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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Harold Lloyd: the graceful ghost

Like so many things, this piece has a history.

God knows how many years ago it was - could have been 15, could have been 20 or more. It was on the radio, so I didn't know who was playing the piano. It was one of those scenarios where I was stopped dead in my tracks. The armload of books I was carrying slid onto the floor, and my knees unlocked.

This first performance of a piece that I didn't even know the name of was something that grabbed my gutstrings and never quite let go. It was a long, long time until I heard it again and could put a name to it. I just sat there in a strange altered state, wondering how mere chords could stir emotion from the very bottom of the glass.

I never heard the piece played that way again. That first version was played smokily, stealthily, the chords impossibly elongated, with mists rising from it, a black cat sneaking along a midnight fence, or some melancholy gent in an expensive, rumpled suit walking home alone from empty revelry in a nightclub.  

Yes, and years and years and years blew by, as years always do.

When I found it again and found the title and the composer (Graceful Ghost Rag by William Bolcom), I was unsatisfied with every version I heard. Everyone played it too fast, too jauntily, almost player-piano-style, when the original was (I thought) meant to be interpreted with indigo sadness. At one point I found a YouTube version with a kid playing it, and it was bloody good, if lacking polish. For a while, it was my touchstone. Then I found this one, beautifully rendered by Barron Ryan. Not quite like the first, smoky midnight version, but lovingly approached with a tender melancholy that evokes a certain familiar presence.

When I began to write The Glass Character, my lovesick paean to Harold Lloyd, this piece became its theme song.  It somehow perfectly captured Muriel Ashford's hopelessly-fated passion for a man she could never have, a genius who did not portray so much as embody his character and evolve, quicksilverish,  from "knockabout" comedian to superb tragicomic actor. While Muriel watches in blissful, agonizing erotic thrall.

I like to say I loved writing this novel, and that's true. But it was also anguish. The writing took 18 months - and just about every day, I couldn't wait to get to the computer. But that, as they say, was the easy part. Getting any attention for it at all took three years. Three years of being told it was too melodramatic, too boring, too irrelevant. I've heard many a comment about my work and have learned to roll with it all, but the fact nobody wanted Harold was a misery to me. Why had I been lifted so high, only to be dropped with such a sickening thud?

The truth is, at some point I had become Muriel. The more I watched those incredible movies, the more enthralled I became. There is a surrealism in some of his earlier films in which he becomes a sort of cartoon cat-figure, impossibly agile and fast. Then as time goes on, his plots become infinitely more complex, deeper. Those who criticize his work for being too surface or "mechanical" haven't seen him weep in Girl Shy or The Freshman, haven't seen his tender yearning as a male Cinderella in The Kid Brother, haven't even seen his clock-climbing epic, Safety Last!, in which he does everything for love.

And he does. Everything. For love. He singlehandedly invented the genre of romantic comedy, and indeed, there is something romantic about him, the tightly-wound, impossibly agile body, the thick black head of hair, the eyes a little bedroomy behind the glasses with no glass in them. This is why Muriel's heart gets torn apart, and why she keeps coming back for more. There was an eleven-month period during the three years that it took me to get a contract that I just stopped. I quit Harold altogether. I stopped watching my favorite YouTube videos and perusing Google images for choice photos and even watching those DVDs I had become so addicted to.

I just stopped. I couldn't stand it any more - I was dying inside. Perhaps part of me hadn't quite given up, but I was trying to. I knew the novel was good. Why would I waste my time (or theirs) if it wasn't? But even when The Artist won Best Picture, editors were telling me things like, "The public isn't interested in silent movies."

Well.

I have a contract now, I'm with Thistledown and I will publish in spring 2014. I wanted to do it the traditional way, because to be honest I don't have a clue how to self-publish and hate taking "writer's courses" (when I could probably teach most of them, so there). I'm too old to go back to square one, and besides, I still believe in the process. So I told myself, "Just get the book out there. Then we'll see what happens." Would Harold back me up on this?

I have written before about Lloyd synchronicity, the eerie way in which the name Lloyd would come up four or five times in a day (and I devoted a whole post, which I might re-post along with some of my other Harold pieces, about "the church at the corner of Gloria and Lloyd", a huge brick tabernacle standing in the middle of nowhere). There is much more, of course, but I have been hesitant to put it out there, some of it is so odd and unbelievable. Throughout my life I've known mediums and spiritualist healers, and while I do not quite ascribe to all of it, I don't throw it all away either. 

