A pianist walks on stage in 1920s Paris, sets a loaded revolver on top of the piano, and starts to play. That was George Antheil, the self-styled bad boy of music who flunked out of Trenton Central High School, secured a 20-year stipend from Mary Louise Curtis Bok, badgered Ernest Bloch into teaching him, and moved into an apartment above Shakespeare and Company where Sylvia Beach introduced him to Joyce, Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. This episode follows his riotous Paris debut, which may have been staged for a Marcel L'Herbier film crew, and his catastrophic 1927 Carnegie Hall premiere of Ballet Mécanique.

The story then takes an astonishing turn. After fleeing a ruined reputation and rising fascism for a Hollywood career scoring more than 30 films, Antheil reinvented himself as a syndicated columnist on glandular criminology, which is how h ...