SECRET DREAMS, SECRET TALENTS

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.