Jack Gibbons plays Gershwin's Swanee

ALL RIIIIIIGHT! This may just be the BEST two minutes in all of YouTube. Here Jack Gibbons plays the HELL out of Gershwin`s first hit song, Swanee. Though it`s now negatively associated with minstrel shows (especially Al Jolson, who made this a hit with an excruciating blackface performance), Gershwin did not write those lyrics, and may well have had no idea it would be so darkly transformed. But pay attention to the slam-bam exuberance, the crystalline accuracy, the sheer blinding SPEED of this, the "great heady surf", as one Gershwin associate described his exuberant influence - and note the sheer joy emanating from Gibbons as he allows the song to take him over. The fact he just sat down at a New Years party and played this thing echoes the way Gershwin would sit at the piano and take over the room, and all the people in it.

Right in the middle of all that madcap tumble of notes, Gershwin suddenly quotes that "other Swanee": Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, also known as "Way down upon the Swanee river. . ." No sooner have we recovered from that shock of brilliance than he suddenly starts playing a different tune with each hand: his left hand bops and thunders away at Swanee, while his right deftly quotes a delicate spill of notes from Listen to the Mockingbird. 

This song harks back to Gershwin's early days toiling away on Tin Pan Alley, writing and demonstrating songs to various artists who soon realized that this brash young man was on to something. Gershwin's story is bittersweet, because his life was tragically short and his death nothing short of horrifying. He was a kind of Mozart of the Jazz Age, the songs tumbling and spilling through his hands and his brain faster than he could capture them on the page. 

He was just beginning to hit his stride as a serious classical composer - the thing he had always wanted to be - with his astonishing masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, which most critics panned because they had no idea what he was doing. But he did. And then, racked with bizarre symptoms, with agonizing headaches that even in those primitive times fairly screamed "brain tumor", he was allowed to die with little or no treatment, in isolation, separated from the family because his behaviour had become so embarrassing. 

So every time I listen to Gershwin - and, like Dylan, I keep circling back around to him  because he seems to speak not just TO my soul, but FOR it - I feel this melancholy, even anger, that he had to die that way, beloved of the world but abused and mistreated by his own family, and let down by doctors who should have known better. At any rate, I will never stop listening to this because it is a golden performance which I believe strikes closest to the way Gershwin would have played it himself. 

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Gibbons plays Gershwin: Kickin' The Clouds Away & Love Walked In

I have listened to this a thousand times, and never get tired of it! Gibbons is considered the master of Gershwin's piano pieces, mainly because he meticulously restores the original piano score from all the myriad arrangements of Gershwin's tunes. Kicking the Clouds Away swings in a way that is both primitive and extremely elegant, and Gibbons plays it with the kind of gusto that George must have exhibited. He'd sit there at parties and just play, and play, and play. Much of it was improvised, so we will never know what it sounded like, but this captures the lighting-bug under glass for a few minutes, giving us a hint of what it must have been like to sit around the piano at those parties.

This piece is like a pocket version of Rhapsody in Blue, encapsulating so much of his edgy, urban, heady elegance with that incredible underlying urgency and drive. Gershwin said that Rhapsody in Blue was conceived while he was on a train and mesmerized by the steady chug of the engine, the hypnotic click of the wheels on the rails. You and I would hear that, and probably fall asleep, while he sat there conceiving a work of pure genius. And here it is all condensed down into a few minutes, while losing nothing of the fizzy joy of the original.

The second tune is one of my all-time favorites, Love Walked In, an exquisite arrangement which brings to mind the impressionist chords of Debussy. The lyrics are perfectly married to the tune: simple, achingly heartfelt, a universe of emotion which fits inside a thimble. Simple like Einsteins's formula, e=mc2. 

Nothing seemed to matter any more, 

Didn't care what I was headed for. 

Time was standing still, 

No one counted till 

There came a knocking at the door. 

Love walked right in and drove the shadows away; 

Love walked right in and brought my sunniest day; 

One magic moment, and my heart seemed to know 

That love said "Hello!", 

Though not a word was spoken. 

One look and I forgot the gloom of the past; 

One look and I had found my future at last. 

One look and I had found a world completely new, 

When love walked in. . .with you.

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Hummingbird Aerial Fight in Slow-mo!

 

An amazing gif of two hummingbirds fighting in SUPER slow-mo.

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🌕INCREDIBLE SIGHT: Plane flies by Full Moon WHILE I’M FILMING! 🌛

This is an incredible shot I accidentally took while trying to film the moon, which was glowing orange due to local forest fires. In the slow-mo gif, you can see the plane's lights flash as it goes by. 

