Hedy's Folly Page 4

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  “We arrived in Paris in the middle of June,” she remembered, “and the first night we were there, we went to the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt to see and hear the Diaghilev ballet performing Stravinsky’s Les noces. What a magical beginning.” Les noces—The Wedding—had given Stravinsky great trouble. He put the libretto together himself, mining a collection of old Russian wedding songs. Conceiving a dance cantata—a ballet with song—he originally tried to score it for full orchestra, “which I gave up almost at once in view of the elaborate apparatus that the complexity of the form demanded.” Next he tried a smaller ensemble. “I began a score which required massed polyphonic effects: a mechanical piano and an electrically driven harmonium, a section of percussion instruments, and two Hungarian cimbaloms [that is, concert hammered dulcimers].” He worried that it would be difficult to synchronize the mechanical instruments with singers and the instruments played live by musicians. To see if the combination worked, he orchestrated the first two scenes. He was unhappy with the result; it “was all pure loss,” he said, and he “did not touch Les noces again for four years.” When Diaghilev asked for a new ballet for his Paris-based Ballets Russes, Stravinsky resuscitated Les noces, this time instrumenting it for multiple pianos, timbals, bells, and xylophones, “none of which instruments gives a precise note.” Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, choreographed it. (“In contrast to her brother,” Stravinsky writes acidly in his 1936 Autobiography, she was “gifted with a real talent for choreographic creation.”) Les noces was performed that June 1923 to great acclaim. “Absolutely breathtaking,” Boski praised it, “and the glitter and joyousness of the audience, after bleak Berlin, was like champagne.”

  Not only Berlin but also Vienna had been bleak. The war may not have affected Hedy Kiesler and her prosperous family; Boski, who had attended school in Vienna before beginning her university studies in Berlin, remembered an uglier reality. “When I went to school there,” she writes, “after the First World War, Vienna and Austria were really terribly beaten, losing the war, losing their emperor, losing the illusion that they were the center of the universe. They were terribly poor, everything was rationed, and you had to wait in line for the simplest necessities of life.”

  Boski found Paris transforming:

  Paris was like a carnival. I will never forget its busy ebullience on the early morning of our arrival: shops opened, housewives wearing slippers marketing, carrying shopping baskets for bread and milk, carts full of vegetables, noise, bustling, cheerful, sunny. We fell in love with it that instant … even though I was not too sure whether I had made the right decision coming to Paris with George. Not because it was “improper,” for we in our generation tried to kick over the conventional ideas. I was quite radically minded, quite believing in woman’s equal rights, fiercely believing in independence of spirit … and also slightly cynical about the world.… But George and Paris humanized me. I suddenly knew that just simply living can be fun.

  Their first task was locating a place to live. Instead of consulting a realtor, they found Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookstore at 12, rue de l’Odéon on the Left Bank near the Luxembourg Gardens. “I still don’t remember how we ever did get to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop in the first place,” Boski reminisced, “except that somehow within a week or two almost anyone interested or active in the arts did get to Shakespeare & Co.”

  Sylvia Beach, the daughter of the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, had opened her bookstore in Paris at a different location in 1919 after serving with the Red Cross in Serbia during the Great War. She moved to the larger rue de l’Odéon location in 1921. An English and American expatriate community formed in Paris in the 1920s in response to a highly favorable exchange rate and a conviction like Antheil’s among artists and writers that their work would find more support abroad than at home. Perhaps because Beach maintained a rental library of books as well as sold them, perhaps because of her sympathy for struggling artists and writers—“she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip,” Ernest Hemingway remembered of her—her bookstore became the expatriate community’s lively center.

  Besides Shakespeare and Company, Beach’s greatest contribution to the literary life of the day was undertaking to publish James Joyce’s controversial masterpiece Ulysses. She did so after the work had lost its American publisher. B. W. Huebsch, she wrote to a friend in 1921, “threw up the job in a fright” when an issue of the Greenwich Village journal the Little Review featuring a section of the book was declared obscene. Beach stepped in to save it, borrowing money from her family to publish it by subscription in Paris in regular and deluxe editions.