So if any of it is true, I have been in touch with a ghost who is graceful indeed, and his music still plays in  my head on a continuous loop that might just last forever.

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Stars and bars. . . forever

When I stumbled upon this video - well, actually, I didn't stumble because, triggered by my reflections on Vladimir Horowitz, I was deliberately trying to scare up some of his playing - I could not stop laughing, gasping, and just sitting in awe. This is one quirkily fabulous piece of music, a transformation of the ultimate American marching tune into an elegant Chopin-esque processional. I'm not sure when this was recorded, but it's certain Horowitz already had total command of it (he wrote the transcript himself, of course, and no one else dared tinker with it after that).

I thought of this one because of an interview I saw, so long ago that it appeared in my memory as grainy and bleached, like a dream or a bad colour TV. That's because, according to that resurrective/great gettin'-up mornin' of YouTube, it appeared on 60 Minutes in 1977. Mike Wallace, obviously fascinated with his subject matter, begs and pleads "Vlodya" to play his infamous version of the Sousa march, The Stars and Stripes Forever. At first he resists, insisting he has forgotten it (which he largely has), but finally he caves and goes over to the piano and just pounds the hell out of it, his foot jammed on the loud pedal, but somehow it still sounds elegant and impressive.

 

Horowitz went on and on until he fell over with age, and made lots of mistakes in concert, but couldn't seem to stop. I promise you, I won't get into his friend "xxxxx xxxxxx" and his own premature retirement from the stage. It interests me that Horowitz suffered so much from depression and substance abuse, and it saddens me too. This Wiki entry seems like a variation on the theme I dealt with a few posts ago about Who's Gay in Hollywood:

Personal life

In 1933, in a civil ceremony, Horowitz married Toscanini's daughter Wanda. Although Horowitz was Jewish and Wanda Catholic, this was not an issue, as neither was observant. As Wanda knew no Russian and Horowitz knew very little Italian, their primary language became French. They had one child, Sonia Toscanini Horowitz (1934–1975). It has never been determined whether her death, from a drug overdose, was accidental or a suicide.^[1]

Despite his marriage, there were persistent rumors of Horowitz's homosexuality.^[7] Arthur Rubinstein said of Horowitz that "Everyone knew and accepted him as a homosexual."^[21] David Dubal wrote that in his years with Horowitz, there was no evidence that the octogenarian was sexually active, but that "there was no doubt he was powerfully attracted to the male body and was most likely often sexually frustrated throughout his life."^[22] Dubal observed that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent which was communicated in his piano playing.^[23] Horowitz, who denied being homosexual,^[24] once joked "There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists."^[25]

In the 1940s, Horowitz began seeing a psychiatrist. According to sources, this was an attempt to alter his sexual orientation.^[26][27] In the 1960s and again in the 1970s, the pianist underwent electroshock treatment for depression.^[28]

In 1982, Horowitz began using prescribed anti-depressant medications; there are reports that he was drinking alcohol as well.^[1] Consequently, his playing underwent a perceptible decline during this period.^[1] The pianist’s 1983 performances in the United States and Japan were marred by memory lapses and a loss of physical control. (At the latter, one Japanese critic likened Horowitz to a "precious antique vase that is cracked.") He stopped playing in public for the next two years.

 

Blogger's comments. Because Horowitz had more performing lives than a cat, he did emerge triumphant (again!) and play for a few more years to cataclysmic applause, mistakes and all. But isn't it sad that he felt so ashamed, or threatened by his homosexual side that he couldn't act on it, at least not without the terror of being discovered?

This goes on. We haven't solved it, friends. We think we have, which somehow makes it worse. Homophobia slithers around underground now, while on the surface of things we accept being gay as an inherent orientation (though some would say it's a "lifestyle choice"). 

But if you're any sort of religious fundamentalist, you probably believe it's a sin or an aberration. My feeling is that sexual orientation is hard-wired, and most of us are hard-wired to "tend" one way or another. This doesn't mean there is no heterosexual element in a homosexual orientation. Or the reverse. Maybe, like in Brokeback Mountain, same-sex attractions can spring up, seemingly out of nowhere. "I ain't queer," one of those adorable cowpokes (sorry) said in that movie. "Neither am I," Jake Gyllenhaal replied. I'd love to test out that "neither am I" theory with him, preferably in a sleeping bag out on the lone prai-riee (but then, there is the little matter of those Victorian women in corsets).

