Hedy's Folly (12 page)

At this point the two versions of the story more or less converge. Hedy wanted a contract with MGM, but she wanted better terms. She therefore had to find a way to impress Louis B. Mayer. He and his wife were sailing home on the
Normandie
, the fast, elegant French ocean liner that was at the time the largest ship in the world, 1,028 feet long and 117 feet wide—more than three city blocks long, that is, and half a block wide—with a service speed of twenty-nine knots, decorated beautifully in contemporary Art Deco.

Hedy bought a ticket. When the
Normandie
sailed on 25 September she was aboard with what she had managed to remove from Austria of her worldly goods. And “
on board ship as, frankly, I had hoped, we became friendly, Mr. and
Mrs. Mayer and I.” Hedy in the meantime, in her words, “became the center of attention for all the young males aboard, and was able to parade them back and forth past Mr. Mayer.” That, and several more meetings and discussions, did the trick: Mayer offered her $500 a week—about $8,000 today—on a seven-year contract “with the usual escalators of $250. All predicated on her agreement to cooperate in taking English lessons and also dependent on her agreement to change her name.”

In 1938, Hedy said that Margaret Mayer, Louis’s wife, invented her stage name, Hedy Lamarr. “
We all agreed,” Hedy recalled, “that Hedy Kiesler was not good for the theatre marquees. It was not a name that could be readily pronounced. And so one evening at dinner Mrs. Mayer announced to us, ‘I have thought of a name for you, Hedy. What about Hedy Lamarr?’ And Hedy Lamarr it was—and is.”

The Viennese screenwriter Walter Reisch, a recent hire, was also on board the
Normandie
on that late-September voyage. (So were the William Bullitts, whom Hedy did not yet know, the French actress Danielle Darrieux, the English actress Greer Garson, and many other notables.) Reisch’s story of Hedy’s renaming is earthier than Hedy’s and more detailed:

[Mayer] didn’t like Kiesler, because that sounded too German to him, and Germany at that time had fallen
into deep discredit all over the world; and he couldn’t use Mandl because the husband would create difficulties. So they tried to figure out what to do about her name: Every afternoon they held story conferences around the Ping-Pong table on the “A” deck of the
Normandie
with [Mayer’s assistants Howard] Strickling, [Benny] Thau, and all the others, trying to decide how to go about introducing the young beauty to the members of the New York press who would infallibly arrive on the boat.

Now earlier, one of Hollywood’s most famous motion picture stars, one of the most beautiful girls in Hollywood—well under thirty—had died. Her name was Barbara La Marr. Somehow that name was the property of MGM. Louis B. Mayer, not superstitious at all, picked that name and said, “We are going to replace death with life.” And he coined the name Hedy Lamarr. She had no idea that she was getting the name of a dead motion-picture star. When we arrived at Ellis Island, a girl more beautiful than any ever seen in America, by the name of Hedy Lamarr, came down the gangplank: not anybody’s daughter, not anybody’s sister or relative … a star was born.

Barbara La Marr’s death was more than simply the tragedy of a beautiful woman dying young. The actress had in fact been a Mayer favorite whom he had touted as “the most
beautiful girl in the world.” She had been a heroin addict, and she had died of tuberculosis and nephritis at twenty-nine. If Margaret Mayer had indeed introduced Hedy Kiesler to her new name, a name borrowed from a dead actress who had been a favorite of her husband, a well-known philanderer, was she delivering a blessing or a curse?

Hedy accepted the name change. It was almost the last piece of the puzzle of her new identity, a rebranding that marked her transformation from Austrian actress to Hollywood starlet. The rest was up to her. She arrived in Hollywood in October 1937 and began learning English by screening films with her assigned housemate, the Hungarian actress Ilona Massey. George and Boski Antheil had preceded her by a year.