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Dream House: 20 Victoria Avenue

 

Some dreamy images of the house I grew up in, as it looks today. The pale blue is so beautiful (it used to be yellow), and the outside has been beautifully kept up, as has the inside (though mostly unrecognizable to me). I believe this house is Edwardian, as it has many old-fashioned features, including a dumbwaiter (which we used as a laundry chute) and a root cellar in the basement, a little room with a door on it and a dirt floor. This feature pre-dated refrigerators and perhaps even the icebox. Some claim people in Chatham gave sanctuary to fugitive slaves, and hid them in attics and other secret places. This house was built after that, but it could have been used for that purpose. 

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VICTORIANA: the house I grew up in

 

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You CAN go home again! 20 Victoria Avenue

This came out of the blue! But not really, because a few years ago I got an email from someone who had just bought my childhood home on 20 Victoria Avenue, Chatham, Ontario, Canada (and I used to like to rhyme off the whole address because I loved the rhythm of it!). He had found my several blog posts about growing up in Chatham (I'll try to find a link to some of them), followed the trail and got in touch with me. The house had been converted into offices after we sold it in the early '70s, which made me sad, so to see that it had been converted back into a home and that people were going to live in it (including young children) filled me with gladness. 

But now the house is on the market again, and the fellow actually sent me a link to a YouTube video made by the realtor. So I get to see what the inside is like today (virtually ALL different, except for the gorgeous outside, and the layout of the living room and bathrooms). This was a very strange feeling indeed, and it could only happen via the internet. To see a tiny little thumbnail picture of my ancestral home was an odd, wondrous feeling. The place looks well-kept and well-loved, with its magnificent hardwood floors bared at last (we stuck grotty wall-to-wall carpeting down on it back then, because hardwood floors were for poor people and wall-to-wall was the height of luxury). My goodness, this is like me re-discovering my long-dyed, natural grey hair and actually loving it. There MUST be some good surprises in life.

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💗"Boots look nice on pussy cats. . ." (purr, purr)

Boots look very nice on pussy cats. (purrrrrrrrr)

The photo I used for the thumbnail is Bentley's "mug shot", the picture that started it all. We weren't in the market for a cat - at all - and in fact, I had just lost a beloved pet, a sweet little lovebird I called Paco. My last lovebird Jasper had died after seven years or so of companionship, and when I brought Paco home I was delighted - if you opened the cage, she would climb right onto your hand, go up your arm and nibble on your ear. But only a few weeks later, we found her dead on the bottom of the cage, and we never figured out why. She wasn't quite mature yet, and may even have slipped off an unfamiliar perch in a very large cage. But I was devastated, and knew I could not adopt another bird, it was just too heartbreaking.

Meantime, my daughter, who had also lost a cat, had adopted a new kitten named Mia - and every time we went over there, we were enchanted. But we hadn't owned a cat for ten years, and after Murphy left us, we said, "No more cats." Then Shannon  began to work on us. Hey, you're retired now - retired people need a cat!

So I began to look on various websites, SPCA and kitten rescue sites, and then - I found this picture, and something happened! I showed it to Bill, and said, "We have to go see this cat. Maybe tomorrow?" He said, "Why don't we go right now?"

We weren't even thinking of an adult cat, and this cat was a year old, a stray wandering along the road probably trying to find a girl friend. He was badly injured, and someone found him and brought him in to the SPCA across town. He was in a cubicle all by himself, and when I went in he was very high up, but immediately jumped  down and came up to me, his tail in a question mark. I picked him up, and he melted in my arms. We had our cat.

Yes, he HAD been injured, attacked by a dog or a  coyote, and it was a lucky thing that he had survived it. There was virtually no  fur on his back, just a shaven patch with awful  scars. I asked the staff if the fur would grow back, and they said they didn't  know. But when we took him home, everyone fell in love with him instantly. My daughter-in-law commented on his  bald spot: "That's where his wings broke off."

The fur almost all grew back, but when he leans forward you can see little bald spots on his shoulders,  which we call his "duelling scars". We like to say, "You should have seen the dog!" Obviously he had fought back valiantly, and ended up in safe haven.

So  now Bentley appears in many of my videos, and wanders into the frame when I show off my trolls. We can't imagine our lives without him. He is the perfect cat for us, quiet and dignified, but quirky and unpredictable at times, and fiercely loyal to us. If  Bill and I are having coffee and talking, Bentley will mosey into the room  and plunk himself down exactly in the middle. If I am sick or troubled, he will nudge the door open and jump up  on the bed to be with me. He lap-sits on Bill, but with me he prefers to nest between my ankles while I am reading in bed.

