Chapter 1: THE WESTERN SCORE
GEORGE
October 25, 1940
The piano bench creaks when I sit down. It's been doing that since we moved into this apartment three years ago. Böske says I should fix it. I keep meaning to. The creak has become part of the routine now — I sit, it creaks, I open whatever manuscript I'm working on.
Tonight it's a Western. ‘Rio Grande Dawn.’ The title alone makes me tired.
The producer called it last week. He wants something that sounds like wide open spaces and men making hard choices. ‘Frontier spirit,’ he said. I've been giving him frontier spirit for six pages and it sounds like exactly what it is — a competent composer doing competent work for a film people will watch once and forget.
The manuscript sits on the piano. Six pages of orchestration. Strings doing what strings do. Brass punctuating at the right moments. A theme that sounds like every other Western theme written in the last five years because that's what the producer wants. Something familiar. Something safe.
I play through the second movement. It works. Everything is in the right place. The violin line climbs where it should climb. The horns come in on cue. It's perfectly adequate.
I hate it.
Not hate exactly. That's too strong. Hate requires caring. This is something worse than hate — it's indifference. I'm indifferent to my own work and that indifference sits in my chest like a weight I can't name.
Peter is asleep down the hall. I can hear Böske in the next room turning pages. She reads detective novels in German, those where someone dies on a train and an inspector solves everything by the last chapter. She's been reading the same one for three days. I asked her once why she likes them. She said they're soothing.
The Western needs something in the third movement. The hero has been avoiding the thing he knows he has to do. Now he does it. He rides toward the danger. The music needs to shift here — from avoidance to decision.
I know what note comes next. I've known for two days. The problem is it's a note I used before, in something else, something that mattered. Paris, 1926. I kept a revolver on top of the piano during performances because audiences threw things. Vegetables mostly. Once someone threw a shoe. The revolver was loaded. I never had to use it but people knew it was there.
That was a different life. That was when I was the Bad Boy of Music and people wrote articles about whether I was a genius or a charlatan. Now I write Westerns and people don't write articles.
I play the passage again. It's fine. It does what it needs to do. The producer will listen to it and nod and tell me it's exactly what he wanted. I'll get paid. The film will come out. Nobody will remember the music. This is what I do now.
I look at my watch. Seven-fifteen. The party starts at eight.
Henry has been dead four months and eleven days. Nobody at the party I'm about to attend knows this. Some of them know I had a brother — those who knew me in the twenties, who remember when I had stories instead of anecdotes. But Henry died in June, shot down over the Baltic in a passenger plane, and I haven't mentioned it to anyone in this city.
Mentioning it would require explaining it. Explaining it would require having words. I don't have words yet. I have a symphony I started in July. I haven't titled it.
The Western score can wait until tomorrow. I close the manuscript. Böske appears in the doorway within seconds.
"You're not wearing that," she says, looking at my shirt.
I'm wearing the shirt I put on this morning. Coffee stain near the collar. She's right.
"I'll change."
"You should leave by seven-thirty."
"I know."
I go to the bedroom. Find a clean shirt. White, pressed this morning by Böske or possibly by me, I can't remember which. I put it on. Check the mirror. I look like a man going to a party. This is the goal.
Janet Gaynor's house is in Beverly Hills. Cars line the circular driveway. A valet takes my keys. Inside, the party is already in motion.
I'm good at this. I've been good at rooms like this since Paris, since I learned that being the Bad Boy of Music is a performance you can put on and take off like a jacket. The trick is knowing which version of yourself each room requires.
Tonight's room requires the successful Hollywood composer. Charming, available, still slightly European but not so European that people get uncomfortable. I can do this in my sleep. Sometimes I think I am doing it in my sleep.
Ben Hecht is near the piano talking to a woman in green. I make my way over. Hecht writes films now. He used to write plays in Chicago.
"Antheil," he says when he sees me. "Tell Mrs. Patterson the censors are idiots."
"The censors are idiots," I say to Mrs. Patterson.
She laughs. Hecht launches into a story about a scene that got cut from his last picture. Something about adultery implied in a doorway. The censors made them rewrite it so the adultery happened offscreen. He's telling it like it's funny. Maybe it is funny. I laugh at the right moments.
Mrs. Patterson asks about my latest project. I tell her about Rio Grande Dawn. She says it sounds exciting. We both know it doesn't sound exciting.
Hecht starts another story. Something about Selznick. I'm listening to the words but not hearing them. My attention has gone somewhere else.
Across the room, near the bar, someone is saying the name Hedy Lamarr.
I turn.
She's standing there with a drink she isn't drinking. Dark hair pulled back. Dark dress, simple, expensive. The face that makes you understand why magazines put faces on their covers.
I've been told several times, by several people, that Hedy Lamarr is the most beautiful woman in the world. It might be true.
She's talking to a producer whose name I can never remember. Short man, loud laugh. She's nodding at whatever he's saying with the attention that looks real but probably isn't. I know that attention. I use it myself.
Hecht is still talking. I've lost the thread entirely.
"—and that's why I'm never working with Selznick again," he finishes.
"Absolutely," I say.
He grins. "You didn't hear a word of that."
"Not one."
"She's something, isn't she." He's following my gaze.
"Who?"
"Don't be dense. Every man in this room is looking at her. Half the women too."
"I was just —"
"Go talk to her. You're George Antheil. You kept a gun on your piano. You can talk to a movie star."
He's right. I can talk to a movie star. I've talked to dozens of movie stars. They're just people who happen to look better in photographs.
I excuse myself. Walk toward the bar.
I'm standing next to her before I have a plan for what to say.
She is taller than me. I hate that everyone is always taller than me.