Can I confess something? Do you care? Since few people read this, I think I can safely say that for the most part I like and love men. Most of my close friends have been men (though admittedly, about 1/3 of them gay men). I like the way men smell and their low chesty voices and scratchy faces and the way they tower over me. I love their hands, especially their lack of tri-color nail polish with every other finger a different color.

Hard-wired, I think. Once in a while though, when I see, usually, a picture of a woman, or someone doing something adorable, or - what is it, anyway? Usually something very fleeting - I can't even think of an example now - and I think: my God, I can see how someone could fall in love with her. So does this make me queer-ish, or a part-time lesbian, or bisexual, or what?

As I get older I give less of a fuck because I am not, at this point, going to run off with a girl or a woman just because I wonder if I am queer-ish and want to test it out. I think women would be as hard to live with as men, but they wouldn't smell right to me. I don't want someone who looks too much like me, for one thing. I can go look in the mirror if I want to be appalled.

And going off with a woman - "going gay", a friend of mine calls it, with some annoyance - would be sexual infidelity just as surely as crawling into a sleeping bag with Jake Gyllenhaal on Brokeback Mountain.

And as far as I am concerned, neither possibility is about to happen any time soon.

Oscar, Oscar, OSCAR!

 

It's hard to find a gif with Oscar Levant in it, and when I do it's always an oddball one. Here he seems to be the epicentre of the room, yet Gene Kelly keeps on hitting him in the face (why?) while he maintains that deadpan, Buster Keatonesque non-expression.

 

This one has That French Guy in it, the one I hate, who is the main reason I don't watch An American in Paris when it comes on, approximately weekly, on Turner Classics. I don't like that Stairway to Paradise or whatever it is because That French Guy is just a swish and not good for Gene Kelly, not a wholesome influence.  He's better off with his grouchy, slouchy roommate, who can play the piano like nobody's business.

 

(I also don't like that stupid "I got" thing with the street kids, though it's sexy when Gene Kelly runs his hand up Leslie Caron's thigh when they're dancing at the end. Can't find a gif of that.)

 

 

 

This is a more typical, Rodin-esque Oscar pose, as he thinks to himself, what a couple of stupid jerks, the French guy is probably a poof the way he keeps making eyes at Gene. Everyone else is moving in this, but Oscar is the still point, the eye of the hurricane.

 

This is what I mean about the poof-iosity, the poof-i-tudinousness of An American in Paris. Gene Kelly puts a tablecloth on his head and pretends to be a girl in a kick line. It's positively perverse. Meantime Oscar, who is adorable and sexy at the piano, shedding some of that saturnine quasi-Bogart-esque grimness, is his usual head-nodding piano-playing self. Just a Gershwin-playing fool.


"Everyone in Hollywood is gay, except Gabby Hayes — and that's because he is a transvestite."

Oscar Levant: Rhapsody in . . . green??

Oscar Levant in 12 takes. . .
(or: variations on a theme)

 

 

"Who turned out the lights?"
 

 

 

 

Furioso
 

 

 

Gershwin's  ghost
 

 

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

Aqua velvet
 

 

 

 

Rhapsody in Green
 

 

 

"Somebody had me bronzed"

 

 

You call that a picture?
 

 

 

 

Blackface blues

 

 

 

Incandescent light

 

 

 

 

"Wait a minute, that's only TEN!"

(ok then. . .)

Pina colada

 

Indiglow

 

Oscar Levant plays Khatchaturian

So here is the only clip I could find that would play: the Concerto in F one wouldn't work. This is more of a flashy showpiece, but my my, what he does with it! Women must have thrown their hotel room keys on the stage. This video displays certain unique aspects of his playing: the prizefighter bobbing and weaving; being a hair's-breadth ahead of the beat, which conveys a certain urgency; tiny comic elements like turning around to face the orchestra; producing a "something extra" with some chords (I can't express this, but I can hear it), almost a hidden overtone or bright extra sound that wasn't written down anywhere, a new color in the spectrum, so that the chord opened out and became excruciatingly pleasurable (and this is, after all, Khatchaturian, the composer I rhapsodized about a few posts ago). But it happens so fast and then vanishes, not so much mercury as lightning. I wish I knew who wrote this arrangement of the Sabre Dance, but at the same time I know it could be no one else but Oscar, incorporating his trademark sour/sweet dissonances and complexity. He blows this tired old piece of circus music out of the water.