Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography, Science
ISBN: 9780385534390
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

[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“We were good friends of Adrian, the dress designer, and his wife Janet Gaynor,” Boski Antheil recalled in her unpublished memoir.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.

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