The Magnificent Elmer Read online

  Leon came to Los Angeles to write the screen adaptation of Battle Cry, and by then, Elmer and I were settled there. Leon and his wife were living a mile from us on Laurel Canyon Drive, and we often saw one another. As Elmer wrote his movie scores, Leon wrote other novels, among them Exodus, QV VII, Topaz, Trinity, and Mila 18 (which incidentally forced Joseph Heller to find a new number for his own war novel, Catch 18).

  Now, moving on to my life at eighteen. That is the age when I got a job as a waitress at a summer camp in the Berkshires where the politics were so progressive that, as Rubin Carson said, “When they produced a play about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti were acquitted.”

  Elmer was working on the entertainment staff. He played the piano at the musical shows, and Wednesday evenings entertained the guests with Beethoven and flashing black hair.

  It would be a dozen years before Elmer would write the score to The Great Escape, a movie about men escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in World War II.

  Our own escape, to Hollywood, affluence and glory, came sooner.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THINGS CHANGE

  “Dear Mr. Bernstein, We regret that the saxophones are unacceptably suggestive.”

  —Letter from the Hays Office

  When Elmer and I left for Hollywood in 1950, there was no way that the feisty thirty-year old that was Elmer when he arrived in L.A. could know his talent and industry would carry him through five decades in the changing worlds of movies and music. And there was no way that I could know what lay ahead for me in the worlds of motherhood and law, love and loss. It is said that God made the world round so that we could not see too far down the road. How else could we stand the fear of pain or be patient for the pleasures to come.

  In the twenties, when Elmer and I were born, the life expectancy was 53 for men, 54 for women; 32,000 men got college degrees, 17,000 women; milk was 17 cents a quart and bread 12 cents a loaf. By the time we set out for California in 1950, life expectancy was 65 for men, 71 for women; annual income was $2,992 (a figure we just barely reached); 60 million Americans went to the movies every week; milk had crept up to 21 cents a quart, and bread to 14 cents a loaf.

  People will tell you that the sixties was a time of the most fantastic changes, a time of social and political upheaval. True enough. But ah, the fifties! From where I sat, the fifties were the pivotal decade in the life of the century, and certainly the pivotal decade in the life of the Elmer Bernsteins.

  The fifties were supposedly the bland decade, but I found it anything but bland. The fifties were the decade of conformity, but Elmer was anything but a conformist.

  When we arrived in Hollywood, radical changes were afoot in the film capital that would transform the movie business and the business of scoring movies. Never fall in love during a total eclipse, they say, and never move to a company town where the company is going bust. That Elmer could succeed amidst of the death of the studios was extraordinary, and the greatest testimony to his talent and resourcefulness.

  The movie industry of the thirties and forties was a pyramid scheme, as imposing as any of DeMille’s Egyptian pyramids. It linked production, distribution and exhibition. The fifties were a time of conservative politics and button-down conformity. Everything was neat and trim, from the sweeping lawns outside the Thalberg Building to the Swedish modern boardroom at Universal. Movies were junk food for drive-ins, from Rock Hudson & Doris Day to Ben Hur. Russia had the bomb, but the bomb had Hollywood.

  ***

  When we drove into Hollywood in our spanking new green convertible we didn’t hear the sound of collapsing industries. Maybe if we had had the top down. Johnny Carson said, “Three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off.” When all those phones stopped ringing in the Thalberg Building, they should have known something was up.

  The period from the introduction of sound in 1929 to 1950 is referred to by film historians as “the Golden Age of Hollywood.” A lot of folks who remember those old films may dispute the adjective. In an artistic sense, the age wasn’t all that golden. Foremost among the things that inhibited quality was the matter of censorship. Elmer wryly observed that fortunately music was not a literal art form, so the censors had to leave the mangling of his scores to the directors. Elmer was free of the moralizing and meddling that Hollywood screenwriters had to deal with daily. (Can you picture a letter from the Hays office? “Dear Mr. Bernstein, We regret that the saxophones are unacceptably suggestive. Please replace all the blue notes.”)

