Oscar Levant: a spill of brilliance

 

Oscar Levant, Oscar Levant! I am too exhausted now from a truly gruesome sick-week  to go into a long prologue about who he was, and what he has meant to me over the years.  So I will just use a canned intro:

Oscar Levant (December 27, 1906 – August 14, 1972) was an American concert pianist, composer, music conductor, bestselling author, radio game show panelist and personality, television talk show host, comedian and actor. He was as famous for his mordant character and witticisms, on the radio and in movies and television, as for his music.

I just finished reading, or re-reading, a superb biography of Levant, A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. It's one of those "old friend" books that  I re-read again and again for a certain kind of comfort. Through a lot of deep research and vibrant writing, the authors capture the Byzantine complexity of a figure so contradictory and fraught with paradox that it's hard to know how they ever pulled it off. Second only to the Marion Meade bio of Dorothy Parker, What Fresh Hell is This? (which I usually re-read back-to-back with the Oscar one), it's the best biography I've encountered among the at-least-a-hundred-or-so I have read and reviewed.

Oscar was almost hopelessly fxx'ed up, to say it politely, with a host of psychiatric ills that included  bipolar disorder, OCD, runaway anxiety, intermittent paranoia, prescription drug addiction, and even a splash of benevolent narcissism. But there was so much more to him than that. Over the many years, his vast assortment of friends noticed and celebrated the little boy inside the man, the one who played hide-and-seek behind the great wall of his cynicism.  A lifelong friend eulogized him thus: "For behind the facade of the world's oldest enfant terrible  lurked the sweetest, warmest, most vulnerable man I've ever known. . . I loved him." Words such as "innocent" and "pure" crop up, confounding those who so completely bought his sardonic public persona. One doctor described him as an “extremely worthwhile human being”, a rather strange description which he set down in a formal medical report just as Levant was about to be thrown to the wolves of the psychiatric hospital system - again. He didn’t want his patient to be written off, forgotten about,  or completely devoured. 

Levant is mostly remembered as a razor wit, which I think was the very least of his almost frightening mass of talents. I refuse to quote even one of his "isms" here, because I am tired of them and no longer like to see them. He was, as writer and friend Christopher Isherwood described him, "completely unmasked at all times," and this unusually bare-faced quality startled, surprised, and (paradoxically) delighted people. He threw them completely off-guard and off-balance, but instead of being anxious or offended by it, they actually anticipated and enjoyed it. I can't think of another performer who did that, knew how, or could get away with it. 

Turner Classics coincidentally happened to show 5 or 6 of his movies recently, with an embalmed-looking Michael Feinstein introducing them. His introductions mostly consisted of long chains of Oscar-isms which we've all heard dozens of times before. Feinstein is the perennial "Gershwin source" because he early on managed to cultivate George's sister-in-law Lee, and was thus handed a career as fetch-and-carry boy to Gershwin's memory. He also ingratiated himself with Oscar's glamorous actress-wife June, a more complex figure in Oscar's life than anyone else seems to recognize.  It's never spelled out, but I can see the degree to which she acted as an enabler for Oscar's miasma of physical and mental miseries. As a child performer with a drunken Irish father, caretaking was  second nature to her, the kind of support which is a  knitting up and an unravelling at the same time.

 

After not seeing these movies for a few years, watching him perform, sometimes in a pianistic "blob" right in the middle of a third-rate movie, was absolutely hair-raising and almost unbelievable to see and hear. Those abnormally long, slender, piano-machine fingers flew so fast that most of the time they were a blur. His glittering precision inspired a critic to comment that the notes spilled "like brilliants from a broken necklace".  His close friend Vladimir Horowitz (a true buddy - they hit it off immediately, both melancholy Russian Jews  burdened with the gift of being musical prodigies) claimed that Levant was the superior pianist, even the “best”, meaning best in the world. 

