Hedy's Folly (14 page)

[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.”

I said, “Uh-huh.”

They repeated, “Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “but I keep hearing you both say, ‘Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.’ ”

… “But she does, she really does!” they insisted.

“You mean,” I faltered, “that Hedy Lamarr wants to see … 
little
me?”

“Yes,” they said, “and moreover we’re going to arrange it for next week. Now don’t protest.”

“Who’s protesting?” I said, bewildered.

So George Antheil met Hedy Lamarr one evening in late August 1940 at the Adrians’ house. His “
eyeballs sizzled,” she was “undoubtedly … the most beautiful woman on earth,” she looked even better in person than she did on the screen, and “her breasts were fine too, real postpituitary.” In the rush of all this gushing, Antheil the author fails to explain that Hedy wanted to see him not generally about her “glands” but specifically because she was concerned that her breasts were too small. (In her book,
Ecstasy and Me
, she attributes this canard repeatedly to Louis B. Mayer, which was probably true.)

“You are a thymocentric,” George told the actress once the subject of breast size was invoked, “of the anterior-pituitary variety, what I call a ‘prepit-thymus.’ ” She responded, “I know it. I’ve studied your charts in
Esquire
. Now what I want to know is, what shall I do about it? Adrian says you’re wonderful.” In his memoir George feigned embarrassment. Hedy pressed him: “The thing is, can they be made
bigger
?” Yes, said George, blushing, “much much bigger!”

When Hedy left, Antheil claimed, she wrote her phone number on his windshield with lipstick.

The next day he called her, she invited him to dinner
“
high up in her Benedict Canyon retreat,” and over dinner, served by a butler, they discussed the use of “various glandular extracts” that would make “an honest gland” of her post-pituitary (the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland). “And so the bosoms stay up,” Antheil concluded his presentation. Later that evening:

We began talking about the war, which, in the late summer of 1940, was looking most extremely black. Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about new munitions and various secret weapons, some of which she had invented herself, and that she was thinking seriously of quitting M.G.M. and going to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established Inventors’ Council.

“They could just have me around,” she explained, “and ask me questions.”

Although Antheil describes Hedy as “
very, very bright,” he succeeds here in making her sound at least scatterbrained. In fairness, he does add that she had been the wife of Fritz Mandl, had “
overheard him and his experts discussing new devices, and … had retained these ideas in basic form,” but then goes on, “in her beautiful beringleted head—while all the time clever Fritz Mandl didn’t think she knew A from
Z.” Even this explanation doubles back on itself: Did Hedy invent independently or simply borrow the “ideas” she had “retained … in basic form”? The misogynistic debate about whether or not Hedy’s ideas were original or borrowed continues to this day. Evidently, Fritz Mandl wasn’t the only one who, deep down, “didn’t think she knew A from Z.”

When Hedy suggested that the National Inventors Council, just established in August 1940, could profitably ask her questions, she wasn’t implying she was a prodigy who could spontaneously generate inventions out of nowhere; she was referring to the fortuitous espionage she had conducted over the Mandl dinner table listening to Austrian and German experts discuss their weapons projects and problems. In effect, she was proposing that Washington could benefit from debriefing her about the weapons-development work of the Austrian and German engineering establishments. That was one way she believed she could help the Allied war effort.

Another way she thought she could help was by working on inventions of her own. She had several weapons inventions in mind. In
Bad Boy of Music
, Antheil locates her discussion of one such new weapon during that first evening at her house. But
Hedy told an interviewer many years later that the impetus for her idea of inventing a remote-controlled torpedo had been the sinking of the
City of Benares
on 17 September, which was still four weeks away when Antheil first met her. Evidently, Antheil, to make a better story, compressed his several early meetings with Hedy into one.

Several years later, drafting a chapter for his memoir,
Bad Boy of Music
, Antheil described the setting for invention he found at Hedy’s house:

Here, then, and at long last must suddenly come the true solution as to why Hedy does not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her, why her “drawing room,” sure enough, is filled both with unreadable books and very useable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use. Why apparently she has no time for anybody except something ultra mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights
and invents
! I believe it because I know.

By 12 September 1940, George could report to Boski that he had only the title music of the film score left to write. He was also working on the edited draft of his book about the war,
The Shape of the War to Come
. A writer who was a friend of his had taken the original manuscript in hand, George reported: “
Our pal, Ted Mills, turned out to be an angel … and has done such an expert rewrite job with the book that I can hardly believe I wrote it. The facts are all mine, however. They [Longmans, Green] are
featuring
it on their fall list.” Antheil had worked himself into exhaustion, however, which had resulted in an accident that needed his doctor’s attention:

I have been up so many nights and have lost so much sleep that several days ago I was sharpening my pencils with a razor blade and gashed the forefinger of my left hand, which I promptly tourniqueted … and took to [Dr.] Lou Eshman who, fortunately, was home. He washed and bandaged it, saw that it was not serious, and since then I have had to play with 4 fingers of the left hand—until it heals which will not be for another week or two. But it shows you how extremely nervous I am.

Boski and Peter must have been away for most of the month of September, which would be consistent with a long trip by train across the United States and back—six days round trip—and with grieving in-laws; Hedy and George began working on Hedy’s idea for a remote-controlled torpedo some time after the 17 September
City of Benares
disaster. When Boski returned at the end of the month, Antheil reports in his memoir, she was suspicious of her husband’s new friendship with a beautiful movie star. “
Boski was so indignant,” he writes, “that I had to bring Hedy down to our house just to show Boski what a nice girl Hedy really was.” His wife wasn’t convinced, Antheil adds, but “as time went by, Boski and Hedy became good friends anyway. They are really very much alike basically; both are Hungarian-Austrian and have many tastes in common.”

Left unsaid in Antheil’s public version of Boski’s reaction to Hedy is a long-standing conflict between the Antheils over
George’s evident infidelities. Writing to Boski from his hotel while she was away, George had reported on his behavior: “
I have been a very very very VERY good boy—why this time I haven’t even had a girl out to lunch, or dinner, to say nothing of anything else. Why I haven’t even spoken to a girl—any girl—alone!!!!! Nor have I wanted to, really.” But of course he had spoken to a “girl,” to Hedy, and had dinner with her as well, although at that point perhaps only with the Adrians chaperoning. The story, in
Bad Boy of Music
, about Hedy writing her phone number on his windshield in lipstick, whether true or not, is certainly intended to invoke a standard device in B movies of signaling the beginning of a sexual liaison, another marker Antheil plants to demonstrate that he was a certified bad boy.