Showing posts with label Dorothy Parker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dorothy Parker. Show all posts

Monday, December 9, 2019

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.


Friday, November 15, 2019

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.


Saturday, November 19, 2016

Margaret Atwood Follies: "gee, thanks, lady"




Margaret Atwood "can't write a novel," according to Norm Macdonald

(AARON VINCENT ELKAIM / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By PETER EDWARDS Star Reporter

Fri., Nov. 18, 2016

After kicking off something of a one-way Canadian literary feud, comedian Norm Macdonald has deleted a series of Twitter rants in which he called author Margaret Atwood “a no-talent mountebank bent on fooling fools” and other insults.

Some of the tirade from Macdonald, a former Saturday Night Live star, came late Tuesday night and Thursday morning of this week, after Atwood tried to console Americans after the election of Donald Trump.

Atwood: “Just like the Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump has no magical power”




Macdonald: “You make a very good, if utterly obvious, point. So, you’re saying he DOESN’T have magical powers. Thanks.”

And then Atwood, a Toronto resident, tries again to console American readers with: “Dear Americans. It will be all right in the long run. (How long? We will see.) You’ve been through worse, remember.”

Macdonald replies: “Gee, thanks, lady.”

Atwood, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for Literature, urges readers to take practical measures to help them cope with life under Trump, to which Macdonald adds: “How to SURVIVE in the era of Trump, lady? How about staying in your house with your money?”




Earlier, the 57-year-old Quebec City native observed, “Canadians have frauds and imposters just like everyone else. Most people in the arts are charlatans. One is @MargaretAtwood.” Macdonald later deleted the Atwood run of tweets (though they remain on his Facebook page), as he has done in the past with stories about meeting Bob Dylan, helping to write the SNL 40th anniversary special and more.

The comedian has a well-received book of his own currently out, Based on a True Story: A Memoir. Despite the title, Macdonald has described it, on Twitter and elsewhere, as a novel.

The shots he took online at Atwood went beyond her advice on life in a Trump America.

When Atwood sends a reader a handwritten quote from her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Macdonald jumps in and posts: “Oh, bad writing scribbled on a piece of paper. Well, who wouldn’t want that?”

Atwood has 1.32 million Twitter followers while Macdonald has 768,000.





Several of her fans jumped in to defend her. One posts: “as if I don’t have enough to deal with Norm hates Margret (sic) Atwood??”

Macdonald replies: “I don’t hate @MargaretAtwood. I hate bad writing.”

He then adds: “It isn’t her fault and I’d never have anything but pity for the talentless. But the Canadian school system makes you read her.”

One Atwood defender tries for some sort of anti-Trump solidarity but Macdonald has none of that.

“@normmacdonald In an authoritarian regime, the most important thing is whether you are ‘one of them’ or ‘one of us,’ ” he tweets.

“no,” Macdonald replies.





Macdonald accuses Atwood of “chasing celebrity and promoting anything for a buck” and compares her unfavourably to Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro.

“It is nauseating to consider that through shameless self-promotion someone like @MargaretAtwood could care consider herself Munro’s peer,” Macdonalds writes.

“Unlike Munro, @MargaretAtwood is incapable of writing a novel, yet churns out chum at an alarming rate,” Macdonald continues.

“Munro is the greatest writer Canada has ever produced but feels herself incapable of writing a novel. On the flip side sits @MargaretAtwood,” Macdonald continues.

Atwood, 77 ,did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.





https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2016/11/18/norm-macdonald-deletes-anti-atwood-tweets.html

Friday, October 12, 2012

Are we there yet? . . . Are we there yet?

Coda

Dorothy Parker

There’s little in taking or giving,
  There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
  Was never a project of mine.
 
 
 
 
 
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
  The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
  And love is a permanent flop,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And work is the province of cattle,
  And rest’s for a clam in a shell,
 
 
 
 
 
So I’m thinking of throwing the battle—
  Would you kindly direct me to hell?
 
 
 

Monday, October 1, 2012

Why Leslie Caron and Oscar Levant are not not NOT the same person





(from A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenenberger):

"It was Gene Kelly who had brought the seventeen-year-old ballet dancer Leslie Caron over from Paris to star as the gamine Lise Bourvier (in An American in Paris). . . At a studio party to welcome Leslie Caron to Hollywood, Oscar (Levant) met the French teenager who would be turned into an American movie star with her first picture. June (Levant) was anxious to know what Gene Kelly's discovery looked like. 'She looks too much like me as far as I'm concerned,' he replied.




As preposterous as the remark sounded, there was truth in it. Caron did indeed look like a feminized, fetching version of Oscar Levant, with her full, pouty lips, round head, and wide, intelligent eyes. The resemblance would be borne out later in Amanda Levant, the daughter who looked the most like her father and who would bear a striking resemblance to Caron."

OK then. . .

We may not agree with this thesis, but we can try it on, can't we? Every adjective has been used on Levant, and his pictures show a man who can be either borderline-dishy, or as toadlike as Jabba the Hutt. He's much better in his movies, where his set-the-world-on-fire piano playing style immediately sends the hormones soaring, whether you like his looks or not.


 

As for Caron, she's a bit overbite-ish for my tastes, her invisible tail frisking away like a merry little squirrel's. Hi-Lily, Hi-Lo, indeed.


 

 
There's something Satanic about Oscar's face that doesn't go well with a blunt cut.
 

 


Funny, but I DO see the pouty mouth and sad eyes in this one,
though he was awfully young here.
 