  She had less luck locating a place for the Joyce family to live near Shakespeare and Company. “I tried my best to find an apartment for the Joyces,” she told their mutual friend Harriet Weaver, “but as they required six rooms at least and as Mr. Joyce insisted on being in the Odéon quarter or very near it, there was nothing that could be done. There is never an apartment to be had in this quarter and excepting some impossible streets far from the center there is nothing on the entire Left Bank.”

  That hardly boded well for the newly arrived young lovers. “Sylvia and George immediately took a shine to each other,” however, Boski recalled, “not only because George was American, not only because Sylvia was interested in every kind of artistic endeavor … but also because George was a Trentonian (even though a refugee of, as Sylvia was a refugee of Princeton) and their vocabulary, their physical landscape of youth was the same.” Beach may have had an ulterior motive as well for helping Antheil; according to Bravig Imbs, another American expatriate who became a friend of the Antheils, the bookseller “was on the look-out for a talented composer, of course, having vague musical plans for James Joyce, and she intuitively recognized George’s sincerity and force.” If there was no apartment nearby for a family that required six rooms, there was an enclosed mezzanine directly above Beach’s bookstore—she had been using it as a storeroom—that might suit a young couple traveling light. Boski remembered that it “consisted of one room with a so-called cabinet de toilette with a washbasin and shelves for dishes and a gas ring. It was a heavenly place as far as we were concerned.” In those days, she said, “one went to the public baths, being careful to take along a bottle of Lysol, one’s own towels and a warm overcoat to wear when one got out of the hot bath.”

  The Antheils, as they came to be, lived above Shakespeare and Company for more than ten years, expanding into two adjacent rooms when the American students to whom Beach rented them finished their studies and moved on. “George was a voracious reader,” Boski said, “he was a voracious worker too, and apart from our friendship with Sylvia, it was wonderful to be able to go downstairs and borrow any amount of books and exchange them at a moment’s notice. It helped me to learn English also.” George pointed her to detective stories, on the theory that searching out the clues hidden in the story would encourage her to use the dictionary to look up any unfamiliar words. “I was very shy about my not knowing English and I was the most taciturn little thing for over a year until I finally ventured to say a few words in English. I am sure a lot of George’s friends (who did not speak French which I spoke well) were surprised that the little Hungarian savage could talk.”

  After attending the Les noces premiere on the night they arrived in Paris, 13 June 1923, George and Boski had gone backstage to congratulate Stravinsky on his new ballet. The Russian composer had invited them to visit him the next day at Pleyel’s, which Antheil calls “the great piano warehouse rooms where Chopin had often practiced.” Pleyel was an old-line piano manufacturer, the French counterpart to Steinway or Bösendorfer. Besides making concert pianos, Pleyel manufactured player pianos—the firm, punning on its name, called its model a Pleyela.

  Player pianos, the entertainment centers of their day, brought music into homes in the half century before radio replaced them with a full menu of mus
ic and voice transmissions. The great advantage of the player piano was that it did not require piano lessons or years of practice to play, merely legs strong enough to pump the bellows that supplied the vacuum to actuate the works. The first player pianos had been cabinet players—Americans called them push-ups—large wooden cabinets that hunched over the keyboards of standard pianos and actually pressed the piano keys with felt-covered mechanical wooden fingers. Gradually, piano owners parted with their standard pianos and push-ups and replaced them with player pianos, which had internal mechanical workings, could be played mechanically or by hand, and took up much less space. By 1919, player pianos had become so popular in Europe and America that their production outnumbered the production of standard pianos.

