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.”