When Oscar played, his face was usually masked, a “poker face”,  which is odd given his otherwise “unmasked” quality. Sometimes he tipped his head back, but that's about all. Only rarely did you see any pleasure on his face when he played. He gave it, but couldn't feel it.
But here I  want to insert a sentence that jumped out at me just this minute, when I randomly opened his bio: "While the Swopes' guests were gossiping or playing card games or croquet, someone would invariably be at the piano - George Gershwin, Deems Taylor, or Irving Berlin. Levant would take his place there as well, but only when no one asked. He would play only when he felt like it (see Dorothy Parker's perfectly accurate description of this, below), never on demand - but when he did he would play beautifully." This incredible Last Supper-like  gathering of musical giants makes me want to say, "Pass the salt, Jesus".

I wonder why this sudden return to Levant, except I don’t. I'm pretty sick right now, need surgery, am in almost perpetual  pain, and though I don't usually share it on this blog, I feel a certain desolation that I have hardly any readership left (though, to be sure, I cherish those few that I have), and pursue it now mainly as a sort of therapeutic journal to keep me busy and distracted.  It seems like synchronicity that those movies  came on TCM, all of which I've seen multiple times, just as I came back around to the Levant bio again. Maybe I need to see an example of suffering that is FAR worse than mine, both in frustrated potential in so many areas (despite his considerable fame), and utter, flat-out wretchedness, with both major mental illness (misdiagnosed, mismanaged, and blatantly mistreated) and studio-driven addiction that nearly killed him. All this with a jaw-droppingly neglected, serious and chronically painful heart condition: he was pumped full of Demerol, then pushed back out there so he could keep on performing.

His most energetic performance in The Band Wagon (a movie I just hate, though it's been called the best movie musical ever made) came just six weeks after he nearly died of a serious heart attack and refused to go to the hospital, because he was terrified the insurance companies would dump  him and he’d never work again. So he hunkered down at home with a hired nurse, barely recovering before he dove back into work under an unbreakable contract.

The appalling thing is, he was right - they WOULD have dumped him, maybe forever. He was the breadwinner in the family, so needed to work to raise his three musically-gifted daughters and send them to Julliard.  As with Garland, this was an engineered addiction that ran him into the ground and even cut his life short. He did not play a version of himself in The Band Wagon, that musical dog's breakfast – it was really the only time he didn’t.  In yet another strange Levantine twist, he based his character on his good friend Adolph Green, the man who wrote the script.

It was a heroic effort, and for those who didn't know the circumstances, he covered his pain as well as any broken man could. But he wasn't up to it and was quite literally risking his life. Though his wife June was loyal and no doubt loved him, she didn't stand in the way of any of this nonsense, and too  often even seemed to  encourage it. Indoctrinated as a child performer, her sense of "the show must go on" was amplified to the point of near-ruthlessness. Ironically, he told everyone on set that he had been in a mental hospital because it was "safer" than revealing his heart attack.  I am not making this up!

But his mental illness was his thing, his “shtick”, and though everyone knew he was telling the truth, they found it hilariously funny. I still don't understand this and wonder if he appealed to the worst qualities of schadenfreude and sadism in his audience. He brought this on himself, of course, jacking open his chest to display his broken heart for shockingly comic effect - but what can you do when you’re down and nearly dead from mental illness? You “sell” it, which is what he felt he had to do. 

He lived to be my age, and I love the way he died, taking a little nap upstairs while waiting for Candice Bergen to come over and interview him. It is the strangest but most beautiful death I ever heard of. But I have always felt that, one way or another, you die the way you live. I have a mental image of Oscar borne up on airy wings to Eternity, pianistic diamonds  in a glittering spill behind him. 

I can't say much more about all this, though I certainly could. Originally, I was going to do a comparison of Levant with Dorothy Parker. It's not the comparison that would be hard, but doing all the backstory on Parker, whom a lot of  people probably won't even know about. The parallels between them are surprisingly many. They sometimes crossed paths, had friends in common,  liked each other, and even wrote about each other with great admiration and affection. Oscar eulogized Dorothy:

". . . a tiny woman, fragile and helpless, with a wispy will of iron. She loved dogs, little children, President Kennedy, and lots and lots of liquor. Even her enemies were kind to her; she brought out the maternal in everyone. At her cruelest, her voice was most caressive - the inconstant nymph. She was one of my favorite people."