So it was a natural that he would be the visual for this song, which to this day brings tears to my eyes. Boots like nice on pussy cats. . . (purr, purr!)

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CUTE HALLOWEEN FUN WITH OUR FAVORITE "EX" ROYALS

Yes, and THIS, too!

Exclusive Footage from Meghan Markle’s podcast Episode 3

OH YEAH.

🍄"OH, JOY!" STRANGE ad from 1950s

I made this animation from a VERY strange 1950s print ad for Batchelor's mushroom soup mix. The fact that this couple is so ECSTATIC about seeing/tasting a REAL MUSHROOM (singular) kind of gives you a sense of the quality of this product. Like chicken soup with no chicken in it, or the clam chowder joke: "Waiter! There's only one clam in my clam chowder!" Waiter to kitchen: "Hey, Charlie! The string broke!" 

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😲WHAT?? Two Canada geese mirror each other EXACTLY!

I love it when nature does these things! We've noticed how "flock-y" Canada geese are - walking in stately single-file, swimming around in circles, and of course flying in their famous migrating V-shape. But it amazes me how they can stay in exact tandem like this, mirroring each other's every move. There is some sense they have, either a very finely tuned sensitivity to each other (not likely, for Canada geese are both aggressive and not too bright), or a kind of "hive mind" that operates all the geese at one time. Lately we have been seeing a vast colony of a hundred geese or more camping on the shores of Lafarge Lake. But even if they are sleeping along shore, their fat breasts bulging, they are all facing the same way. Hive mind says: SLEEP! Squawk! Honk! Eat! Run off the ducks!!

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A Day In The Life (Master Tapes)

Further to my post of yesterday, here is a really fascinating deconstruction of the final chord of A Day in the Life - perhaps the most meaningful one minute of sound in all of pop history. As most of us know - well, I did from somewhere - the final chord is an auditory amalgam of the same chord played simultaneously on several different pianos by several different groups of people - with a kind of "buzz" sound added to the mix to boost the bass. In the last five minutes or so of this video you actually get to hear the component parts. This kind of technical manipulation was almost unheard-of in 1967, and in itself was a stroke of genius perhaps invented or implemented by George Martin. The original ending was going to be one note. Thank God someone re-thought THAT idea! 

If you listen very carefully to that legendary final chord, as it slowly decays you can hear a chair squeaking. Others have heard the air conditioning system at Abbey Road Studios, though personally I can't. Given that playback is now much improved in clarity, people are still finding sounds in it, and to everyone's dismay, it turns out the recording equipment was turned off BEFORE THE END OF THE CHORD. It was still vibrating ever-so-subtly, but the truth is no one could pick it up even in playback. It was finished, wasn't it? SURELY it was finished, it had to be! No, it was not. It may have gone on vibrating for another 30 seconds, but we will never know.

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Deconstructing A Day In The Life (Isolated Tracks)

This song is primal, and without a doubt the Beatles' masterpiece. Every single element of it rings true, and every single element of it is necessary to the whole. As Salieri said in Amadeus, "Pull out the tiniest detail, and the whole thing would fall down." But it doesn't, and evokes the '60s more vividly than anything else I can think of. What leaps out at me instantly are the drums - and if anyone still underestimates Ringo's brilliance here, they will have to answer to ME!

Ringo was my first Beatle-love, back when drums were just a lot of pounding rather than the glue holding the entire thing together. The big nose, the floppy hair, the sad blue eyes and somewhat rueful smile - it KILLED me when I was only ten years old and supposedly far too young for those sorts of feelings. The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 - memorable because it happened to be my tenth birthday, for which we had actually gone to a restaurant (named Rossini's - and for some reason I remember seeing a mouse running along the sidewalk outside). This was rare, as most birthdays were home affairs - but my mother still made the cake. Restaurant desserts were deemed almost wicked back then, a near-shameful extravagance.

So we get home from my birthday dinner, turn on the TV as always, and whether or not I was prepared for what happened next has been lost to me. After the fact, it seemed that the sizzle and buzz around the Beatles must have been going on for weeks. But I was too young to play those 45 rpm pop records, and may or may not have heard them on the radio. Then the gangly, stiff-limbed Ed came on and announced something "for all you youngsters" - and then - BAM!

Everything changed.

The next day, all I was hearing about at school was Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. We had all been watching Ed Sullivan forever, and I had never seen any references to any of the other acts (not even Topo Gigio, the Little Italian Mouse). I remember the teacher could not keep order that day, and at one point made a remark about wigs, thinking that's what "Beatles" were. But suddenly it was Beatles everywhere, including bubble gum cards with four different  poses per ten-cent package (I had a nearly-complete set before THROWING THEM OUT when I turned 13 - how childish to collect such things!), shirts, lunch boxes, thermos flasks, and - most magical of all - Beatles dolls. I promptly got me a Ringo doll, and kept him in my desk.

