Hedy's Folly

  Antheil then undertook to convince Mrs. Bok to invest in SEE-Note. He wrote to her with his usual enthusiasm, which looked to the uninformed like megalomania, offering her a 49 percent interest in SEE-Note for $49,000 ($770,000 today) and mentioning in the next breath that he had only thirty-five cents to his name and that he, Boski, and “little Peter” would soon be hungry. He also blamed his former patron for having dismissed his original idea back in 1924, which had discouraged him from pursuing it. Mrs. Bok thought he was once again asking her for support and responded angrily.

  Antheil apologized in his next letter. He’d found the money to go on. If Mrs. Bok invested, she could make millions on his invention and endow the Curtis Institute of Music even more lavishly than she already had. (In 1927 she had shored up her original $500,000 gift with one of $12 million, the equivalent of $155 million today—Antheil was aiming high.) They debated back and forth. She consulted a music publisher, who advised her, “The publishers of the world have vast fortunes invested in plates and in printed copies. In order to do a new notation this tremendous capital would have to be wiped out and this is wholly unlikely.” Antheil noted that a music publisher, with a vast fortune invested, was not exactly an objective expert. Then he reported that his potential business partners, businessmen with hard heads and good credentials, would only join the SEE-Note enterprise if they could command a 70 percent share. To forestall losing control, he asked Mrs. Bok to loan him $2,000. (In the process, he looked up the total of her gifts to him since 1922: $26,000, or $400,000 today.) That failing, he decided to start small and asked her to join four other friends investing $200 each.

  He might have been Abraham pleading for Jehovah to spare Sodom for all the good it did him financially. Mrs. Bok didn’t invest in SEE-Note, and the opportunity of a lifetime once again passed George Antheil by. But he had learned about patents, patent lawyers, and patent searches, and also something of the nature of inventing itself.

  It did the Antheils little enough good in Hollywood. “We never learned the game,” Boski said later. “Everybody thought that George had sold himself down the river in Hollywood, where the sad fact was that we struggled like crazy to try to keep afloat.” They were happier, she thought, after they gave up their original plan of making a killing writing movie scores and then getting out:

  We tried to keep up this mirage for about two years, living it up in a very elegant house, with marble floors, two grand pianos, a nurse for Peter, a maid and four bedrooms.… After George made his first picture for DeMille, which was very successful, no other scores seemed to come his way. He knew a man, who at the time was one of the top musical comedy producers, and whom he [had known] in his earlier period, who always said how much he admired George’s music and promised him a picture in the very near future … and we lived on this promise like silly fools. Until we were behind the rent for many months and decided to ask the landlady, who was an extremely nice person, to take our promissory note for the rent we could not pay, and moved into a small Hollywood bungalow, which brought us a lot of happiness, good friends. We had practically no furniture beyond the bare necessities. It was like being back in Paris.

  Mrs. Bok, moving to a new, smaller house herself, had discovered several crates in her basement that Antheil had sent her from Paris and forgotten about. She asked him if he wanted them. He realized they contained the paintings he had bought from starving artists in his early days in Berlin and Paris. He had them shipped to the “small Hollywood bungalow,” Boski writes, where she hung them “on the walls. But these being paintings by Braque, Picasso, Leger and other famous contemporary artists, most people would not have known that they were of any value and would have just noticed that if we were more than four people, one had to sit on a cushion on the floor.”

  Some truly desperate financial crisis afflicted the Antheils in March 1940. George wrote to Mrs. Bok in despair, the more so since he had assured her early in 1939, when SEE-Note was bubbling, that he would never ask her for money again. Generous soul that she was, she came through with twice the amount George requested. At the same time the chairman of the music department at Stanford University invited George to join the faculty, which he did.

