Are you listening, George? Somebody finally got it.

The one that got away

The night is bitter
The stars have lost their glitter
The winds grow colder
And suddenly you're older
And all because of the man that got away.

No more his eager call
The writing's on the wall
The dreams you dreamed have all
gone astray.

The man that won you
Has gone off and undone you.
That great beginning
Has seen the final inning.
Don't know what happened. It's all a crazy game!

No more that all time thrill
For you've been through the mill
And never a new love will
be the same.

Good riddance, goodbye!
Every trick of his you're on to
But fools will be fools
And where's he gone to?

The road gets rougher
It's lonelier and tougher.
With hope you burn up
Tomorrow he may turn up
There's just no let up the live-long night and day.

Ever since this world began
There is nothing sadder than
A one-man woman looking for
The man that got away...
The man that got away.

Harold Arlen, Ira Gershwin

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"Again, the Rhapsody": George Gershwin revisited

I'm all afizz tonight, and for an unexpected reason. I just came out the other side of one of those old Hollywood juggernauts, the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue. It really was a too-long movie, and kind of heavy going. I wouldn't even have watched it (again), except for the fact that I'm re-reading A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant. I went through a "thing" a couple of years ago and probably bored everybody (but who's everybody?) with endless posts on Levant, one of the strangest human beings ever to walk the earth (and a musician, so I inevitably fell madly in love with him). Levant was one of several people who "played themselves" in Rhapsody, since they knew and/or worked with Gershwin while he was alive. 

It had that earnestness that film bios had in the 1940s, and though it attempted to portray Gershwin's drivenness and arrogance, it didn't quite come off, largely because Robert Alda was just too weak and mild. He was nice-looking, looked vaguely like Gershwin without that exotic feline strangeness, and could play the piano well enough that he didn't have to fake it, though it was Oscar Levant's inspired performances that ended up on the soundtrack. Alda was. . . well, he was nice, even in his temperamental rages. He conveyed the agony of the brain tumor that killed him by pressing on his forehead and sighing, "These headaches."

Levant wasn't in it very much, and when he was, I was surprised at how baby-faced he looked, almost boyish, with those haunted eyes. I study Levant whenever I see him, and in this movie I noticed something different, how his body language isn't strictly American. The Old World follows him around. He leans his forehead towards people and stares at them when he talks, grabs or perhaps grasps people by the arm, even pinches Alda's cheek in a "mein boy" attitude. He is both sardonic and warm. An exotic thing, I don't know what it is, something almost Middle Eastern about the cheekbones, or surely Slavic. And green eyes, which show up mainly in An American in Paris in the scene where he is lying in bed smoking. 

I'm getting to the part that sneaked up on me, hypnotized me almost, and I didn't expect it. But it seems so obvious now. It was the music. A mammoth hunk of the repertoire, most of it well-performed and pretty much all of it familiar to me, but this time - . What is it that makes your perception of things slip sideways? I was inside the music, inhabiting, dwelling within those dissonant chords, and not just grabbed by the crazy rhythms but infected, injected until my bones began to dance to the music's free will. 

I began to hear Gershwin as both coolly, almost offputtingly elegant and screamingly driven, furiously primitive in the sense of touching the Essence. I began to see a world within his songs, almost a universe. The perfection of it hurt me, jarred me. At the same time, the wildly jarring syncopation, the massive primal rushes of energy were dizzying, like plugging directly into a brain on intense overload. 

The sexuality of it was stunning. I had never heard sexuality in Gershwin before. Ever. I grew up with it, we had records lying around of Gershwin, An American in Paris and multiple versions of Rhapsody in Blue (and here I am reminded of  Levant's mother, her dry comment to her son: "Again, the Rhapsody?"). I have a few favorites, one of them being the I've Got Rhythm Variations. My favorite Gershwin song is The Man I Love, but almost no one knows how to sing it.

But tonight, somehow, it was all changed, changed utterly.

What happened here,  I wonder - how did it fall open, all this grey buttoned-down stuff, the music of my parents, bursting in a heady rush like a  tropical flower that flings itself open and gushes with an overripe, intoxicatingly embarrassing fragrance? This has nothing to do with the mild civilized Gershwin I knew, this bom-bompa, bom-bompa, bom-bompa of something deeper than drums, something that makes the concept of "rhythm" seem laughable. 

