Oscar Levant: one-man band

 

Oscar, reclining and reflective, begins to dream. He dreams he is in a vast concert hall. . . 

. . . playing Gershwin's Concerto in F with his cigarette-stained fingers. . . 

. . . and conducting at the same time. . . (and he was a real conductor so he isn't just waving his arms)

. . . and likewise the  percussion, he's really playing (an early

 example of cloning, or else he accelerates himself to the speed of sound)

My personal fave, cuz he looks so sexy. . . 

     Cute with a gong (and doesn't he look a bit like Buster Keaton?)

"Bravo! Bravo!"

Oscar, Igor and Little Tich: degrees of separation

For several decades now I've been chasing down a Stravinsky album called Favorite Short Pieces. It had some gorgeously eccentric stuff on it and in my teens, when I was in the midst of a Stravinsky fit, I listened to it all the time.

All my internet sleuthing got me nowhere - if it existed at all, it was only on vinyl. But then today - a brainwave - if I got a playlist of the tracks on said album, couldn't I try to find the individual pieces on YouTube?

And by the holy - I did - I reassembled all seven works, not in any order or by any particular artists, but who cares, I have it all now. So how on earth does this connect to the video?  Ah.

My first awareness of Little Tich (who sounds like he has some sort of skin condition) came from reading the liner notes of Favorite Short Pieces. Stravinsky wrote them himself, in his usual dry, droll manner. He claimed that the second movement of his Eight Instrumental Miniatures for Fifteen Players was inspired by "the manifold eccentric appearances of the celebrated English clown, Little Tich." 

And that was all that happened, until I began to read about Oscar Levant.

Stravinsky, Oscar Levant. Little Tich. . . hold on, these dissonances do relate. There was a great tidbit in the fascinating but painful-to-read bio of Levant, A Talent for Genius. Levant liked to hobnob with (some might say suck up to) musical geniuses such as Gershwin and Copland and Horowitz, hoping something would rub off. His encounter with Stravinsky was memorable. This is a long quote, but worth transcribing:

"One day Igor Stravinsky visited the Warner Bros. lot and dropped in on Oscar Levant during a break in the long workday. Wearing black tie and tails and balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, Levant received the composer of Le Sacre du printemps in a quiet corner of the movie set. Levant greatly enjoyed the spirited, fiercely opinionated Russian. Between takes he had been reading a life of Ferruco Busoni, the Italian pianist and composer, so he knew that Stravinsky had met Busoni only once, despite the fact that they had lived just five miles from each other in Switzerland during the First World War.

"Why did you visit Busoni only once?" Levant asked Stravinsky.

"Because," replied the composer, bristling slightly, "he represented the immediate past and I hate the immediate past."

It's the kind of remark you like, but you can't quite determine why.

Anyway, about Little Tich. . . I was chopping my way through Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac - a fascinating and nearly unreadable book, the last fourth of which takes place in a series of mental institutions - and I came across the name again - I couldn't believe it! It was Little Tich!Not only hadn't I heard the Favorite Short Pieces album for over 40 years, I hadn't heard one mention of this creature and had come to think of him as chimeric, maybe a product of Stravinsky's fevered imagination.

I wish I could find the exact quote, but you're going to have to trust me that he did talk about Little Tich. I wish I remember exactly what he said: memoirs don't have an index and I've already chopped through enough of it.  I don't want to fall into the Levant memoirs again: the man had talent to burn, and he burned it. Not only that, the name-dropping is deafening. He seemed to have an almost pathological need to align himself with the "greats", even if it was only the likes of Frank Fay or Shirley Booth (or the nightmarish Al Jolson).

I just have to tell one more story - I shouldn't, and I know I already told it many posts ago. Levant was playing the sidekick in a movie calledHumoresque, starring the ferocious man-eating diva Joan Crawford. He noticed she always brought knitting on the set with her and worked at it furiously between takes. She regaled the cast with amusing stories about her obsession: oh, I knit at dinner parties, I knit on airplanes, I knit in restaurants, I. . . 

