[TWO]
Bad Boy of Music
A young American composer whose path would intersect Hedy’s in Hollywood was writing radical music in Paris while she was still a girl. Born with the century in Trenton, New Jersey, George Antheil (pronounced ANT-hile) had made his way to Europe in 1922 as a concert pianist performing both classical and modern works but emphasizing his own. He was small, about five feet four; Time would describe him colorfully as “a cello-sized man with blond hair and childlike blue eyes.” A nose flattened in a childhood accident made his choirboy face pugilistic, however, and his tireless intensity gave him scale. “He did nothing but write music and play it on the piano,” his playwright friend Ben Hecht recalled, “which he made sound like a calliope in a circus parade.” His fellow composer Aaron Copland assessed Antheil’s technique more professionally: “When I first went to Paris I was jealous of Antheil’s piano playing—it was so brilliant; he could demonstrate so well what he wanted to do.”
What Antheil wanted to do was to create a distinctively American music, an ambition he conceived at seventeen while still living at home:
Curiously enough, my springboard on this momentous occasion was not any American music I knew, nor American folksong, nor American composers of the past. It was, rather, a sudden acquaintanceship with the works of the Russian Five, that nationalist group of Russian composers chief amongst whom were Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and, most of all composers, Tchaikovsky. Mussorgsky, particularly, charmed me, and I gathered at the Trenton, New Jersey, public library all the information about him and the Russian Five that was available.
The information that I gathered enchanted me; I was, at the time, completely ripe for the musical philosophy of nationalism which the Russian Five had once preached and lived.
Antheil’s early ambition matched the program for American music championed by the New Yorker Paul Rosenfeld, the most influential music critic of the day. “I myself was present as a young man of 20,” Antheil recalled, “when… Rosenfeld called a meeting of the four or five young American composers he then considered talented, in his apartment near Gramercy Place…. The upshot of that meeting was roughly something like this: ‘The Russian Five could do it; why can’t we?’ It was, mainly, agreed that… we needed a housecleaning and a nationalist objective.”
Antheil found inspiration for his new American music not in the United States but in Europe. “When I was 17,” he wrote later, “in 1917, I used to go to sleep with a score of [Stravinsky’s] ‘Sacre du Printemps’ and Schönberg’s ‘Fünf Orchestra Stücke’ under my pillow.” The problem was how to get to Europe when he was without money or immediate prospects. In 1921 he was forced to go hungry even to pay for composition lessons until his teacher found out and generously refunded his fees. When the refund depleted in turn, he went to see his mentor and former music teacher Constantin von Sternberg. “I told him I was broke and that I was getting rather tired of it,” Antheil recalled with more bravado than he’d felt at the time. Sternberg sent him to the Philadelphia Main Line with a sealed letter to a wealthy American patron, Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Bok was the only child of Cyrus Curtis, whose Curtis Publishing owned both the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. The letter she read while Antheil waited in her parlor that afternoon described him as “one of the richest and strongest talents for composition that I have ever met here or in Europe.” It asked her to give the young man “the means to hide himself for a year or two in some secluded spot… where… he could devote himself to his work without having to earn money for his bodily maintenance.”
Bok responded to Sternberg’s appeal, she told Antheil later, “on the basis of a young man possibly gifted for composition, actually a good pianist and very definitely an ill and starving boy.” She set him up as a teacher at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, with a generous monthly stipend of $150—the equivalent of $1,700 today.
The following spring, well fed and comfortable but no less eager to work abroad, Antheil seized his chance. Learning that a young concert pianist had fallen out with the impresario M. H. Hanson, leaving a hole in Hanson’s European concert commitments, Antheil set himself to practicing sixteen to twenty hours a day, soaking his hands in fishbowls of cold water when they swelled. “In this way,” he wrote, “I gained a technique which, when a month later I played for Hanson, took him off his feet.” Taking Hanson off his feet would have required great percussive force, which Antheil was already known for; the concert manager was “the exact duplicate of [the corpulent Hollywood actor] Sydney Greenstreet.”
Hanson needed money to finance an Antheil concert tour. The ambitious young pianist turned again to Mary Louise Bok, as he would repeatedly for the next fifteen years, until her remarkable patience with his wheedling finally ran out. He told her why concertizing around Europe would be good for him, then sicced Hanson on her. Hanson described two tours, plain and deluxe, at $3,900 ($44,000 today) or $6,400 ($72,000 today). Not wishing to seem ungenerous, Mrs. Bok chose the deluxe. Twenty-one-year-old George Antheil, child prodigy, high-school dropout, concert pianist, and incipient avant-garde composer, left for Europe in style.
His real reason for going to Europe, he claimed long after, was to chase down a young woman he was in love with. Her mother had spirited her off to prevent their engagement, “to either Italy or Germany, probably the latter.” But he also revealed that he had actually given up on her “the day she had disappeared without leaving me a clue.” If he encountered her, it would only be to “silently reproach her,” he fantasized, and then “sadly turn on my heel and walk away.” At another time he explained that he went to Europe because, “first, I wanted to learn how to write better music; secondly, I wanted that music to be heard by publics more likely to be receptive to it than any I was likely to encounter in the America of 1922; and thirdly, the little money I had would last longer in Europe.” None of these explanations is mutually exclusive. Europe—cheap, permissive, and reemergent—was a siren call for talented young Americans in the years after the Great War.
Antheil sailed with Hanson on the Empress of Scotland in May 1922. He performed in London to mixed reviews and detoured to southern Germany for an all-Teutonic music festival before setting up a base camp in Berlin. He spoke German like a native; his German-immigrant parents had spoken the language at home.
Hyperinflation was rapidly impoverishing the defeated citizens of Weimar Germany. The mark, which had stabilized at 320 to the U.S. dollar during the first half of 1922, would sink to 8,000 to the dollar by December, and that was only the beginning; by December 1923 the exchange rate would be 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar. That summer of 1922, Antheil remembered, “the girls and wives of some of the best families of Berlin were out on the street. Everything else had been hocked. Now they were hocking themselves, in order to eat.” He was too young and too recently released from living at home not to take advantage of the opportunity. “There were just too many women. The men of Germany had mostly been killed off, or were crippled. In any case, the men left over were as poor and as starving as the women.” So, inevitably, “it was curious to be a young foreigner with money, enough money, in Berlin in those days.”