Eighty-Eight Keys

Dinners at Hedy Lamarr’s house usually ended with tipsy producers and photographers lying in wait in the garden. That one ended differently: with two people sitting at the piano at three in the morning and a newspaper open on the lid. A German submarine had sunk the City of Benares, a ship carrying ninety British children away from the bombs. Seventy-seven of them would never reach Canada.

George Antheil had known her for only a few weeks. He was a composer, and the press had nicknamed him “the bad boy of music” ever since, in 1926, he premiered a ballet in Paris with aeroplane propellers and player pianos. He knew what everyone knew: that Hedy was the most dazzling star at MGM. He knew much less about her earlier life. In 1933, in Vienna, she had married Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer who held endless dinners with officers and ministers. Nobody bothered to ask the young wife what she had understood of those conversations. She had understood almost everything. In 1937 she fled, and never went back.