Even now I can't capture it, I go around and around the subject. I did not even realize fully that I was being mesmerized and taken over until the end of the thing, when I noticed I felt very strange. There was one song, and God how I wish now that I remember which one, because the chords were gorgeously, sourly dissonant, to the point almost of pain, and I loved it, oh I loved it, loved it and wanted more of it, and now I forget which song it was because they all bled together into one great throbbing Thing.

I did not expect this ambush, a slow cumulative effect that steamrollered me, out of this fusty old '40s movie with its cliches (Gershwin, in a Paris hotel room with the Eiffel Tower visible out the window, hears cab horns going "toot-toot-toot" and rushes to his notation paper, wild with inspiration, writing with an elegant flourish on the title page: "An American in Paris"). Right now I feel tired enough to die and know I have to go to bed. I don't know what it is about music, does it change as we change? New layers are exposed all the time by fresh artists, to the point that the original is sometimes twisted into a corkscrew, its essential meaning lost.

Anyway. When I hear this, Judy Garland's raw and sweet version of my favorite Gershwin song, complete with its distortion and wavering sound, I realize some few artists always knew what was hidden inside this deceptive stuff. Almost every artist sings it as a standard ballad, without much expression, and I want to scream: how can you not hear, how can you not see? The lyric is hopefully hopeless, the yearnings of a waif with no life, of a wispy woman barely hanging on until Her Hero arrives to take away all the ugliness and disappointment, the despair. It's all there, both in music and lyric, but almost everyone misses it. 

There is something about genius that makes us think, "Of course!" Makes us think, "Why didn't anyone think of that before?" or even, "hasn't it always been that way?" But no. Someone blitz-brained it into being, and I'm glad it didn't have to be me. I don't believe I am up to such dark, warlocky tricks.

Post-blog discoveries. I've become fascinated with the brain tumor that killed Gershwin at age 38, the way the whole thing was grossly mishandled as "hysteria" or "neurosis", even "attention-seeking". Seen through today's glasses, it's impossible to look at this set of symptoms and NOT see something neurological going on.

This from the New York Times Health section explains a little bit:

When he was 23, Gershwin began complaining of vague abdominal pain and constipation. Doctors found no physical basis for the complaints and told him the illness was in his head. He eventually sought psychotherapy.

But in early 1937, his behavior turned bizarre. He tried to push his chauffeur out of a moving car, smeared chocolates on his body, complained that he smelled burning rubber and forgot his own music at a performance.

He received little sympathy. ''There were people who said of him that he was an attention-seeker,'' said Hershey Felder, the creator and star of ''George Gershwin Alone,'' a Broadway show. ''They thought he was just making antics.''

On June 23, Gershwin was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, complaining of debilitating headaches. He refused a spinal tap, a painful procedure that was commonly used to diagnose brain tumors, and was discharged with a diagnosis of ''most likely hysteria.''

Less than a month later, he was taken back to the hospital, unconscious. In the right temporal lobe of his brain, surgeons found a cyst filled with an ounce of dark yellow fluid. They removed it, but it was too late. The pressure had begun to bear down on his brain stem, which controls functions like heart rate, respiration, temperature and consciousness, forcing part of it outside his skull. He died on July 11.

(Worst part of this, which they don't say: Lee Gershwin, his brother's acidulous bitch of a wife, seemed to have a hate on for him. Once when he fell in a restaurant and couldn't get up, she was quoted as saying, "He's just after the attention. Leave him there."

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Sunday Underwear and other signs of longing

When the mellow moon begins to beam,

Ev'ry night I dream a little dream,

And of course Prince Charming is the theme,

The he for me.

Although I realize as well as you 

It is seldom that a dream comes true,

For

To me it's clear

That he'll appear.

Some day he'll come along,

The man I love

And he'll be big and strong, 

The man I love

And when he comes my way

I'll do my best to make him stay.

He'll look at me and smile

I'll understand ; 

And in a little while,

He'll take my hand ; 

And though it seems absurd, 

I know we both won't say a word

Maybe I shall meet him Sunday 

Maybe Monday, maybe not;

Still I'm sure to meet him one day

Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day

He'll build a little home

Just meant for two,

From which I'll never roam, 

Who would - would you ?

And so all else above

I'm waiting for the man I love.

Erotic collision: when Garland met Levant

 

 

If anyone doubts for an instant, for even a flea’s sneeze, that I am an obsessive, then hear ye and hark. Here comes another entry about Oscar Levant! Something about the man just hooks me, and it’s not altogether a comfortable feeling.