"Do you knit while you fuck?" Levant asked.

The two never became friends.

CODA. When I got up this morning, I thought: damn! I have to find that reference to Little Tich. You know, the one in Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac. I KNOW it's in there somewhere (probably near the beginning of the book). So I went page by page, and on page 31: JACKPOT!

This is one of his charming, hair-raising mental hospital anecdotes, particularly heartbreaking because he demonstrates the same eccentric, devastating wit that made him so famous:

I remember one patient, a little girl who had a horrible splash of acne on her chin and always carried a box of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. She would jump into my lap like Little Tich (and that`s regressing to before I was even born) and make a big fuss over me.

There was one nurse of whom I was very fond. Her name was Nan.

I guess Little Tich (fortunately I forget her real name), who was so fond of me, resented Nan because she was very attractive. One day she hauled off with all her might and slapped Nan`s face. Nan didn`t move; she didn`t hit back - some of them do.

Little Tich was like a bantamweight version of Tony Galento. Later she got to hate me. We had to use the same toilet. God! The choreography that went on in there! She was the craziest kid I ever saw, but she also had more perception than the other patients. Sometimes the more ill you are, the more perceptive you are.

Oh yes.

CODA TO THE CODA. Poking around, you always find out more. I loved this little Stravinsky anecdote:

Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part". The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.

 

Grab it and pull: John Garfield and Oscar Levant

Don't watch all of this, because most of it is a little slow. The good part starts around 2:00 and is only about 45 seconds long.

To set this up, here's an interesting fragment of a conversation - at least *I* think it's interesting, and since it's my party and I'll cry if I want to, you simply have to come along - which took place in 1938.

Hedda Hopper: Well, when I saw you in 'Daughters', I gasped and said: 'There is Oscar Levant.'

John Garfield: You're the first person who's recognized it. When I read the script, that mad, sardonic genius of music flashed through my mind. And I based my character on him.

Levant's biographer explains that "it is clear from the wrinkles in his suit to the limp curl hanging over his forehead that Garfield had imagined Mickey Borden as Oscar Levant."

This is interesting, to me anyway, because it illustrates how someone can just remove someone else's skin and try it on, walk around in it.  If it sounds gruesome, it is. The movie in question, Four Daughters, is all about a proper New England family (or if they're not New England, they sure seem like it) and the lively and exuberant four marriageable young daughters who to seek to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and French kissing and stuff like that, except it's not allowed on the screen. And women will get pregnant without anyone ever attaining an erection. 

The only really bright spot in this otherwise too-Rockwell-ish thing is John Garfield's pirating the soul of Oscar Levant. He plays this bitter, sardonic tough wreathed in cigarette smoke who plays the piano like nobody's business, but never seems to catch a break. (Which means, of course, that the most beautiful of the four daughters throws herself down on the cement in front of him.) And he did it so well that no one knew who it really was. Levant was mostly famous as a radio personality at the time, though he'd played a sardonic sidekick in a few movies. But this isn't a caricature; it's that thing where you grab someone's guts and pull. 

It's doubtful Levant knew he had been taken over either, or vice-versa, because no one expected it. It was pretty hard to riff on such a strange, saturnine, yet oddly appealing personality. I vaguely remember Oscar going on the Jack Paar Show in the early '60s and talking about being in a mental hospital, describing it all in delicious detail as if he'd just come back from a vacation. The audience found it screamingly funny. When I found out, years and years later, that it was all true, that he DID do serious time for psychosis and drug addiction, it made my mouth fall open, and it still does.

