Hedy Lamarr’s World War II Adventure

By JOHN ADAMS
NYT

(TM note: anything by Richard Rhodes is a good read.)

HEDY’S FOLLY: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World
By Richard Rhodes
Illustrated. 261 pp. Doubleday. $26.95.

On a sweltering Paris evening in June 1926, a 25-year-old pianist and composer from Trenton stepped out onto the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which was crowded with an array of pianos, bass drums, xylophones, electric bells and electric fans (later to be substituted by enormous airplane propellers), as well as a hand-cranked siren. He nodded to the conductor, and the stuffy air in the hall suddenly began pulsing and throbbing, banging and wailing with a loud and persistent mechanical cacophony. Within a few minutes, according to one eyewitness, the

concert had degenerated into a shouting match: “Above the mighty noise of the pianos and drums arose catcalls and booing, shrieking and whistling, shouts of ‘thief’ mixed with ‘bravo.’ ” The audience, which included Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Diaghilev, was in an uproar.

The young composer from Trenton was George Antheil. At 5-foot-4, with a round, cherubic face and straight blond hair perfectly parted like a choirboy’s, he resembled anything but the piece of aggressive musical brutalism that was inciting the crowd. It was originally called “Message to Mars,” and was intended to be music for a Dadaist film. The title had been changed to “Ballet Mécanique,” perhaps better to amplify the work’s emphatic embrace of Machine Age aesthetics, a kind of futuristic robo-art that Fritz Lang would evoke the following year in his film “Metropolis.”

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