And Dorothy on Oscar, no less a perfect encapsulation of the man's dizzying complexity:

"Over the years, Oscar Levant's image - that horrible word - was of a cocky young Jew who made a luxurious living by saying mean things about his best friends and occasionally playing the piano for a minute if he happened to feel like it. . . They also spread the word around that he was sorry for himself. He isn't and he never was; he never went about with a begging bowl extended for the greasy coins of pity. He is, thank heaven, not humble. He has no need to be.

He has no meanness; and it is doubtful if he ever for a moment considered murder. . .

Well. This was a losing fight before it started, this striving to say things about Oscar Levant. He long ago said everything about everything - and what Oscar Levant has said, stays said."

CODA. OK, there had to be one! I was fascinated to read that in his very first picture, John Garfield would play a character very closely based on his good friend Oscar Levant. This was in a movie called Four Daughters, and this clip might give you an idea of how well he pulled it off.  

Amen.

More troll stop-motion gifs!

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I am, I really AM working on a serious post for this blog, about the common points/affinities between legends Oscar Levant  and Dorothy Parker. I've been obsessed with both of them for years, and after re-reading the Levant bio, I just have to write something about this. They knew each other well, as it turned out, and liked each other a lot,  though it's doubtful they had too many deep conversations. They didn't have to, because they "got"  each other on a very deep level, which is never more profoundly shared than in the valley of intractible pain. I made notes on a little piece of lined paper in the car,  stuck a few sticky-notes on top of that, typed it in point form on my Word program, and that's as far as I've got it -  but meantime, enjoy my dancing trolls.

Gershwin home movies: who ARE these people?

Oh how I wish I had encountered this little snippet of greatness when I was in my Oscar Levant fever back in 2012-13.  Now, every time I ferret out a snippet of Gershwania (which rhymes with mania), I find Oscar. In this clip he's acting more than outrageous, crouching on the ground beside George and pulling up his pantleg, then lunging at him as if to kiss him, only to be pushed away. One can see the contrast, a Mutt n' Jeff quality at work: the long and lean, rather princely being who knew he was a genius, as opposed to the squatty, bulging-eyed, cigarette-sucking madman, the Mephistophelian jester at Gershwin's royal court.

Even here, though, there's a funny vibe going on. I'm partway through my first Gershwin bio, a short one by Walter Rimler, and it's more of an overview, a way of preparing myself for the big one by Howard Pollack, considered the textbook. I can't wait to read about all the ramifications of his brain tumour and the bizarre symptoms that proceeded it, such as squashing up chocolates and rubbing them all over his body.

(Did he think it was cocoa butter, I wonder?)

But I want to get close, and it doesn't seem as if Gershwin HAD a "close". He may not have. His work could burgeon with emotion, and some of it, particularly Porgy and Bess, can be very dark indeed. But what about the man? Did anything or anyone really stick to him?

I see him as being charming and charismatic, not to mention self-absorbed as a baby, but having a touch-me-not quality about him that must have infuriated his women. Yes, "women": he kind of had them in bulk. In fact, one young woman, one of many disciples who had moved her husband and children to New York just to be near him, finally broke down and asked him, "Do you love me?" He answered, "No."

The upshot of all this was that he attracted a very large flock of fairweather friends.

"Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: "I felt on the ­instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

And while this is the stuff of greatness, it's also the seeds of codependence, the breeding ground of hangers-on. I am sure that everyone sucked on his magnetism, drained it dry. Being quite naive and underdeveloped emotionally, with almost no capacity for real intimacy, he might not  even have noticed that he was being vampirized. But loyalty actually ran perilously thin in his life. When he was terminally ill, Ira's wife Lee banished him to another apartment, not wanting to see him fall down and drool. The multiple girl friends, not quite knowing what to do, drifted away. His personality became more and more bizarre and unpredictable. 

