In Bad Boy of Music, Antheil described Lamarr as “very, very bright” and recalled her as an intellectual, a woman who read and thought and pressed past the surface of things. He recorded a dinner conversation in which she said she wanted to offer inventions to Washington, to contribute something to the war effort that went beyond selling bonds and signing autographs. He took her seriously. She had been married to an arms manufacturer; she thought about weapons in ways that most people around either of them did not.
## A Hollywood Neighborhood in Wartime
By 1940, the United States was not yet at war but it was watching Europe with growing alarm. The German military had overrun France in June. The Battle of Britain was underway. The Royal Air Force was holding, barely, against the Luftwaffe’s sustained bombing campaign. In September, a German U-boat sank the SS City of Benares in the North Atlantic. The ship was carrying ninety evacuee children from Britain to Canada; seventy-seven of the children died. The disaster received extensive coverage in the United States and in Britain, and it created, for many people, a sudden and concrete understanding of what submarine warfare meant in human terms.
George Antheil lost his brother Henry in June of that same year. Henry W. Antheil Jr. was a diplomat posted to the US Legation in Helsinki. On June 14, 1940, he was aboard a Finnish passenger aircraft leaving Tallinn when Soviet forces shot it down over the Baltic Sea. He was among those killed. George Antheil’s grief was not abstract. The war was not abstract.