The Guardian on Oscar Levant

Hollywood's piano man

Misha Donat, The Guardian, 22 Dec 2006

From a week ago, but Levant's birthday was the 27th, so I'm not too far behind.

Also, he died in 1972, so not much about him has changed in the past week.

"It isn't what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."

A line from the Joan Crawford melodrama Humoresque, spoken by Oscar Levant - who was born 100 years ago this month. He's playing the part of a pianist, but they are words that might have been intended for himself. Today the actor, musician and composer is chiefly remembered for his flamboyant public persona and his association with George Gershwin, yet at the peak of his career, in the early 1940s, his concert fee was higher than those commanded by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein. Not because he was regarded as a finer pianist (he wasn't), but because his radio show, Information Please, had a regular audience of 12m and had made him a household name in the US.

Born in Pittsburgh on December 27 1906, Levant was the youngest son in an orthodox Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from one of his brothers. On the day of his first lesson at high school, the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski was due to give a local recital. The 12-year-old Levant greeted his new teacher by asking him if he wanted to hear what Paderewski was going to perform - and played the programme in its entirety.

Levant made his debut on Broadway at the age of 21 in Burlesque, adapted by Clifford Odets from a story by Fannie Hurst. He was cast as a pianist, and the play was filmed the following year as The Dance of Life. "I played an unsympathetic part: myself," he commented.

The best of his films was The Band Wagon, the Minnelli musical made in 1953, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. But by this time, Levant was clearly ill. He had always been a notorious hypochondriac and he had become addicted to prescription drugs. He was to make only one more film (also for Minnelli) - The Cobweb, in which he played another part that might have been modelled on himself: a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

His ill-tempered personality was legendary. Ernst Lubitsch's comedy That Uncertain Feeling features an obnoxious pianist who causes mayhem to the bourgeois marriage of Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas. The part was reputedly modelled on Levant. Kenneth Tynan summed him up: "Pearl is disease of oyster; Levant is disease of Hollywood."

As a wit, he could hold his own with such friends of his as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and George S Kaufman and Tynan picked Levant as one of Hollywood's three quickest on the draw for one-liners. It was Levant who famously quipped, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."

Levant's talent for wisecracking ultimately put paid to his ambition to be taken seriously as a musician. The pieces he wrote during his period of study with Schoenberg - a piano concerto which he performed with the NBC Symphony, a string quartet and a nocturne - have sunk without trace. Of the 80-odd songs he composed, one at least - "Blame It On My Youth" - is still widely known, and was recorded by such artists as Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Keith Jarrett and Nat King Cole. Levant complained it brought back more memories than royalties.

His own recordings as a pianist include etudes, polonaises and mazurkas by Chopin, as well as music by Debussy and Liszt, and the Grieg and Tchaikovsky concertos (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). But it is as a Gershwin pianist that his chief claim to fame lies. He played all the major works to the composer, so his interpretations have the stamp of authority; and his recordings of the "Rhapsody in Blue" (with Ormandy) and the "I Got Rhythm Variations" (with Morton Gould and his orchestra) have a rhythmic verve and spontaneity that have never been surpassed. So much did Levant fall under the spell of Gershwin, that a chapter devoted to him in his autobiography A Smattering of Ignorance is entitled - not without a tinge of irony - "My Life".

Oddly enough, in an article that notes Levant in Hollywood, the films he made with Vincente Minnelli and his association with George Gershwin, there is no mention of An American in Paris. Possibly because Ms. Donat finds the film as difficult to sit through as I do.

This article is the inspiration for this weeks 5 on Friday.