 

I have a horrible habit of sampling through books before I actually read them. It’s far worse than reading the ending of a murder mystery, for this involves sucking the marrow out of a book, vacuuming up the essence and thus insulting the author by claiming to know what’s in it, and whether or not it’s worth reading.

 

I have never, I mean NEVER done this with a review copy: I have always read every word, keeping in mind the golden rule. If a reviewer ever covered my work after a mere skim or a skipping dip, I’d be devastated. But when it’s my favourite form, the three-inch-thick, slightly skanky literary and/or Hollywood biography, I allow myself to abandon the sequential. I am a speedboat bumping along on the crests of exhilarating waves.

 

 

And in such a way am I bumping through this book. When I came across the passage in A Talent for Genius about Oscar Levant and Judy Garland, my heart beat a little faster. I can’t really reproduce these 2 1/2 delicious pages because it would violate every copyright ever invented. But I can describe it in my own words, and somehow I must!  Oscar was in his early 30s and already a major celebrity as a concert pianist and radio personality. In various places in the book, women refer to him as “sexy”, “tender” and even “a wonderful lover”, so the big sloppy mug with the Walter Matthau looks must have had a thing or two up his pianist’s sleeve (or in the tips of his Gershwin-playing fingers).

 

It was even more surprising to learn just how readily he partook. Women, glamorous or otherwise, were there for the sampling, but he didn’t just sample. He devoured. Prostitutes were his first choice as a young man, with his rowdy older brothers actually dragging him off to a brothel to celebrate his bar mitzvah.


"Oscar was sexy," one of his conquests claimed, "and women instinctively knew he'd be good in bed. . . particularly if they were a little thwarted in that department with their husbands."

 

 

Along with other people's wives, he was drawn to  actresses, gorgeous and glittery, many of them beautiful sexual predators. These were mere hors d’oevres to Levant, who no doubt enjoyed himself with them (and they with him!), but felt no real emotional attachment.

 

He was a Victorian sort of male in that he kept sex and love so widely separated that they barely inhabited the same planet. Eventually he married one of these glittery women and made it last 33 years, so let’s hope he got over the dichotomy enough to thrill her with those swift and talented fingertips.

 

Anyway, one day came a momentous encounter at the Capital Theatre in New York – don’t ask me where that is (New York, maybe?).  Judy Garland was still in her protracted girlhood, her chest strapped down to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But at 17, florid passions were beginning to bloom, and the first object of her romantic obsession was . . .  Oscar Levant.

 

Yes. Oscar Levant, rumpled and gangsterish (and who wouldn’t love a man who strode down Fifth Avenue “hatless as usual, wearing Nick the Greek’s castoff overcoat”?), with his tragic eyes and lips that suggested all sorts of dirty orgasmic things: somehow this unlikely poet of Tin Pan Alley had attracted the attention of a dynamo, a girl already hurtling towards phenomenal stardom. When she sidled up to him and asked him, “What do you think of me?”, he quickly replied, “You’re enchanting.” “Don’t give me that! What do you really think of me?”

 

The two of them had instantly recognized something essential in each other: both of them were terminally insecure, with an incurable inner void that may have held the key to their magnetism. Still in her teens, Garland was a mere bud, and Levant must have known it, for he handled her passionate love letters and gale-force eyelash-batting with extreme care. ANY attention from him was welcome, obviously, but when she wrote to him confessing her undying passion and existential angst, he recommended certain books for her to read and music to listen to. Not exactly what she had in mind.

 

 

He must have believed that mentor was a safer role than lover for such a vulnerable creature, and of course he was right. In fact, they never did become lovers, but something better happened. I think this was a case of mutual fascination, something that went on for years and years. Their paths would cross again and again because they ran in the same circles. Which is to say, they did a lot of running around in circles and falling down.  They’d salute each other on the way down, maybe trading a pill or two.

Thank God they never married. When he met the girlish bundle of insecurity that was Judy Garland, Oscar was already deeply involved with June Gale, his future wife, but was not above using Judy to create the aphrodisiac of jealousy. This helped June leap over the chasm of uncertainty about marrying such a walking dilemma.

