She was not simply a famous person who agreed to pass along information she happened to hear. She was a skilled observer, trained by necessity from a very young age to understand social environments quickly and accurately, and to position herself advantageously within them. The celebrity was the credential that got her into the room. What she did with the access was a function of professional capacities that the credential alone could not have created.
The specific choice to write on her skin — to use her own body as the initial recording medium — reflects both the practical constraints of her situation (no notebook that could be found in a search) and something deeper about the nature of what she was doing. The information was written on her body, carried in her body, hidden within the most visible thing in the room. The woman who had spent fifteen years as a spectacular physical presence — whose body had been marketed and mythologized and exhibited in ways that were simultaneously her achievement and her constraint — was now using that body for a purpose that none of the people in the room could have imagined.
She was the most famous woman in the room, and no one knew what she was actually carrying.
## The Films and What They Showed
Before the war turned Baker into an intelligence operative, she was also a film actress — a dimension of her career that is often overshadowed by the stage performances and the subsequent wartime history but that reveals something important about the range of her ambitions and the specific limits the film industry placed on those ambitions.