That fall he composed the score for a Cecil B. DeMille film, The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. For a two-hundred-page score he was paid only $750 ($12,000 today), one-third of a three-score contract. He assured Mrs. Bok that established composers earned $5,000 to $7,000 ($80,000 to $111,000) per film. Then Boski announced one day that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was completely unexpected, and the bank account was empty. Antheil asked his reluctant patron to help them until he got out from under his second and third scores, and she did.
The Antheil’s only child, Peter, blond and blue eyed like his father, as dark Boski had predicted, was born in June 1937. By then, Gingrich had exhausted his enthusiasm for George’s writing, just when George had concluded that he “liked the idea of writing for a living…. Writing words, moreover, was not like writing music for the movies; I could write words all day—however corny—and these words would in no manner interfere with my writing music at night.” Antheil then “studied the writing field very exactly” and concluded that the most highly paid field of writing was the syndicated column. He undertook to write a “love column” called “Boy Advises Girl” for the new Esquire Syndicate. Within a few months the syndicate was ghosting the column for him—paying him less, he says emphatically, “but I no longer had to work for it.” He published a book that year as well, Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology, capitalizing on and incorporating his Esquire endocrinology studies.
He was still living from project to project, however, and with his new sense of responsibility as a father he looked beyond one-off film scoring to invention, which appeared to have the advantage of long-term financial return. Like many novice inventors, he seriously underestimated the difficulty of finding investors. Like other novices as well, he benefited from his ignorance, which liberated his enthusiasm.
In 1924, Antheil recalled, when he was living in Paris, he had conceived “a system of musical notation in which… one could write or print music that could be instantly read by the veriest tyro.” An editor friend of his had suggested he lock in the idea by devising a typewriter that could type the simplified notation and patenting it. He had done so, but the patent had been issued in France, and before he moved to California, he had burned his only copy along with “every last piece of ‘valuable paper’ which I had previously insisted upon carting around with us all over the world.”
He turned to William Bullitt, since October 1936 the U.S. ambassador to France, to help him straighten out the foreign rights and fend off a Dutch challenger who had either independently invented a similar system or stolen Antheil’s. At the same time, he reconceived the invention as a scrolling sheet, like a player-piano roll but rolling down vertically, that would guide the novice’s fingers to the right keys at the right times to play the music scored on the scroll. (As the sheet scrolled down above the piano keys, vertical black bars printed on the sheet emerged and passed by above the keys to be played. The length of the bar as it passed by dictated how long a key should be held.) He called his invention SEE-Note.
By the time Bullitt reported back on the French patent (expired) and the Dutchman (not a threat but a successful example of how many copies of the SEE-Note system an energetic promoter might sell), Antheil could report in turn to Bullitt, “Our company, you will be glad to know, is now definitely established; our investors made an analysis of the situation, the sales graphs, and a complete report on the amount of pianos in various locales, etc. etc. and decided to start at $225,000 capital. We shall start October 15th.”
Antheil then undertook to convince Mrs. Bok to invest in SEE-Note. He wrote to her with his usual enthusiasm, which looked to the uninformed like megalomania, offering her a 49 percent interest in SEE-Note for $49,000 ($770,000 today) and mentioning in the next breath that he had only thirty-five cents to his name and that he, Boski, and “little Peter” would soon be hungry. He also blamed his former patron for having dismissed his original idea back in 1924, which had discouraged him from pursuing it. Mrs. Bok thought he was once again asking her for support and responded angrily.
Antheil apologized in his next letter. He’d found the money to go on. If Mrs. Bok invested, she could make millions on his invention and endow the Curtis Institute of Music even more lavishly than she already had. (In 1927 she had shored up her original $500,000 gift with one of $12 million, the equivalent of $155 million today—Antheil was aiming high.) They debated back and forth. She consulted a music publisher, who advised her, “The publishers of the world have vast fortunes invested in plates and in printed copies. In order to do a new notation this tremendous capital would have to be wiped out and this is wholly unlikely.” Antheil noted that a music publisher, with a vast fortune invested, was not exactly an objective expert. Then he reported that his potential business partners, businessmen with hard heads and good credentials, would only join the SEE-Note enterprise if they could command a 70 percent share. To forestall losing control, he asked Mrs. Bok to loan him $2,000. (In the process, he looked up the total of her gifts to him since 1922: $26,000, or $400,000 today.) That failing, he decided to start small and asked her to join four other friends investing $200 each.
He might have been Abraham pleading for Jehovah to spare Sodom for all the good it did him financially. Mrs. Bok didn’t invest in SEE-Note, and the opportunity of a lifetime once again passed George Antheil by. But he had learned about patents, patent lawyers, and patent searches, and also something of the nature of inventing itself.
It did the Antheils little enough good in Hollywood. “We never learned the game,” Boski said later. “Everybody thought that George had sold himself down the river in Hollywood, where the sad fact was that we struggled like crazy to try to keep afloat.” They were happier, she thought, after they gave up their original plan of making a killing writing movie scores and then getting out:
We tried to keep up this mirage for about two years, living it up in a very elegant house, with marble floors, two grand pianos, a nurse for Peter, a maid and four bedrooms…. After George made his first picture for DeMille, which was very successful, no other scores seemed to come his way. He knew a man, who at the time was one of the top musical comedy producers, and whom he [had known] in his earlier period, who always said how much he admired George’s music and promised him a picture in the very near future… and we lived on this promise like silly fools. Until we were behind the rent for many months and decided to ask the landlady, who was an extremely nice person, to take our promissory note for the rent we could not pay, and moved into a small Hollywood bungalow, which brought us a lot of happiness, good friends. We had practically no furniture beyond the bare necessities. It was like being back in Paris.
Mrs. Bok, moving to a new, smaller house herself, had discovered several crates in her basement that Antheil had sent her from Paris and forgotten about. She asked him if he wanted them. He realized they contained the paintings he had bought from starving artists in his early days in Berlin and Paris. He had them shipped to the “small Hollywood bungalow,” Boski writes, where she hung them “on the walls. But these being paintings by Braque, Picasso, Leger and other famous contemporary artists, most people would not have known that they were of any value and would have just noticed that if we were more than four people, one had to sit on a cushion on the floor.”