The more you listen to this, the more impossible it all seems. These guys were just bloody geniuses. Paul and Ringo are now in their 80s, and like Bob Dylan, still performing, still going strong. Ringo has turned out to be the coolest Beatle, as I always suspected. Peace and love! His son Zak was drummer for The Who, which is not too shabby and proof that talent can be inherited, so long as you put in the hard work and dedication along with it.  I don't know a lot about drums, except that Ringo's accuracy was crystalline - combined with a slight shuffly effect which was deliberate. He has even talked about it, a way of slightly smearing the decay so that the beat was both diamond-hard and spookily underwater-ish.  I have always felt A Day in the Life would be nothing without Ringo. 

This is the Ringo doll I DIDN'T have. Magnificent! The little ones are worth a fortune now, so I can only imagine what this work of art would fetch on eBay nowadays.

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😽How the Pussycat Learned to SPEAK!

A song from my favourite childhood record, Puss in Boots. Puppetry by ferociousgumby!

When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty,
Everyone told me that I looked so pretty.
They said, “Beautiful eyes!”
They said, “Lovely fur!”
But all I could answer was “Meow”,
Or “purr”.

My coat was black,
My eyes of course were yellow,
People always said, “What a charming fellow!”
I wanted to thank them, but I did not know how,
For all I could answer was “purr”
Or “meow”!

Then one fine day, as I was lying sleeping,
A great idea into my head came creeping:
A pussycat who could learn to say “meow”
Could say just “me”, by leaving off the “ow”-

So I said, “me, me, me, me, me”
And it was plain you could see
From “me” to “we” to “she” to “he”
Was just as simple as it could be.
I practiced daily for a week,
And that is how I learned to speak!

Then I thought that I would try
Slipping off from “me” to “my”.
From “me to “my” to “sky” to “why”
Was just as simple as eating pie!
I practiced daily for a week,
And that is how I learned to speak.

Soon I was no longer a beginner,
If someone asked, “How would you like some dinner?”
If I wanted to answer, I could say, “YES, SIR!”
Instead of replying just “Meow-ow-wow-ow

Wow-ow-wow"
Or “purrrrrrrrrrr,
Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

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Meghan's Mess!

 

I don't like to waste space (except that I do, sometimes) on such an insignificant figure as Meghan Markle. But the worst of her many "worsts" is how she holds herself up as a fashion icon. People really buy this, supposedly, though she looks dreadful most of the time, with the worst assortment of ill-fitting, ill-suited, badly-designed outfits that make you wonder if she even uses a mirror.

These "industrial beige" pants are a case in point. I don't know at what point high-waisted, pleated, baggy, wide-belted polyester pants came back in style. I remember "high-rise baggies" in the early '70s, but eventually they gave way to increasingly lower-rise pants, an inch or so lower a year, so that by Year 5 or so they barely covered a woman's ass. Thus, when she bent over, her entire ass, and I mean both cheeks, could easily pop out and display itself. I considered this an abuse of the public consciousness, because you just could not look away, and it went on and on for literally years. Then, relentlessly, fashion dictated that beltlines would rise again to a more decent level, which caused me to breathe a sigh of relief.

When I first saw my very stylish granddaughter wearing  a version of these in a much nicer colour, I was kind of amazed,  but happy about it. But to see Meghan in them somehow didn't quite make it. She has a very square figure, is short and has no waist, so pleated pants just widen and flatten her in all the wrong places. NEVERTHELESS, on her podcast she not only wore the above beige pants, but (of course) MERCHED them on Meghan's Mirror (an ironic title if ever there was one). These relics from  the early '70s went for somewhere around $350.00. But just look what happened when she actually wore them!

YES. These selfsame, pre-merched, high-rise, pleated, wide-belted baggies turned into THIS mess. I cannot fathom how an article of clothing could go from one state to another. It is almost a work of science fiction. If she slept in them for a week without bathing, maybe? Or wore them out in the rain? Or are they just too goddamned tight in the crotch?

What truly astonishes me is what happened to the bottom hems. Suddenly the legs are two totally different lengths! I can't believe this is just her usual spraddle-legged way of posing, so that her crotch (always the most prominent feature of her stance) is thrust into our faces. One bottom hem is a good six inches longer than the other. The short hem is also a few inches narrower. It's a high-water look, but only on one side! 

