Hedy's Folly Read online

  In his memoirs Antheil would present the riot that broke out during his Ballets Suédois concert as spontaneous, but in fact it had been set up by another Parisian filmmaker, Marcel L’Herbier, to create a scene for a film he was making, L’inhumaine, which showcased the French opera singer Georgette Leblanc. Sylvia Beach’s partner, Adrienne Monnier, confirms that Antheil had not been informed in advance that he was intended to bait a riot: “Georgette Leblanc, back from America, knew through her friend Margaret Anderson that Antheil’s music always caused a scandal; and if it caused a scandal in New York, what was it going to be like in Paris! … Antheil had believed that they had seriously asked him to play his most ‘advanced’ music; when he saw the trick, he was not angry, he had a lot of fun.” L’Herbier had sent out several thousand concert invitations to notable Parisians. As a result, Antheil writes, “the theater, the famous Champs Elysees Theater, was crowded with the most famous personages of the day, among others Picasso, Stravinsky, [the French composer Georges] Auric, Milhaud, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Man Ray, Diaghileff, Miró, Arthur Rubenstein, Ford Madox Ford, and unnumbered others. They had not come to hear me, but to see the opening of the ballets.”

  They heard very little. “The uproar was such,” Boski said, “that after [George] started to play one of his ‘mechanisms’ nobody could really hear very much.… The riot was tremendous. Not being George’s wife officially, I was seated way up in the balcony and was really scared, when people started to throw things and screaming and yelling, that they might hurt George. But he was used to this and kept on playing as cool as can be. He seemed too slight and almost childlike, calmly playing the piano, not paying the slightest attention to all the commotion.” Antheil registered the fighting around him but managed to hear what he hoped to hear as well:

  I now plunged into my “Mechanisms.” Then bedlam really did break loose. People now punched one another freely. Nobody remained in his seat. One wave of persons seemed about to break over the other wave. That’s the way a riot commences, one wave over the other. People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandemonium!

  I suddenly heard Satie’s shrill voice saying, “Quelle precision! Quelle precision! [What precision!] Bravo! Bravo!” And he kept clapping his little gloved hands. Milhaud now was clapping, definitely clapping.

  By this time some people in the galleries were pulling up the seats and dropping them down into the orchestra; the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested.

  I finished the “Mechanisms” as calm as a cucumber.

  Paris hadn’t had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.” As Jack Benny would have said: “Boy, they loved me in Paris!”

  A contemporary reviewer reveals that Antheil’s version of the riot leaves out a restaging that was called for L’Herbier’s film:

  After the finish of the first movement of the “sonata” the Champs-Elysees was the scene of the greatest musical riot since the performance of the “Sacre du Printemps” eleven years ago. After the first movement no one heard a note, except in the infrequent lulls: The audience shouted itself quite hoarse with both indignation with the composer and indignation with the others in the audience who prevented them from hearing.…

  [Then] the master of ceremonies came out to announce that motion pictures would now be taken of the audience, and would they be so kind as to reproduce the riot which had just taken place when Monsieur Antheil had played. The audience, in a fighting spirit, was so kind, with the result that many famous faces were immortalized behind clapping and enthusiastic hands—those whose approval it is hardest to earn.

  The scene of staged riot duly appeared the following year in L’Herbier’s film. Antheil accomplished his purpose as well. “Satie came out in my favor, and, as he and Cocteau were then the artistic arbitrators of Paris, I was famous overnight.”

  There remained his concert with Olga Rudge, which was held at the Salle du Conservatoire in Paris’s 9th arrondissement on 11 December 1923. This event was probably the occasion that Aaron Copland recalled “where Antheil played, and Ezra Pound, with his striking red beard much in evidence, passionately turned pages.”

  And then, finally, Antheil was free to spend the rest of the winter and spring composing the music for Ballet mécanique, except that by then it had enlarged in his mind beyond a film score into a showpiece. “My first big work,” he wrote to a childhood friend. “Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. NO LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates. Revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary.”