[
SIX
]

Cinemogling

Louis B. Mayer had picked up a job lot of actors and writers in Europe; he had no special role in mind for twenty-two-year-old Hedy Lamarr when he signed her in September 1937. After she arrived in Hollywood in October, Hedy spent the next six months learning English, losing weight, and killing time. “
She swam,”
Time
noted, “batted tennis balls, expertly played her piano, stole the show at a few beauty-ridden Hollywood parties, to which she was squired at times by Rudy Vallee, Howard Hughes and lately by actor Reginald Gardiner.” When, finally, in April 1938, she was loaned out to the independent producer Walter Wanger to star opposite Charles Boyer in
Algiers
, she had dropped from 125 to 110 pounds on her five-foot seven-inch frame. “It was discovered,”
Time
added snidely, “that she would require padding to fill out her bust—a deficiency no cinemogler had noted in
Extase
.” (
Time
in those days liked to invent portmanteau
words—“cinema” plus “ogler” in this case—in the manner of James Joyce.)

Algiers
was a remake of a French film,
Pépé le Moko
, about a jewel thief hiding out in the Casbah, the Arab quarter of the North African city of Algiers, who meets the beautiful French visitor Gaby, falls in love with her, and, in doing so, is delivered to ruin by the jealousy of his Algerian mistress, Ines. “
The film and especially Hedy Lamarr were a sensation,” writes a film historian. “Pepe and Gaby fall in love and learn that they grew up in the same [impoverished] Parisian quarter. He says: ‘What did you do before the jewels?’ She replies: ‘I wanted them.’ ” Pepe’s invitation, “Come with me to zee
Casbah
,” though it was only spoken in the film’s trailer, entered the American language. Hedy became a full-fledged Hollywood star. The turbans she wore in the film started a new fashion among American women. Other Hollywood actresses, previously blond, dyed their hair black to match hers and, as she did, began parting it in the middle.

Despite Hedy’s new fame, after
Algiers
she once again had time on her hands: Mayer was better at declaiming his managerial gifts than at finding good scripts for his new star. Hedy was not an intellectual, and English was her third or fourth language. Beyond magazines, scripts, and the research necessary to prepare for a role, she was not a reader.
Man Ray recalled playing chess with her when he lived in Hollywood in the 1940s. She was of course a trained pianist and played at home both alone and with friends. She made the rounds of parties more from necessity than for pleasure: being seen and
meeting the cast and crew of Hollywood—studio executives and her fellow actors—were part of her acclimatization. Even newly arrived, still in her early twenties, she spoke warmly of good friends and good conversation. “
My favorite thing,” she said in 1938, “is to sit in my own house or in the private houses of my friends where we can talk. I don’t like people who kid all the time. My ideal evening is to have dinner quietly with friends and then enjoy their stimulating conversation.”

One way Hedy occupied her spare time was inventing. Spending evenings at home working on an invention may sound surprising today, especially for a movie star, when so many other activities beckon through the Web. In 1938 the most common intellectually stimulating entertainments available at home were books, card and board games, and musical instruments. Hedy invented as a hobby. “
Howard Hughes once lent her a pair of chemists,”
Forbes
magazine reports, “to help her develop a bouillon-like cube which, when mixed with water, would create a soft drink similar to Coca-Cola. ‘It was a flop,’ she says with a laugh.” Her daughter, Denise, remembers a tissue-box attachment Hedy invented for disposing of used tissue. Hedy invented to challenge and amuse herself and to bring order to a world she thought chaotic.

——

George Antheil had also turned to inventing during the 1930s, but his motives were more practical. “
My life has been motivated by one steadfast resolve,” he told
Esquire
in 1939, “which is
not to starve to death
. This attitude has
embarrassed my friends who had better ideals for me, i.e., to live in a garret, write ‘great music,’ and gradually starve to death. Because from time to time I write either an article or a movie score as well as ‘my serious music,’ they consider that I am not fulfilling the great faith and trust which they had originally placed in me.”
Ballet mécanique
had started out as a movie score, of course, but since the movie in question was itself avant-garde, it had passed muster with Antheil’s “friends.”