I was unable to find it, unfortunately, but last night I saw a full-colour version of this mess, and beside it, the version that appeared in most of the media worldwide. All the wrinkles had been photoshopped out, so that the pants appeared much more like that merched version at the top.

I don't know where I heard this saying (like so many other random bits of effluvia that swim around in my consciousness), but it has been said by SOMEONE that "you have to be very rich to look that bad." Rich, maybe not. Bad - definitely YES. How can you spend that much and look so  horrendously awful? The wide, bulky elephant pants (which actually hark back to the '60s) have bottom hems that drag the ground and completely cover the nauseatingly pointy, tottering stilettos, and - in addition - the cherry on the shit sundae -  a back seam that is so taut it wrinkles on one side (??WTF) and rides up the ass.

To paraphrase another quote that rattles around in my brain: Some are born great, some attain greatness, and some marry Prince Harry, the dimmest bulb in the entire royal lineup. I can only think of one other example of a Hollywood princess marrying royalty - but  Grace Kelly never looked like this, not even on her worst day, with a hangover.

BONUS PHOTOS! Oy-vey, there's more.

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The Troll Doll Channel: 💗FALLING IN LOVE💗

I have discovered a TROVE of 78 rpm recordings from my childhood, all in pristine shape, with nary a pop or a skip. This is one of the real joys of YouTube. I tried to sing some of these songs to my kids a zillion years ago, and they acted like I was crazy (which I am, of course!). But now I feel vindicated, and get to enjoy these any time I want. One of my all-time favorites was Puss in Boots. What I really appreciate now is how good the voiceovers were, with Puss coming across as a total smart-aleck and his master, John, naive and a bit of a dimwit. And the singing was so great! They honestly do not make voices like this any more. People really knew how to sing, and gave their best even on a children's record which would probably not pay them much. What I love about this is how childlike the imagery is, making the romantic aspect a little more comprehensible to kids. I mean - sliding down bannisters? Home runs in baseball? Come to think of it, falling in love IS a little like that. Especially the bannister part.

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Dream images: black and white, late at night

A collection of dreamy and somewhat nightmarish images from my files, some disturbing, others confusing, and still others just plain weird. A few are images of what is now popularly called liminal space, a phenomenon which I thought I was the only one to perceive, as in - why does this familiar place look oh, so strange and frightening? Why is everything just a little bit "off"? HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?

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OSCAR LEVANT: Good-bye, and good night

 

GOOD-NIGHT, OSCAR LEVANT 

CANDICE BERGEN  APRIL 1  1973

Notes on an all too brief encounter in Hollywood

APRIL 1  1973 CANDICE BERGEN


“Good-night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are. . . .”

On an April afternoon in Los Angeles, the Walter Matthaus gave a luncheon for the Charles Chaplins. People began waging their campaign for invitations in early March.

The weather was sublime; the kind of day that strangled you with the joy of living. It was a day that made abandoning the East for the West a rational move. It was a day that made everyone glad to be alive . . . or almost everyone. . . .

Sulking in the shadows, a spectral silhouette, loomed the face that launched a thousand analysts. Was I seeing a ghost? I thought Oscar Levant had been dead for years.

This was one of his rare sorties of the last decade and he observed it by scowling fiercely from the deep recesses of a rocking chair.

A die-hard New Yorker assaulted by western resort wear, he wore a dark and somber suit that looked like it last saw action in the 1950’s with Harpo Marx at “21” or Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin.

His feet sat passively in slender, shining wing tips reviewing the passing parade of patent leather boots and white Gucci loafers. It was as if he were a British colonialist struggling to maintain civility amidst savages.

“Oscar Levant”—the name was a household word, like “polio" or “anemia;" a name synonymous with merciless humor, hypochondria, insomnia, insanity, George Gershwin, and chain-smoking. He was a brilliant, sickly legend—terrified of living and petrified of dying.

I loved him in movies but he always looked like the stand-in’s stand-in, or the anemic son of a studio head. There was this ugly guy wisecracking with Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, or falling over Fred Astaire and I could never figure out how he ever got there.

But in Rhapsody in Blue he played himself—concert pianist, wit, Gershwin’s old friend and foremost interpreter of his music—and he stole the movie.

He wrote three books—A Smattering of Ignorance, The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, and The Unimportance of Being Oscar—crammed with anecdotes about celebrities and insights about himself: his army of analysts, the legion of doctors, his addiction to pills, the convulsions, the shock treatments, the mental hospitals. All told in crisp, concise story form.

His television show in the late Fifties was a weekly video happening. People everywhere were exclaiming, “Did you hear what Oscar said last night!” Because Oscar would say anything. And did.

