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middle.”
    â€œYeah,” said the other. “Somebody hollered, ‘Here comes Gary Cooper,’ and then wham!”
    â€œThat ain’t it,” said a man in a cloth cap and sweater. “This is a riot you’re in.”
    â€œYeah,” said another woman. “A pervert attacked a child.”
    â€œI come from St. Louis,” said the first woman, “and we had one of them pervert fellows in our neighborhood once. He ripped up a girl with a pair of scissors.”
    â€œHe must have been crazy,” said the man in the cap. “What kind of fun is that?”
    Everybody laughed. They were enjoying themselves. Rioting was something to pass the time, and as Tod Hackett was swept along by the crowds, he imagined them all as the arsonists of his painting, imagined working on the painting itself, “modelling the tongues of fire so that they licked even more avidly at a corinthian column that held up the palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.”
    This city of the inferno, both cruel and grotesque, was somewhat different from the Hollywood that had bewitched the American imagination, and the reviews of West’s book were respectful but unenthusiastic. Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker that it had “all the fascination of a nice bit of phosphorescent decay.” To Scott Fitzgerald, West wrote: “So far the box score stands: Good reviews—fifteen percent, bad reviews—twenty-five percent, brutal personal attacks—sixty percent.” In June, just a month after publication, Bennett Cerf informed West that the sales for the latest two weeks numbered exactly twenty-two copies. He added that the “outlook is pretty hopeless.” Cerf was sadly disappointed. “By God,” he declared, “if I ever publish another Hollywood book, it will have to be ‘My 39 ways of making love,’ by Hedy Lamarr.”
    Â 
    Hedy Lamarr. Hedwig Kiesler was her real name, Hedwig Kiesler Mandl by marriage, aged twenty-five or thereabouts, a recent immigrant from Vienna. What was there about Hedy Lamarr that should make a sedentary New York publisher like Bennett Cerf, thinking about Hollywood in 1939, start to glow when he thought of her and her thirty-nine ways of making love?
    Probably it was the rumors surrounding Ecstasy, in which she had been photographed, from a discreet distance, darting through some trees and going for a swim in the nude. When Ecstasy was first imported into the United States in the fall of 1934, it was immediately seized by the customs authorities. An official committee, including Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, wife of the Secretary of the Treasury, viewed the film and professed itself shocked not by the nude swimming but by a subsequent scene in which the camera focused on Hedy Lamarr’s face while a man supposedly made love to her. “I was not sure what my reactions would be, so . . . I just closed my eyes,” Miss Lamarr later recalled. * “ ‘ Nein, nein, ’ the director yelled. ‘A passionate expression on the face.’ He threw his hands up and slapped them against his sides. He mumbled about the stupidity of youth. He looked around and found a safety pin on a table. He picked it up, bent it almost straight, and approached. ‘You will lie here,’ he said. ‘I will be underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react! ’ I shrugged. . . .”
    The customs authorities demanded that this scene be expunged; the distributors refused, so Ecstasy was not only banned but literally burned. The distributors imported another copy, and managed to get it past customs, but then a federal jury in New York declared that it was “indecent . . . and would tend to corrupt morals.” Various legal appeals permitted showings in Boston, Washington, and Los Angeles. The litigation and publicity rumbled along