing in the movie Boomtown, which is a massive hit. And she stars 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 to perform for long hours, she's given amphetamines. It's the, 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 on set as well where she can go and tinker between takes because she wants to do science stuff. Yeah. After her marriage to Jean Fails, Hetty, she starts dating Howard Hughes , the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch the Aviator, so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him . But incredible innovator , serious mental illness , right? It kind of went unchecked. I think so, yeah. She says he's a quote very strange man. But they do get along really well. Give us example. I know. They say something like he was a bad lover. And I'm like, what does that mean? Does that mean at what level there's so many levels where he could be ? He keeps making airplane noises just the whole time 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 so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane . And that kind of becomes the plane that we know today. Like he uses it shit. And he calls her a genius. She is a genius, it sounds like. Yeah, 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 and 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 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 su nk, 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 people out of there in time. So Hetty comes up with this idea that she had had of frequency hopping with help from a professor at Caltech in Pasadena. Guiding the torpedoes with frequencies that constantly change so they can't be jammed. So she meets a composer named George Ant il and together they come up with a way to make this frequency hopping system work inspired by a method George has used and figured out of synchronizing player pianos. So you know when you see the like 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 always control. . Like a player piano , they just keep going. Right. So George and Hetty patented this idea . They present it to the Navy, but it's rejected as being impractical. They kind of laugh them off. We're 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. They think she could be a spy. She's made this patent and tried to give it to them . And they're like, no. We'll get you. Right. And then it's like, yeah, now we're onto you. Or it's like, right, you're on to me the person who came and gave you this 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? 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 much of an ego to like agree and allow it . It's frustrating. Can we have our own planet, please? No . They make you that sounds right. In nineteen forty three, Hetty marries a British actor named John Lod er. They are together until nineteen forty seven. They have two children. Everyone says he's really dull compared to her vibaciousness and intelligence. So then she has another brief marriage after that , but what? I like the way you said that like because everyone said he was dull, she was like, fine, I'll divorce him. Like somebody else. And so Hetty has a bumpy relationship with Louis V Meer. I think a lot of actresses probably did. And she gets a reputation for being difficult 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 so. And she does it herself, which pisses off Mayor even more. And in nineteen forty nine, she does get the movie Samson and Delilah. It's a massive hit and 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 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. Mean to support my children. You're gonna hit that money button if it is within your reach. Yeah. And she has to move to Texas with him and it sounds almost like a green acre's kind of the movie star and get her to move back to Texas. Yeah, exactly. She does become ang estred 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. In the nineteen fifties, she starts 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, the salt takes a huge toll and she has several breakdowns. In the sixties, she also becomes a patient of doctor Max Jacobson, AKA doctor Feelgood , who I actually covered in episode three hundred and forty nine. I'm surprised to hear that . And it was relatively recently. Yeah, it's called The Bit of Stew twenty twenty two, that's not recently. Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't know where my brain was at the time. That was we were on Zoom. That was like the blank years. Yeah. We should skip that and rewind. Just skip the whole pair pretend 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 meth. 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 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 Wenona Rider style way that it's like, did she or didn't she? She gets acquitted, but it definitely tarnishes her reputation. 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 hit. 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 open exactly. You don't do things for yourself like that back then. I think the Winona Rider won it reminded me of like when somebody is a star, back then, that level of a star where literally everyone does everything for you. It gives you whatever you want. All the time. Yeah, yeah. 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 through her eyes , she starts to get cosmetic procedures . And in fact, she dictates to the surgeon how she thinks the procedure should be done . And she ends up making plastic surgery. She 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. Yeah. I mean, she looks in today's standards, incredible. Yeah. But of course, this press is still relentless, still photographs where every time she leaves the house, it's kind of just the worst 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. And so if you the patent , you have to pay for it. Yeah, that's kind of the understanding when you file a patent. That's the thing about patents. Yeah. If the U. S. 