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.
“A radio-guided torpedo is far more accurate,” she said, without looking up from the paper. “But the enemy only has to find the frequency to shout over it. And then the torpedo goes deaf. One transmitter is one voice, and one voice is easy to drown out.”
George didn’t know what to say and let his fingers run over the keys. Hedy sat down beside him. “Let’s play a game,” she suggested. “I play and you follow me.” She began a simple tune and suddenly leapt two octaves, came back to the middle, dropped to the bass. George stumbled on the third note. Then she took a score from the music stand, wrote something on it in pencil and set it in front of him. With the paper in view, George followed her leap by leap, as if all four hands belonged to one person. “And if someone were listening from the street,” Hedy asked, “what would they hear?” “Noise,” he said. “Scattered notes. No tune at all.”
Afterwards they talked about that Paris ballet. George told her the score demanded sixteen player pianos playing at once, each reading its own roll of perforated paper. If the rolls started at the same instant, the sixteen sounded like one. If one got half a second ahead, the theatre turned into a henhouse. He rummaged in a sideboard drawer, where Hedy kept mementos from her guests, and pulled out a piece of roll he had given her a few days earlier, a souvenir of that premiere.
Hedy unrolled it against the lamp. The light shone through the perforations and cast a swarm of dots on the wall. She was silent for a long time, moving her lips like someone counting. “George, how many keys does a piano have?” “Eighty-eight.” “Eighty-eight,” she repeated slowly, as if the number meant something else.
When George left, in broad daylight, Hedy was still on the piano stool with the roll spread across her knees, jumping from one key to another in no apparent order. Only she knew there was one.