Garfield had a gangsterish quality to him, and Levant did too, hanging out with an unsavory element, wearing Nick the Greek's cast-off overcoat and never wearing a hat. That alone would be grounds for incarceration in those days. I think Levant fell victim to his own wit, however, and became a sort of salon doggy, sitting up and performing his slicing and dicing, things we'd never say because they'd be seen as lacerating and even cruel. When he did it, it was somehow OK. Something about his face. And women loved him, God how they loved him, he must have had some secret or other.

It interests me also that Garfield and Levant did eventually star together in a delicious movie with Joan Crawford. Humoresque was gorgeously parodied on SCTV many years ago as New York Rhapsody, with Catherine O'Hara wearing shoulder pads that jutted out so rigidly you could practically sit on them. She played the sexy older woman with bags of money but an empty life, just looking for a young genius (the violin prodigy with talent to burn) to "encourage" and bankroll/patron-ize. This had obvious sexual benefits for both.

But the movie didn't need parody, for it was already over the top, noir-ish with a hint of sepia, a dark story of bitter failed romance and enraged artistry sucked dry by an insatiable carmine-lipped emotional vampire. The beach scene is a real classic, and they even show them riding horses together. The problem that a tough urban kid like Garfield never would have come within ten miles of horses is never addressed.

Levant is very funny, self-deprecating and caustic in this movie. He was allowed to write his own lines, I mean, just sit down and write dialogue for himself. This was almost unprecedented, but I guess directors must have realized he could do it better than anyone else. Who knows what the screenplay-writers thought. No one listens to them anyway.

A cry for help

As with so many things, I have tried to figure out the point of this. It's from a very bad movie starring Mitzi Gaynor, whose name I could never stand, called The I Don't Care Girl. In this number, which strains to be avant garde and flamboyant and all that uninhibited shit, she flings herself around in a slutty outfit and repeatedly shrieks, "I DON'T CARE".  How they got one of America's foremost concert pianists to put on a dog suit, or a wolf suit or whatever it is (first I thought it was a cat suit, but I don't think so) is beyond me, but he may have been stoned on pills. Alarmingly, I seem to be travelling backward in time to 2012 and my Oscar Levant phase, which was quite fascinating, at least for me.

Oscar Levant in drag. He still has that saturnine Slavic face, melancholy crumpled brow and incredible profile even when wearing this ridiculous old-lady suit. There was something truly poetic about him, original, and sad.

I almost want to apologize for this post, and for the last one about my dream, which came pretty much straight out of my journal. Though my life isn't bad now, my attitude toward my work couldn't be worse. Frustration and failed dreams are beginning to curdle into cynicism and bitterness. So what do I do?

Turn again?

That dream about talking to Harold - well, analyzing a dream can puncture it, leave it limp and lifeless. But I found it strange, or I do now,  that though I was fairly interested, I was not wildly excited nor even surprised that I could meet a man who had been dead for 40 years. He didn't really look like HL, though I knew it was him, in that weird way that people can shape-shift in dreams. He looked almost like a cartoon of himself or one of those standard 1950s black-and-white businessmen on TV sitcoms, the Dad on Dennis the Menace or something. Pulling out that list of ten questions was killing. If this was supposed to be some sort of interview, the dynamics had been completely reversed. He had taken control utterly, and obviously didn't really want to know anything about me or have any sort of real exchange. Just answer the questions, like a quiz. I grabbed the paper and crumpled it up and threw it away, and at first he looked disconcerted, but then -

BLANK.

The most crucial part of a dream liquefies and collapses like the centre of a caramel chocolate left out in the sun too long, or microwaved to see if it'll make it taste better. (I do that all the time, even though it's fairly idiotic and usually ruins the item in question.) We talked, yes, in a little more relaxed way, and I felt a bit hopeful, but I don't remember ANY of the content, though obviously that should have been the whole point of the dream. He got up to leave quickly - God, he WAS in black and white, though I wasn't. - and when I shouted after him, "Can I send you a copy of my novel?" he said, "Oh, no" in a sort of bright, breezy, utterly dismissive way.