  “[We] put our meager possessions in storage,” Boski recalled, “and drove to Stanford with Peter [and] our Japanese student [helper] and settled in a nice house on the campus. But the perversity of Hollywood fate is really funny. No sooner were we settled in Stanford than Ben Hecht wanted George to write the score for a picture he was doing, and as George and Ben were good friends and as salary was not too high at the university and we were in debt, and if one has waited for three years for an offer, one can hardly refuse it when it comes along, George decided he can do both and would commute from Stanford to L.A. when he was not lecturing.”

  Antheil did, flying down to Hollywood, flying back to Stanford, “just making it on time for his lecture.” They couldn’t let Stanford know—“Hollywood,” Boski said, “was not a respectable word in academic circles.”

  The Antheils were still living on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto when word came in late June 1940 that George’s cherished younger brother Henry had been killed in a plane crash. Henry had remained at the American embassy in Moscow, serving as the clerk in charge of the code room, when Bullitt had moved on to France. In 1939, Henry had requested a transfer from Moscow to the U.S. legation in Finland, where he arrived just in time to experience the 30 November bombing of Helsinki that initiated the brief, brave winter war between little Finland and the Soviet Union. At the resort hotel outside of the capital where the U.S. legation had moved to avoid the bombing, Henry met a young Finnish woman, Greta Lindberg, and the two fell in love. They quickly became engaged.

  It was Henry who had been supplying George with information on the burgeoning war that George had used, along with discussions with Bill Bullitt and his own sharp wits, to write a series of spectacular articles for Esquire that were in the process of being assembled into a book that George would publish in the fall, The Shape of the War to Come. Antheil had predicted to within a week the beginning of the war in Europe with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939; he also predicted the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese entry into the war late the same year. Henry’s inside information came from classified State Department cables that he illegally extracted for his older brother’s use. Henry also, according to a recent review, “falsified assignment cables in order to remain together with his Finnish fiancée, Greta.” No one ever faulted the Antheil boys for timidity.

  The Finns were vastly outnumbered—450,000 Soviet troops to 180,000 Finns, 6,500 Soviet tanks to 30 Finnish, 3,800 Soviet aircraft to 130 Finnish—but the Finns, defending their homeland, fought the Soviets to a standstill in December and January; in one battle alone, Russia lost more than 17,500 men, the Finns about 250. Finally, the Soviet Union invaded en masse, no other country was prepared to come to Finland’s rescue for fear of inciting a German response, and the Finns unhappily agreed to a peace treaty that required them to cede territory. The poor performance of the Soviet forces—the Soviet army took 400,000 casualties, including 126,000 dead, compared with Finland’s loss of 40,000 wounded and 26,600 dead—encouraged Adolf Hitler in his plans to launch Operation Barbarossa, his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, the following June.

  Henry and his fiancée had gone off to Tallinn, Estonia, for a holiday on the weekend of 1–2 June 1940, their last days together. They had returned to Helsinki, but Henry had flown to Tallinn again on the morning of 14 June, the first day of a new Soviet-imposed blockade of Estonia, to pick up diplomatic pouches from the U.S. legations in Tallinn and Riga. He left Tallinn at two that afternoon on a commercial flight back to Helsinki. Five minutes after takeoff his plane, Time reported, “mysteriously exploded in mid-air and plunged into the Gulf of Finland.” A telegram to George Antheil from Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, reported that “no hope is held of recovering the rema
ins of the passengers lost,” offered “profound sympathy,” and said that Henry had been “killed in an airplane accident.” By 17 July, however, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Soviets had shot down the Finnish airliner, probably because it was technically in violation of the Soviet blockade.

  ——

  Hedy’s shock of war was less personal than Antheil’s. She did not lose a loved one that summer, but she read and heard of murdered children even as she adopted a baby boy, separated from and divorced her second husband, and shared with her friends Janet Gaynor and Gilbert Adrian, the actress and the costume designer, the birth of their first child.