 

Oh God, Garland and Levant! Am I the only one who has such trouble with them? They both lapsed into an awful sort of tawdry deterioration at the end of their lives. It was painful to watch. Garland kept dragging herself onto the stage, singing in a raucous parody of her early brilliance, while Levant mercifully withdrew, but with body and soul mangled, mental health completely ravaged. According to this book, there were times when he really was insane, howling his anguish in mental hospitals, hallucinating, and. . . I really can’t go on.

 

Life stinks. You know it does. If YOUR life doesn’t stink, then you are damn lucky. Would you want the sort of life these two had? Would you choose the life of ANY great artist, since so many of them are ripped apart by sharks, either internal (Levant) or external (Garland)? Why must it be that way? If I had a gun in my hand. . . but I don’t, and my life is boring and ordinary and I am spectacularly untalented. Perhaps it’s just as well.

The Wicked Witch: Isn't She Lovely

While we're on the subject of Oz, let's get away from dead munchkins hanging from trees for a while and look at a little snippet of Margaret Hamilton's screen test for The Wizard of Oz. This wasn't an audition, as she was an obvious shoo-in with her ascetic face and gorgeously witch-y voice. I think this was a test of makeup and costume: the producers didn't want another Buddy Ebsen on their hands (he nearly expired from the lead-based makeup for the Tin Man and had to wait thirty more years to attain legendary status as Jed Clampett on The Beverley Hillbillies).

She does a little good-natured witching, showing her hands to the camera,  etc., but from .16 to .20 she suddenly smiles so radiantly that you wonder how she ever could've played such a . . . witch. She actually looks lovely, sunny, and full of good humour.

Who'd a thunkit, eh?

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Munchkin Suicide: Caught on Tape!

Do you sincerely wish to be creeped out? Then watch this. There's been an internet rumour around for years about The Wizard of Oz: supposedly you can see a munchkin hanging himself in the background while Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow do their sprightly little "Off to See the Wizard" quickstep.

I have no idea if the tape has been doctored, or if it's just something else in the background (though it does appear to swing oddly). In other versions, definitely doctored, you see legs kicking out. In still others, the munchkin is hanging upside-down. Not the best way to kill yourself.

The reason given is that he was up for the part of the third flying monkey from the left, and didn't get it due to his Armenian accent.

How many times have I seen this movie? I still watch it once in a while, and it's crackin' good. It holds up well and is beautifully performed all the way through by actors who seem to relish their parts. (Next time you watch it, pay close attention to Ray Bolger when Dorothy is saying goodbye at the end: those are real tears in his eyes. Something about Judy Garland grabbed the heart of even this seasoned old pro.) It even has a timeless message: you gotta find everything out for yourself, kid - no matter how obvious the lesson is in retrospect.

When I was a kid, it would come on once a year like Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (the one with the "razzleberry dressing"), and nobody had a colour TV. But everybody got excited about it and talked about it in school. It didn't bother us that Dorothy stepped from the black-and-white world of the barnyard to the magical, astonishing black-and-white world of Oz because we thought it was spozed-ta be that way.

When I first saw it in colour, and God knows when that was, maybe on TV much later, I was blinded by all the sequins. Everything seems to glitter in this, but then again, Oz is a supernatural sort of place, isn't it? And I'll bet all those sequins were sewn on by hand.

And it took me forever to figure out that it was the same guys at the beginning, you know, that guy that falls into the piggy poo and stuff. And why'd they have such a runty little dog on a farm? I guess the border collie didn't get the part.

And oh, I still cry when Dorothy's imprisoned in the witch's tower and the hourglass is running out and Aunty Em appears in the crystal ball and says, Dorothy! Dorothy, where are you? I'm embarrassed, but I always do.

My grandkids watched this on DVD a couple years ago, and while Caitlin squirmed around and stood on her head a lot, she seemed to enjoy at least parts of it. She had fun imitating the actors' nasal New England and Bronxian accents, i. e. "If I only had a haaahhhht," and "Dah-rah-thee!" Surprisingly, Ryan, then four, was playing cars as usual, but dropped what he was doing, sat cross-legged, and watched the whole thing almost without blinking. I asked him what he liked best, and he showed me his dimple and said, "I liked the ending."

Ah, yes - so do we all.

So anyway, what's creepy about this clip isn't so much the shadowy "something" in the background (and God knows what it really is; most movies have multiple flubs in them even now), but the way the sound keeps slowing down and slowing down until it's an inhuman, dragged-out, almost Satanic groan, the music pounding and thudding and the voices bawling like tortured animals.

S'cool! I liked it, too.

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