Hedy's Folly (10 page)

“With us,” Hecht recalled,
“were gypsy dancers and fiddlers, Russian clowns and aristocrat refugees, famous wrestlers and pugilists, lady vocalists, swimmers, fortune-tellers, and a gallery of admiring debutantes” from the wealthy enclave of Tuxedo Park nearby. The picture would be a flop—too many nearly unintelligible foreign accents in the cast, Hecht suspected—but he thought Antheil’s music “was delightful. I have never heard a merrier collection of waltzes, polkas, and background tunes than came out of its sound track. George wrote melodies as if he had never heard or written a note of modern music.” Even one of the animal characters
had its theme. “There was a sway-backed old horse named Bombonetti in the picture. What tunes Antheil wrote for this decrepit nag, Bombonetti! With belly sagging and head hanging, our weary Bombonetti seemed to be dreaming always of spring days and of nymph horses neighing in the glades.”

There was hell to pay with Mrs. Bok when summer ended. Evidently, she was no fan of movie music. In September, back in Manhattan, Antheil wrote to her to report all the work he was accomplishing and to put his turn toward Hollywood in the best possible light:

This summer has been very fruitful, and I have worked hard, and there is quite a lot of new manuscript and new situations and new opportunities.… I began working upon my symphony, a new one which I had hoped to enter for the Paderewski Prize, ending upon the 1st of October. I finished considerable of the new symphony when a new situation arose. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, authors of movies like “Viva Villa” and “Twentieth Century” and a host of other successes … gave me the job of writing the entire music to [their] first picture.…

This, however, prevented me from finishing my symphony, and also lost me the opportunity to write a ballet for Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg.… However, [Page and Kreutzberg] wished only to pay me $200 for this enormous score, and a whole summer’s work.

Nevertheless, Antheil went on for pages, “I really think that I deserve my salt as a young idealistic struggling earnest American composer.” He had “more performances this season than any other of my colleagues. Still they are subsidized and I am not.” It was “not so much the [lack of] leisure, but also the nervous tension. One comes back to one’s native land and sees that one has been abandoned.” He hated to ask her, who had been so good a friend, “but the time has arrived when I must either turn to Hollywood and its great organization, and become a part of its mill … or be a subsidized symphonic and operatic composer because I am part of that great hope of America for a music of its own”:

If you, who are the only farseeing person in America, as far as I am concerned, abandon us, what shall we do? We can only do what we must do in a country unsympathetic to creative musical art, however sympathetic it might be to REcreative musical art. We must accept the verdict and turn to the beerhall Hollywood robber barons, and be a part of their marauding outfit.

Three days later he wrote to her again asking her to provide him with a monthly subsidy so that he could devote himself entirely to his music. That, finally, was enough for Mary Louise Curtis Bok. She replied apocalyptically on 28 September 1934:

My dear George:

 … I must say [your letter] is no different than letters I have received from you over a long period of years, and while I am sorry to put any further discouragements in your path, I do not feel inclined to do what you ask and provide you with a monthly stipend. To do so would imply an interest in your work that I really do not have.…

I have watched the quality of your work—not always, it is true, through my own eyes, but I have kept tabs on it through various people in the musical world whose judgment I trust. Not once have they reported favorably to me of your output
.

I know all your arguments as to lack of success, and quite evidently you place the blame anywhere but on yourself. Your egoism has displeased me, for it transcends a rational self-confidence. The successes you quote in your letters to me have never had the endorsement of those whose judgment I trust.…

That I have advanced sums the past years has been simply from humanitarian reasons, knowing how badly up against it you and your wife were. If I do not at last speak out and tell you this you will continue to be misled, interpreting my assistance as my faith in your musical gift, which faith has, alas, become nil
.

Now, my dear George, you know how I feel about it, and I think you must make up your mind to stand on your own feet and make your own living
.

He was wounded, of course, deeply wounded. His response, pointedly written on Hecht-MacArthur Astoria studio stationery, was by turns confidently assertive, respectful or mock-respectful, and grandiose. He was wounded that she thought him conceited; how little she would ever realize the courage it took to write her those letters throughout the years “
wherein I
had
to represent myself in my best light … or better!” Music was “a strange and beautiful thing,” and it would not be made by the opinions of “conservatory professors, however excellent, or by the opinions of antiquated once-great artists out of sympathy with the radical creations of the newer generations.” Neither would it be made by “the critics, nor by the orchestral conductors.” Yet she had been “more than generous. God bless you.” He thanked her from the bottom of his heart. “Goodbye,” he concluded. “I shall show you someday that your friends have been wrong. But never again in writing. I am afraid that this shall be my last letter to you, Mary Louise, whom I have
not
betrayed.” He signed it: “Faithfully—George Antheil.”

But of course it was not nearly his last letter to his reluctant patron. He would continue to write to her for six more years, and continue to ask for support, or for investment in one or another of his ventures. In the meantime, he had to find a way to feed and house himself and Boski. Movie music would be one solution.

Writing might be another. In
Bad Boy of Music
, as he did with so many of his struggles, Antheil makes a lighthearted
story of his pursuit in 1935 of a writing commission from Arnold Gingrich, the editor of the two-year-old men’s magazine
Esquire
. George, Boski, their costume-designer tenant, Irene Sharaff, and their sometime post-performance visitor George Balanchine would sit up late drinking Boski’s good Viennese coffee and gossiping:

We had been discussing the subject of how most men are unwilling to believe their wives or mistresses unfaithful and are usually the last to stumble upon that fact. We were merrily racing through the lists of our acquaintances when, suddenly, the thought occurred to me: “Why not write this up for
Esquire
?”

I did so immediately, twenty-five little squibs, each one an instance of how to detect unfaithfulness. I labeled them, “She Is No Longer Faithful IF,” and sent them off to Arnold Gingrich,
Esquire
’s editor.