Taking time out for assorted nervous breakdowns, he returned to the air in 1960, announcing:

“This is Oscar Levant in Meet The Mess. This is Oscar Levant, who has made insanity America’s favorite hobby. My show is now syndicated. It goes to the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Bellevue in New York, and the psychiatric ward at Mt. Sinai in Los Angeles.”

I was never so excited to meet anyone. What with his penchant for pretty girls and my fixation for ailing underdogs, we were instantly smitten.

He clutched my arm and I helped him outside. He seemed very ill and had great difficulty walking. “How old are you?” he asked, without much hope.

“Twenty-five.”

“I’m sixty-five,” he said proudly. And while he looked awful, it was hard to believe. He seemed more like a little kid imitating a dying old man.
“I’ve always been very boyish,” he offered offhandedly. “William Le Baron at RKO called me Peter Pan. . . .” Tremors contorted his face into grimaces, interrupting his speech.

I asked Oscar if he were all right. What a dumb question.

“My wife took me to a doctor and he treated me for Parkinson’s disease, which it turned out I didn’t have,” he said venomously, “but the treatment gave me Parkinson’s symptoms.” He stopped short.

Looking steely and suspicious, years of service on her sleeve, his wife June appeared and took his arm, announcing as if to a child, “Come on Oscar, it’s time to eat lunch now.”

He glowered at her furiously, muttering, “I read where Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack from smoking too much. Maybe I should start again.” And sulking and seething, he was firmly led away.

After lunch, I asked him if I could take a photograph. “Of course,” June answered quickly. “Where do you want us?”

I pointed to a chair I had for Oscar. He had barely lowered himself onto it when June landed on his lap. His face went ashen and he limped into the house, cawing crazily, “June’s trying to murder me! She sat on my lap and almost killed me. . . . She almost broke my legs!”

Later, I went to say good-bye to Oscar. “Will you talk to me?” he pleaded, immersed in an overstuffed sofa.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave.”

“Can’t you stay a little longer?” he asked weakly.

“I really can’t, I’m sorry,” and I bent down to give him a kiss.

“I love you,” he said plaintively, looking up at me from the depths of the couch.

“I love you too,” I said. And I did.

On a Thursday, four months I later, I called him about possibly arranging an interview the following week. “Can’t you come today?” he croaked urgently, as if next week would be too late. I could.

It was the same old, large house he had lived in for twenty years— across from Jimmy Stewart, down the block from Lucille Ball—the kind of house you don’t notice on a street with homes designed to be seen.

Oscar sank slowly into a chair in the living room—faint from opening the front door. There were no maids. The house was silent and simple.

With his pajamas discreetly buttoned at the neck while a robe, slightly askew, slid off his shoulders, he looked like a kid home sick from school.

Extraordinary hands, a pale, translucent yellow, dangled delicately from his sleeves—elegant and sensitive contradictions of the fiendish face. His furtive eyes were a faded green and his teeth looked like old piano keys. His hair lay limply in oily strands, and blistered, black leather slippers hung on veined, snow-white feet. As a physical specimen, he deviated violently from the ideal.

It was as if his face and body had already begun to die. Oscar was merely dispensing with preliminaries.

He camouflaged his terror with toughness and impatience, bombarding me intensively with stories familiar from his books.

“You know what I said about Zsa Zsa Gabor? She not only worships the Golden Calf; she barbecues it for lunch.

“And I used to say I grew organic marijuana and I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

“I also said ‘I live on the periphery’ and ‘So little time, so little to do,’” he announced proudly.

Squeezing out the words with winces and grimaces, he sped on in spurts, “Judy Garland loved me. We met and she hugged me and I said, ‘This is the greatest embrace of pharmacopoeia in history.’

“Joe Kennedy loved me too. He leaned over to me once at Pavilion and said, ‘You know, you’re one of the only Jews I like.’”

The stories flowed like wine. “When Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe got married and Marilyn became Jewish, I said, ‘Now she’s kosher, he can eat her.’ And they took me off the air,” he crowed triumphantly.

“You didn’t see my show. I was brilliant on that show. It was after I had left all the mental hospitals, God, all the pills I took. . . .”

He continues in frantic free association, “Did you see Mick Jagger on the Cavett show? All that hollering and sybaritic dancing. He seemed overripe, priapic. Do you know what ‘priapic’ means? A continual state of erection. And it’s very. . . .” He begins to sing, “It’s very clear . . .” and trails off.

“I had quite a time in London in 1946. I was slightly priapic myself. There was a club . . . well, I laid every dame in the place—except a Jewish girl named Mimi. And she’d make café au lait. I was so impressed by her manners. A prostitute. You know what she said to me? ‘I suspect you of buttering your toast on both sides.’ So I told my analyst and he said, ‘Why didn’t you have an affair with her?’