  Music to be performed on a player piano was recorded on a roll of tough paper. Technicians cut holes and slots into the paper roll by hand, following the notations on the sheet music. In operation, the roll was loaded onto spools in the player piano much as recording tape is wound reel to reel. Pumping the pedals then scrolled the punched paper over a row of vacuum ducts—small holes, one for each piano key, in a brass bar called a tracker bar that looked much like an extremely long harmonica. The spooling paper covered the tracker ducts, holding the mechanism behind them at rest, until a hole or slot in the paper allowed air to be sucked into the duct. A rubber tube connected the tracker duct to one of a series of valve chests. The air flowing from the tube into the valve chest activated a sequence of valves and bladders that drove up a pushrod that in turn actuated the piano key.

  The piano rolls cut by hand following sheet music notations reproduced music purely mechanically; they did not program changes in tempo or dynamics. Player-piano operators had to adjust these qualities in real time, pumping more or less vigorously and manipulating a tempo lever. Some piano rolls featured a printed expression line that wavered up or down as the roll turned to direct the player’s adjustments. These adaptations distracted from listening and still failed to reproduce an authentic professional performance. To improve the quality of recordings, manufacturers developed reproducing pianos with electric motors to drive the pneumatics, up to sixteen dynamic levels between soft and loud, and multitrack piano rolls that could register and generate the variations. It then became possible for a pianist or composer to record a musical work with some confidence that its player-piano reproduction would approximate his performance.

  Pleyel had contacted Stravinsky in 1921 to propose that he transcribe his works for the Pleyela reproducing piano. The company offered him the use of a suite of rooms in its building in Paris and technical support. He quickly decided to accept the offer, he wrote, for two reasons:

  In order to prevent the distortion of my compositions by future interpreters, I had always been anxious to find a means of imposing some restriction on the notorious liberty … which prevents the public from obtaining a correct idea of the author’s intentions. This possibility was now afforded by the rolls of the mechanical piano.…

  There was a second direction in which this work gave me satisfaction. This was not simply the reduction of an orchestral work to the limitations of a piano of seven octaves. It was the process of adaptation to an instrument which had, on the one hand, unlimited possibilities of precision, velocity, and polyphony, but which, on the other hand, constantly presented serious difficulties in establishing dynamic relationships. These tasks developed and exercised my imagination.

  After the Les noces premiere, Antheil recalled, “the next day we went to see him at Pleyel’s … and Stravinsky himself played Les noces, this time on an electric pianola. I liked the second version even better than the one which we had heard last night; it was more precise, colder, harder, more typical of that which I myself wanted out of music during this period of my life.” He told Stravinsky it was wonderful. Boski concurred.

  A day or two later, abruptly, Stravinsky dropped him, refused his calls, made no answer to an inquiring letter. Antheil learned from a mutual friend that the composer had taken umbrage over reports that Antheil had claimed they were close friends, that Stravinsky admired his music, and that the two had spent all their time together in Berlin. “Months later I encountered him at a concert,” Antheil writes ruefully, “but his steely monocle bored straight through me.” The two friends did not reconnect for more than a decade.

  The incident depressed Antheil “tremendously,” he recalled. “It haunted my dreams for many years.” No doubt it did, but Boski believed it also released him from his hero worship of the older man. “I’m happy about it!” she told him. “You liked Stravinsky’s music too much.” Stravinsky’s abrupt rejection motivated Antheil to compete with his former hero—“for where,” he writes, “is the younger man who does not revolt against his elders?” And, a little later, speaking as if for his whole generation: “We are done with [Erik] Satie, Les Six, Stravinsky, and the Dadaists. Even though we recognize the value of the innovations brought about by these men in our imbecilic age, we want nothing to do with them.”

  As one mentor pulled away, another almost immediately stepped forward. The American poet Ezra Pound, introduced to Antheil by a mutual friend, “turned up … in a green coat with blue square buttons; and his red pointed goatee and kinky red hair above flew off his face in all directions. Boski looked at him, not a little astonished.” Antheil played several hours’ worth of his compositions for the Pennsylvania expatriate and shared his theories of the future of music, after which Pound decided to write a short, flamboyant book about the man, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.