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 had expired in nineteen fifty nine, but she expects that they had used it before, which would mean it hadn't expired yet and said she is owed money. So in nineteen ninety, when Hetty seventy five, a reporter named Fleming Meks 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 from a colleague that actress Hetty 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 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 Hedi Lamar's inventions. You know, she had been keeping it to herself. Over the course of the nineties and into two thousands, frequency 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 scientific, there you go. Oh, I love a blueprint. Here's a blueprint . Do it, what you will. This is her just like as she's filming and in her dressing room, she's like, to do just some thoughts. What a genius . I know. And that's just one of very many. So our most secure military communications are done with a satellite system that was built using Heti'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 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 acknowledgement 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 at the age of eighty five without ever knowing for sure if her patent had been used before it expired. 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. This was four years before the patent had expired , so just like she had saw it, it had been used . He used it actually to create something called a Sono Buoy. You know what that is? It's a buoy that communicates securely with aircraft. Sure.'s just It it was used. Yeah . He had been unaware of the patent implications or that Hetty had not been paid , and it only comes to light when 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. Wow. So she was right all along. Confirmed from the inside. That's right. So that is the story of Hetty Lamar, who was a great beauty, of course, but also more important ly, an innovator and an inventor. 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. 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. Then 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 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 Saxes tennis match. Hell yeah. Do you know about this? No, I know the story not very well. Okay, I'm excited. Let me get to the details. Okay, so the sources used in the show today are Billy Jean King 's autobiography. It's called All In and her website Billy Jean King. com. We went to the source. Got it, but there are other ones and they're in our show notes. So Billy Jean Moffat, 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, like softball and basketball , but she doesn't pick up tennis until she's a pre teen when her friend Susan asks if she wants to come with her for a lesson at Long Beach's Virginia Country Club. Did you know there were 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. Her family self described blue collar family. Her dad's a fireman, her mom is a homemaker. So tennis is basically a sport that she's just not been exposed to. Yeah. It's basically at this time for the elite . So it's a secret secret sport. And according to her, for this first lesson, Billy Jean is not good at tennis, but something clicks inside her. And later on, she's going to write, quote, I the var liiketedy 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 has a natural aptitude for the game. She's very competitive . She's always working to improve, and because of this, she starts to win a lot. But it is nineteen fifty five. So even though Billy Jean is proving herself on the court, she's treated very different 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? Neither. And she's wearing a pair of shorts her mother made for her . And she's told those shorts 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 young tennis players gather for a group photo, she is excluded from that photo. Yeah . Another time also at the Los Angeles tennis club, they have lunch arranged for the top ranked players, which Billy Ejean 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 my gosh. Yeah. But wherever Billy Jean plays tennis, sexism and double standards follow. One of her teachers docks points off of her grades because as they say, quote, Billy Jean occasionally takes advantage of her superior ability during recess tennis games. Oh my god. Yeah , she's upsetting boys by being too good at they get real upset. Oh the sports. 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 wow . So she had to get used to it from a very young age. Yeah . But as she enters her teens, 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 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 desegre gate 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 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 Jean King . She will write, quote, even if you're not a born activist, life can damn sure make you one. Wow. The older I got, the more I aspire to. There wasn't just unrest in the world around us. There was a storm gathering inside of me. Yeah. End quote. I totally remember this culturally, even though I was three years old when it happened. So it was too young, but I think it kind of lived on totally at least the next decade . Yeah . But I seem to remember like the vibe of it. Ultimately, Billy Jin King, as she began to fight for women's rights, had to like fight publicly against really chauvinistic men about those . You're not just fighting it in tennis, it's you're fighting the entire world society. You're like, yeah, you become the face of a fight like that, right? It's just a lot of pressure. Yeah. Billy Jean graduates high school in nineteen sixty one, and just weeks later, at seventeen years old, she and nineteen year old Karen Hunts win the women's doubles at Wimbledon and they are the youngest who ever do it and they still are to this day. Holy shit . Yeah seventeen . 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 ninet.een By 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 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 in no relation to Larry King . What if this was like a young Larry King pre suspenders Larry King ? So Larry supports Billy Jean's career wholeheartedly, but the tournament circuit is tough and it's undeni ably discriminatory to women athletes. Most notably, Billy Jean and her female peers are routinely paid less prize money than their male counterparts. So in 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? Yeah. Infamous ladies skinny cigarette that we all know and love decides to start a tennis tour with women only. It's a nineteen city stop tennis tournament 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. Got it. These athletes still plan on playing the Marquis 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. Well, it makes sense to you that they're like, you're not going to pay us enough. We're going to go somewhere else. We get paid. Yeah, how much see money you lose because we're not here anymore. Right. And if you don't think we're that important, right? We only deserve, you know, a tenth of the pot. Yeah , then let's see what happens. Yeah. It's a huge move, and it's that kind of thing. can It'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. 