Hedy's Folly (7 page)

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Boski remarks on the tension between the Bullitts in her unpublished memoir: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

There was a great deal of fuss while the orchestra arranged itself for this event. George appeared on the stage, pale and nervous, giving crisp directions to the movers who were pushing five pianos into place, and to the electricians who were arranging a loud-speaker to amplify the small electric fans that took the place of the airplane propellers. All these operations variously provoked fear, pity and amusement in the audience. Finally, George nodded his head, as a cue to Golschmann that everything was ready, and sat down at his piano with a grim expression on his face.

Within a few minutes, the concert became sheer bedlam. Above the mighty noise of the pianos and drums arose cat-calls and booing, shrieking and whistling, shouts of “thief” mixed with “bravo.” People began to call each other names and to forget that there was any music going on at all. I suffered with George, wishing
that people would have at least the courtesy to stay quiet, but Golschmann was so furious he would not give up his baton, and continued to conduct imperturbably as though he were the dead centre of a whirlpool.

I caught the general fever of unrest myself.

“Do keep quiet, please,” I said to some of my particularly noisy neighbors.

“Shut your face, yourself,” they answered, and then started whistling, which is the supreme form of contempt in France.

Then, for an instant, there was a curious lull in the clamor and Ezra Pound took advantage of it to jump to his feet and yell, “
Vous etes tous des imbéciles!
”

He was shouted down from the gallery, of course, with many vulgar epithets, and the music continued monotonously and determinedly.

The
Ballet
began to seem to me like some monstrous abstract beast, battling with the nerves of the audience, and I began to wonder which would win out.…

The opposition reached its climax, though, when the loud-speaker began to function. It made as much noise as a dozen airplanes, and no amount of shouting could drown it completely. One fat bald old gentleman who had been particularly disagreeable would not be balked by this, however, and to the glee of the audience, lashed out his umbrella, opened it and pretended to be struggling against the imaginary gale of wind from the electric
fans. His gesture was immediately copied by many more people in the audience until the theatre seemed decked with quite a sprinkling of black mushrooms.

Of course, when the
Ballet
was over, George got an ovation which was greater than the cat-calls, for everyone was willing to applaud a man who had at least accomplished something. He bowed and blushed and blushed and bowed and all his friends were very proud of him.

In the “Manifest der Musico-Mechanico” he published in
De Stijl
in 1924 (but wrote in Berlin in 1922), Antheil had envisioned a future music enriched with new sonics through the use of mechanical reproduction, a prediction that his experiments with synchronized multiple instruments and player-piano technology would encourage and support:

We shall see orchestral machines with a thousand new sounds, with thousands of new euphonies, as opposed to the present day’s simple sounds of strings, brass, and woodwinds. It is only a short step until all [musical performance] can be perforated onto a roll of paper. Of course, we will find sentimental people who will object that there will then be no more of these wonderful imprecisions in performance. But, dear friends, these can be added to the paper roll! Do not object; you can have what you want.

At that time the paper roll and the player piano were the most reliable mechanisms for accomplishing his ends. But the player piano, which had accounted for more than half of all pianos manufactured in the United States in 1919, was already in steep decline as the new technology of radio emerged to replace it, providing a far larger range of musical performances from an instrument that required no training or effort to operate. Five thousand radios sold in 1920 became 2.5 million sold in 1924; 30 radio stations in the United States in 1922 had become 606 radio stations in the United States by 1929. In 1932, with the disaster of the Great Depression, Americans bought only
two thousand player pianos.