Gingrich knew a good feature when he saw one.
Esquire
was based at the time in Chicago; he set up a breakfast appointment with Antheil for the following week, when he expected to be in New York. Over breakfast at the Plaza hotel he offered the composer $250 per batch of twenty-five squibs if he would produce sixteen batches.

Antheil did the math. He was stunned. Sixteen batches times $250 was—“
FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS! [About $65,000 today.] Holy smoke!”

If he could sell this editor his late-night musings, Antheil thought, maybe he could sell him his hobbyist venture into endocrinology as well. Antheil had been an amateur student of endocrinology for years, ever since a roommate in Berlin had left behind an endocrinology textbook when he moved out. Voracious reader that he was, Antheil had devoured it and become fascinated with what he took to be the possibility of predicting behavior according to which hormones appeared to dominate a subject’s physiology. “By the way, Mr. Gingrich,” he now spoke up, “would you also be interested in a series of articles on how to recognize which girls will and which girls won’t? I have worked out a very scientific method, via endocrinology.”

Gingrich was skeptical. He asked for a demonstration. Antheil, nothing if not bold, “analyzed the next fifty girls that came down the Plaza staircase.” Gingrich happened to know one of them. Evidently, the composer called her correctly. “I went home that morning with exactly five thousand six hundred dollars’ worth of ordered articles,” Antheil concludes. Gingrich had even offered to pay in advance.

[
FIVE
]

Leaving Fritz

Hedy never specified in detail which German technological advances she heard discussed over luncheons and dinners in the Mandl mansions, but there was much to hear. In 1935, the monocoque-bodied Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter and the dual-use Heinkel He 111 bomber both saw their first flight tests. The small, heavily armed cruisers that the British called pocket battleships began entering service in the German navy. In 1936, the first of the new Type VII diesel-electric attack submarines was commissioned, and Adolf Hitler began planning his
Westwall
of defensive fortifications opposite France’s Maginot Line.

Certainly Hedy listened closely to discussions of submarine and aerial torpedoes, weapon systems for which Hirtenberger was supplying components. The genius of German torpedo development at that time was a northern German mechanical engineer named Hellmuth Walter. Born with
the century and educated at the Hamburg Technical Institute, Walter was particularly interested in submarine propulsion, which was limited by the problem of supplying oxygen underwater to sustain combustion.

The standard submarine of the day (and throughout World War II) used diesel engines for surface operation, where it could draw in air from outside the vessel. Underwater, with no available air supply, it had to switch to battery-powered electric motors, which limited its speed and the time it could remain submerged before its batteries had to be recharged. On the surface such a submarine might make 17 knots (“knots” is a phonetic abbreviation of “nautical miles per hour”; 1 knot equals 1.15 miles per hour). Underwater it could make half that speed at best, while the ships it might be stalking could pull away (or hunt it down) at surface speeds of up to 35 knots. Walter wanted to find a means, he wrote, “
to drive a submarine at much higher speeds than the conventional 6 or 8 knots, submerged.”

In the 1920s, while employed as a marine engineer at Stettiner Maschinenbau AG Vulcan in Stettin, on the Baltic, Walter worked out his ideas: Instead of carrying fuel for engines that needed air to sustain combustion, preventing their operation underwater, why not identify an oxygen-rich fuel that could be chemically decomposed to supply its own oxygen, and use that reaction to drive a turbine directly? There were such fuels. Pure oxygen was obviously one, but storage in a small space such as a submarine would require that it be
cooled to a liquid and maintained there, below its boiling point of −297.33°F. Nitric acid was another, with 63.5 percent oxygen available when decomposed, but it was highly corrosive and difficult to store and handle.

A little research led Walter to
hydrogen peroxide, H
₂
O
₂
, a liquid slightly denser than water first isolated by the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard in 1818. Used in low concentrations, up to 30 percent, as a bleaching agent and a disinfectant, hydrogen peroxide at high concentrations could be decomposed by contact with an appropriate catalyst into steam and oxygen—H
₂
O + O—in the process generating intense heat: 80 percent H
₂
O
₂
when it decomposed would generate a temperature of 869°F, superheating the steam sufficiently to drive a power plant without adding any additional fuel. Fuel could be added, however, drawing on the oxygen released from the H
₂
O
₂
for combustion and further superheating the steam, increasing its propulsive energy. In the first case, the purity of the H
₂
O
₂
would determine the rate of energy release; in the second, the injection of a fuel such as alcohol or kerosene into a combustion chamber to mix with the decomposing H
₂
O
₂
could be throttled to vary the output on demand. In either case, the energy would be generated without the need for additional air.

Walter found very little available research on the use of hydrogen peroxide for energy production, he recalled, “
only isolated suggestions which have never been developed beyond the stage of theoretical discussion.” Nor was there
much interest at Vulcan in H
₂
O
₂
research. Frustrated, Walter took his ideas to the German naval command in Berlin. “
Years later,” a biographer writes, “colleagues remembered him carrying around papers for his Unterwasser Schnellboot [underwater fast boat], so that he could lobby for his proposals at any opportunity.”

The naval command was interested, but before Walter could proceed with research and development, he had to prove to its officials that H
₂
O
₂
was safe for transportation and storage. Higher concentrations were commonly believed to be dangerously explosive, a prejudice that had seriously retarded research.
Tests at the Chemical State Institute in Berlin—exploding lead azide, a strong detonator, with H
₂
O
₂
, decomposing it under pressure—established its non-detonability up to 80 percent strength. “After the encouraging results of this period of predevelopment and research,” Walter writes, “I founded my own engineering firm on July 1, 1935. The real development of engines and rockets started after this date.”