  It seems very disorderly, but I think a paragraph ought to be wedged in here to point out that the censors created a whole goddamn mythology of life. They really did, as Holden Caulfield would say. The most impressionable among us grew up believing all of the following myths: 1) married couples always slept in twin beds and that’s all they did there; 2) honeymoon nights were a series of farcical mishaps; 3) criminals were always punished; 4) women had no navels since we weren’t permitted to see them; and 5) copulation was rare, though we were sometimes provided with clues that a couple had gone beyond hand-holding. These visual metaphors included logs crackling in the fireplace, waves crashing on the beach, fireworks exploding in the air, and my own favorite, a fire hydrant gushing water.

  But to get back to the story. The studio system was the method of film production dominated by a small number of studios. The term “studio system” refers to the practice of large movie studios producing films on their own lots, with their own people under long-term contracts stretching from thirteen years to death, and dominating the movies’ exhibition in local movie palaces near you.

  The system was challenged under the anti-trust law in a 1948 Supreme Court ruling that separated the production of films from their exhibition. Thus, by the time Elmer had really hit his stride, the era of the big studio was over.

  ***

  When the system collapsed, ironically, it was good for Elmer’s career. Suddenly a new school of film music replaced the symphonic sound of the thirties and forties. More and more movie music became an American sound, and first among the creators of this sound was Elmer.

  Of course, the death of the studio system brought problems for Elmer as well. The Hollywood studios, for all their hidebound conservatism had a cadre of contract musicians under contract, ready to serve their composers at the drop of a baton—orchestrators, copyists, musicians, editors. All the composers had to do was, well, compose. But suddenly with the demise of these dinosaurs, every time Elmer scored a movie he had to become a mini-music department.

  ***

  Hollywood is such a volatile, unstable, capricious place, that a fifty-year career is almost unimaginable. How do you do that? How do you span a period from Gershwin and Rodgers to hard-rock and hip-hop?

  I can’t quite get my mind around a man whose talent began in the era of Cecil B. DeMille and Otto Preminger, went sailing through the era of John Landis and Martin Scorsese, and came out in the era of Todd Haynes. Most composers, screenwriters, and actors can barely survive a decade in this town, let alone most marriages.

  When I look back at the mid-century mark when Elmer and I headed west, America was certainly another country from what it was in the millennial year when Elmer was to write his last movie.

  In 1950 North Korea invaded the south. And Joe McCarthy said, “I have in my hand a list of 205 names of communists in the Department of State.” And Harry Truman wrote a letter to the music critic who had harshly reviewed his daughter’s debut: “Some day I’m going to meet you and you will need a new nose and a supporter as well.” Old Gold cigarettes said: “We cure just one thing, the world’s best tobacco.” They got that right. On TV you could see Martin & Lewis, George S. Kaufman and Abe Burrows on This Is Show Business, Bennett Cerf and Arlene Francis on What’s My Line, and Groucho Marx on This Is Your Life. Since there is no one even remotely resembling these people today, I am not going to even attempt a comparison.

  CHAPTER TEN
/>   HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME

  “Hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp…”

  —Larry Hart, “The Lady is a Tramp”

  When Harry Cohn extended an invitation to desert the Big Apple for the Gold Coast, Elmer’s first reaction, as recounted earlier, was distinctly negative. But his distaste for abandoning New York for L.A. was as much geographical as musical. He liked the predictable arrangement of the streets of Manhattan, and he was a little intimidated by the randomness of the winding roads of Los Angeles. East 57th and Madison were in a position you could always count on, neat as the lines on his manuscript paper. Hollywood streets were all over the map.

