Heady, Hedy, Hedley
And some thoughts on duty and the law of the pack
Random word: Heady
That’s a word with multiple meanings. Heady can mean willful or rash. Also violent or impetuous. It can indicate intoxication or giddiness, which you get by imbibing a “heady brew.”
It can also mean intelligence in action, as in, “He’s a heady ballplayer, boy.”
However, if you’re heady with booze, you can’t be heady on the ball field.
Or can you?
Babe Ruth loved his beer (and hot dogs). Mickey Mantle, the great Yankee slugger, was an alcoholic. Jim Bouton, author of the great memoir Ball Four, was Mantle’s teammate for a time in the 1960s. He wrote:
We had been out the night before, having a few drinks, and Mickey came to the clubhouse the next day, and he was a little hungover. So Ralph Houk, the manager, said, “Sleep it off in the trainer’s room. We’ll put somebody else in center field.” Well, the game goes extra innings. We needed a pinch-hitter in the 10th. Somebody went to wake up the Mick. He comes out, puts a bat in his hands. He walks up to home plate, takes one practice swing and hits the first pitch into the left field bleachers. A tremendous blast. He crosses home plate. Actually, he missed home plate. We had to send him back for that. He comes over to the dugout and he looks up in the stands, and says, “Those people don’t know how tough that really was.” After the game, a sportswriter said, “Mick, how did you that?” And Mickey said, “Well, it was very simple. I hit the middle ball.”
Heady is not the same as Hedy (as in Lamarr). You may recall the character played by Harvey Corman in the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles—Hedley Lamarr. People keep calling him “Hedy” and he responds indignantly, “That’s Hedley!” Absurd and funny to adults of that generation. I’m sure most people under forty have no idea what the joke is. Allow me to explain.
Hedy Lamarr (1914 – 2000) was one of the most beautiful actresses ever to grace the silver screen. She was born in Vienna as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, which was hard to fit on a movie poster, especially if your costars were Olivia de Havilland, Richard Barthelmess and Maria Ouspenskaya. So when Louis B. Mayer saw this young beauty in London and signed her up for MGM, he gave her a new name—Hedy Lamarr. The last name was suggested by Mayer’s wife, who had been a fan of a silent screen beauty named Barbara La Marr.
Hedy was a star from the beginning, but acting was not her only interest. She was fascinated with inventions, inspired by her father, a banker, who liked to tinker. She became a tinkerer, too.
When World War II broke out, German U-boats were an especially effective tentacle of the Nazi war machine, in no small part because they had the technology to pick up radio-controlled torpedoes and jam their frequencies, making it easy to outmaneuver them. In the summer of 1940, a U-Boat torpedoed a ship carrying children to safety. All hands on board, including 83 children, were lost.
Hedy got mad.