She glances over. Up close the face is still the face but there's something running underneath it. Some quality of attention that suggests she's been doing her own investigation of this room and has filed everyone in it under categories I don't have access to.
"You're George Antheil," she says.
Not a question. I'm surprised she knows.
"I am," I say.
"You write about endocrinology." She's looking at me directly now. "I read your article in Esquire. About glandular types."
This is not what I expected. "You read that?"
"I did. I have a question." She pauses. "Can it make breasts bigger?"
I blink. "What?"
"The glandular manipulation you described. Can it affect breast size?"
There's no flirtation in how she asks this. It's clinical. Like asking a mechanic about an engine.
"In theory," I say, which is a lie. The whole article was mostly speculation dressed up as science. But I'm not about to admit that. "Why do you ask?"
"I was curious about the mechanism. Whether you could manipulate one physical characteristic without affecting others. Targeted change versus systemic." She tilts her head slightly. "You wrote that piece as entertainment, didn't you. You don't actually believe most of it."
She's right. The endocrinology column pays bills. It's pseudoscience for men's magazines. But nobody has ever called me on it to my face.
"I saw Ballet Mécanique in Vienna,” she change the topic out of nowhere.
But it’s the title that suprises me more. Ballet Mécanique played exactly twice in Vienna and both times to audiences who left confused and vaguely angry. The reviews called it noise. One called it an assault.
"What did you think?" I ask.
"I thought the synchronization was the problem."
I stare at her.
Nobody has ever said this sentence to me. People say they loved it. People say they hated it. People say it was ahead of its time, which is what people say when they mean they didn't understand it and don't want to admit it. Nobody has ever identified the actual technical problem with a piece I wrote fifteen years ago.
"The player pianos," she continues. She's not looking at me now, looking at her drink instead. "They couldn't hold together. You needed them synchronized but the technology didn't exist. It was a good idea. The execution was impossible."
"That's exactly right," I say. My voice sounds strange.
She looks up. "I think about synchronization problems."
"In what context?"
She pauses. Deciding something. "I read about torpedoes."
This conversation has taken a turn. "Torpedoes."
"Radio guidance systems. The problem is they're too easy to jam. If you're broadcasting on a single frequency, anyone can find it and broadcast noise on the same frequency. Makes the torpedo useless." She stops. "I'm sorry. This isn't interesting party conversation."
"It's the most interesting party conversation I've had in six months."
She almost smiles. "My husband — my former husband — was in munitions. Austrian. I attended a great many dinners where men discussed these things."
There's something in how she says ‘dinners.’ Like dinners were something that happened to her rather than something she chose.
"You attended dinners and thought about torpedo guidance systems," I say. "What would you do differently?"
"Make it impossible to jam." She sets her drink down on the bar. Hasn't touched it. "Frequency hopping. You broadcast on one frequency for a fraction of a second, then jump to another, then another. The pattern is known to both transmitter and receiver but not to anyone trying to intercept. They can't jam what they can't predict."
My face is doing something. I can feel it. My eyeballs might be sizzling. She's watching me with the expression of someone who has just explained a mechanism and is waiting to see if the other person understands how it works.
"That's —" I start.
"Completely impossible with current technology," she finishes. "I know. But the principle is sound. Like playing sixteen pianos that are synchronized even when no one can hear the synchronization happening."
She's using my own work to explain torpedo guidance. My brain is trying to catch up to what my body already knows, which is that I'm talking to the most intelligent person in this room and possibly in this entire city.
"The principle is more than sound," I say. "The principle is —"
Someone calls her name from across the room. A man's voice, loud. She glances over, then back to me.
"I should go," she says.
She walks away. I stand at the bar watching her move through the room.
I'm standing at a bar thinking about frequency hopping and player pianos and a woman who went to munitions dinners in Austria.
I find my way to the door without saying proper goodbyes to anyone who requires them. Outside, the valet has my car ready. There's something on the windshield.
Red. Bright in the driveway lights.
Lipstick. A phone number written in red lipstick directly on the glass.
I stand there in Janet Gaynor's driveway looking at a phone number written in lipstick on my windshield. Several things occur to me in rapid succession.
First: she knew what she was doing when she mentioned Ballet Mécanique.
Second: she wrote this.
Third: it means she checked which car is mine.
Fourth: I'm standing in a driveway staring at my own windshield like an idiot.
The valet is pretending not to notice. I get in the car. Drive home.
Böske is reading when I come in. She looks up from her book.
"How was it?"
"The usual," I say.
"You’re early."
"Ben Hecht tells the same stories."
She nods. Goes back to her book. I sit at the piano.
The Western score is where I left it. Rio Grande Dawn.
I put my hands on the keys.
I can't remember what note comes next.
This has never happened to me. Not like this. I can see the manuscript. I can hear what the music should do. My hands are in position. The note should be obvious — it's a simple resolution, nothing complicated. But the space where the note should be is occupied by something else entirely.
Frequency hopping. Sixteen pianos. Torpedo guidance systems. A woman who attended dinners and came away with the solution to a problem the United States Navy hasn't solved.
I sit with my hands on the keys. The note doesn't come.
Peter coughs in his sleep down the hall. Böske is in the bathroom. I've played this piano for three years. I've written thirty film scores on this piano. Right now I can't play the next note of a Western because my head is full of torpedoes.
The manuscript can wait until tomorrow.
I close the piano. Turn off the lamp. Walk to the bedroom. Böske is already in bed, reading. I get undressed. Lie down next to her. Look at the ceiling.
The lipstick number is in my head.
I don't know yet what frequency she's transmitting on.
I'm going to find out.
