Hedy's Folly (4 page)

My husband bought a town house that was like a palace. Every piece in it was antique and priceless. We had also three hunting lodges. We had cars and planes and a yacht. We had many, many servants. I had furs
and jewels and gowns beyond any girl’s wildest dreams of luxury.…

[But] in my houses I had nothing to say. Not about anything.… He ordered the house and everything in it.… He was the absolute monarch in his own world. He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.… I was like a guest living in my own house. I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.

As Frau Hedwig Kiesler Mandl turned nineteen that November 1933, she found herself locked into what she would call a “
prison of gold.” Marriage to Fritz Mandl had seemed to be another kind of stardom, a stardom of the real world, radiant with power, but in its pursuit she had entered unsuspectingly into a golden prison. The question now was, how could she bear to live there? And if she couldn’t, how on earth could she get out?

[
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.”

To his credit, Antheil shared his income from performing with fellow artists. “
George was a tremendously generous person and somewhat childlike,” his future wife would say of him, “and he helped a lot of artists at this time by buying paintings, inviting them to dinner, even supporting a few. It was all rather odd because he himself had no money, except what he made off the concerts, but there was some arrangement with his manager that he was paid in dollars, and dollars were at an incredible rate of exchange in the midst of the worst inflation.”

Igor Stravinsky, one of Antheil’s idols, turned up in Berlin
that summer. He had been negotiating since the end of the Russian Revolution to reunite with his mother, still living in what was now the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities had finally agreed to allow her to emigrate, and she was due to arrive on a Soviet ship at Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), then a German port on the Baltic Sea, ninety miles northeast of Berlin. The Russian composer, who knew he had to meet his mother on the dock and personally shepherd her through German immigration or risk her deportation back to the U.S.S.R., had expected to wait in Berlin for no more than a week. Repeated delays in the ship’s departure kept him waiting there for two months. When Antheil presented himself one morning at the Russischer Hof as an American composer and an admirer, Stravinsky welcomed him. They had breakfast together; Antheil showed Stravinsky the most Stravinsky-like of his compositions; Stravinsky asked him to lunch the next day.
“Thereafter,” Antheil perhaps exaggerates, “for two straight months, he and I had lunch together (and also, more often than not, breakfast, dinner, and supper), talking about everything in the contemporary world of music.” In particular they talked “
about mechanistic and percussive music,” which was the kind Antheil was beginning to compose. When Stravinsky’s mother finally arrived and the composer prepared to return with her to Paris, he offered to arrange a piano concert there for Antheil. “
You play my music exactly as I wish it to be played,” Antheil recalled him saying. “Really, I wish you would decide to come to Paris.”

And so Antheil would, but not just yet. Settled that late autumn in a furnished apartment in the Berlin suburbs, waiting out the weeks until his midwinter concert tour would begin, he bought himself “
an enormous fur coat made of Siberian cat,” learned that the German fighter ace Rudolf Schultz-Dornburg, now the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, wanted to perform his First Symphony, and fell in love with the young Hungarian woman who would share his life, “a certain girl called Boski.”

Boski (pronounced
BESH-key
) Markus was named after Elizabeth of Austria—Sissy, the same whom Hedy would play in Vienna in 1933. “
I happened to be born in a little summer resort outside of Budapest,” she recalled, “which was the summer residence of the Empress Elizabeth of Hungary-Austria … so my parents very imaginatively named me Elizabeth, which in Hungarian is
Erzsebet
or abbreviated: Boski.” Antheil first saw her in a café near his apartment; she was simply dressed, “
dark, had high cheekbones, but otherwise was delicately, rather sensitively beautiful.” He asked around about her. A mutual acquaintance waved him off—she was “
related to various well-to-do Viennese and Budapest families,” the woman told him, but had “turned radical and run away from her family.” She had been involved with the Communist revolution in Hungary after the war “and barely escaped Budapest with her life after its downfall.” She was “only eighteen or nineteen, wild, untamable,” a student at the University of Berlin. “She will
hate you for an American capitalist,” the woman concluded. A man who liked a challenge, Antheil was sold.

He invited Boski to the premiere of his First Symphony, assuming she’d be impressed, but she didn’t like his music and left early. Undaunted, he arranged with their mutual friend to meet the two women for dinner two days before Christmas. He was due to leave on the midnight train to Paris, where Stravinsky had made good on his promise to set him up with a concert during Christmas week. When the mutual friend stepped out to make a phone call, Antheil sprang his plan on Boski: Christmas together in Paris. Nothing improper, he promised, just good fun. She confounded him by accepting the date but rejecting the location: the French were still denying visas to the citizens of their former Great War enemies, of which Hungary was one. Antheil was stuck. Either he played truant from performing for Stravinsky, or he revealed to Boski that their trip to Paris was an addendum to a concert commitment. “I was thunderstruck,” he writes. “Boski Markus had said ‘All right.’ That was the main thing. Let Stravinsky wait.”

Stravinsky did not take kindly to waiting. He substituted a French pianist,
Jean Wiener, whom he praises in his autobiography without mentioning Antheil. But George and Boski began a lifelong relationship across a Christmas spent on the farm of an aunt of his in Poland.

It took the rest of the winter to work past Boski’s resistance. “
She represented much of that war-torn, disillusioned
Europe of 1923,” Antheil writes; “I, a young, hopeful, but utterly naïve America of the same period.” Boski recalled that “
everybody was terribly poor at this time in Germany, and very, very bitter.” The losses of the war, the punitive reparations that the victors had demanded, the worsening hyperinflation, all contributed to the German mood, which was turning violent. The Weimar Republic’s foreign minister Walther Rathenau, though a nationalist himself, had been assassinated by two ultranationalist army officers the previous June. The small but burgeoning Nazi Party was mobilizing ever-larger rallies. Boski’s conflict between head and heart was so severe that she deliberately overdosed on morphine in the early spring. Antheil, guilt stricken, took the near suicide for a sign he should quit concertizing and begin full-time composing. When Boski was back on her feet, he pledged himself to her and proposed they move to Paris and live together.