  [THREE]

  Mechanisms

  The film Ballet mécanique premiered in Vienna on 24 September 1924, without George Antheil’s music. As late as March 1926, when the film was screened at the London Film Society, a note in the program apologized for the missing soundtrack: “Mr. George Antheil was engaged in the composition of music for this picture but, according to Mr. Léger, his music is not likely to be suitably ready for some time and a jazz accompaniment suggested by Mr. Léger will accordingly be played instead.” The music was written by then—Antheil recalled composing the greater part of it “during the winter of 1923–24”—but it had grown from a film score into a major composition. “The work had really sprung from previous inspiration,” Antheil explained, “derived from its three predecessors: the ‘Sonata Sauvage,’ the ‘Airplane Sonata,’ and the ‘Mechanisms’—to say nothing of my microscopic sonatina, ‘Death of Machines.’ But it was a work of greater length and orchestration; it also said more exactly what I wanted to say in this medium.”

  Nor was Antheil himself present for the film’s 1924 Viennese premiere; had he been, he would have advanced one move closer to Hedy Kiesler, because the organizer of the premiere at the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques of the City of Vienna Music and Theater Festival was an architect and set designer named Frederick Kiesler, who happened to be a relative. Hedy herself was not quite ten years old in September 1924, probably too young to have seen the film. Léger lectured on it and presented it.

  George and Boski did meet Frederick Kiesler a year later in Paris at the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts. Boski remarked on their affinities:

  Kiesler liked it so well in Paris that he decided to stay there after the Exposition and we became very good friends. He had a most original way of communicating in French, as at the time he did not speak it. When we went to restaurants, he just drew pictures of things he wanted to eat and was never disappointed. He loved the Ballet mécanique, which represented the same ideology as his architecture, and we saw a lot of each other. He had a very nice Austrian wife. Kiesler was very short and hence somewhat Napoleonic in his bearing. But he knew the humor of it and was delighted when we photographed him in a typical Napoleonic pose.

  Kiesler stood only four feet eleven inches tall, which would have recommended him to George and Boski but must have contrasted conspicuously with Hedy’s tall father, Emil.

  George and Boski took time out in 1925 to marry, in Budapest on 4 November. Boski had been away from Hungary long enough to notice how her native language colored even American song lyrics. “One night we went to a gypsy restaurant,” she recalled, “where they played a lot of Magyar songs, but eventually they got around to playing their versions of popular American hits, one of them being ‘Tea for Two,’ but you would never know it. It sounded exactly like a Hungarian folk song from the ‘pusta’ with cimbalom accompaniment.”

  Another of the Antheils’ acquaintances in Paris whom they would encounter again significantly in the United States was William C. Bullitt, the journalist and diplomat, thirty-four years old in 1925. In 1933, Bullitt would become the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, traveling there with a young interpreter and diplomatic secretary named George Kennan. “Bullitt is a striking man,” Kennan would recall: “young, handsome, urbane, full
of charm and enthusiasm, a product of Philadelphia society and Yale but with considerable European residence, and with a flamboyance of personality that is right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Antheil’s young American acquaintance Bravig Imbs took a less diplomatic view of the man when he encountered him in 1926; he described Bullitt as “a hearty, charming and slightly silly gentleman who lived in a magnificent house near the Madeleine.”) The Philadelphian was moderately wealthy, with an inheritance from his mother that would be the equivalent of about $750,000 today. He had served as an assistant to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference following the Great War. With the American journalist Lincoln Steffens he had traveled on a secret mission to Russia during the conference and returned with an offer from Lenin of a peace treaty, an offer that Wilson had rejected. In his bitterness over the failure of his mission and the punitive harshness of the Versailles Treaty that followed, he had quit politics in disgust.

  By 1925, settled in Paris and finishing a satiric novel about Philadelphia society, Bullitt had transformed his life from that of a diplomat into that of a writer and wealthy expatriate. His second wife, whom he had married in 1923, was the former Louise Bryant, the widow of John Reed. Both Bryant and Reed had experienced and written books about the Russian Revolution, Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World the better known of the two. Reed had died of typhus in 1920. He was the only American buried beneath the Kremlin Wall, the necropolis of Soviet national honor.

