There was a time when I thought my entire life would be music. Well, or
rather, music and writing—writing by day, music by night. I had it all figured
out. I would live off of my music while writing the great American novel. If I
played my cards right, I figured I could be a best-selling novelist and a
sought-after New York studio musician by the time I was, say, twenty-five or so.
Such are the dreams of adolescence. Then life happens.
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| When music was everything |
Actually, I wanted to do it all, to be famous for my “incredible creativity”,
be a kind of jack of all arts. Because of these aspirations, I liked talk shows
back then, or at least the segments that included famous musicians, writers and
actors and artists. I’m old enough to remember when another Ohio boy, Jack Paar,
hosted The Tonight Show (1957-1962) and I from time to time got to stay up to
watch some of it. That was before Johnny Carson took it over and became,
perhaps, the most famous host the late-night talk show ever had. I know a lot
of kids my age would have found it boring, but I was fascinated.
I still recall, for instance, Paar’s interview with Oscar Levant. Levant
had been a personal friend of George Gershwin’s and was, himself, a brilliant
pianist, composer and conductor. But he was probably better known to the
general public as a sharp-witted supporting actor, comedian and TV show host
and panelist—and a guy who could sit down at the piano and play Rhapsody in Blue at a moment’s notice.
As if that weren’t enough, Levant also wrote three mordantly hilarious memoirs
over the course of his mid to latter years, A Smattering of Ignorance
(Doubleday, 1940), The Memoirs of an
Amnesiac (Putnam's, 1965), and The
Unimportance of Being Oscar (Putnam’s, 1968).
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| Jack Paar |
I was already familiar with his name from one of my mother’s classic
78rpm records— Oscar Levant playing Rhapsody
in Blue, George Gershwin’s most famous work—but I had never seen Levant in
person. Or rather, I had seen him in several movies as a sarcastic,
chain-smoking wreck of a man (pretty much who he was in real life) but at the
time didn’t know who he was.
But Paar’s audience indeed did. When the show host introduced him and
Levant shambled out from behind the stage curtain, a cigarette dangling from his
mouth and looking like he’d slept in his suit, the live audience broke into
prolonged applause, approving whistles, and loving shouts. It went on for so
long that Levant began to look uncomfortable, to shift a little on his unsteady
feet, appearing weak and ill and underfed. Finally, when the applause died
down, he took the long-ashed cigarette out of his mouth, nodded slightly and
said, “I would bow...but I would fall down.” I became an immediate fan.
On that same show, Paar asked Levant what he thought of news that his
fellow Jewish comedian, Milton Berle, who was wildly popular at the time, had converted
from Judaism to become a Christian Scientist. Levant thought for a moment and
said, “Our loss is their loss.” Paar also asked the self-effacing Levant what
he did for exercise, to which he responded, “I stumble, then fall into a coma.”
Talking, in another setting, about the “magic of Disney”, Paar would later say,
“The only non-believer I ever encountered was Oscar Levant, who said he wouldn’t
visit Disneyland because he had his own hallucinations.”
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| Paar with Levant on The Tonight Show, 1961 |
Levant was widely considered a multi-faceted
genius. I bought The Memoirs of an
Amnesiac at the local newsstand and bookstore, in my hometown of
Wapakoneta, almost as soon as it came out. Genius fascinated me and I wanted to
know what made guys like him tick.
What seemed to mostly make him tick was, indeed, his insecurity. And
that was what, as a genius, brought him up in, and kept him in the shadow of
the more famous genius, his friend and rival, George Gershwin. Oscar first
heard Gershwin's music when he was twelve and immediately aspired to compose
his own unique music, like that of this master of the crossover between jazz
and classical. As a youth who had gone to New York City to find himself as a
musician, he sought out and met Gershwin. They struck up a stormy friendship
that lasted until Gershwin’s untimely death, when he was thirty-eight and
Levant was thirty-one. While insecure about his own talents, Levant was driven
to surpass those of his friend. Instead, he became best known, despite
composing multiple works, as the world’s most brilliant interpreter of George
Gershwin’s music. And due to his blend of hero worship of, and rivalry with his friend, combined with his own self-effacing personality, Levant never seemed to
succeed in stepping out of Gershwin’s shadow.
I got that. I always felt as if I were striving to reach somebody else’s
high standards rather than my own. And I never seemed to myself to be quite
equal to the task.
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| Beryl Baker |
Back then, I was still wondering if one could become a genius. My school guidance counselor, Beryl Baker, was
little help. Or rather, she was a lot of help. Just not how I asked her to be. Early
in my sophomore year in high school, I asked for an appointment with her and
demanded to see my achievement and IQ scores.
Miss Baker was intrigued. Why, she wanted to know, did I want to see
them?
“I have big dreams,” I explained. “I want to be a great musician, a
great writer.”
“And?”
“And I want to know if I’m kidding myself.”
“I don’t follow.”
“None of it comes easy to me. Maybe I’m too stupid to have these dreams
that haunt me all the time. Maybe I’m wasting my time because I’ll just never
have the intelligence to reach such ambitious goals. Maybe my dad’s right.”
