The Magnificent Elmer Read online

  Neither Elmer nor I had ever been members of the Communist Party, but we both were liberal in outlook and that made us fair game for the House Un-American Activities Committee. I had knitted socks for the Russians during the war and Elmer had accompanied Paul Robeson when he sang at Madison Square Garden.

  Hollywood is the only town in America where every lease came with a tube of sun block and a subscription to the Hollywood Reporter. Suddenly a story appeared in the Reporter that a “cooperative witness” to the dreaded House Un-American Activities Committee had testified that he had seen Hollywood’s hot young composer and his wife at a left-wing ranch in New Mexico. The witness was an undercover FBI informer. (He later recanted his testimony, was prosecuted for perjury, and went to prison. But by then the damage had been done.) I remembered the ranch. On our first drive west, someone had suggested we visit “this great ranch” in New Mexico where we could spend a free night. It is my subversive recollection that we spent the evening singing folk songs around a campfire. Jimmy Crack Corn and I Don’t Care.

  Suddenly we cared a lot. When the story appeared, our life changed. We were suddenly on the lookout for men in dark suits serving subpoenas. Here’s how it worked. The word would be out that the Committee was planning to hold hearings in Hollywood. All over town the engines would roar. Elmer and I would rent a motel room outside of Hollywood, take the baby, the cocker spaniel, and the necessities of life, and remain there until word reached us that the emergency had passed. We chose a motel that was nestled in a grove of Eucalyptus trees so we could park the car under a canopy of leaves where it couldn’t be seen from the street.

  On one occasion we didn’t get out of town soon enough. One afternoon, when our son Gregory was three months old, I was home taking care of him while Elmer was at a studio meeting. The doorbell rang. I opened the door to find two men dressed in dark suits and ties. I sensed something was wrong. The only people who wore dark suits in Hollywood in the summer were representatives of the William Morris Office.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “FBI,” he said. “Are you Pearl Bernstein?”

  I admitted I was.

  “Did you teach at the School of Music on Seventy-Third Street in New York?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “Did you know Pete Seeger who taught at the school?”

  “I met him.”

  From that point on the conversation went downhill. Gregory started spitting up.

  “Did you know about a Communist cell at the school?”

  “Garble,” said Gregory.

  “Did you ever encounter Pete Seeger at a cell meeting?”

  “Mergle,” said Gregory.

  “Look,” I said, “I have a baby to feed, so if you have any questions about Pete Seeger, I suggest you ask him.”

  And with that I slammed the door.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE DE MILLENNIUM

  “There were the ten commandments in easy-to-take tablet form.”

  —Elmer Bernstein

  The major studios refused to hire Elmer. Work dried up and the only assignments he could get were sci-fi cheapies. He was reduced to turning out music for low-budget movies like Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon.

  “I’m not important enough to be blacklisted,” said Elmer wryly. “I’m being grey-listed.” The movie producers who hired him were willing to take a chance because they could hire Elmer to score their movie for only six hundred dollars. And we sure needed the money.

  Elmer was never able to disguise the talent he brought to these terrible pictures. Elmer used to say, “If I’m going to do a really bad movie, at least I’m going to do one that is at the top of the bad-movie lists.” Then he would add ruefully, “I guess Robot Monster would qualify.” It certainly did. I remember that it was about a little boy named Johnny who dreams that the earth has been attacked by an alien named Ro-Man who uses a “calcinatory death ray.” I also seem to recall that Ro-Man was an actor in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet. Today they would do it with computer graphics.

  The downward spiral of Elmer’s career continued. I felt like Dorothy in the tornado. I was supplementing our plummeting income by teaching piano again. I was able to line up three young students, and on one occasion I was in the den with my pupil with the TV on in the next room. Suddenly I heard a familiar voice. It was Sidney Buchman, the man who had brought us to Hollywood. I went in the next room. Sidney was appearing before the Committee and taking the Fifth Amendment. I had only seen him twice, once when he and his beautiful vicuna coat visited our apartment, and once when he came to the sound stage during the scoring of Saturday’s Hero. I never saw him again.

