Some truly desperate financial crisis afflicted the Antheils in March 1940. George wrote to Mrs. Bok in despair, the more so since he had assured her early in 1939, when SEE-Note was bubbling, that he would never ask her for money again. Generous soul that she was, she came through with twice the amount George requested. At the same time the chairman of the music department at Stanford University invited George to join the faculty, which he did.
“[We] put our meager possessions in storage,” Boski recalled, “and drove to Stanford with Peter [and] our Japanese student [helper] and settled in a nice house on the campus. But the perversity of Hollywood fate is really funny. No sooner were we settled in Stanford than Ben Hecht wanted George to write the score for a picture he was doing, and as George and Ben were good friends and as salary was not too high at the university and we were in debt, and if one has waited for three years for an offer, one can hardly refuse it when it comes along, George decided he can do both and would commute from Stanford to L.A. when he was not lecturing.”
Antheil did, flying down to Hollywood, flying back to Stanford, “just making it on time for his lecture.” They couldn’t let Stanford know—“Hollywood,” Boski said, “was not a respectable word in academic circles.”
The Antheils were still living on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto when word came in late June 1940 that George’s cherished younger brother Henry had been killed in a plane crash. Henry had remained at the American embassy in Moscow, serving as the clerk in charge of the code room, when Bullitt had moved on to France. In 1939, Henry had requested a transfer from Moscow to the U.S. legation in Finland, where he arrived just in time to experience the 30 November bombing of Helsinki that initiated the brief, brave winter war between little Finland and the Soviet Union. At the resort hotel outside of the capital where the U.S. legation had moved to avoid the bombing, Henry met a young Finnish woman, Greta Lindberg, and the two fell in love. They quickly became engaged.
It was Henry who had been supplying George with information on the burgeoning war that George had used, along with discussions with Bill Bullitt and his own sharp wits, to write a series of spectacular articles for Esquire that were in the process of being assembled into a book that George would publish in the fall, The Shape of the War to Come. Antheil had predicted to within a week the beginning of the war in Europe with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939; he also predicted the German surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese entry into the war late the same year. Henry’s inside information came from classified State Department cables that he illegally extracted for his older brother’s use. Henry also, according to a recent review, “falsified assignment cables in order to remain together with his Finnish fiancée, Greta.” No one ever faulted the Antheil boys for timidity.
The Finns were vastly outnumbered—450,000 Soviet troops to 180,000 Finns, 6,500 Soviet tanks to 30 Finnish, 3,800 Soviet aircraft to 130 Finnish—but the Finns, defending their homeland, fought the Soviets to a standstill in December and January; in one battle alone, Russia lost more than 17,500 men, the Finns about 250. Finally, the Soviet Union invaded en masse, no other country was prepared to come to Finland’s rescue for fear of inciting a German response, and the Finns unhappily agreed to a peace treaty that required them to cede territory. The poor performance of the Soviet forces—the Soviet army took 400,000 casualties, including 126,000 dead, compared with Finland’s loss of 40,000 wounded and 26,600 dead—encouraged Adolf Hitler in his plans to launch Operation Barbarossa, his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, the following June.
Henry and his fiancée had gone off to Tallinn, Estonia, for a holiday on the weekend of 1–2 June 1940, their last days together. They had returned to Helsinki, but Henry had flown to Tallinn again on the morning of 14 June, the first day of a new Soviet-imposed blockade of Estonia, to pick up diplomatic pouches from the U.S. legations in Tallinn and Riga. He left Tallinn at two that afternoon on a commercial flight back to Helsinki. Five minutes after takeoff his plane, Time reported, “mysteriously exploded in mid-air and plunged into the Gulf of Finland.” A telegram to George Antheil from Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, reported that “no hope is held of recovering the remains of the passengers lost,” offered “profound sympathy,” and said that Henry had been “killed in an airplane accident.” By 17 July, however, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Soviets had shot down the Finnish airliner, probably because it was technically in violation of the Soviet blockade.
Hedy’s shock of war was less personal than Antheil’s. She did not lose a loved one that summer, but she read and heard of murdered children even as she adopted a baby boy, separated from and divorced her second husband, and shared with her friends Janet Gaynor and Gilbert Adrian, the actress and the costume designer, the birth of their first child.
“You couldn’t live with a person, in those days, without being married,” Hedy explained many years later. She had met Gene Markey, a screenwriter and man-about-town, in January 1939. In 1937 he had divorced the actress Joan Bennett, with whom he had a daughter. He met the standard of the kinds of men Hedy fell for: older (forty-three when she met him), taller (over six feet), and highly polished. A later wife, Myrna Loy, described Markey as “a brilliant raconteur, a man of unfailing wit and humor [who] could charm the birds off the trees, although birds were never his particular quarry—women were, the richer and more beautiful the better.” Four weeks after they met, on Saturday, 4 March 1939, Hedy and Gene were married at the governor’s palace in Mexicali after holding an impromptu press conference in San Diego to announce the event. “We decided late Friday evening that we must get married the next day—or miss our chance,” Markey had written to the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, whom he had not had time to alert. “Hedy did not even get a chance to go home to change her clothes.” Both busy professionals, they had returned to work immediately after the weekend. They had already bought a house to go home to, on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills.
The marriage lasted only sixteen months. The Markeys separated in July 1940; Hedy filed for divorce on 4 September. She told the court that she and her husband had spent only about four evenings alone together in all the months of their marriage. The judge suggested drily that next time she should take more than a month to get to know someone before she married him.
One result of the marriage was an adoption, although Hedy seems to have pursued adopting the baby boy she named James Lamarr Markey largely on her own. Jamesie, as he was known, joined the Markeys in October 1939 and remained with Hedy after they divorced.
Hedy met Gilbert Adrian, the designer who styled himself professionally as simply Adrian, through their work together at MGM. Born Adrian Adolph Greenberg in Naugatuck, Connecticut, in 1903, Adrian had been the chief costume designer at MGM since he joined the studio as a talented twenty-five-year-old in 1928; his designs were so popular with American women that one MGM film, The Women, shot in black and white, opened in 1939 with a ten-minute Technicolor parade of Adrian’s fashions. He designed the outré costumes for The Wizard of Oz, including Dorothy’s famous ruby slippers; he was Greta Garbo’s favorite and Joan Crawford’s. Most accounts of his life describe him as an openly gay man, but whatever his sexuality he married the actress Janet Gaynor in 1939 and remained married to her until his death, and in the summer of 1940 they had a son. Despite her stardom—she had won the first Oscar for Best Actress in 1929—Gaynor had retired from the film industry at the end of 1938; “I really wanted to have another kind of life,” she had explained. Adrian’s expensive costumes were falling out of style in the last years of the Great Depression; in 1940 he was preparing to transition to a producer of high-fashion clothing lines. Robin Gaynor Adrian was born the same week in mid-July that Hedy filed for divorce from Gene Markey.