If friends trickled away, Oscar Levant didn't. He stuck by his friend doggedly, even though he had a severe phobia of illness. There was a bit of speculation in the Levant biography that he was sexually attracted to Gershwin. I've also heard people speculate that GG was gay, bisexual or asexual, and that his girlfriend-gathering amounted to a massive coverup.

Levant seems to have loved and even devoured women, until he got married to a gorgeous dame (June Gale) who loved and looked after him for the rest of his life. After that, there's not much about affairs. But what about that undercurrent? All of Levant's close male friends (Copland, Horowitz, Isherwood, and on and on) were known to be gay. In his very strange Memoirs of an Amnesiac, he mentions homosexuals/homosexuality many, many times, as if he's driving around and around and doesn't know where to park.

It doesn't matter, in the long run. But what is interesting is how Levant WASN'T left alone. He could be an awful curmudgeon, caustic, and even dangerous when into the prescription drugs. But people stuck by him. Codependence, yes, but this time it turned out differently.

How we die, I've always thought, says a lot about the way we've lived. Gershwin died in a hospital room after failed brain surgery, his temperature 106.5. No one was with him. Now we know people in comas often hear and know and sense. Did he know he had been abandoned, allowed to die in an empty room, not even a doctor or a nurse at his side?

Levant, now. Another strange death, but different. Candice Bergen, then a young and gorgeous magazine reporter, had interviewed him for an article, and came back the next day to take a few pictures. Oscar was looking forward to another nice chat with this beautiful woman, played the piano for a while, said he felt tired, then went upstairs for a nap.

The next scene was surreal: Candice Bergen standing by Oscar Levant's bed, realizing there would be no interview. He was cold and inert, his wife making frantic"arrangements" on the phone. After all the thrashing around, the mental anguish, drug abuse, and (it seems likely) agonizing conflict about his sexuality, his life ebbed away as gently as the tide.

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Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in Black

Since my enthusiasm so often runs ahead of my knowledge, I'm writing this in advance of knowing anything about my subject. Or not much. I have ordered a biography from Amazon called Oscar Levant: A Talent for Genius, one of those 500-page doorstops I love so much, but for this post I'm pretty much winging it.

He was a strange one, and I have strange feelings for him, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Who wouldn't love a man who could play the piano like that? NOBODY could play the piano like that, poetic sensitivity melded with a gangster's rat-a-tat-tat aggressiveness.

Nobody looked like him either, with that sensual, almost Polynesian mouth, the flop of hair that whipped around as he played, the constant manic bobbing and weaving (particularly later in life when he was in the throes of God-knows-what sort of addiction/affliction) reminding me of Michael J. Fox. The grief-stricken, fathoms-deep eyes, the forlorn eyes of an abandoned child, that could quickly flip over into fierceness, to a sense of "yeah, make me", or even blanked-out indifference. 

Oscar Levant was an updated Oscar Wilde without the effeminacy. You knew he wasn't gay by the way he eyed women. Only his personal charm saved it from being a leer. Some glamorous dame would kiss him on the cheek (he played the harmless, charming, eccentric sidekick in all his movies) and he'd lunge at her neck. He got away with lines that would have been censored without that lightning-stroke, oddly monotone delivery: "It's a good thing Marilyn Monroe has gone kosher, because now Arthur Miller can eat her."

Seductive, but somehow - offputting -  as he evolved into a sort of comic hired gun, an outrageous joke-machine that spewed them out on demand. The narrow-eyed, double-breasted gangster demeanour, cigarette constantly dangling from those Filipino lips, deteriorated most awfully over the years as mental illness slowly consumed him. He ended up, no kidding, a real bona fide mental patient, institutionalized, getting shock treatments right during movie shoots so that he had to have himself signed in and out for his scenes (at one point actually playing a mental patient, a part he described as "Pirandelloish").