  As Elmer’s fortunes declined, he got a job as rehearsal pianist for Agnes DeMille who was choreographing the dances in the screen version of Oklahoma! One evening I looked out of our bedroom window and saw Elmer, Agnes, and the entire corps de ballet assembled on our front lawn. And they were singing. No, they weren’t singing “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…” Nor were they singing “Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry…” All those apple-cheeked lasses, those corn-fed ballerinas, had raised their voices in a chorus of that Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial, “Happy Birthday to Pearl.” What a guy, Elmer. “People will say we’re in love.”

  Agnes realized that somehow Elmer seemed a little overqualified to be leading her dancers through the brothel ballet. How did she know? Well, there was the Copland Connection. Agnes had gotten her start when she choreographed Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, and that led to fame on the Broadway stage with Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Paint Your Wagon. Agnes knew that Copland had discovered Elmer and predicted a luminous career for him. That and the emanations that one genius gives off to another. So one afternoon on a drafty soundstage she said, “You should meet my Uncle Cecil.” Uncle Cecil was at that moment shooting a movie. It was called The Ten Commandments.

  ***

  It happened that Cecil B. DeMille needed some incidental music for the dances in his biblical epic. Elmer came home from his interview with C.B. and told me about his conversation with the famous director. Some of the props from the grandiose new saga were scattered around DeMille’s office—Moses’ staff, Dathan’s cape, a stone containing the Ten Commandments in easy-to-take tablet form.

  “How did the meeting go?” I asked.

  “DeMille had only one question. He said—‘Mr. Bernstein, do you think you could do for ancient Egyptian music what Puccini did for Japanese music in Madame Butterfly?’”

  “What did you say?”

  “I gave him the only answer that would have gotten me the job. I said, ‘I don’t know, Mr. DeMille, but I’d like to try.’”

  And so Elmer got the assignment to write the incidental music for the songs and dances that were spotted through the movie.

  DeMille’s usual composer of choice was the very talented Victor Young and he had been signed to write the score for The Ten Commandments. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Red Sea. Victor Young had gone to New York to work on a Broadway musical called Seventh Heaven. The show was a turkey and had placed Victor under great stress. It was very debilitating. As Larry Gelbart said, “If Hitler is alive, I hope he’s on the road with a musical.” When Victor returned to Hollywood he was ill and decided he wasn’t up to scoring The Ten Commandments. Not even a few of them. So DeMille turned to Elmer for the whole enchilada. Wow!

  ***

  History has a sense of humor. Mr. DeMille was Hollywood’s most legendary director, but he was also a dinosaur in his ultra-conservative politics. As such, he was one of the principal architects of the blacklisting that tyrannized a generation of moviemakers. He was the hard-hearted fellow that had poisoned the atmosphere and driven Elmer from the Steinway grand to the rehearsal piano. As a robust crusader against Communism, C.B. was devoted to keeping red propaganda off the screen. But as a sound businessman, he was as anxious to keep Paramount out of the red as he was to keep the reds o
ut of Paramount. So one day he summoned Elmer to his office.

  “Elmer, I want to talk to you,” he said. “I love my country and I love liberty. I am devoted to guarding our cherished freedom. I despise Communism and everything it stands for with every fiber of my soul and my being. So we must be ever vigilant, Elmer, ever vigilant. Now I ask you—are you a Communist?”

  “No, I’m not,” said Elmer.

  “That’s good enough for me,” said DeMille.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EINE KLEINE MOSES MUSIK

  “Trust me, Elmer. It will work.”

  —Cecil B. DeMille

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  Elmer had just spent half a day at the director’s Paramount office.

  Elmer shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I played some themes for him on the piano. I’m a concert pianist so I played them very elaborately.”

  “And?”

