Great trauma is always transformative. Identity shatters and with luck a new identity forms. Hedy had changed, as she knew. “From the moment of his death I was completely changed,” she said. She had tolerated a bad marriage while her father was alive. “Now I knew that I must run away, must escape, must make my plans to go to Hollywood. I had met death for the first time and death had shown me, among other things, how brief life is. I must have my life, the only life I ever really wanted, before it ran away from me into the dark.”
Escape would not be easy. It would take time and planning. It might even take blackmail. She could blackmail Mandl into letting her go if she acquired business secrets he would fear to see revealed. She would have to be a sponge when the German admirals and generals came to dine with them. All she had to do was look glamorous and listen. That was all Fritz expected of her anyway.
By autumn 1933, George and Boski Antheil had settled into an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone at 51 East Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Antheil’s opera Helen Retires was well along in rehearsals at the Juilliard School of Music. It was based on the 1925 novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy by the novelist, pianist, composer, Columbia University humanities professor, and Juilliard president John Erskine, who also wrote the libretto for the opera. (In 1927, Alexander Korda had directed a silent film based on the novel as well, with his actress wife, María, playing Helen.)
“Things were pretty tough,” Boski recalled of this period in their lives. “Emotionally and financially. George had been away from America for a long time, and was almost considered as a European composer, so it was difficult for him to get into the swim of American life. His works were not played, for the Ballet mécanique was still remembered…. And it was, as usual, in spite of no money, an interesting and stimulating life.” Their apartment had three “enormous” rooms, Boski said, all leading off individually from a main hallway. The rent was low, but they decided to sublet the third room anyway to share the cost. For recreation, besides music and the parties they held with wine or punch to help the conversation flow, there was always the spectacle of the city:
We also had the roof to ourselves and spent many hot evenings there, and George again assembled his telescope…. And although we did look at the stars often enough, we used the terrestrial lens and had interesting views of the skyscraper apartments. I always think it is so funny when people live in one of the high stories of such an apartment, they never think that anyone can look at them. Although we did not see anything spectacular, it was interesting to watch people eat, work, argue, without hearing what the words were.
Antheil had the pleasure of reuniting with his family again; his younger brother Henry was clamoring to follow in his footsteps to Europe:
We are around our family dining table over the shoe store on Broad Street. Henry, my brother, is there… and dreaming of going abroad—the wanderlust is strong in all of us. Justine, my sister, is there; she is young and smaller than Henry, and like most girls is particularly close to her father whom she adores. Dear mother is in the kitchen making wonderful mashed potatoes and bringing in the pot roast. Boski, my wife, and I are there too. Dad sits there, utterly delighted. Henry and I kid one another, and Justine joins in….
Dad, in his quiet way, sits in the middle of this scene, and dominates it. He considers Boski as another daughter, loves her as his own. These are his children. He looks very happy. There are many such days, week upon week.
Henry, born in 1912, enrolled at Rutgers University in 1931 after graduating from high school. He had continued to urge his older brother to help him travel abroad, and when George returned to the United States in 1933, he put Henry in touch with Bill Bullitt. The Antheils’ wealthy friend from Paris had returned to politics and government with the election of Franklin Roosevelt; the president had just appointed him to be the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. “Bill told me to send Henry down immediately,” George recalled. “Henry went and talked Bill into taking him with him to Russia, although Henry had not yet finished whatever kind of diplomat’s course he was taking at Rutgers.”
Bullitt, Henry and “a whole coterie of young people” left for the Soviet Union in February 1934—“before the premiere of Helen Retires” at Juilliard on 28 February, Antheil writes, “which was probably just as well. Helen Retires flopped.”
The failure of his opera, following upon the earlier American failure of Ballet mécanique, battered Antheil to a compositional standstill. “Bewildered,” he wrote, “I stopped composing for a time… to think things over.” The hiatus would last six years. Later he would call this period of inactivity both “a great plus and a great minus. It was a great plus in that it permitted me to study, for five or six years, with no other idea in mind except to learn everything about the music of the past that I could. During this time, for instance, I analyzed every great symphony or great chamber work available; and this analysis was not a schoolboy one, but made in great detail and with painstaking care.” It was a great minus because “no compositions of mine were played before the American or international public. I refused to allow those already written to be played; I also refused (until I was ready) to write new ones.”
Whether or not he was willing to work toward new art, he still had to make a living. George Balanchine, one of the few who had actually liked Helen Retires, commissioned him to write a ballet—as it turned out, the first of several for the Russian choreographer. It was supposed to be “American,” Antheil writes, and it would be, but the dances that Balanchine’s American Ballet troupe presented were “pure Paris à la Russe.” Antheil was hungry enough, and therefore flexible enough, to write in the style Balanchine wanted, which Antheil calls “an American ballet sufficiently Parisian!” He also composed two dance ballets for Martha Graham in 1934 and 1935.
Another opportunity emerged when a successful team of theater and film writers, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, came east from Hollywood to Paramount Studios in Astoria, New York, across the East River from Manhattan, with enough funding to make six films. When their music director, Oscar Levant, quit, early in the project, they engaged Antheil to score the first of the six. “I had to accept this offer,” Antheil explained warily to Mrs. Bok, “not because of the money, which actually is very very little considering the enormous amount of work entailed, but because if my music to this film is successful, it will be a way of earning a living, possibly the only way that a composer can make a living in the United States; certainly it is absolutely impossible any other way.”
Hecht remembered a more beneficent collaboration. “MacArthur and I lured Antheil into making money by writing music for movies,” he recalled. They shot the first film in the series, Once in a Blue Moon, “in the woodlands adjoining the elegant town of Tuxedo, New York.” Since the picture was “100% music,” Antheil wrote to Mrs. Bok, the story of a clown “which has as its background Russia,” George was needed on the set during filming; he and Boski lived on location that summer of 1934 with the cast and crew “in a ‘Russian’ village reproduced exactly from some original in Russia by our expert movie-set men.” It felt like a paid vacation, Antheil wrote later, and “one of the nicest” he’d had.