The Movie Star Behind Your Cellphone

In the summer of 1940, George Antheil, an avant-garde composer trying to make it in Hollywood, was invited to a dinner party at the request of the most beautiful woman in the world. She, a movie star, wanted to talk to him about her breasts: Did he think they could they be made any larger? She sought out this improbable consultation on the authority of several articles Antheil had written for Esquire magazine applying his supposed knowledge of endocrinology to such questions as whether one’s wife had been unfaithful and “which girls will and which girls won’t.”