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 her fellow athletes hand out free tickets to random pedestrians on the street, hoping they'll come and watch and basically get 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. Yeah. 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 is in today's? eight hundred and ninety four thousand . eight hundred fifty thousand . I mean, it's over. You just won. 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 is paid fifteen thousand dollars less than prize money than the mail winner. But instead of complaining , instead of whining, it just fuels her . She appears before Congress fighting for the passing of Title II , which bans sex based discrimination in schools that receive federal dollars. So she goes to the root of this discrimination . Yeah. I love that. 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. Yeah, let's fucking kick it. Let's fucking get out of the fucking way. Yeah. And this passes in nineteen seventy two, and it remains the law of the land today. Amazing. Although they chip, chip, chip away at it. 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 gigantic. She's just her. You know what I'm gonna do now? Yeah. She was like , we gotta tighten this stuff up. I have no excuse for my laziness . Listen, you do three podcasts a week. It's not easy. Thank you. I was fishing for that. And you got it. Women's tennis association is responsible for , among other things, the fact that women get equal pay at the U. S. 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 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 vict ory 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 who's gonna cry about it, isn't there? An old bowling bag of a man. And in this story, there is a true villain. Okay . A lot of people there are theories that this was kind of PR Yes, churned up for press. Photos? We will. Okay. But the thing that's funny, I'll show you that bowling bag for . What's funny about this is that it was such a part of the culture of women yet then get back into the kitchen type of stuff. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Yeah . This 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 ex games, exp osition games, what's the word I'm looking for? Ex games? No . Exhibition? Thank you. Exhibition games. Okay. His career had basically turned to playing exhibition games. Right. He's like the Harlem Globetrotters of Texas. But I don't think he was good like the Harlem Globetrotters. I mean, those guys fucking rocked. This guy I think was just around and had a big mouth. Got it. And so that's all you have to do to be a man these days and to be successful. That's right. Be around these days. Have a big mouth. It's pretty much how it is. So he just starts just spouting inflammatory sexist comments about women's tennis and the fight for equal pay in the sport, right? Because she's making progress. Shut the fuck off, dude. 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. It's just very standard. Yeah. Another time he's quoted as saying a woman's place is in the kitchen in the bedroom and not necessarily in that order. Girls, dude, right? Let's take a look at Bobby Riggs . Oh , what's he looks like fucking what's his name ? Austin Powers. He's absolutely Austin Powers . Oh my god I, wonder if Mike Myers did that on purpose it really is that kind of it's a caricature of a man who's like commenting on then you have to respond simply because you won't stop doing it. Right, but it's also like you're commenting on women like you're some kind of prize dude. It's like the concept of I decide other people's values but I matter how to do anything to make myself appealing in any way. I stopped playing tennis thirty two years ago, but I'm going to talk about how you shouldn't be playing tennis. Totally. Okay, so he's just fanning the flames of chauvinism for attention and relevance. It's not a hard thing to do, it never has been, especially as the wom en's movement is looming into the psyche , and men are very much put out by this concept of equality. They do not like it. What? According to a quote from Billy Jean in a bbc. com ic artle, 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 liber of tennis . End quote. Billy Jean says, I'm sorry, don't know who you are. No, that's not true. Actually, Billy Jean King was always super classy she. When talked about Bobby Riggs, she was like, he's a hero of mine. He's one of the greats of tennis. Wow. Like not in this, you know, when this kind of thing comes up , but in general, she had always looked up to him as a hero like of tennis . So it's really gross. And then he just starts harassing her. Yeah, and kind of being like, Oh, you think you're so big, well, play against me, amen. He's harassing and stalking her and playing it off like it's a game , like a playful flirtation. Right. Basically, she just always says no and kind of leave me alone. Yeah. 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 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 three thousand 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 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 gotta think of these like male sports reporters who were like just sitting there waiting Yeah. I would be surprised to learn that there was any kind of equanimity in this report. Absolutely. So everybody 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 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. Bailey 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. 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 . The next day in the final news conference , a direct speaking Billy Jean King calls him a creep. Bobby Riggs asks 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, 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. Yeah. They name it the Battle of the Sexes, and more than thirty thousand people show up at the AstroDome to watch it. The Astro is that the one in UCA in Texas USC? Okay , it's not in LA The Astro is that aren't I? That's famous, right? It is yeah, you're right . Well, look, I never said, listen, I did never. We can't pretend to be sports fans just 'cause we're talking about sports. Astromdam, the Staples Center, I don't know. Very similar places. So thirty thousand people around that area go to watch ninety million watch it from home. Holy shit. 