  “And he said he didn’t want that. He wanted to hear the themes played with one finger. He wanted to hear the tune.”

  “And did he like the tunes?”

  “Most of them.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  Elmer shook his head again. “DeMille is a great believer in leitmotif. He wants every character in the Bible to have his own motif.”

  “Every character?”

  “He wants every character to have his own theme. He wants to hear it whenever they’re on the screen.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And another thing. The best scene in the movie is the big exodus scene. Moses is standing on the bank of the Red Sea, leading his people out of Egypt.”

  “I know, I read the book.”

  “Then you remember how Moses brings his staff down on the ground, the seas part, and the Hebrews march off.”

  “He smote a rock with a rod, as I recall,” I said.

  “Yes, but when DeMille shot the movie, he didn’t use Hebrews to play Jews. The Hebrews were played by members of the Egyptian Army. The scene was shot in Egypt. DeMille was on good terms with the Egyptian government, so he was able to get five thousand troops from the Egyptian army to act in his movie.”

  Elmer described the scene he had been shown in a Paramount screening room.

  “The army moves out slowly and deliberately. Very slowly. So I had written a solemn, ponderous anthem.”

  “I’m sure it was splendid.”

  Elmer was shaking his head again. “DeMille hated it.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “He said it was too slow.”

  “But you said the army was moving slowly and deliberately.”

  “Exactly. I told him I was reflecting what was on the screen.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I said, ‘Mr. DeMille, this is a ponderous movement of thousands of people.’ And he nodded and said, ‘I hate it,’ and I said, ‘Mr. DeMille, won’t it seem strange if I write something very up-tempo? Very fast?’ And he said, ‘Elmer, if the music is fast, the Hebrews will be fast.’”

  “Sounds like a commandment,” I said.

  “He said, ‘Trust me, Elmer. It will work.’”

  “What exactly does he want?”

  “He wants something like Onward Christian Soldiers.”

  “He wants Egyptian soldiers playing Jews and marching to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers?”

  “You’ve got it,” said Elmer.

  Thus wrote Elmer, and thus the great exodus of Jews occurred. And years later Elmer would reflect, “I learned a great lesson from DeMille that day. Music can make an army move faster than it’s actually moving. It defies the laws of physics, but there you are.”

  And lo, the tablets containing the ten commandments were shattered, the profane punished, and the wicked tribes were made to wander in the wilderness for forty years. But not my Elmer. He had not even finished his work on DeMille’s grandiose epic, when he started work on another film with a somewhat more contemporary setting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BIG O

  “Now ve begin.”

  —Otto Preminger

  The soaring strains of The Ten Commandments were still echoing across the Sinai Peninsula when Elmer began creating the screaming sounds of jazz for The Man with the Golden Arm.

  Hollywood was shocked and delighted. The town was not used to such versatility. In the movie business it was tough enough to be typecast. If you were a composer, well, at MGM they had a composer for Sand Epics and another for Ocean Epics. But Elmer was new in town and didn’t realize these generic restrictions. Here he was, successively hitting the two basic poles of American values—the biblical and the narcotic.

  Of course, there wasn’t a great deal of call for composers of narcotic films. Drugs and dope were specifically forbidden as subjects for motion pictures. Drug addiction was recognized by the moralists of the time to be one of the subjects whose depiction was dangerous to mental health. Other such taboos were nudity, profanity, prostitution, and costume design.

  So the Hays Office, the censorship arm of the movie business, had decreed that were anyone reckless enough to turn The Man with the Golden Arm into a film, it would be denied the Hays Office seal of approval. That should have ended the matter. Usually, filmmakers bowed to the censors’ wishes. (That’s why most of the sex in Hollywood wound up on the cutting room floor. I know it sounds uncomfortable, but that’s Hollywood.)