That's sad. That's sadder, even, than the elderly Dorothy Parker and her poodle called Cliche holed up in her fusty ash-and-bottle-strewn apartment, watching soap operas all day as her friends edged away from her one by one.

Oscar Levant had friends aplenty, but did they keep him around just because he was so entertaining? Did he sit down and think about all those viper-strike lines, actually write them down, or did they just pop out of him like Athena from the head of Zeus?  He had an extremely loyal wife who became a caretaker in later life, and three pretty, vivacious daughters. He had a lively, varied career that most people would envy, considerable fame and adoration, and at the same time the most awful, soul-destroying depression that finally claimed him and sucked him under. It's hard for me to even think about it. 

People sometimes called him a sellout; he did coattail on his close association with George Gershwin, who did Levant a big favour by croaking at age 38. Levant was automatically assumed to be his successor, but who can follow George Gershwin? Not even George Gershwin. Oscar Levant composed, but it doesn't hold together somehow. He's a  sort of Schoenberg on ice, a "look-at-me-I'm-a-composer" performing triple axels at the keyboard. The music is technically good, but it doesn't say anything.

His classic, often-misquoted line was, "There is a fine line betwen genius and insanity. I have erased that line." He constantly joked about suicide and his own craziness, causing an uneasiness and even fear that, for some uknown reason, was viewed as hilariously funny. He was, I think, the first shock comedian.

So, that's what I know, and it ain't much because it's less than what's in the Wikipedia entry. I think his doorstop of a biography (which I will consume in installments propped up in bed before sleeping) will be a wild ride, or else it will be boring, as some biographies inexplicably are.

About these pictures. It was a big disappointment to discover there were very few good photos of him, except for the sardonic, Edward G. Robinson-esque pose at the piano which was a publicity shot for his most famous film, An American in Paris. Others were grainy and dusty-looking, almost mildewed, as if no one had bothered to take care of them.  Contrast this with the hundreds of razor-sharp black-and-white shots I easily found of Harold Lloyd, even going back to pre-1920.

So I took the ones I could find, many of them extracted from old album covers, and because they are in the public domain, and because Oscar said I could, I tinkered with them. Something leaped out at me, a kind of predatory energy. There were so many dimensions to him. He looked different in every shot (and I've excluded some of the later, really painful ones). In a few of them he looked like a young Alan Arkin. 

Out of those ancient grey lithographs emerged  Shakespearian spectres, that is, if Shakespeare had dealt in slighty off-colour wisecracks. And many of the black-and-whites, particularly very dark concert shots, exploded into colour, which as far as I know is impossible (i.e. it's relatively easy to go from color to black and white, but how is it possible to go the other way?). But in every case, no matter how much I altered the original, he was still Oscar. His essence came through every one of the masks. 

People were known to say things like, "Oh! That's Oscar Levant. You know, he could have been. . . " But if hehad "been", as they say, we'd know nothing about him now. He would've had a stellar career as a concert pianist, then sunk out of sight, with only a few musty-smelling LP covers to remind us of who he was.

Instead we have quite a few "sidekick" movies where he's somehow irresistable in his craziness, and a few YouTube videos that are a little disturbing to watch, as he becomes a sort of tame circus tiger on pointless panel shows. He even does a turn on his own show, and the one surviving kinescope is excruciating: he slurs and bobs around like Ray Charles at the piano while his wife sits close beside him like a watchdog, making sure he doesn't fall over the edge.

And he did fall over the edge. What's on the other side of it? Nothing, or a reunion with his pal Gershwin, or celestial piano keys waiting to be played? Considering the chaos of his life, I think oblivion would have been more than enough.

CODA: I'm not sure I'll be writing about Levant again. In fact I kind of hope he won't be another Harold: making an Oscar doll would just be too challenging. But I did find out something about his death, so I'd better get to it now. Too bad he wasn't around to enjoy it, for he was morbid enough that I think he would have found the bizarre circumstances amusing.