“Your father? About what?”
“Maybe I’ll never be better than average and had best start looking at
getting some practical skills that’ll provide me with security in the future
instead of fooling around thinking I’ll ever be a successful musician and
writer.”
The counselor smiled and said, “Okay, first of all, from the little I
know about you, you appear to me to be plenty smart enough to be whatever you
want to be. That said, I’m going to have to refuse to show you your achievement
and IQ levels.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if it turns out they’re not what you had hoped, in this state
of mind, you may just give up. And if it turns out that you’re a so-called genius, you may think that’s all it
takes. Either way, it’ll be of no help to you whatsoever.”
She had an impervious smile that expressed something definitive. Guessing
the interview was over, I stood. She stood up from behind her desk as well, and
came around to see me out the door. Before she did, as we stood face to face
(she was quite tall), she reached out, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Get
out there and reach for what you want. Work as hard as you can. You’ll be all
right.”
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| Levant made a career out of neurosis |
When I read about Levant, the whole thing sort
of clicked. Genius was only a tiny part of what made brilliant people
brilliant. What I found out was that it was mostly all about striving to
achieve something despite one’s own seemingly overwhelming insecurities, and
that was something I could surely identify with.
Levant was the poster-boy for insecurity. He once said, “There's a fine line between genius and
insanity. I have erased this line.” And indeed, he had. Literally. Over the
course of his sixty-five-year life, he spent numerous stints in mental
institutions, either checking himself in or being preventively committed by his
wife of thirty-three years, singer and actress June Gale. These
hospitalizations were so frequent that when he once called June to tell her
that he had been admitted again, she quipped, “Gezuntheit!”
He was a pill-popper, addicted to several
powerful pharmaceutical drugs—the drug of choice being Demerol—as well as being
a chain-smoker and caffeine addict (he reportedly drank forty cups of coffee a
day).
And yet, his accomplishments were incredible.
His disastrous personal life was, I couldn’t help thinking, symptomatic of the
insecurities he had to overcome to create—not some perverse, undisciplined
outgrowth of his genius as such. They seemed to be a way of trying to remedy
his stunted ego, which never believed that he was good enough. And he dealt
with all of this pain and suffering by joking about it—about his rampant
hypochondria, his mental instability, his myriad neuroses, his physical
debility and his constant sense of unworthiness. “What the world needs is more geniuses with
humility,” he once joked, and then added. “There are so few of us left.” It was
as if his ego and alter ego were bantering back and forth.
After a stint in a sanatorium, where he had
been experiencing withdrawal from drug addiction, he was quoted as saying, “For
the past six months, my behavior has been impeccable...I’ve been in a coma.” Of
Levant’s hypochondria as opposed to his very real health issues, friend, fellow
humorist and writer Alexander Woollcott once quipped, “There isn't anything the
matter with Levant that a few miracles wouldn't cure.”
When a less than creative interviewer asked
him if he was happy, Levant thought about it for an instant and responded, “Happiness
isn't something you experience, it's something you remember.” From the
outset, his art was a dichotomy between the joy of his talent and the stricture
of his high standard of excellence. His Pittsburgh diamond-jeweler father, Max
Levant, had a deep love of classical music and insisted that all four of his
sons, of which Oscar was the youngest, learn music. Not just to take music
lessons, but to become accomplished musicians. One of Levant’s older brothers
was charged with teaching him piano. Within weeks of taking up the instrument,
he was already playing Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann.
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Levant as film character Billy Starbuck,
reading... Who else? Oscar Levant. |
At age seven Oscar
began studying with Martin Miessler, a graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory who
taught him the Czerny piano method. By the next year, Oscar was giving
recitals. And by age fifteen, with his now widowed mother’s blessing, he was
living on his own in New York and studying intensively with internationally renowned
concert pianist Zygmunt Stojowski. To earn a living and keep studying, he acquired
an agent and started playing in hotels and roadhouses, where he gained his
taste for popular music. Already while in his early twenties, Levant had played
with several house bands and made a few recordings, but his big break came when
he was twenty-two and was asked to stand in as a last-minute replacement for
another pianist, for a recording of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue,
for which he would be accompanied by Frank Black and his Orchestra. He
was to be the first pianist to make a recording of the piece after it was first
recorded by Gershwin himself.
Levant took the gig and recorded the Gershwin
classic—or so the story goes—in fifteen minutes flat with no prior rehearsal.
Radio stations across the country played the new recording again and again, and
it became an instant hit. So much so that, according to Levant, every time his
mother heard it on the radio, she would call him up and say, “What, Oscar? Again,
the Rhapsody?”
The rest is history. Songwriter, Broadway
composer and conductor, concert pianist, actor, comedian and writer, Levant did
it all and did it all to the highest of standards. If the musical world knew
him as a serious professional, popular audiences knew him as a clown. Some of
his best lines have become comedy classics:
I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
So little time and so little to do.
Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.
Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.
Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
I am no more humble than my talents require.
Largely self-educated yet enormously erudite,
he more than once turned down major academic positions and honors because he
considered himself eminently unqualified for them. His immense talent and intelligence
were juxtaposed with his unforgiving artistic discipline and fragile sense of
self-worth, and these diametrically opposed elements combined to foster a true
American treasure.
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With trombonist David Stroh when
the two of us received scholarships
for a summer music workshop at
Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. |
As for myself, I took Miss Baker’s advice. I
focused. If I had been “into music” previously, I now devoted myself to it—ate,
drank, breathed and dreamed it—practicing many hours a day, spending my study
halls in the band room, studying it, listening to it, educating myself in it,
and using money I made working in it to take private lessons from the best
teacher I could find in the area. I trained for it like an athlete training for
the Olympics. I sought every opportunity to play it—high school marching band,
high school concert band, pep band, stage band, and then getting together with
the best music students in the area in the All-Area Band. Later that same year,
I was teaching beginning students after school, first at home and then at a music
store. I worked for the store as well and met all of the professional musicians
from the area. And then was invited to join their union and play with them at
area night clubs and lodge halls. And then I began teaching intermediate and
advanced students and was so highly recommended that area high school band
directors brought me in to prepare their percussion sections for state Contest,
for football season, for concerts. Nothing came before it in my life.
In the meantime, I buckled down in my high
school English courses and went above and beyond mere school assignments. I
read prodigiously and wrote—short stories, essays, journals, stubs of novels that I
worked on as time permitted, features for the school column in the local
newspaper. I consulted about my writing and the writing of authors I liked or
didn’t like with the English teachers I most admired. I studied to try and
figure out what made one writer more effective than another and how each reached
and touched (or didn’t) his or her readers.
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Mark wanted to paint like
Frank Frazetta |
Being so focused, I
sometimes felt like I was all alone. Except for my closest friend, Mark. He and
I could talk about our ambitions, dreams, doubts and insecurities because we
wanted similar things. He wanted to draw and paint like Frank Frazetta and to
write like Tolkien. I wanted to play like Joe Morello and write like Hemingway.
The only thing was, he seemed to be getting a lot closer to drawing like
Frazetta and writing like Tolkien than I was to playing like Morello and
writing like Hemingway. He was way more talented and intelligent than I was, so
I would clearly have to work harder.
Back then, however, I was the center of my
tiny universe, so it seemed to me that Mark and I were alone, shipwrecked
together on a desert island. It wasn’t until I was seventeen and played at an
event called The Redskins Review—our school team name was the Wapakoneta
Redskins—that I met other kids with secret talents and secret dreams. One was a
guy that I played with in that talent show. I had not previously known him. He
wasn’t involved in band or, as far as I knew, in any other musical activities
at school. But he knew who I was and asked me to accompany him in the Review.
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| Frazetta - Death Dealer |
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I play a little piano,” he said
self-consciously.
His name was John. He invited me to jam at
his house. He turned out to be wrong. He didn’t “play a little piano.” He
played the hell out of it. Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Ramsey Lewis, he
could imitate all of their styles to a tee. We picked a couple of Peterson
pieces, polished them up and wowed the audience at the performance.
When we were through, we went down to sit in
the audience and watch the rest of the show. One of the next acts was a girl,
who sang the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic, “If I Loved You”. She was a quiet
girl whom I’d never gotten to know, even though, for three years of our childhood,
she had lived just a few doors down the street from me. She didn’t seem to be
very popular at school and obviously struggled with overweight. I didn’t know
anyone who knew her or ever mentioned her.
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| I wanted to play like Joe Morello |
But that night, in
honor of the school team and our town’s Native American past, she walked out
onto that auditorium stage, dressed as an Indian princess in a beaded buckskin
gown and beaded headband, beautifully made up for the occasion, her hair in
braids, and, accompanied by a friend on the piano, began to sing. Instantly,
the audience was spellbound. She had a strong, beautiful, cultured
mezzo-soprano voice and knew how to use it to effect. After the first eight
bars, I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. And when I glanced around
the audience, all eyes were on her and everyone was open-mouthed with awe. For
as long as the magic lasted, until the last chord of the song, I’m betting that
every guy in the audience was in love with her. I know I was.
Somewhere in my twenties, after a decade of
making a living with music, I realized that I was “a good percussionist”, maybe
even “very good”, but that I would never be great, which was a whole other
standard. So I gave it up. And not a day goes by that I don’t miss it.
Writing was different. I realized when I was
about forty, and had been making a living writing for over a decade and a half,
that I actually had potential. If I worked hard enough, it was something in
which I could reach a much higher standard. It’s still a work in progress and I
still approach it in accordance with the Levant philosophy. Namely, that you
can never know everything, nor can you ever know enough to be as good as you
can be.
Oscar Levant seldom said anything completely serious in public, but when
he did, it was profound. He was once quoted as saying, “It's not what you are,
it's what you don't become that hurts.”
I guess that’s true for all of us.