  Boski remarks on the tension between the Bullitts in her unpublished memoir:

  And of course there was Bill Bullitt and his beautiful wife Louise, who could never get over her guilt feeling of having married a millionaire (no matter how much she loved him) after having been married to John Reed. Who died in Russia and was buried before Louise got there by special Russian dispensation, as in those days there was no such traveling there and it was very much a closed country. The only American hero of the revolution was John Reed, who shared the highest respect with the top Russian revolutionaries. Bullitt was special envoy to Russia at the time, and met Louise there, fell in love with her and eventually married her. [When we knew him in Paris] he was in a period of deep disillusionment about politics and said at the time that he never wants to have anything to do with it. Instead they both turned to the art world of Paris and had some fabulous, but rather off-beat, parties at their elegant mansion. Louise was a beautiful woman, but you felt that she was a tragic woman, ambivalent about herself.

  Bullitt was politically liberal but culturally conservative, not someone likely to have felt an affinity with Antheil’s music. During Louise’s pregnancy, Steffens had read aloud to her in Bullitt’s absence one evening from Joyce’s Ulysses; when Bullitt arrived home and took in the situation, Steffens’s wife recalled, “He was furious. He bellowed at Steff: ‘Think of our baby, our child! What will it turn out to be if it hears language like that?’ ” Bullitt may have been sensitized to the imagined dangers of uterine imprinting by his ongoing psychoanalysis with another Vienna denizen, Sigmund Freud; several years later he and Freud would collaborate on a joint psychoanalytic study of Woodrow Wilson, although Freud had never met the president and Bullitt was not a psychoanalyst.

  Despite these strains, or perhaps because of them, the Bullitts gave great parties, Boski recalled:

  Bill and Louise … had a very interesting conglomeration of people at their parties, down-and-out artists, French aristocracy, successful artists, American upper four hundred, etc. Louise had the most fabulous gowns from the great designers and she held these magnificent dresses in such low esteem that often, I remember, if her dress had a long train, we would use it to jump rope.… It’s hard to explain how elegant these parties were, with butlers galore, absolutely phenomenal food, Louise in her Vionnet dress, Bill in tuxedo, most women in long dresses or else very artistic confections of artists’ wives who had little money but a lot of imagination.

  “We had a lovely and lively time that summer,” Boski writes elsewhere. “All summer was a marvelous fair. George was getting the Ballet mécanique ready and the rouleaux were being cut at Pleyel and we used to go there with friends who wanted to hear it ‘in progress.’ ” The rouleaux were the paper player-piano rolls. “[Ballet mécanique] was very hard to play, because there were so many notes that one had to pump the pedal very hard in order to get all the notes to sound. It was written directly to be cut into the pianola roll.”

  Writing in a prophetic mood in one of the manifestos George published during this period in avant-garde periodicals like the Dutch art journal De Stijl—as time went on, he would prove to be gifted at prophecy—he encapsulated the giddy, febrile Paris mood in a phrase. “One day in the future,” he wrote, “we will make God in the heavens with electric lights.”

  Boski remembered fondly the Vienna of the late 1920s, where Hedy was dropping out of school and preparing to storm the film studio barricades and where they crossed paths again without meeting:

  We went to Vienna for George to finish [an] opera there. We had quite a wonderful time in Vienna which I don’t believe was ever as charming as in the late twenties. Finances were better, people were happily indolent, enjoying themselves. We had an apartment in the Prater Strasse, not a fashionable district, but very comfortable and near the Prater [city park]. We more or less introduced our Austrian friends to a game called poker, which they took up with great enthusiasm.… They finally got so good that we had to watch our step. They were composers, writers, executives of Universal Verlag, then the most influential publishing house in Europe. Everybody was very young, mostly under thirty and full of enthusiasm.

  … We went to the opera or concerts practically every night.