  “You couldn’t live with a person, in those days, without being married,” Hedy explained many years later. She had met Gene Markey, a screenwriter and man-about-town, in January 1939. In 1937 he had divorced the actress Joan Bennett, with whom he had a daughter. He met the standard of the kinds of men Hedy fell for: older (forty-three when she met him), taller (over six feet), and highly polished. A later wife, Myrna Loy, described Markey as “a brilliant raconteur, a man of unfailing wit and humor [who] could charm the birds off the trees, although birds were never his particular quarry—women were, the richer and more beautiful the better.” Four weeks after they met, on Saturday, 4 March 1939, Hedy and Gene were married at the governor’s palace in Mexicali after holding an impromptu press conference in San Diego to announce the event. “We decided late Friday evening that we must get married the next day—or miss our chance,” Markey had written to the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, whom he had not had time to alert. “Hedy did not even get a chance to go home to change her clothes.” Both busy professionals, they had returned to work immediately after the weekend. They had already bought a house to go home to, on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills.

  The marriage lasted only sixteen months. The Markeys separated in July 1940; Hedy filed for divorce on 4 September. She told the court that she and her husband had spent only about four evenings alone together in all the months of their marriage. The judge suggested drily that next time she should take more than a month to get to know someone before she married him.

  One result of the marriage was an adoption, although Hedy seems to have pursued adopting the baby boy she named James Lamarr Markey largely on her own. Jamesie, as he was known, joined the Markeys in October 1939 and remained with Hedy after they divorced.

  Hedy met Gilbert Adrian, the designer who styled himself professionally as simply Adrian, through their work together at MGM. Born Adrian Adolph Greenberg in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1903, Adrian had been the chief costume designer at MGM since he joined the studio as a talented twenty-five-year-old in 1928; his designs were so popular with American women that one MGM film, The Women, shot in black and white, opened in 1939 with a ten-minute Technicolor parade of Adrian’s fashions. He designed the outré costumes for The Wizard of Oz, including Dorothy’s famous ruby slippers; he was Greta Garbo’s favorite and Joan Crawford’s. Most accounts of his life describe him as an openly gay man, but whatever his sexuality he married the actress Janet Gaynor in 1939 and remained married to her until his death, and in the summer of 1940 they had a son. Despite her stardom—she had won the first Oscar for Best Actress in 1929—Gaynor had retired from the film industry at the end of 1938; “I really wanted to have another kind of life,” she had explained. Adrian’s expensive costumes were falling out of style in the last years of the Great Depression; in 1940 he was preparing to transition to a producer of high-fashion clothing lines. Robin Gaynor Adrian was born the same week in mid-July that Hedy filed for divorce from Gene Markey.

  The children whose deaths that summer horrified Hedy were London schoolchildren assembled in Liverpool for transport by ship to Canada to protect them from the German strategic bombing of London—the Blitz—that was expected to begin and did begin in early September, seventy-six consecutive nights between September 1940 and May 1941 that took more than forty thousand lives in London and elsewhere in Britain.

  Submarine and antisubmarine warfare between the British and the Germans had gradually loosened the rules of engagement agreed upon between the two belligerents in the London Submarine Agreement of 1936. According to Karl Dönitz, the commander of the German submarine force, Germany responded to a series of British violations of the agreement:

  [German] Naval High Command reacted only with extreme caution and step by step to the British measures … which constituted a breach of the London Submarine Agreement. Slowly and one by one the restrictions on the conduct of U-boat operations were removed in a series of orders from Naval High Command—beginning with permission to fire upon vessels which used their wireless, which sailed without lights and which carried guns, followed (as a result of the instructions to ram [U-boats] given to British ships) by permission to attack all vessels identified as hostile and ending with a declaration of sea areas that would be regarded as operational zones. These latter were at first restricted, but finally, on August 17, 1940, the whole of the seas around the British Isles were declared an operational zone, in which attack without warning would be permissible.

