Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page A

for many years.” No doubt it did, but Boski believed it also released him from his hero worship of the older man. “I’m happy about it!” she told him. “You liked Stravinsky’s music too much.” Stravinsky’s abrupt rejection motivated Antheil to compete with his former hero—“for where,” he writes, “is the younger man who does not revolt against his elders?” And, a little later, speaking as if for his whole generation: “We are done with [Erik] Satie, Les Six, Stravinsky, and the Dadaists. Even though we recognize the value of the innovations brought about by these men in our imbecilic age, we want nothing to do with them.”
    As one mentor pulled away, another almost immediately stepped forward. The American poet Ezra Pound, introduced to Antheil by a mutual friend, “turned up … in a green coat with blue square buttons; and his red pointed goatee and kinky red hair above flew off his face in all directions. Boski looked at him, not a little astonished.” Antheil played several hours’ worth of his compositions for the Pennsylvania expatriate and shared his theories of the future of music, after which Pound decided to write a short, flamboyant book about the man, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony .
    While working on his book, Pound moved to promote his latest protégée, who happened also to be his mistress, the American violinist Olga Rudge. “A dark, pretty, Irish-looking girl,” Antheil recalled her, twenty-eight years old in 1923, “and, as I discovered when we commenced playinga Mozart sonata together, a consummate violinist.” Pound wanted to arrange a concert for Rudge and Antheil. “At this concert, he explained, he would take care to see that all of important Paris was present, the really important Paris that mattered.” To that end, he wanted his friend to compose for Rudge not one but two violin sonatas.
    Antheil’s solution to the problem of composing two violin sonatas in a matter of months—it was the end of July, and the concert would be scheduled for November—was to swoop Boski up and take her off to Tunis, on the north coast of Africa opposite Sicily. They both liked the fierce heat of North African summer. They remained in Tunis for a month, listening to Arabic music that Antheil copied down with his phonographic ear while writing not a note of his own.
    Because he was vacationing in Tunis that August, Antheil was not in Paris when two sometime American filmmakers, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, began shooting clips for an art film. Murphy had seen Man Ray’s work at a Dada theater gathering, Le coeur à barbe ( The Bearded Heart ), on 6 July 1923. (Antheil may have attended as well; he left for Tunis later in July.) The event included premieres of compositions by Stravinsky, Satie, and Darius Milhaud; poems; a Tristan Tzara play (named for another heart, this one gas: Le coeur à gaz); and several short films, including Man Ray’s first, Le retour à la raison ( The Return to Reason ), a three-minute silent, semiabstract short. “All the celebrities of Paris,” the Little Review ’s publisher, Jane Heap, writes,“painters, sculptors, musicians, poets; foreigners of every title, and rich excitement-hunting Americans turned out for this ultra-modern show.” Fights broke out. “Canes clashed, mirrors and footlights smashed, the audience stamped and laughed and shouted.”
    Some time after the Dada gathering, Dudley Murphy paid Man Ray a visit. “One day a tall young man appeared with his beautiful blond wife,” Man Ray recalled. “Dudley Murphy said some very flattering things about my work and suggested we do a film together.” Murphy was the son of a prominent Boston School painter, Hermann Dudley Murphy, who taught drawing at Harvard. Young Murphy’s parents had divorced when he was a teenager, and he had moved with his mother to Pasadena. He had grown up with the movie business at a time when Hollywood was still tolerant of experimental film work. He