  But darkness was drifting across Germany and beginning to spill into Austria, and Fritz Mandl rode the black wave. “Fritz was immersed in the family arms business,” Time would report of Hedy’s husband-to-be. “His firm had a sharp reputation for circumventing the restrictions of the Allied Control Commissions. His own politics were opportunistic.… He backed Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg and his fascist Home Guard [and] bet on [the Austrofascist federal chancellor Engelbert] Dollfuss and [the Italian dictator Benito] Mussolini to stave off Hitler.” The politics of postwar Austria, a historian writes, “are unintelligible except to a virtuoso,” but it’s clear at least that Mandl’s politics lined his pockets; Hirtenberger arms would rearm Austria and Germany and fuel the Italian slaughter of Ethiopians in that 1935–36 colonialist excursion.

  The high point of George Antheil’s musical career, much to his enduring chagrin, was the grand public premiere of his Ballet mécanique—the freestanding composition, not the film theme music—in Paris in the twenty-five-hundred-seat Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 19 June 1926. With his patron’s substantial support Antheil hired the French conductor Vladimir Golschmann, who conducted for the Ballets Russes, eighty-five musicians, and Paris’s largest concert hall. “The only serious problem,” writes one of Antheil’s biographers, “was a score that called for sixteen mechanical pianos, all to be operated by cables attached to a master keyboard. It is doubtful if that many [player] pianos existed in all of France, and even if they did, bringing them together on one stage would have been a daunting task. [As an alternative] Antheil assembled eight grand pianos, engaged eight players, and wired up an amplifier to the master piano he would operate. As for the nonmusical instruments the score required, local hardware stores supplied saws, hammers, and electric bells; and from a flea market came two airplane propellers that would help bring the Ballet to a noisy and windy climax.”

  Some have questioned if Antheil actually intended his composition to include sixteen synchronized player pianos or was only exaggerating for effect. A letter to Mrs. Bok, his patron, accompanying a copy of the Pianola score, which he sent her in December 1925, settles the question in favor of the full complement of pianos. “This is the first edition of the Ballet mécanique,” Antheil wrote, “and is limited to 20 copies. It is the 16
-pianola part alone, none of the xylophones, drums, and other percussion being written into or cut into this part. These are the master rolls which run the 16 pianolas electrically from a common control (switching on 16 or 1, as might be necessary to the sonority) together with which the other percussion is synchronized.”

  Synchronizing the player pianos electrically might have solved the problem, but no such control system existed at the time. The “cables” of Antheil’s biographer isn’t right either. A nonelectrical system would have required elaborate pneumatics worthy of a mighty pipe organ, which was not something that could be assembled at relatively short notice for a concert. Antheil explained many years afterward that the essential problem was getting enough fortissimo out of the piano part. “The idea of [sixteen] pianos,” he wrote in 1951, “had been to swell or amplify the original [part] when ‘fff’ was desirable; today the same effect may be had through four pianos and one microphone.” He solved the problem in 1926 by using eight grand pianos played by eight pianists who could be directed to play in synchrony; the synchronization mechanism was thus the human brain.

  The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées concert, on a sweltering June evening, was one of the touchstone events of the 1920s in Paris. Ezra Pound had marshaled all his forces. Among those who filled the large hall were James and Nora Joyce and their two children; tall, top-hatted T. S. Eliot with the Princess di Bassiano; the wealthy salonist Natalie Barney with her temple of friendships; Diaghilev; Constantin Brancusi; the Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky; Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine; the writers William L. Shirer and Stuart Gilbert; Antheil’s unbathed and somewhat unhinged Philadelphia friend Lincoln Gillespie; the French poet Pierre Minet; the Antheils’ concierge, Madame Tisserand, looking like a duchess in a black dress with a face powdered white with bread flour and seated next to a real one, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre; Man Ray and his mistress, Alice Prin, better known as Kiki of Montparnasse, the woman whose iconic face centered Léger’s film; and many, many more. Of several eyewitness accounts of the Ballet mécanique portion of the concert, that of Antheil’s droll protégé Bravig Imbs is unsurpassed: