The children whose deaths that summer horrified Hedy were London schoolchildren assembled in Liverpool for transport by ship to Canada to protect them from the German strategic bombing of London—the Blitz—that was expected to begin and did begin in early September, seventy-six consecutive nights between September 1940 and May 1941 that took more than forty thousand lives in London and elsewhere in Britain.
Submarine and antisubmarine warfare between the British and the Germans had gradually loosened the rules of engagement agreed upon between the two belligerents in the London Submarine Agreement of 1936. According to Karl Dönitz, the commander of the German submarine force, Germany responded to a series of British violations of the agreement:
[German] Naval High Command reacted only with extreme caution and step by step to the British measures… which constituted a breach of the London Submarine Agreement. Slowly and one by one the restrictions on the conduct of U-boat operations were removed in a series of orders from Naval High Command—beginning with permission to fire upon vessels which used their wireless, which sailed without lights and which carried guns, followed (as a result of the instructions to ram [U-boats] given to British ships) by permission to attack all vessels identified as hostile and ending with a declaration of sea areas that would be regarded as operational zones. These latter were at first restricted, but finally, on August 17, 1940, the whole of the seas around the British Isles were declared an operational zone, in which attack without warning would be permissible.
Twelve days later, the first of two ocean liners carrying children, the SS Volendam, with 320 children among 606 passengers, sailed from Liverpool into the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic. A substantial part of the 351 British ships torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats by early September already lay on the bottom of the ocean. “On her second day out,” writes a historian—31 August 1940—“the Volendam was struck by a U-boat’s torpedo at a little before midnight, seventy miles off Ireland’s Donegal Coast. The ship and her passengers were fortunate; all eighteen lifeboats were deployed successfully, the seas were calm, and there was, according to the ship’s captain, ‘no panic whatsoever.’” A purser was killed; all 320 children survived.
The next ship carrying children to refuge sailed to a more bitter fate. The SS City of Benares, with 406 passengers and crew, including 101 adults and 90 children being evacuated to Canada, part of a nineteen-ship convoy, was torpedoed and sunk on 17 September 1940. The British Wartime Memories Project describes the consequences:
Four days, 600 miles out to sea, the destroyer HMS Winchelsea and two sloops, who had been escorting the convoy, departed to meet eastbound Convoy HX71. Despite a standing order to disperse the convoy and let all ships proceed on their own, Rear Admiral Mackinnon delayed the order. Shortly after 10 pm the City of Benares was torpedoed by U-boat U-48. The order to abandon City of Benares was given but due to rough conditions and twenty-miles-per-hour winds, lowering the boats was difficult and several capsized. Two hundred and forty-five lives were lost either from drowning or exposure. Rescue did not arrive until [2:15] the following afternoon when HMS Hurricane arrived on the scene and rescued 105 survivors.
Only 13 of the children survived, 6 of whom spent seven days in a lifeboat before being rescued by HMS Anthony.
It was after this second, horrific disaster—seventy-seven children drowned in twenty-mile-per-hour winds in the bitter North Atlantic, killed by people who spoke her native language and whose country had forcibly annexed her native land—that Hedy, in Hollywood between films, with a new baby boy in arms, decided the Allies had to do something about the German submarine menace. She began thinking about how to invent a remote-controlled torpedo to attack submarines just at the time she met George Antheil, who knew quite a lot about how to synchronize player pianos.
[SEVEN]
Frequency Hopping
“We were good friends of Adrian, the dress designer, and his wife Janet Gaynor,” Boski Antheil recalled in her unpublished memoir. “Adrian had a talent to be able to imitate people’s voices and mannerisms and had great fun doing impersonations.” Bright people tend to find one another wherever they live, including in Hollywood. A decade later, when the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker studied Hollywood as if it were an island in the South Pacific, she noted “a few homes where intelligent and gifted people, regardless of their financial status, gather for good conversation and fun, not dependent on elaborate food, heavy drinking or ostentatious entertainment.” She might have been describing Hedy’s epitome of her “ideal evening,” or a dinner party at the Adrians.
Boski and Peter traveled east during the third week of August 1940, George Antheil wrote to William Bullitt, “to visit my heartbroken parents in Trenton.” His brother’s death, he told Bullitt, “has both saddened me and steeled me in the resolution to do whatever I can best do to help my country, the U.S.A.—the country that Henry loved so dearly—to withstand and defeat the evil, predatory powers that are again loose in the world. And I ask for no easy job…. I feel I owe the enemy something very particular.” That week before the sinking of the Volendam and several weeks before the worse disaster of the City of Benares was the week when George and Hedy finally met.
With Boski and Peter gone, George was batching it and miserable in a local hotel, the Hollywood-Franklin, working on a movie score. The Adrians invited him to dinner to make up a foursome with Hedy, who had separated from Gene Markey the month before. Two intelligent and articulate people, both temporarily alone, both native German speakers, both former members of the European artistic community, were reasons enough to put them together. In Bad Boy of Music, however, Antheil attributes the invitation specifically to his endocrinology work:
One day around this time, late summer 1940, [the Adrians] said to me:
“Hedy Lamarr wants to see you about her glands.”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
They repeated, “Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.”
“It’s funny,” I said, “but I keep hearing you both say, ‘Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.’”
… “But she does, she really does!” they insisted.
“You mean,” I faltered, “that Hedy Lamarr wants to see… little me?”
“Yes,” they said, “and moreover we’re going to arrange it for next week. Now don’t protest.”
“Who’s protesting?” I said, bewildered.
So George Antheil met Hedy Lamarr one evening in late August 1940 at the Adrians’ house. His “eyeballs sizzled,” she was “undoubtedly… the most beautiful woman on earth,” she looked even better in person than she did on the screen, and “her breasts were fine too, real postpituitary.” In the rush of all this gushing, Antheil the author fails to explain that Hedy wanted to see him not generally about her “glands” but specifically because she was concerned that her breasts were too small. (In her book, Ecstasy and Me, she attributes this canard repeatedly to Louis B. Mayer, which was probably true.)