What does it all mean? Well, what do YOU think it means? This chimera, this rare unicorn in the woods has retreated back into the mist. Now I feel a bit ridiculous to have taken this on. I should've written about Oscar Levant, instead. Or anything else. I allowed my imagination to go wild, as you are supposed to. Writer's imaginations are damnation, like a muscle that has been worked and worked, a huge grotesque bicep good for nothing except completely disabling your arm.

Dream-Harold's dismissal represents pretty much the reception of my novel, and at the same time, my lovely torturous Facebook experience grinds it into me daily how much more successful all other writers are, how they are wined and dined and laugh buoyantly out on the terrace while sipping rare champagne and smoking cigarettes in long holders. With those long white gloves on, you know, Deborah Kerr-type gloves that are sort of wrinkled, and immaculate as if you never touch anything because you don't have to. I however am left with my nose pressed against the windowpane. It was that way with my two other novels, and as a matter of fact, it has been that way throughout my entire life with the majority of things. The feeling is, I should go away now and not embarrass myself any further. For my failure embarrasses THEM, you see, and intimidates them, for hungry dogs lurk around the outside of the terrace with the men wearing their top hats and the women in the wrinkled gloves. Hungry dogs who never "made it", though everyone else did, of course, because God loves them and doesn't love you.

And that's what the dream means.

Postscript. I forgot about the Jerusalem part, watching the choir at the beginning of the dream. This may have just been some sort of crazy-ass thing that wasn't even connected, and it was full of the Dali-esque symbolism (speaking of melting) that suggests dada or theatre of the absurd.The hymn was significant to me in the past, quite significant in fact: it was on an old Christmas album of mine, and I used to thrill to it, cry, etc. It was Special in that I only listened to it at that time of year. Then I remembered more about it: it was on an old LP that I transferred to a tape, but the sound quality got worse and worse over the years. I made the mistake of sending the LP away somewhere to get it transferred to a CD, as was common then when nobody had any equipment to do it. When it did come back months later, it was a worse mess than the original. The album "faded in" at the start - in other words, it didn't just start normally, so it sounded like  ". . . oy to the WORLD. . ." When I complained about it, they said they did that with all their transfers "for effect". Imagine losing the first couple of bars of every song - this is effect?

So what does this have to do with anything? I suppose it's just part of my odd history with the song.

Which is all about the present world passing away and a New World, a new Jerusalem taking its place. The afterlife, as I understand it. It means crossing over. Leaving this world forever for greener and saintlier pastures, where the music is better and somebody listens to you.

Literal death, or just the death of my dream? The death of my dream is bloody painful. The theme of my life is family, with all its monumental struggles and irreplaceable rewards. That's it, that's  my assignment while here on earth, and I guess I'm not going to get beyond it no matter what my efforts. I often say, well, when you're lying on your deathbed (speaking of crossing over), is your career going to walk in and say, "I love you and I will never leave you until the end"? I don't see it.

And once again the scene was chang'd
New earth there seem'd to be,
I saw the Holy City
Beside the tideless sea
The light of God was on its streets
The gates were open wide,
And all who would might enter
And no one was denied.
No need of moon or stars by night,
Or sun to shine by day,
It was the new Jerusalem
That would not pass away

It was the new Jerusalem

That would not pass away
Jerusalem! Jerusalem!
Sing for the night is o'er
Hosanna in the highest,
Hosanna for evermore

Hosanna in the highest,

Hosanna for evermore!

(I don't set out to do it this way. But I don't like to do a whole lot of separate posts on the same subject, or, worse, incorporate new information into the original post. This whole blogging thing is a process, with deeper layers uncovered and connections made - perhaps the most valuable part of it. So sometimes I end up with a P. S. to the P. S. With all those hosannas at the end of The Holy City, I remembered something I had heard in a Bible class somewhere. The leader looked around the circle searchingly and asked, "OK, who knows what hosanna means?" Of course all the hands shot up and someone claimed it meant "Praise God!" or some-such. Then, shaking his head with the intense pleasure of proving everyone wrong and himself right, he said, "Oh, no, it doesn't."

