‘Upper berth – lower berth. That’s the difference between talent and genius,’ muttered George Gershwin to his friend Oscar Levant as he settled down for the night in the more comfortable lower bunk. The two musicians were on the sleeper from New York to Pittsburgh, where Gershwin was due to perform his iconic, jazz-infused Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F. The conductor Bill Daly had been held up in New York, and Levant was to help out by playing the solos while Gershwin rehearsed the orchestra.
If Oscar Levant was no genius on the level of Gershwin, he was nothing if not multi-talented. Pianist, composer, actor, writer, radio show host – he managed all those careers throughout his life. As a Gershwin performer, Levant was second only to the composer himself.
At the peak of his career, in the early 1940s, Levant’s concert fee was higher than those commanded by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein, two of the greatest pianists of all time. That wasn’t because he was regarded as a finer pianist (he wasn’t), but because his radio show Information Please had a regular audience of 12 million in the US.
Who was Oscar Levant?
Oscar Levant was born in Pittsburgh on 27 December 1906, the youngest son of an Orthodox Jewish family. He received his first piano lessons from one of his brothers, and soon developed into a prodigy. On the day before his first lesson at high school, the pianist, composer and future Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski was to give a recital in Pittsburgh.
The 12-year-old Levant asked his new teacher if he wanted to know what the famous pianist was going to play. Instead of rattling off the pieces verbally, Levant sat at the piano and played the entire programme.
When, in February 1924, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra presented his ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’ concert in New York with the premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as its highlight, Levant’s ears pricked up. On hearing the piece, he immediately learned the solo part. He was to become closely associated with it for the rest of his life, playing it once with Toscanini and recording it twice. He also performed it with Paul Whiteman in the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue.
‘I played an unsympathetic part – myself’
As an actor, Levant made his debut on Broadway at the age of 21 in Burlesque, adapted by Clifford Odets from a story by Fannie Hurst. Levant was cast as a pianist and songwriter, and the play, which also featured a young Barbara Stanwyck, was filmed the following year as The Dance of Life, again with Levant. ‘I played an unsympathetic part – myself,’ he commented.
Oscar Levant played a thinly disguised version of himself in most of his later films too. In the Vincente Minnelli musical An American in Paris he appears as Gene Kelly’s unemployed pianist friend, and in an egomaniacal dream sequence performs the finale from Gershwin’s Concerto in F, managing through film trickery to appear not only as the soloist, but also all the orchestral players and an enthusiastic audience member.
‘It isn’t what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts’
In the Joan Crawford melodrama Humoresque (another Clifford Odets script based on Fannie Hurst), Levant gives his violinist friend, played by John Garfield, advice from the piano stool that might have been intended for himself: ‘It isn’t what you are, it’s what you don’t become that hurts.’
In an attempt to give the impression that Garfield was actually playing the violin on the soundtrack, his arms were pinned to his sides while the instrument was attached to his chin, and two violinists (one of them Isaac Stern) crouched with their faces out of camera-shot and did the playing – one the bowing, the other the fingering. The soundtrack was recorded by Stern and Levant. After a few takes, Levant suggested, ‘Why don’t the five of us do a concert tour?’
My favourite among the films in which Levant appeared is The Band Wagon – a Minnelli musical made in 1953, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and with songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. But by this time Levant was clearly ill, and he couldn’t take an active part in any of the energetic musical numbers.
Addicted to prescription drugs
He had always been a notorious hypochondriac and had become addicted to prescription drugs. He was taking a mixture of Dexedrine and Thorazine – a cocktail whose effect he described as ‘chaos in search of frenzy’. Levant made one last film for Minnelli – The Cobweb – in which he played another part that might have been modelled on himself: a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
For all his inbred talent for showbusiness, Levant made a valiant attempt to become a serious composer. He took lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, who told him at their first meeting ‘You have a very talented face.’ Levant eventually commissioned Schoenberg to compose his Piano Concerto, but then refused to come up with the high fee the composer was demanding for the dedication and the privilege of giving the work’s premiere.
In the end, the concerto’s first performance was given by Schoenberg’s former pupil and long-time collaborator Edward Steuermann. Levant later received encouragement from Aaron Copland – and from composer and longtime Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann (one of the greatest movie composers of all time), who persuaded him to compose a Sinfonietta and even gave him lessons in orchestration. ‘Mine,’ said Levant, ‘was the sort of piece in which nobody knew what was going on – including the composer, the conductor and the critics. Consequently I got pretty good notices.’
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He famously quipped, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin’
As a wit, Levant could hold his own with such friends of his as Dorothy Parker, SJ Perelman and George S Kaufman. When Kenneth Tynan interviewed Perelman and Groucho Marx for The Observer, they picked Levant as one of the three fastest on the draw for one-liners – the others being Kaufman and Irving Brecher, who wrote two of the Marx Brothers’ films.
One example of his rapier wit: Levant had appeared (as a pianist named Oscar Farrar) in Doris Day’s first film, Romance on the High Seas. When she became synonymous with the innocent all-American girl next door, he famously quipped, ‘I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin’.
‘Levant is disease of Hollywood’
Levant’s crabby personality was legendary. Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy That Uncertain Feeling features an obnoxious pianist who creates mayhem in the bourgeois marriage of Merle Oberon and Melvyn Douglas. The part, brilliantly played by Burgess Meredith, was reputedly modelled on Levant. Tynan summed him up accurately: ‘Pearl is disease of oyster; Levant is disease of Hollywood.’
In the end, it may have been Levant’s talent for wisecracking that 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 premiered by the famous Kolisch Quartet, and a Nocturne for orchestra – have sunk without trace.
On the other hand, of the 80-odd songs he composed, at least one – ‘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. Characteristically, Levant complained that it brought back more memories than royalties.
A Gershwin pianist without equal
Levant’s own recordings as a pianist, all made for Columbia, include études, polonaises and mazurkas by Chopin, plus music by Debussy and Liszt, and the piano concertos of Grieg and Tchaikovsky (the latter with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy). But it is on his Gershwin performances that his reputation rests. He played all the major works through to the composer, so his interpretations have the stamp of authority.
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That may not have helped him much when, after Gershwin’s early death in 1937, Oscar Levant performed the Concerto in F with the NBC Symphony and Toscanini. Faced with differences of opinion between them about how certain passages should go, Levant told the Italian maestro, ‘Mr Gershwin wanted it this way’ – to which Toscanini replied, ‘That-a poor boy, he was a-sick.’
Be that as it may, Levant’s 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 a 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 regret – ‘My Life’.
Top pic: Rhapsody In Blue, US lobbycard, from left: Robert Alda, Oscar Levant, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)