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 of the most watched sporting events of all time, period. Holy shit. Yes. Because it's really kicking up all the vibes of like early seventies politics, essentially. That's about so much more than yeah. So they have these insane entrances it almost goes into like professional wrestling. Wow. Billy Jean King is carried onto the court by shirtless men in one of those beds with four men at each of each other was 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. 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 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 dude's side. Can you imagine being his kid and being like, Oh, this is so embarrassing. My dad is so embarrassing. It's 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 as the kind of opening salvo . Bobby wearing a sugar daddy sweatsuit gives Billy Jean an oversized sugar daddy lollipop . And because Bobby Riggs has proclaimed in the press over and over that he is proud to be a male chauvinist pig. Billy Jean gives him a piglet . A live piglet In photos. Let's see them being carried. You want to see them being carried . Oh, he's in a rickshaw. He's in a little rickshaw. Those are the sugar daddy women that are pushing it, but then here's her. Oh, she looks incredible. Isn't that the best? So she's got more of a Cleopatra thing going. But also the woman standing next to her with a fucking tight perm. He's got a sign that just says bye bye . I know. What kind of time traveler woman is that? Seriously . Because that's a Billy Jean King shirt. Yeah. She's on her side. She's like, Bye. Yeah. There's some go bobby goes in the background. 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 ball busting . Right. That's not what this yeah. Yeah, I get what this is. She's like being playful about it. Yeah , which is a great way to like make an inroad. And show your smart. Yeah. Here's a piglet. Go away . Yeah. Now 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 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 maker and a shrewd tactician too. Fuck yeah. Now I'm trying different shots, seeing what works. I'm making Bobby work for every point. Yeah. 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 imperfection , she allowed like, hey, he's gonna get some points, whatever. She learned from it and adjusted. Yeah . And then she's like, what do I need to be doing? Not how do I need to be defending? Right. Yeah. So in the end, they play five full sets, which is what only men did back then really. Women played three and men played five . Okay. Billy Jean decisively blows Bobby Riggs away. Hell yeah 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 match. It would ruin the women's tennis tour and affect all women's self esteem. God , I mean so much pressure. She had so much more to lose than him. So much. It was just a dumb joke to him. Yeah. Yeah, but then for her to realize halfway through, not even half in the beginning like, oh, I'm actually better than him. What's why am 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 gonna put the ball places and make that little guy . Look stupid. Make that little wig come off . Do you want to take a look at her winning this Battle of the Sexes? Yes, please. What she did. Ah , she had a great night that night. And there's the Astro Dome. Look at how full it is. Crazy. Oh God 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 to tennis. Amazing. And quote. So then she's also just being a business woman. It's an opportunity. Yeah, a big opportunity. The fan fare around this match introduces countless new people to the previously elites 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 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 people out there who try to say that Bobby Riggs threw the match because he needed the money because he owed the mafia so much money with gambling , which is, of course, Billy Jean King calls those rumors ridiculous. Yeah. And they are ridiculous. He was a fifty five year old man playing a woman at the top of her game. Right. He will later go on to say that he completely underestimated 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 anyway. She treated him like the joke he was treating her as and they actually were able to stay friends to the point where 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. Got it. That's nice. I know, isn't it? Because she's the bigger she gets to be the bigger person because she's like, Yeah, I 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 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's when. you That win the Australian open, the French open, Wimbledon, and the US Open all in the same year. Jesus. So you go slam. That's a very William 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 out ed by an ex lover in the early eighties. No way when nobody was out. Yeah . 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 wow, 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 then, Billy Jean King has talked at length about how confusing and painful this part of her life initially was there was no one to follow . Like very few. I shouldn't say no one. There were some people out there in the culture but in the kind of like show business she was in totally she was a true trailblazer once again . And 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 at twelve years old. Oh my god. I wanted to be able to influence and do those things. End quote. In two thousand nine, President Barack Obama presents Billy Jin King with the U. S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and says, quote , what we honor are not simply her twelve grand slam titles. She did it twelve times. twelve grand slams? Yeah , one hundred 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, you know, do side commentary. And 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 the reach of the game, to change how women, athletes and women everywhere view 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 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 qu,ote , I just love hitting a tennis ball . It's just that 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 Ledgendary Billy Jean King. That was amazing. I love that. And I got the feeling that day. And I wonder if the woman, the tennis player who lost Margaret , Margaret Kourt, 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 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 in sports or let's fight for women's tennis or let's get out there and give them a chance to prove themselves. It just seemed so unlikely in like nineteen seventy three. Right . But I think answering this kind of like, oh, you think boys are better than girls? Like this playground fight that's just been going on for so long. Right