Though everyone seems to think he was a complete wreck at the end, like everyone else with serious mental illness he also had his good days. Days when he could noodle around on the piano, talk to his wife June, take a nap. This is what happened: he went upstairs to lie down for a while (for, at age 65, he was already frail from years of drug abuse), to rest up for an interview he'd be having later in the day with a certain fresh-faced young photojournalist.

Her name was Candice Bergen.

Late in the afternoon when the doorbell rang, his wife welcomed Candy in, all bubbly and excited about meeting this living legend. June called upstairs:

"Oscar! She's here!"

No response.

"Going deaf, obviously. Oscar! Come on down now."

"Oh, it's OK, Mrs. Levant, if he wants to. . . "

"OSCAR." She looked at Candy in puzzlement. "What's he up to? I'll be right back."

Mrs. Levant went upstairs and into the bedroom. He was curled on his side in a fetal position, the way he always napped, the corner of a blanket childishly wrapped around his head.

"Oscar."

The silence was profound.

"Oscar." She touched his shoulder, then drew back with a gasp.

It must have been hard for Candice Bergen, being assigned a plum interview like that, an interview withpictures,  to have to report back to her editor, "Uh, sorry, but I couldn't do it."

"Couldn't do it? Why not?"

"He's dead."

"Dead?"

"Dead."

"Oh. Are you - "

"Sure? Yes, I'm sure."

"Oh."

"He's sure, too."

Then they both disgraced themselves - and each other - by collapsing into helpless laughter.

I'm glad, though. Not glad he's dead - I'm not that mean - but glad that such a turbulent, often agonizing life ended in such sweet surrender. It was like the tide going out: his heart stopped; it was time to go home.

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I was dredging around for some decent photos of George Gershwin - for my Facebook profile picture, as a matter of fact - cuzzadafact I'm kind of on a Gershwin kick now. The music frightens me, it is so gorgeous and unbelievable, yet in another way it pushes me back. Anyway, as sometimes happens, I found a cool picture of Oscar Levant instead, and it turned out to be on MY BLOG. I got reading the post, and liked it. In fact it's better than most of the shit I post now. . . I confess. . . so I'll rerun it, in hopes I'll get more than 17 views. This time.

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The Gershwin cartoon: it's here! It's very clear!

I was gobsmacked to find this. I went on YouTube and searched under "Gershwin cartoons", knowing such an absurd thing could never be. And here he is in the Rhapsody in Blue segment from Disney's Fantasia 2000, obviously based on the famous Hirschfeld caricature of the 1930s:

I can't find Oscar Levant, but this fellow looks a little bit like him, especially the coffee:

But Oscar, of course, is infinitely sweeter. . . 

Up in smoke: what happened to George Gershwin?

George #1: dredged out of rare archival footage, in turn dredged up by documentarians. Here we see the godlike, melancholy Gershwin portraits come to life. The guy looks like Basil Rathbone on the surface of things. The pipe, the regal bearing. I assume he's either courtside or At Home, or at the home of some bigwig like Schoenberg. 

George #2. This one reveals so much: the godlike creature casually stretching, the playfully rough character grabbing the neck of some poor unfortunate female (who doesn't look too happy about it), the jauntily histrionic piano-playing with whoever-it-is. Not Oscar Levant, we know that much.

When you keep seeing the same 10 or 15 seconds played over and over again, it either drives you crazy or helps you see more and more in these tiny moments, these gestures, the setting of what looks like director's chairs in front of a massive, flat-trimmed hedge. This really happened, it did, and it spins on your hand, a few seconds of reality played over and over as no one ever dreamed it could be.

George #3. This might be Schoenberg, but then again, I think S. was older than this at the time (early '30s?). Whoever it is, they're playing piano four hands, and goofing around facing the camera like little kids. 

George #4. The long and lanky man with the bearing of royalty Walks Out on the Patio, jerks a treat away from the dog, unfolds a chaise.