  And yet… and yet… the town had something…

  I should now like to say a few words in defense of Hollywood. God knows the town has taken its share of hits from the eastern elites who visited or settled here. Oscar Levant said, “No matter how hot it gets in the daytime, there’s nothing to do at night.” Mel Brooks said, “The difference between Hollywood and yogurt is that yogurt has a living culture.” Truman Capote said, “It’s a scientific fact that for every year you stay in California, you lose one point off your IQ.” Neil Simon said, “When it’s 40 degrees in New York it’s 72 in Hollywood. When it’s 100 in New York it’s 72 in Hollywood. Unfortunately, there are 8 million interesting people in New York and 72 in Hollywood.”

  Okay. Now here is the case for the defense.

  In Hollywood, I knew the cinema history that had unfolded a stone’s throw from my living room. For example—

  I was a mere thirty-two blocks from the spot where David Selznick’s brother Myron stood on a tower beside Vivien Leigh at the burning-of-Atlanta scene, and said, “Okay, Genius, meet your Scarlett O’Hara”; I was twelve blocks from the theater in Westwood where Charlie Chaplin had entered a Little Tramp look-alike contest and come in second; I was nineteen blocks from the Burbank motel where Clark Gable had first bedded Carole Lombard who reported to friends, “The old man is not great in the sack”; I was two miles from the Bel-Air home of Jerry Lewis where, after Jerry suffered a heart attack, he was handed a prescription by his cardiologist that read, “Work alone”; I was fourteen blocks from where Hedy Lamarr was arrested for shoplifting in the May Company; I was a mere three blocks from where a shy Walt Disney showed his rough sketches of a talking mouse to a movie mogul and pleaded for a loan; and I was twelve blocks from where Lillian Hellman first saw Dashiell Hammett on his way to the men’s room at the Cocoanut Grove, fell in beside him, and began a journey that would last thirty-two years.

  I mention these colorful contretemps to show why the Hollywood citizen cannot fail to be profoundly affected by the history of the place. You are, after all, in the middle of a town where icons have lived, where you have to always be prepared for the worst and willing to settle for the best.

  If you think back on the apocalyptic scene in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, you know that Hollywood should have destroyed itself a long time ago—the place should have been destroyed by flames or rebellion or self-delusion. But somehow it hasn’t.

  ***

  I’ve been remembering, as I try to construct this memoir, what it felt like as a young woman to live in a town of giants. When Elmer and I first arrived in Hollywood, his personal giants were Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, and Max Steiner. Mine were a clutch of writers, directors, and actors. I was burning with a steady passion, because I was in the same town as Billy Wilder, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and God forgive me, Otto Preminger and the Three Stooges. And whenever I drove down the 800 block of North Roxbury, the street where George and Ira huddled over a piano and tried to parse romance, the pavement seemed to shudder under my wheels.

  Hollywood was a land full of young movie worshippers, each depending on his wits to stay afloat, each with his own stable of giants, from Miklos Rozsa to the Ritz Brothers.

  No, it wasn’t Mecca. And unlike New York, it didn’t smell like it.

  It was Hollywood, damn it, Hollywood!

  Now, how would you like to see The Ten Commandments again, this time taking place completely on a PT-boat? You wouldn’t? That’s all, step down. The defense rests.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  “If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

  —John F. Kennedy

  There were also giants on the world stage in those days. Kennedy in the White House, Khrushchev in the Kremlin, Adlai at the UN, de Gaulle in Paris. And they led us to the first great crisis of the nuclear age. In October of 1962 JFK learned from photographic evidence that Russia had implanted in Cuba missiles bearing atomic warheads. That was the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation between the two great nuclear powers that brought the world to the abyss.

  In July 1963, a mere eight months after we nearly had a nuclear war with Russia that brought an end to mankind, Elmer and I were off to Moscow. After coming close to Armageddon, America and the Soviets, doubtless chastened by their near-death experience, had stepped back from the brink and had contrived a Hollywood ending. We were planning, heaven help us, a film festival!

  ***

  Elmer had written the rousing score for a prison-camp movie called The Great Escape. It was thick with testosterone, and a dazzling cast that included Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Jim Garner, as a bunch of blow dried boys in one of the great “popcorn” movies of all times. (Years later a British soccer team paid a lot of pounds to Elmer to use his stirring theme to welcome their athletes to the stadium each week).