  Twelve days later, the first of two ocean liners carrying children, the SS Volendam, with 320 children among 606 passengers, sailed from Liverpool into the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic. A substantial part of the 351 British ships torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats by early September already lay on the bottom of the ocean. “On her second day out,” writes a historian—31 August 1940—“the Volendam was struck by a U-boat’s torpedo at a little before midnight, seventy miles off Ireland’s Donegal Coast. The ship and her passengers were fortunate; all eighteen lifeboats were deployed successfully, the seas were calm, and there was, according to the ship’s captain, ‘no panic whatsoever.’ ” A purser was killed; all 320 children survived.

  The next ship carrying children to refuge sailed to a more bitter fate. The SS City of Benares, with 406 passengers and crew, including 101 adults and 90 children being evacuated to Canada, part of a nineteen-ship convoy, was torpedoed and sunk on 17 September 1940. The British Wartime Memories Project describes the consequences:

  Four days, 600 miles out to sea, the destroyer HMS Winchelsea and two sloops, who had been escorting the convoy, departed to meet eastbound Convoy HX71. Despite a standing order to disperse the convoy and let all ships proceed on their own, Rear Admiral Mackinnon delayed the order. Shortly after 10 pm the City of Benares was torpedoed by U-boat U-48. The order to abandon City of Benares was given but due to rough conditions and twenty-miles-per-hour winds, lowering the boats was difficult and several capsized. Two hundred and forty-five lives were lost either from drowning or exposure. Rescue did not arrive until [2:15] the following afternoon when HMS Hurricane arrived on the scene and rescued 105 survivors.

  Only 13 of the children survived, 6 of whom spent seven days in a lifeboat before being rescued by HMS Anthony.

  It was after this second, horrific disaster—seventy-seven children drowned in twenty-mile-per-hour winds in the bitter North Atlantic, killed by people who spoke her native language and whose country had forcibly annexed her native land—that Hedy, in Hollywood between films, with a new baby boy in arms, decided the Allies had to do something about the German submarine menace. She began thinking about how to invent a remote-controlled torpedo to attack submarines just at the time she met George Antheil, who knew quite a lot about how to synchronize player pianos.

  [SEVEN]

  Frequency Hopping

  “We were good friends of Adrian, the dress designer, and his wife Janet Gaynor,” Boski Antheil recalled in her unpublished memoir. “Adrian had a talent to be able to imitate people’s voices and mannerisms and had great fun doing impersonations.” Bright people tend to find one another wherever they live, including in Hollywood. A decade later, when the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker studied Hollywood as if it were an island in the South Pacific, she noted “a few homes where intelligent and gifted people, regardless of their financial status, gather
for good conversation and fun, not dependent on elaborate food, heavy drinking or ostentatious entertainment.” She might have been describing Hedy’s epitome of her “ideal evening,” or a dinner party at the Adrians.

  Boski and Peter traveled east during the third week of August 1940, George Antheil wrote to William Bullitt, “to visit my heartbroken parents in Trenton.” His brother’s death, he told Bullitt, “has both saddened me and steeled me in the resolution to do whatever I can best do to help my country, the U.S.A.—the country that Henry loved so dearly—to withstand and defeat the evil, predatory powers that are again loose in the world. And I ask for no easy job.… I feel I owe the enemy something very particular.” That week before the sinking of the Volendam and several weeks before the worse disaster of the City of Benares was the week when George and Hedy finally met.

  With Boski and Peter gone, George was batching it and miserable in a local hotel, the Hollywood-Franklin, working on a movie score. The Adrians invited him to dinner to make up a foursome with Hedy, who had separated from Gene Markey the month before. Two intelligent and articulate people, both temporarily alone, both native German speakers, both former members of the European artistic community, were reasons enough to put them together. In Bad Boy of Music, however, Antheil attributes the invitation specifically to his endocrinology work:

  One day around this time, late summer 1940, [the Adrians] said to me:

  “Hedy Lamarr wants to see you about her glands.”