“I couldn’t. I liked her.”

He was like some Lewis Carroll character who spoke in rhyme or riddle. His idioms were anecdotes and the songs he sang.

“My father was a great man,” he raced on nonstop, “he died very young. What of? I don’t want to say the word. It’s too terrible what he went through. I left it out of the book.

“My father told me a story once: A boy killed his mother and cut out her heart and the boy tripped and the heart said, ‘Did you hurt yourself, son?’

“My father told me that about my mother. It really bedeviled me,” he paused, looking pained.

“One of my sisters-in-law had the chutzpah to tell me that while my mother was carrying me, she tried to get rid of me during her pregnancy.” He looked at me, incredulous. “Isn’t that a helluva’ thing to tell a young boy?”

He continued compulsively, “Once I said to Bill Inge that September was the worst month because my mother died in September. But Inge said that August was the worst month because he went to Menninger’s and it was always empty in August. All the doctors were on vacation.”

He stood up shakily, sashed his robe and sat down, “You know I read a lot. This eye closes when I read and when I play the piano it stays open. Does my blinking bother you?” He looked suddenly concerned. “Is it pretty bad?”
June entered briefly. “She’s a terrific dame, terrific,” Oscar said soberly when she left. “She used to make her entrance to my act doing a cartwheel on a cane.”

Suddenly the old green eyes darted in my direction and he angrily erupted, pointing a fragile finger accusingly, “Why aren’t you taking notes? What’s the matter? Don’t you like my stories? These are terrific stories!”

Oy. Of course they were terrific. Although I’d read most of them. But what I wanted was something more personal than a performance. I replied that I loved the stories but that I wanted to hear more about him.

“These are about me!” he insisted.

Hmm. So I explained that he was one of the most special people I had ever met and I wanted very much to know him.

“Really?” he said in a small, surprised voice. And bravely battling gravity, he smiled. It was like watching salmon swim upstream. I melted.

“Help me into the den,” he said. “I want to play you something.”

He shuffled in and sat down at a piano, the top thickly thatched with old sheet music. “I can’t play too long,” he warned. “I’ve got arthritis in my back and Morton’s neuralgia in my feet and I’ve had this bacterial disease. . . .”

He opened a piece of music and smiled softly. It was like finding his first love. “I love songs more than anything,” he crooned quietly, almost to himself. Then he said hastily, “Half the keys don’t play,” and he began playing But Not For Me, confiding happily, “These are lyrics no one knows—the third verse.”

And in his robe and pajamas and a faltering falsetto, he sang softly, “It all began so well,/ But what an end./ This is the time a fella’/ Needs a friend./ He ain’t done right by Nell./ However, what the hell/ I guess he’s not for me.”

I’ve had more than my share of moments in my life, but this was one of the best. He savored it a second then snapped, “You know what Ira Gershwin said about me? Oscar is a masochist because he wants his cassock kissed.”

And then he disappeared into a mountain of sheet music, ferreting furiously, surfacing triumphant. “Look what I found!” he crowed, waving Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. He played it slowly, with “customary arthritic abandon.” “That’s one of the pieces I played the night my mother died. I haven’t played it in years.”

Frail, pale hands flying, slippers scurrying over the pedals, piano wires rattling; Oscar was in his heaven. Now all was right with the world.

Music was the miracle drug, a magical time machine; the tremors and blinking disappeared, his ailments vanished. Radiant and rapturous in the arms of his music, he went from Prokofiev to Schoenberg like a madman in love.

At the front door, he asked timidly, “Is it okay if I kiss you good-bye? Just on the cheek,” he added properly. “I don’t have any designs you know.”

It was a sunny summer evening, Oscar peered outside, turned on the porch light and asked anxiously, “Can you see all right?” I was hooked.

The next day he left a message to call him. I phoned from a friend’s house and he asked for the number and called back; he’d remembered more stories he wanted me to take down.

Then he announced proudly, “My grandson came to visit me today—I kiss him. . . . Could I call you?” Assured he could, he sighed, “Well, I feel like I’ve found a friend. Thank you very much for listening to me.”

He phoned over the weekend and I was out, so he called my friend, sometimes two and three times a day, with tales of George Gershwin and Alexander Woollcott, Humphrey Bogart and “Paganinny,” as he pronounced it.

I called him Monday at two o’clock to confirm our visit at four. “Oh no,” he wailed urgently, “that’s too late, come over now. Give me ten minutes.”

Twenty minutes later, I rang the bell. June, who was just leaving, answered it. Oscar was upstairs resting after practicing the piano and she went up to get him.