  While working on his book, Pound moved to promote his latest protégée, who happened also to be his mistress, the American violinist Olga Rudge. “A dark, pretty, Irish-looking girl,” Antheil recalled her, twenty-eight years old in 1923, “and, as I discovered when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata together, a consummate violinist.” Pound wanted to arrange a concert for Rudge and Antheil. “At this concert, he explained, he would take care to see that all of important Paris was present, the really important Paris that mattered.” To that end, he wanted his friend to compose for Rudge not one but two violin sonatas.

  Antheil’s solution to the problem of composing two violin sonatas in a matter of months—it was the end of July, and the concert would be scheduled for November—was to swoop Boski up and take her off to Tunis, on the north coast of Africa opposite Sicily. They both liked the fierce heat of North African summer. They remained in Tunis for a month, listening to Arabic music that Antheil copied down with his phonographic ear while writing not a note of his own.

  Because he was vacationing in Tunis that August, Antheil was not in Paris when two sometime American filmmakers, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, began shooting clips for an art film. Murphy had seen Man Ray’s work at a Dada theater gathering, Le coeur à barbe (The Bearded Heart), on 6 July 1923. (Antheil may have attended as well; he left for Tunis later in July.) The event included premieres of compositions by Stravinsky, Satie, and Darius Milhaud; poems; a Tristan Tzara play (named for another heart, this one gas: Le coeur à gaz); and several short films, including Man Ray’s first, Le retour à la raison (The Return to Reason), a three-minute silent, semiabstract short. “All the celebrities of Paris,” the Little Review’s publisher, Jane Heap, writes, “painters, sculptors, musicians, poets; foreigners of every title, and rich excitement-hunting Americans turned out for this ultra-modern show.” Fights broke out. “Canes clashed, mirrors and footlights smashed, the audience stamped and laughed and shouted.”

  Some time after the Dada gathering, Dudley Murphy paid Man Ray a visit. “One day a tall young man appeared with his beautiful blond wife,” Man Ray recalled. “Dudley Murphy said some very flattering things about my work and suggested we do a film together.” Murphy was the son of a prominent Boston School painter, Hermann Dudley Murphy, who taught drawing at Harvard. Young Murphy’s parents had divorced when he was a teenager, and he had moved with his mother to Pasadena. He had grown up with the movie business at a time whe
n Hollywood was still tolerant of experimental film work. He arrived in Paris in 1923 an accomplished director with one feature and numerous short art films to his credit.

  Who precisely was responsible for the now-classic art film Ballet mécanique has been a subject of debate for more than eighty years. Murphy and Man Ray evidently contributed more mise-en-scène and footage than the French artist Fernand Léger, to whom the film is usually credited. What no one disputes is that Antheil signed on later in 1923 to write the film score and produced a score that was twice as long as the film and never cut or synced to fit. Boski’s recollection of the informality of the film’s production is probably as accurate as any. “Even though the idea of the film and music called Ballet mécanique was to be a joint conception of Léger, Dudley Murphy and George,” she writes, “it seems to me everyone, in their individual manner, went their own way. George got so enthused about composing the music that any synchronization between objects of the film and tone clusters and tempo of music must be considered purely coincidental. But this was nothing that bothered us in those days, things didn’t have to ‘fit’ as they do in commercial pictures, as long as essentially they had an esthetic connection.”

  Before Antheil could begin work on the film music, he wrote Rudge’s two sonatas and practiced them extensively with her. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap’s partner and the editor of the Little Review, invited him to perform on the opening program of the Ballets Suédois—the Swedish Ballet company—on 4 October 1923. Antheil knew the occasion was second in importance only to the Ballets Russes as an annual Parisian cultural event. He signed on to play several of his recent compositions: the Sonata Sauvage, his Airplane Sonata, a two-minute, four-movement sonatina called Death of Machines, and his Mechanisms, composed for the player piano. (“George was writing his Mechanisms for a hard new age,” Boski recalled of its composition the previous year, “and I still remember his talking about the future when one central recording station would be blasting talks [and] music over a whole city.”)