George Antheil - Other Interests

Other Interests

Apart from music, Antheil had many other pursuits. In 1930, as "Stacey Bishop", he wrote a murder mystery called Death in the Dark with a character based on Ezra Pound. He was the film music reporter and critic for the magazine Modern Music from 1936 to 1940, writing columns considered lively and thoughtful, noting the comings and goings of musicians and composers during an era when the industry was flirting with more "modern" scores for films. He was disappointed, however, and wrote that "Hollywood, after a grand splurge with new composers and new ideas, has settled back into its old grind of producing easy and sure-fire scores."

Antheil wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper relationship advice column, as well as regular columns in magazines such as Esquire and Coronet. He considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as "The Glandbook for the Questing Male".

Antheil's interest in this area brought him into contact with the actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr had fled her Austrian munitions-making husband, and coming to the US had become fiercely pro-American. As a result of a chance conversation, they conceived and patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system. Lamarr contributed the knowledge of torpedo control gained from her husband and Antheil a method of controlling the spread spectrum sequences using a player-piano mechanism similar to those used in Ballet Mécanique. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the U.S. Navy, the importance of the Antheil-Lamarr discovery was only acknowledged in the 1990s. The creation of the device designed by Lamarr and Antheil was not implemented until 1962, when it was used by the U.S. military in Cuba. Later it served as a basis for modern communication technology, such as CDMA transmission protocol for cellular telephones.

During World War II, he participated in the "Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy" with Oscar Hammerstein and others, putting on exhibits of artworks banned in Nazi Germany such as those by Käthe Kollwitz. He also published a book of war predictions, entitled The Shape of the War to Come.

In 1945, he published his autobiography Bad Boy of Music, which became a bestseller.