“You are a thymocentric,” George told the actress once the subject of breast size was invoked, “of the anterior-pituitary variety, what I call a ‘prepit-thymus.’” She responded, “I know it. I’ve studied your charts in Esquire. Now what I want to know is, what shall I do about it? Adrian says you’re wonderful.” In his memoir George feigned embarrassment. Hedy pressed him: “The thing is, can they be made bigger?” Yes, said George, blushing, “much much bigger!”
When Hedy left, Antheil claimed, she wrote her phone number on his windshield with lipstick.
The next day he called her, she invited him to dinner “high up in her Benedict Canyon retreat,” and over dinner, served by a butler, they discussed the use of “various glandular extracts” that would make “an honest gland” of her post-pituitary (the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland). “And so the bosoms stay up,” Antheil concluded his presentation. Later that evening:
We began talking about the war, which, in the late summer of 1940, was looking most extremely black. Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about new munitions and various secret weapons, some of which she had invented herself, and that she was thinking seriously of quitting M.G.M. and going to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established Inventors’ Council.
“They could just have me around,” she explained, “and ask me questions.”
Although Antheil describes Hedy as “very, very bright,” he succeeds here in making her sound at least scatterbrained. In fairness, he does add that she had been the wife of Fritz Mandl, had “overheard him and his experts discussing new devices, and… had retained these ideas in basic form,” but then goes on, “in her beautiful beringleted head—while all the time clever Fritz Mandl didn’t think she knew A from Z.” Even this explanation doubles back on itself: Did Hedy invent independently or simply borrow the “ideas” she had “retained… in basic form”? The misogynistic debate about whether or not Hedy’s ideas were original or borrowed continues to this day. Evidently, Fritz Mandl wasn’t the only one who, deep down, “didn’t think she knew A from Z.”
When Hedy suggested that the National Inventors Council, just established in August 1940, could profitably ask her questions, she wasn’t implying she was a prodigy who could spontaneously generate inventions out of nowhere; she was referring to the fortuitous espionage she had conducted over the Mandl dinner table listening to Austrian and German experts discuss their weapons projects and problems. In effect, she was proposing that Washington could benefit from debriefing her about the weapons-development work of the Austrian and German engineering establishments. That was one way she believed she could help the Allied war effort.
Another way she thought she could help was by working on inventions of her own. She had several weapons inventions in mind. In Bad Boy of Music, Antheil locates her discussion of one such new weapon during that first evening at her house. But Hedy told an interviewer many years later that the impetus for her idea of inventing a remote-controlled torpedo had been the sinking of the City of Benares on 17 September, which was still four weeks away when Antheil first met her. Evidently, Antheil, to make a better story, compressed his several early meetings with Hedy into one.
Several years later, drafting a chapter for his memoir, Bad Boy of Music, Antheil described the setting for invention he found at Hedy’s house:
Here, then, and at long last must suddenly come the true solution as to why Hedy does not go out upon joyous evening relaxations to which all Hollywood would only too willingly invite her, why her “drawing room,” sure enough, is filled both with unreadable books and very useable drawing boards that look as if they are in constant use. Why apparently she has no time for anybody except something ultra mysterious about which no inside Hollywood columnist has dared to even venture a guess. Believe it or not, Hedy Lamarr stays home nights and invents! I believe it because I know.
By 12 September 1940, George could report to Boski that he had only the title music of the film score left to write. He was also working on the edited draft of his book about the war, The Shape of the War to Come. A writer who was a friend of his had taken the original manuscript in hand, George reported: “Our pal, Ted Mills, turned out to be an angel… and has done such an expert rewrite job with the book that I can hardly believe I wrote it. The facts are all mine, however. They [Longmans, Green] are featuring it on their fall list.” Antheil had worked himself into exhaustion, however, which had resulted in an accident that needed his doctor’s attention:
I have been up so many nights and have lost so much sleep that several days ago I was sharpening my pencils with a razor blade and gashed the forefinger of my left hand, which I promptly tourniqueted… and took to [Dr.] Lou Eshman who, fortunately, was home. He washed and bandaged it, saw that it was not serious, and since then I have had to play with 4 fingers of the left hand—until it heals which will not be for another week or two. But it shows you how extremely nervous I am.
Boski and Peter must have been away for most of the month of September, which would be consistent with a long trip by train across the United States and back—six days round trip—and with grieving in-laws; Hedy and George began working on Hedy’s idea for a remote-controlled torpedo some time after the 17 September City of Benares disaster. When Boski returned at the end of the month, Antheil reports in his memoir, she was suspicious of her husband’s new friendship with a beautiful movie star. “Boski was so indignant,” he writes, “that I had to bring Hedy down to our house just to show Boski what a nice girl Hedy really was.” His wife wasn’t convinced, Antheil adds, but “as time went by, Boski and Hedy became good friends anyway. They are really very much alike basically; both are Hungarian-Austrian and have many tastes in common.”
Left unsaid in Antheil’s public version of Boski’s reaction to Hedy is a long-standing conflict between the Antheils over George’s evident infidelities. Writing to Boski from his hotel while she was away, George had reported on his behavior: “I have been a very very very VERY good boy—why this time I haven’t even had a girl out to lunch, or dinner, to say nothing of anything else. Why I haven’t even spoken to a girl—any girl—alone!!!!! Nor have I wanted to, really.” But of course he had spoken to a “girl,” to Hedy, and had dinner with her as well, although at that point perhaps only with the Adrians chaperoning. The story, in Bad Boy of Music, about Hedy writing her phone number on his windshield in lipstick, whether true or not, is certainly intended to invoke a standard device in B movies of signaling the beginning of a sexual liaison, another marker Antheil plants to demonstrate that he was a certified bad boy.
Yet an affair between Hedy and George seems highly unlikely. Even without heels she was three inches taller than he, and all the men in her life were tall. Boski, for obvious reasons, monitored George’s behavior closely. Her skeptical initial response to his friendship with Hedy is one example. Another is her response to an offer from Hedy. The two women may have become friends, but later, Antheil writes, “when Hedy moved down into Beverly Hills proper and discovered that the so-called ‘play’ house in back of her swimming pool was fully equipped and furnished” and invited the Antheils to move in rent free, Boski turned down the offer, even though the Antheils were, as usual, short of funds. Boski had asked Hedy if she went swimming every day. Hedy had said yes, she did, “but nobody else comes, excepting [her fellow MGM star] Ann Sothern.” Boski had then inspected the house and found that every window looked out on the pool. The Antheils stayed where they were.