  But the movie was not exactly Citizen Kane. There were quite a few better American films that year. Indeed, Elmer had scored a better movie himself, a story about a scoundrel in the tradition of Sammy Glick. It starred Paul Newman, and was written by some good friends, Irving Ravitch and Harriet Frank. But the commissars of the Kremlin’s Cinema Office knew enough about the political requirements of the Cold War not to nominate Hud. They were willing to honor an escape movie in the mindless American mold, not one in which Hollywood mocked America’s capitalist spirit. They also passed up the chance to nominate other worthy American movies—Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marlon Brando’s The Ugly American. If they had a taste for kitsch, they could have chosen Cleopatra, on whose Roman set Liz Taylor and Richard Burton fell hopelessly in love.

  The Russian Film Festival was scheduled for Moscow during the second and third week of July. The invitation reached us late, so we had to pull strings to get passports. Barely three days before the plane left for Moscow, we had them.

  Danny Kaye was on the plane. He was not a nominee at the festival. Danny had no film that year to command attention. His best work in movies was a decade behind him. His fascination with all things Russian—culture, language, literature—began when he was lifted to stardom by an Ira Gershwin lyric that Danny sang in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark. The memorable show-stopper was called “Tchaikovsky.” In it Danny rattled off the names of forty-nine Russian composers strung together by Ira Gershwin in a tongue-twisting inventory. Danny did it in less than a minute. Matter of fact, he did it most nights in thirty-nine seconds and managed to stop the show every time. During Danny’s number, the ostensible star of the show, Gertrude Lawrence, “the lady in the dark,” was sitting on a swing onstage, watching him as he stole her show. And each night, the audience cheered its appreciation of Danny’s tour de force, and each night as they kept applauding, Danny kept bowing and bowing.

  He recalled the song with satisfaction.

  “At each performance,” he crowed, “I tried to break my speed record in reciting those names. The orchestra couldn’t keep up with me!”

  “You should have done it a cappella,” said Elmer dryly.

  The plane that carried us East contained such seriously famous Hollywood celebrities as Danny, Steve McQueen, Stanley Kramer, and my composer husband.

  “I’d like to see the story in the Tim
es if this plane went down,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t make the first paragraph,” scowled Elmer.

  “Maybe an inside page,” I said.

  ***

  As our aircraft hurtled toward Moscow, on the same approximate route that our strategic bombers had traveled eight months earlier, Elmer idly leafed through the packet of press material that had been given to the luminaries aboard. The Moscow International Film Festival, it declared, was to be held at a newly built auditorium of twenty-five thousand seats that had opened two years earlier and was designed by two distinguished architects.

  Elmer scanned the mimeographed material.

  “Do you realize that there are a hundred-fifty movie houses in Moscow?” he said in surprise. “That makes Moscow one of the cinema capitals of the world.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said Danny.

  “Ask Stanley,” I said.

  Stanley Kramer, who bore no grudge with the Soviets for failing to nominate his 1963 release, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, was acting as the scoutmaster and administrator on our trip. He distributed the press releases and kept everyone from changing planes in Prague.

  The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation which ran the affair had been wise enough in the ways of capitalist public relations to invite various celebrities who were not actually nominated for anything. Thus Danny Kaye and Stanley Kramer whose current work was too commercial to warrant an actual nomination, were invited along with Steve McQueen and Elmer Bernstein whose work was deemed culturally worthy. For their presence the Russians provided the cost of two round-trip airline tickets and four-day hotel accommodations.

  Stanley Kramer had a reputation for serious work, though often as heavy-handed as a Pravda editorial. Stanley had created some fine progressive themed films on topical subjects in recent years—Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, and On the Beach, and in the years ahead he would produce Ship of Fools, and the paean to integration Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was said that by the cynics of the back lot that Stanley Kramer could always be depended on to fight liberal battles three years after they had been won. But I had to admire his attempts to moderate prejudice.