  But Otto Preminger was not bashful about pursuing the most incendiary themes, whether they be justice (Anatomy of a Murder), Judaism (Exodus), dirty politics (Advise and Consent), or sex (The Moon is Blue). But you know those autocratic Prussians. Say “no” to a Prussian and they do one of two things: they ignore you, or they invade Poland. So Mr. Preminger purchased the screen rights to Nelson Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm in which Frankie Machine is a would-be drummer, an expert card dealer, and a man with an arm aching for a fix.

  The day before Elmer was to meet Otto Preminger for the first time, he phoned his friend and fellow composer Ernest Gold. Ernie had worked with Preminger a few years before.

  I watched Elmer as he listened to his fellow composer’s assessment of the director. Finally Elmer thanked his friend and returned the receiver to its cradle.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Well, Ernie said he didn’t really like the man.”

  “Why not?”

  “He said he found Preminger obsessive, demanding and self-indulgent.”

  I processed this.

  “Well, so far he’s describing you. What didn’t he like about him?”

  Elmer grinned. “You’re a pal.”

  ***

  Another warning came from screenwriter friend Irving Ravitch. He and his wife Harriet Frank were two of the most famous names in the Hollywood writers’ colony. They had been commissioned to write a screenplay for Preminger, had handed it in, and been summoned to his office. The director nodded them to seats, moistened a thumb, and turned to the first page of their script.

  “Ve begin,” said Preminger, without preamble. “Ve rewrite every page—ve look at every scene—ve study every character—ve examine every line.”

  Irving and Harriet rose as one.

  “Ve quit,” said Irving.

  ***

  At their first meeting, Elmer was a little more outspoken than is usual for a novice composer speaking to a celebrated director, perhaps out of a desire to seize the initiative from the overbearing filmmaker.

  “I have an odd idea about what I want to do with the score,” he said. Preminger lifted a Teutonic eyebrow. “This movie is about a jazz drummer,” said Elmer. “I think the whole score should be driven by jazz.”

  “Jazz?” said Otto Preminger, tasting the word and the idea. “Jazz?” The producer made the one short word sound like a query, a challenge, and a paradox.

  He was silent as he absorbed this absurd unorthodoxy.

  “Jazz?” said Preminger.

  “Jazz,” said Elmer.


  Preminger sighed ponderously. “That’s your department. If that’s what you want to do—do it.”

  ***

  Elmer’s jazz score signaled a new era of film music. He augmented the traditional orchestra with a small jazz group that he assembled. He used to love the jazz music that his father played on their living room phonograph, but never dreamed he would one day be bringing that sound to the movies. The group Elmer put together included legendary trumpet player Shorty Rogers, drummer Shelly Manne, and a dozen other jazz greats. The success of Elmer’s music helped drive the success of the film, along with Sinatra’s performance as the drummer. The LP album of Elmer’s score was an instant bestseller. There were countless other recordings of his main-title theme. The McGuire Sisters even recorded a vocal version of Elmer’s theme, with lyrics by Sylvia Fine, wife of Danny Kaye.

  ***

  If Elmer had assumed after his first meeting with the ostensibly agreeable Preminger that he would be working with a malleable boss, he definitely had the wrong number. The Big O was no pussycat. He was a very hands-on employer who knew what he wanted and wasn’t shy about demanding it. One back-lot wag had said: “Otto is no Nazi like the ones he played in movies. He is a civilized man. His favorite hobbies are Flemish painting, classical music, and torture.” One of the forms that torture assumed was in requiring that his composers be on the set from the first cast reading to the final day of shooting. Elmer would have infinitely preferred to be at the keyboard, but Otto wanted him close at hand.

  I remember one spring morning Elmer was sitting on a sound stage at the Goldwyn Studios watching a lighting man set up for a shot. Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker were in their trailers. Sinatra was doubtless somewhere studying a Nelson Riddle arrangement. And I was in our kitchen mixing some brown salad. The phone rang.

  “Hello?” I said brightly.

  I heard the sound of Elmer growling.

  “What am I doing here?” he demanded.