“Oh God,” I heard June gasp over and over. I froze. Well rehearsed after thirty years, she called the emergency squad. “Come right away, there’s something wrong with my husband. I think he’s dead.”

I went upstairs. June was standing in the hall trembling. “He had a towel over his face,” she stammered. “He covers his head with a towel because he always sweats after practicing. I thought he was taking a nap.”

He was lying in bed, waxen hands across his chest, flanked by a battery of pill bottles. The faded green eyes were locked wide ahead. His mouth was stretched taut and open in a soundless, outraged scream.

I had never seen anyone dead before. In the movies someone always feels for a pulse, so I felt for his pulse. My heart was beating so hard I could only feel my own.

I couldn’t believe it. The man who was constantly terrified death would arrive before you did was dead. I always thought he was kidding. We had always mourned him. He’d devoted his life to dying—he would die forever.

We were going to be buddies. I was looking forward to a siege of phone calls, an assault of anecdotes. I had been dreaming of afternoon visits and talks, listening to him practice in the late-day sun with the keys that didn’t play and the piano wires that rattled and Gershwin and Berlin and Schoenberg. . . . I was going to be his friend.

Now he lay there like a furious old bird. Shot down quietly on a summer afternoon, with no fanfare or glory, no grand farewell; he died in bed with a towel on his head, his slippers off and his pajamas on.

For a man who spent his life dreading it, death seemed cruelly anticlimactic.

“What is—what was the man’s name, Miss?” asked the young policeman routinely filling out his forms.

“Oscar Levant,” I said.

He showed no signs of recognition. A tourist bus glided by on its guide to movie stars’ homes.

“The poor thing,” June whispered as they carried him out.

BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. First of all, hurray - I never thought I would see this piece in its entirety, though I hunted for it for years. It was paraphrased in the Levant bio A Talent for Genius, but I realize now that some key details were left out. I think I have an idea why.

Candice Bergen obviously could have had her choice of professions, given the lurid and loving way this piece is written. She spares no details about how macabre a presence Levant was at only 65, and yet, the unique charm and sweetness dwells deep even in a thoroughly wrecked and prematurely old man.

There were surprises in this piece, but not many.  No surprise that June Levant was a bit of a drill sergeant who probably arranged every detail of the last fifteen years of his life, but a rude surprise in that his death wasn't at all what I thought. Reading the bio A Talent for Genius, the authors seemed to be implying he lay down for a nice little nap, and then peacefully died. It wasn't that way at all, obviously. 

The details Bergen sets down are brutal - I won't repeat them, because I can't. He died with a look of horror on his face, like he had been struck by lightning. The great conductor Leonard Bernstein, another tortured artist who had a sort of running feud with Oscar, was wasting away from cancer and emphesema, when suddenly one day his whole body stiffened, and he shouted, "WHAT IS THIS?" - and died.

Death came calling, and instead of stealing away with him or bearing him up on gauzy wings, it shoved him hard and knocked him over. Both of them, really, were just bucked off. And yet, their deaths matched their tormented, unhealthy, driven lives, both men paradoxically attracting doggedly loyal, loving support right to the end.

I am pretty sure the description of his death in the biography was watered down for a reason. It was written with a lot of input from June Levant, and though most of it is vivid and detailed, there's a hard sort of shellac over some of it. A veil was drawn over that harrowing face, perhaps in deference to her. I don't mean to be too hard on Mrs. Oscar, who obviously had a formidable task in looking after her husband in his prematurely invalid state. But I also believe she had a role in pushing him out into the spotlight on late night TV and quiz shows, where he looked so gruesomely awful that his old friends could barely suppress gasps of horror when they saw him. It could be argued he wanted and needed the stimulation, but at that point he seemed hardly of this world any more: a somnambulist, a walking ghost. 

The authors use ghostly images to describe Levant again and again in the biography: "a spectral presence", "wraith", "shade", and so on. Candice Bergen lays it on very thick, perhaps TOO thick in places. And what killed him? He was a four-pack-a-day smoker and drank up to 40 cups of coffee a day, supposedly did not drink, but sucked up copious quantities of Demerol and any other painkillers he could lay hands on, finally just gobbling whatever pills his "friends" brought over when they visited, even birth control pills. It takes a toll. But like Bernstein, he also wore himself out from the inside. One day, the heart too frail for living just stopped, and he was unceremoniously kicked off the mad ride that had been his life. 
 

BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is a repeat, but it's one I particularly like. It took me years to track down this article, which until that point I had only seen excerpts of. It is both tender and macabre, which kind of describes its subject. Rest in peace, Oscar. You deserve to.

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