Free Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

futuristic, at least the way some European artists visualized the cities of the future.
    Friede, at twenty-five in 1927 a year younger than Antheil, was good at publicity and spared no expense. Ford Madox Ford wrote a profile of Antheil for Vanity Fair . Man Ray and Berenice Abbott photographed the heralded young composer. Miguel Covarrubias and William Cotton drewcaricatures. James M. Cain, at that time an editorial writer for the New York World , panned the concert in advance, sight unseen, then reversed himself and praised it after meeting the Antheils and sitting through a rehearsal. “The eleven grand pianos,” Friede writes—one for Antheil, ten for his slaved counterparts—“made a magnificent picture in the huge Welte-Mignon [piano] studios.… Even the mechanical problems proved to be not too difficult. We found an electrician who undertook to make the battery of electric bells that we needed. We commissioned a wind machine with a regulation airplane propeller. And we started our search for a real fire siren.” They had more difficulty with the Jazz Symphony , since it turned out that the pianist and conductor W. C. Handy couldn’t read an orchestra score.
    The concert sold out within twenty-four hours of its announcement. “Everybody wanted to meet Antheil,” Friede notes, which meant almost nightly parties during the Antheils’ entire stay in New York. The most memorable, says Friede, was at “Theodore Dreiser’s enormous studio on Fifty-seventh Street,” where Dreiser pumped Antheil dry of information about his music and his life. More intimately, a Harlem choir led by the composer and choirmaster Hall Johnson crowded into Friede’s apartment one evening and sang spirituals until guests and chorus both were exhausted.
    Unintentionally, Friede had paved the way for disaster with all his publicity. “The trouble was that I was doing for a musical event what I would normally do for a book. And Idid not realize that one by one I was alienating all the critics, all the people who were really important to [Antheil], all the people who had contributed toward making it possible for him to write his music without any financial worries, by turning a serious performance into a circus.”
    The performance itself, on a Sunday evening, was something of a circus. The real airplane propeller in use in the performance had been aimed downstage, directly at the audience, instead of upstage, where the blast of air it generated could collide and disperse. “When it reached full power,” writes Friede, “it was disastrous. People clutched their programs, and women held onto their hats with both hands. Someone in the direct line of the wind tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender.” The percussionist quickly slowed the motor, “but the damage had been done. Laughter is contagious, and besides we had spent weeks building up the fact that there had been riots in Paris at the first performance of this number. Now everybody … wanted to get into the act. The riot they put on, however, was completely synthetic. [The conductor] turned to glare at the noisemakers, and they shut up at once. Then the more conservative members of the audience decided that they had had enough. They started to leave in droves. It was an agonizing experience for Antheil, and I, back in my box once more, could not help but feel for him. I knew he wished, as I did most fervently, that we had never heard of each other.”
    Antheil was devastated, not least because of the reports he knew Mrs. Bok would hear and read. He wrote to her the next day, mentioning a second concert scheduled for Wednesday that was nearly sold out as well. “The unheard-of viciousness of the critical press,” he warned his patron, “which even went as far as prevarication in minimizing even the scandal of the performance, which was a great one … has earned me … no doubt justly from their viewpoint … the suspicion