And it doesn't.

Nothing comforting about the original meaning: it is a cry of anguish, fear and near-despair. Somewhere along the line, someone found that definition too "strong" and softened it. On Palm Sunday, the crowds were really shouting to Jesus, "Save us! Save us!" Kind of puts a whole new spin on it, doesn't it?)

Strong's Concordance

hósanna: save, we pray

Original Word: ὡσαννά

Part of Speech: Hebrew Form (Indeclinable)

Transliteration: hósanna

Phonetic Spelling: (ho-san-nah')

Short Definition: hosanna

Definition: (Aramaic and Hebrew, originally a cry for help), hosanna!, a cry of happiness.

HELPS Word-studies

5614 hōsanná – a transliteration of the Hebrew term (hôsî-âh-nā) meaning "Oh, save now!" or "Please save!"

[The -na suffix in Hebrew expresses intense emotion. 5614 (hōsanná) comes from two Hebrew roots meaning, "Save now!" (= "Save I pray!").]

Oscar Levant: one-man band

Oscar, reclining and reflective, begins to dream. He dreams he is in a vast concert hall. . . 

. . . playing Gershwin's Concerto in F with his cigarette-stained fingers. . . 

. . . and conducting at the same time. . . (and he was a real conductor so he isn't just waving his arms)

. . . and likewise the  percussion, he's really playing (an early

 example of cloning, or else he accelerates himself to the speed of sound)

My personal fave, cuz he looks so sexy. . . 

     Cute with a gong (and doesn't he look a bit like Buster Keaton?)

"Bravo! Bravo!"

(I stumbled on these while looking for gifs on Google. I keep looking for gifs on Google and finding MY gifs and thinking, why are MY gifs so much better than anyone else's? 'Strue, you know. These were made during my feverish Oscar Levant phase a couple of years ago. It was fascinating, and I am sure I could dig out more now if I wanted to. In fact, what brought me here in the first place was finding another Levant performance on YouTube. He shows up in odd places on Turner Classics and always adds something strangely appealing to otherwise-routine movies. He showed up in an abomination called The I Don't Care Girl, in which he played something so convoluted and strange that I couldn't guess who wrote it. Just ripped through it like chain lightning. He also wore a strange tiger-striped cat suit for one scene in which he had one line. There was nobody like him, and perhaps that was a good thing.)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Popocatapetl!

You know how it is - don't you? You're sitting there watching TV, mindlessly - in this case, a Doris Day movie with Oscar Levant in it (he doesn't get the girl - but, notably, he was the one who coined the infamous quote, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin"), when suddenly.

Just these things came into my mind, these - things. One was, how old is Johnny Depp anyway? He fell off a horse while playing Tonto and could have been kicked to death, and now there are rumors going around that he really is dead.

There were worse things, as Doris sang "You smile and I hear violins, it's magic. . ." with Oscar (needing the money no doubt)  playing florally on the piano. Then these words sprang into my head:  Harald Hardrada and Tostig. Surfeit. Popocatapetl. Along with them, meaningless bits of phrases: a surfeit of peaches and honey. Somebody died of it. And you know you'll never boil a kettle/on Mount Popocatapetl.

I found out something about some of it. Google seldom lets me down.  Harald Hardrada was some sort of English king or whatever, really boring stuff. I kept coming across the word thegn, which sounded like someone with a really bad headcold. I still have an old satire called 1066 and All That, and remember some obscure English show called The Norman Conquest, starring, I think, a comedian called Norman Wisdom.

Tostig, he sounds kind of Scandinavian or Norse or something, one of them Vikings maybe? But I thought they got lost in North America.

