Nor was Antheil himself present for the film’s 1924 Viennese premiere; had he been, he would have advanced one move closer to Hedy Kiesler, because the organizer of the premiere at the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques of the City of Vienna Music and Theater Festival was an architect and set designer named Frederick Kiesler, who happened to be a relative. Hedy herself was not quite ten years old in September 1924, probably too young to have seen the film. Léger lectured on it and presented it.
George and Boski did meet Frederick Kiesler a year later in Paris at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts. Boski remarked on their affinities:
Kiesler liked it so well in Paris that he decided to stay there after the Exposition and we became very good friends. He had a most original way of communicating in French, as at the time he did not speak it. When we went to restaurants, he just drew pictures of things he wanted to eat and was never disappointed. He loved the Ballet mécanique, which represented the same ideology as his architecture, and we saw a lot of each other. He had a very nice Austrian wife. Kiesler was very short and hence somewhat Napoleonic in his bearing. But he knew the humor of it and was delighted when we photographed him in a typical Napoleonic pose.
Kiesler stood only four feet eleven inches tall, which would have recommended him to George and Boski but must have contrasted conspicuously with Hedy’s tall father, Emil.
George and Boski took time out in 1925 to marry, in Budapest on 4 November. Boski had been away from Hungary long enough to notice how her native language colored even American song lyrics. “One night we went to a gypsy restaurant,” she recalled, “where they played a lot of Magyar songs, but eventually they got around to playing their versions of popular American hits, one of them being ‘Tea for Two,’ but you would never know it. It sounded exactly like a Hungarian folk song from the ‘pusta’ with cimbalom accompaniment.”
Another of the Antheils’ acquaintances in Paris whom they would encounter again significantly in the United States was William C. Bullitt, the journalist and diplomat, thirty-four years old in 1925. In 1933, Bullitt would become the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, traveling there with a young interpreter and diplomatic secretary named George Kennan. “Bullitt is a striking man,” Kennan would recalclass="underline" “young, handsome, urbane, full of charm and enthusiasm, a product of Philadelphia society and Yale but with considerable European residence, and with a flamboyance of personality that is right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Antheil’s young American acquaintance Bravig Imbs took a less diplomatic view of the man when he encountered him in 1926; he described Bullitt as “a hearty, charming and slightly silly gentleman who lived in a magnificent house near the Madeleine.”) The Philadelphian was moderately wealthy, with an inheritance from his mother that would be the equivalent of about $750,000 today. He had served as an assistant to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference following the Great War. With the American journalist Lincoln Steffens he had traveled on a secret mission to Russia during the conference and returned with an offer from Lenin of a peace treaty, an offer that Wilson had rejected. In his bitterness over the failure of his mission and the punitive harshness of the Versailles Treaty that followed, he had quit politics in disgust.
By 1925, settled in Paris and finishing a satiric novel about Philadelphia society, Bullitt had transformed his life from that of a diplomat into that of a writer and wealthy expatriate. His second wife, whom he had married in 1923, was the former Louise Bryant, the widow of John Reed. Both Bryant and Reed had experienced and written books about the Russian Revolution, Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World the better known of the two. Reed had died of typhus in 1920. He was the only American buried beneath the Kremlin Wall, the necropolis of Soviet national honor.
Boski remarks on the tension between the Bullitts in her unpublished memoir:
And of course there was Bill Bullitt and his beautiful wife Louise, who could never get over her guilt feeling of having married a millionaire (no matter how much she loved him) after having been married to John Reed. Who died in Russia and was buried before Louise got there by special Russian dispensation, as in those days there was no such traveling there and it was very much a closed country. The only American hero of the revolution was John Reed, who shared the highest respect with the top Russian revolutionaries. Bullitt was special envoy to Russia at the time, and met Louise there, fell in love with her and eventually married her. [When we knew him in Paris] he was in a period of deep disillusionment about politics and said at the time that he never wants to have anything to do with it. Instead they both turned to the art world of Paris and had some fabulous, but rather off-beat, parties at their elegant mansion. Louise was a beautiful woman, but you felt that she was a tragic woman, ambivalent about herself.
Bullitt was politically liberal but culturally conservative, not someone likely to have felt an affinity with Antheil’s music. During Louise’s pregnancy, Steffens had read aloud to her in Bullitt’s absence one evening from Joyce’s Ulysses; when Bullitt arrived home and took in the situation, Steffens’s wife recalled, “He was furious. He bellowed at Steff: ‘Think of our baby, our child! What will it turn out to be if it hears language like that?’” Bullitt may have been sensitized to the imagined dangers of uterine imprinting by his ongoing psychoanalysis with another Vienna denizen, Sigmund Freud; several years later he and Freud would collaborate on a joint psychoanalytic study of Woodrow Wilson, although Freud had never met the president and Bullitt was not a psychoanalyst.
Despite these strains, or perhaps because of them, the Bullitts gave great parties, Boski recalled:
Bill and Louise… had a very interesting conglomeration of people at their parties, down-and-out artists, French aristocracy, successful artists, American upper four hundred, etc. Louise had the most fabulous gowns from the great designers and she held these magnificent dresses in such low esteem that often, I remember, if her dress had a long train, we would use it to jump rope…. It’s hard to explain how elegant these parties were, with butlers galore, absolutely phenomenal food, Louise in her Vionnet dress, Bill in tuxedo, most women in long dresses or else very artistic confections of artists’ wives who had little money but a lot of imagination.
“We had a lovely and lively time that summer,” Boski writes elsewhere. “All summer was a marvelous fair. George was getting the Ballet mécanique ready and the rouleaux were being cut at Pleyel and we used to go there with friends who wanted to hear it ‘in progress.’” The rouleaux were the paper player-piano rolls. “[Ballet mécanique] was very hard to play, because there were so many notes that one had to pump the pedal very hard in order to get all the notes to sound. It was written directly to be cut into the pianola roll.”