 
 
 No, no, NOOOOOOO. . . this isn't working. . .  Levant in drag is just too incongruous. Once he outgrew that soft-faced, baby-lipped phase, he began to look sort of like the neighborhood tough, and it suited him.
 



Now THIS is Caron's true predatory nature, all done up in Oscar's sexy performing tux and trademark bow-tie.
 

 
Uhh. . .
 
 
Ahh. . .
 
Enough, enough! Let me quote another strange source, an astrology site that dissects Levant's natal chart (something to do with a goat), and makes the following alarming statements:
 
 

 
 
"He was knock-kneed and always looked disheveled with his rumpled, crumpled attire. Many women found Levant sexy with his limpid eyes, sensuous mouth, helpless demeanor, and devilishly wicked tongue. At home, his friends would find the pianist hunched over the piano smoking one of his countless cigarettes playing Bach, listening to Beethoven on the phonograph and reading Albert Camus at the same time."





Would I have wanted to know Oscar Levant? He was a close friend of Dorothy Parker - they always spoke highly of each other - but I've always had severe doubts as to whether I would have wanted to meet her. She was just too difficult, too draining, though as with Levant, celebrity swirled around her. I've just started reading the Levant bio, and already it's alarming: the man was a sort of bipolar's bipolar who careened from one extreme state to another, sometimes soaring in huge updrafts of grandiosity and other times glued, paralytic with depression, to his bed.

As with Parker, though, he had loyal friends, people who honestly loved him and knew they were in the company of an original. They don't make them like that any more, do they?  Perhaps in the course of human history, one Oscar Levant was enough.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Scratch me a lover, pass me a drink


Be My Robert Benchley

 (Dedicated to Dorothy Parker and the members of the Algonquin Round Table. . . with a nod to the Barenaked Ladies' Be My Yoko Ono)



If there’s someone you can drink without,
Then do so.
And if there’s someone you can waste your time with,
Do so.
You can be my Robert Benchley
You can follow me wherever I go
Be my, be my,
Be my Robert Benchley




Well there was this little lady in old New York
Her quips couldn’t get much darker
She soon became the toast of the Algonquin
Miss Dorothy Parker
If you were smart, or thought you were
If you dared to do it and were able
You got yourself to that hotel, and sat down at
That big Round Table
 
(Be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley
Be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley)



There was this fat guy sitting there
By the name of Woollcott
He and ate and drank and partied and insulted folks
Yes, quite a lot




And look, there’s George S. Kaufman
High hair and skinny as a rail
Though he wins no beauty contests,
His plays just never fail
(you can be my Robert Benchley)




Back in 1921
bootleg liquor there was plenty
You either had a bag of bills
Or you just didn’t have any
Though movies had no soundtrack
With Lloyd, Gilbert and Garbo
Round Tablers were all talkies:
Like George, Heywood and Harpo
(be my, be my, be my Robert Benchley)


While Dottie loved her Benchley,
They all said it was platonic
To think they’d ever hit the sheets
Was really quite moronic
When Benchley married Gertrude
Dottie nearly had conniptions
She was a girl without a brain
It just defied description


One day Dot and Benchley
Decided to incorporate
They had to call the company
A name that sounded great
They tried on this and tried on that
In English, Dutch and quasi-French
Till Alexander Woollocott said
“Why not call it Parkbench”




(You can be my Robert Benchley
You can follow me wherever I go)
Though Dottie loved her Benchley
His wit and clever thinkin’
There’s no doubt she corrupted him
And started him on drinkin’
He started chasing chorus girls
It saddens me to say it
But that’s the game that Benchley chose
And so he had to play it
Oh no, here we go – life is just one big pun,
Oh no, here we go – It’s Benchley on the run!



It’s sad to say this fairy tale
Doesn’t end in blazing glory
Benchley made short subjects
And Miss Parker wrote short stories
His liver conked at fifty,
And that’s not very groovy,
And his shorts are only fillers now
On Turner Classic Movies
Dorothy went on living
Smoking, drinking, taking lovers
But her heart belonged to Benchley
In her mind she had no other
Though her talent was unquestioned,
Her stories now are history
A product of her times, I guess
To me it’s just a mystery




You can be my Robert Benchley
You can follow me wherever I go
Be my, be my,
Be my Robert Benchley
 
Yes, thinking she is obsolete
Strikes me as quite absurd.
So let’s let Dorothy Parker
Have the final word:





Ballade Of A Great Weariness

There's little to have but the things I had,
There's little to bear but the things I bore.
There's nothing to carry and naught to add,
And glory to Heaven, I paid the score.

There's little to do but I did before,
There's little to learn but the things I know;
And this is the sum of a lasting lore:
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

And couldn't it be I was young and mad
If ever my heart on my sleeve I wore?
There's many to claw at a heart unclad,
And little the wonder it ripped and tore.
There's one that'll join in their push and roar,
With stories to jabber, and stones to throw;
He'll fetch you a lesson that costs you sore:
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

So little I'll offer to you, my lad;
It's little in loving I set my store.
There's many a maid would be flushed and glad,
And better you'll knock at a kindlier door.
I'll dig at my lettuce, and sweep my floor,
Forever, forever I'm done with woe.
And happen I'll whistle about my chore,
"Scratch a lover, and find a foe."




Thursday, May 3, 2012

The first time I died

Epitaph




The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.





I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the new moon's cup.




I dared not look on the sweet young rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.




















The next time I died, they laid me deep.
They spoke worn words to hallow my sleep.









They tossed me petals, they wreathed me fern,
They weighted me down with a marble urn.









And I lie here warm, and I lie here dry,
And watch the worms slip by, slip by.