But Popocatapetl, now. That one I thought I recognized, from a jolly Aztec-colored, magenta-and-turquoise little poem we chanted in school. About how you can't boil a kettle /on Mount Popocatapetl, likely due to the altitude which makes people walk 2 feet off the ground.

But I couldn't find it. I only found some shred of a reference to it that led to nothing: the search terms gave what might be the first line, teasingly: "My friend if you should want to go and make your"- and when I googled it I got a whole long post about William the Conqueror. Well, at least it sort of matched up with my Tostig thing.

Yes, that could very well have been the first line. But I was quite blown away by some of the poems and song lyrics Popocatapetl inspired, such as:

ROMANCE

by: W.J. Turner

HEN I was but thirteen or so

I went into a golden land,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Took me by the hand.

 

My father died, my brother too,

They passed like fleeting dreams,

I stood where Popocatapetl

In the sunlight gleams.












 

I dimly heard the master's voice

And boys far-off at play,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had stolen me away.

 

I walked in a great golden dream

To and fro from school--

Shining Popocatapetl

The dusty streets did rule.

 

I walked home with a gold dark boy,

And never a word I'd say,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Had taken my speech away:




 









I gazed entranced upon his face

Fairer than any flower--

O shining Popocatapetl

It was thy magic hour:




The houses, people, traffic seemed

Thin fading dreams by day,

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

They had stolen my soul away!















I would assume this poem alludes to homoerotic love, hidden behind a mountain where it has a chance of staying hidden. But it occurs to me that those Aztec-sounding names are wonderful when inserted into poetry, not to mention Popocatapetl, its six syllables rising and falling symmetrically like ocean waves.




But soft - here's a lovely song lyric by a group I've never heard of, Krux:




In the eye in the heart in the flesh
In my mind all the time
Silver fountains golden castles made of ashes
Crimson tide blood like wine

Earth mother birth goddess
I love you like no other
Within you around you
A stream of fire inside you
Earth mother birth goddess
I love you like no other
Within you around you
I can't exist without you











Dream forever prince of nowhere man of shade
I cast my fire where I go
Tears and treason in my prison night and day
You destroyer of my soul

Earth mother birth godess
I love you like no other
Within you around you
A stream of fire inside you
Earth mother birth goddess
I love you like no other
Within you around you
I can't exist without you















And here, this one more:







Mexico: Popocatepetl, the Mountain

Popocatepetl

William Haines Lytle (1826–1863)

(Excerpt)     PALE peak, afar Gilds thy white pinnacle a single star, While sharply on the deep blue sky thy snows   In deathlike calm repose.     The nightingale         5 Through Mira Flores bowers repeats her tale, And every rose its perfumed censer swings   With vesper offerings.     But not for thee, Diademed king, this love-born minstrelsy,         10 Nor yet the tropic gales that gently blow   Through these blessed vales below. *        *        *        *        *     Deep in thy heart Burn on vast fires, struggling to rend apart Their prison walls, and then in wrath be hurled         15   Blazing upon the world.     In vain conspire Against thy majesty tempests and fire; The elemental wars of madness born,   Serene, thou laugh’st to scorn.         20     Calm art thou now As when the Aztec, on thine awful brow, Gazed on some eve like this from Chalco’s shore,   Where lives his name no more.     And thou hast seen         25 Glitter in dark defiles the ominous sheen Of lances, and hast heard the battle-cry   Of Castile’s chivalry.     And yet again Hast seen strange banners steering o’er the main,         30 When from his eyrie soared to conquest forth   The eagle of the North.     Yet at thy feet, While rolling on, the tides of empire beat, Thou art, O mountain, on thy world-piled throne,         35   Of all, unchanged alone.     Type of a power Supreme, thy solemn silence at this hour Speaks to the nations of the Almighty Word   Which at thy birth was stirred.         40     Prophet sublime! Wide on the morning’s wings will float the chime Of martial horns; yet mid the din thy spell   Shall sway me still,—farewell















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