George #5, my least-favorite, but perhaps the most revealing. When the dog, which he has already deprived of a treat, won't jump up on the chaise with him (reminding me of Hitler's cowering Blondi), he jerks it up forcefully by the scruff as it resists him with a flinch. I am reminded of a magician yanking a rabbit out of a hat.

George #6: again, in slow, and fade to black.

Given how world-famous he was, why don't we have more archival footage of Gershwin performing? The last gif (below) of GG racing through I Got Rhythm and bowing like a jerky puppet was all I found, and it was described as "extremely rare". He lived until 1938, for God's sake. This wasn't the Stone Age. By that time Oscar Levant (usually seen as a much lesser light) had a solid career as a composer and pianist, and had already written a book and appeared in a couple of movies. Where was George?

And after that, a fade to nothingness. A brain tumour carried him off, horribly, at age 37. His life sprang wildly out of shape, his behaviour became crazed, he smeared chocolate all over himself (though he was surely not the first - or last - to do that; it was just that no one expected George Gershwin to do it. My theory is that he was making himself up in blackface, and missed.)

His sister-in-law Lee Gershwin had a hate on for George, and as he fell out of his chair in restaurants and endured agonizing headaches, she pushed him away in disgust, banishing him from friends and family. It was all psychosomatic, you see, a result of the strain of being a Great Composer. Never did anyone think to look under the hood, where a golf-ball-sized malignant tumor was destroying his temporal lobe.  By the time they looked, it was too late, there was nothing they could do. His temperature shot up to 106.5 degrees, and he soon died, going up in flame hotter than the fires of his genius.

I have only barely begun to touch Gershwin, though like most afficionados I used to think I knew him pretty well. I am becoming fascinated now (oh boy, look out, here comes another obsession that will take up a couple dozen posts!) as I wait for a bio I ordered from Amazon. Not the 900-page one - I'm waiting to see if the shorter one whets my appetite for more, or puts me off. I bogged down in two massive Twain biographies when it all got to be too much. 

I always felt GG was snobby, cool, asexual, full of himself, if vital and driven and full of energy. The music always struck me as a bit crazy, and sometimes excruciatingly beautiful. It was as if the composer and the rest of George were two beings. His death was just plain godawfully horrible, no one deserves to die like that, exiled even from one's own mind. So what was going on there, were things just burning too hot to carry on in in any state of health?

More will be revealed.

APPENDA (UM, IX). I remembered a story from maybe 40 years ago, when my brother Walt, a professional musician, told it to me. At the time I thought, oh, this is what musicians talk about around the water cooler or at the bar or wherever. But it's a damn good story, and as usual I wondered if I dreamed it.  I looked it up, and, yes, here it is!  I found several versions of it (in fact I just deleted one that stunk), but I like this one best, embedded in a story in the Wall Street Journal. There are various versions, of course - and sometimes the teller is actually in the car with Gershwin, or even driving it. If it never happened, then perhaps it should have.

Throughout his brief life—he died in 1937 at age 38—Gershwin had the golden touch. The phenomenon of George Gershwin astonished everyone—not least Gershwin himself. He was famous for his immodesty, except that in him it came off as something else, self-amazement perhaps. "You know the extraordinary thing about my mother," he once said, "she's so modest about me." When a friend in Hollywood was driving wildly, ­Gershwin alerted him: ­"Careful, man, you have ­Gershwin in the car." Listening for the first time to a full ­orchestral rendering of the ­opera "Porgy and Bess," he ­exclaimed: "This music is so wonderful, so beautiful that I can hardly believe I wrote it."


Not F. Scott Fitzgerald but George Gershwin may have been the reigning figure of the Jazz Age. Gershwin holding forth at the piano at parties in Manhattan, everyone gathered around as if by magnetic force—these scenes were among the symbolic tableaux of the 1920s. Samuel Behrman, the playwright and memoirist, described his reaction when he first heard Gershwin at one such party: "I felt on the ­instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

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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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