In the autumn of 1935, with an ample advance from Arnold Gingrich, Antheil had begun writing his series “She’s No Longer Faithful If—.” The series ran in
Esquire
from April through October 1936 under the droll pseudonym Marcel Desage—was Antheil alluding to the Marquis de Sade? The magazine required a pseudonym to avoid revealing how many of the composer’s articles it was publishing, sometimes more than one an issue. Under his own name, in April,
Esquire
carried Antheil’s first full-length article on endocrinology, “Glands on a Hobby Horse,” and in May, after that introduction, his “Glandbook for the Questing Male,” subtitled “Reducing a Laboratory Science to a Sidewalk Sport for a Grading of the Passing Females from A to D.”

Antheil fell ill in the midst of all this essaying, in December 1935—“
very very ill,” he told William Bullitt—with the serious asthma and bronchitis that plagued him during wet winters in those days before antibiotics. He spent January and February largely in bed and told Mrs. Bok later that he “
almost died.” He and Boski had been thinking of moving
to California for his health. He had also become aware of the increasing opportunities in Hollywood for composers, a change that he explained to his peers in an article in
Modern Music:

Ten years ago existing musical scores were not protected by copyright from [movie exploitation]. The only expense producers incurred was the cost of having able copyists go to the music libraries or buy sheet music. The contents were available to them without royalty costs.…

But now that copyright has been recognized as protecting composers against the sound-film, it costs the movies big money to quote twelve bars from anything or anybody—an average of $100 a measure. Think of a hundred thousand measures, and you will have some idea of the cost of a quoted score, and you will also understand the sudden new vogue for “originals.”

These several convergences gave him, he said, “
just enough of a taste for motion picture scoring to come out to Hollywood.” In 1936 he and Boski bought a car, packed up, and took their time driving out west by way of Charleston, Clearwater, New Orleans, El Paso, and Santa Fe. They lingered in Santa Fe through the summer, collecting friends, until an uncharacteristic spell of July rain shrouded the high desert country, when they proceeded on to Hollywood. “I have made my first great trip across America,” Antheil wrote
to his patron grandly after he arrived on 1 August. “
I have been down to the border of Mexico, and up in Santa Fe. My health seems to have been improved by the westward trip 100%; I really feel fine. I hope, somehow or another, that things might at last go a little better with me—I really feel that I deserve it.”

That fall he composed the score for a Cecil B. DeMille film,
The Plainsman
, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. For a two-hundred-page score he was paid only $750 ($12,000 today), one-third of a
three-score contract. He assured Mrs. Bok that established composers earned $5,000 to $7,000 ($80,000 to $111,000) per film. Then Boski announced one day that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was completely unexpected, and the bank account was empty. Antheil asked his reluctant patron to help them until he got out from under his second and third scores, and she did.

The Antheil’s only child, Peter, blond and blue eyed like his father, as dark Boski had predicted, was born in June 1937. By then, Gingrich had exhausted his enthusiasm for George’s writing, just when George had concluded that he “liked the idea of writing for a living.… Writing words, moreover, was not like writing music for the movies; I could write words all day—however corny—and these words would in no manner interfere with my writing music at night.” Antheil then “
studied the writing field very exactly” and concluded that the most highly paid field of writing was the syndicated column. He undertook to write a “love column” called “Boy Advises Girl” for the new Esquire Syndicate. Within a few
months the syndicate was ghosting the column for him—paying him less, he says emphatically,
“but
I no longer had to work for it.
” He published a book that year as well,
Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology
, capitalizing on and incorporating his
Esquire
endocrinology studies.

He was still living from project to project, however, and with his new sense of responsibility as a father he looked beyond one-off film scoring to invention, which appeared to have the advantage of long-term financial return. Like many novice inventors, he seriously underestimated the difficulty of finding investors. Like other novices as well, he benefited from his ignorance, which liberated his enthusiasm.

In 1924, Antheil recalled, when he was living in Paris, he had conceived “
a system of musical notation in which … one could write or print music that could be
instantly
read by the veriest tyro.” An editor friend of his had suggested he lock in the idea by devising a typewriter that could type the simplified notation and patenting it. He had done so, but the patent had been issued in France, and before he moved to California, he had burned his only copy along with “every last piece of ‘valuable paper’ which I had previously insisted upon carting around with us all over the world.”