The Magnificent Elmer Read online

  “Ah-hah!” said the composer.

  “So he assiduously avoided touching anything that looked the least bit difficult.”

  Elmer grinned. “And that has become the guiding principal of the whole damn movie business.”

  “Exactly,” said Danny.

  “Play ball!” shouted the home plate umpire.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  OLE BLUE EYES

  “As a performer no one could touch him.

  As a person no one wanted to touch him.”

  —Neil Simon. The Sunshine Boys

  Frank Sinatra ate scrambled eggs off a call girl’s belly.

  Frank Sinatra paid a bartender to punch Dominick Dunne in the face.

  Frank Sinatra threw darts at Elmer’s face on Sammy Cahn’s dartboard.

  All right. I admit it. Frank Sinatra is a singer, and the important thing with a singer is the music, as it is with a composer. The twenty thousand bobby soxers who pressed against the doors of the Paramount Theatre back in those days adored him. The millions who were touched by the magic of his talent loved him. He was the touchtone of his time and that’s what matters, isn’t it?

  But still—hurling darts at Elmer’s face at the bulls-eye of Sammy Cahn’s dartboard? Sammy Cahn? Not even Johnny Mercer? Sammy, the man who they said never joined the rat-pack because he couldn’t pass the physical?

  Why the dartboard? Elmer had written the music for The Man with the Golden Arm, the movie that had lifted Sinatra to a career in the movies when his career lay fallow in the mid-fifties. No good deed goes unpunished.

  Three years later Columbia Pictures had hired Elmer to score Sinatra’s next film. It was called Some Came Running, and starred Frank, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine about life in a small town. It would feature a song written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen called “To Love and Be Loved.”

  Elmer’s music for Some Came Running was among the best work he did in the 1950s. It combined his uncanny ability to write cool style jazz with touches of Americana. Sinatra told director Vincent Minnelli that he wanted the music of “To Love and Be Loved” used prominently in the film, though he didn’t want to sing it himself, nor did he want Dean Martin to sing it. Elmer chafed. But he swallowed hard and used it in the film with a male trio singing the song in a nightclub scene. And he wove the melody into the underscoring late in the picture. That was as far as Elmer felt comfortable in ceding to another composer the job he had been hired to do. When you hire Cole Porter to write a song, you don’t ask him to put a little Berlin in the chorus and a little Gershwin in the release.

  That was when Elmer received a phone call from ole blue eyes.

  “Hello, Elmer—this is Francis.”

  “Arlene or the talking mule?”

  “Funny, Elmer.”

  “What’s up, Frank?”

  “I’m anxious to have the melody from Sammy’s song under the main title. And the end credits. And in your score throughout the movie.”

  Elmer took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you something that Otto Preminger told me when I first talked to him about the music in Golden Arm. I said I’d like to do the score in jazz, and Otto said that’s your department. Frank, this is my department.”

  “Don’t challenge me, Elmer…”

  So this was Hollywood in the trenches. It wasn’t just dog eat dog. It was dog implies you’ll never work in this town again. It was: “I’ll be waiting for your answer in the legal department.” It was: “Don’t challenge me, Elmer.” That was the point at which a whole lot of correspondence, heavy with threats, started flowing through the mailrooms of MCA, the William Morris Office, Columbia Pictures, and the offices of Mr. Sinatra’s lawyers.

  “I hate show business,” said Elmer. “I like the show but I hate the business.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  COMEDY TONIGHT

  “If you score funny scenes seriously, they might be funnier.”

  —John Landis

  Nothing succeeds like success, but in Hollywood nothing fails like it, too. You become yesterday’s “big thing.” Or last year’s. Or last decade’s. And there is scarcely a movie star who is not afraid the phone will never ring again. There’s no business like show business; it’s neurotic, paranoid, and thoroughly terrifying. Elmer was going through a patch of insecurity. His agents didn’t call. And when the phone rang it was a recorded political message, or someone selling bossa nova lessons. Then, serendipity being what it is with successful men, at this lethargic point in his career, the phone rang.

  It was John Landis. He was a friend of our son Peter when they were teens at Oakwood, the Sherman Oaks school founded by actor Robert Ryan. The last Elmer had seen of John Landis was when he had taken the boys to see the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. I had given John and Peter a 16-mm camera that was gathering dust in our guest closet. They used it to film an animated movie by pasting photos on the garage door. John had known what he wanted to do from an early age. He had little interest in anything but film. He pursued his passion and grew up to direct some of the most successful comedies of the ’70s an ’80s. He was wired into the talent at the quixotic new TV show, Saturday Night Live, and he did well. He directed The Blues Brothers (with Aykroyd and Belushi), Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America (with Eddie Murphy), and he made Michael Jackson’s bestselling video, Thriller.

  “It’s John,” said a telephone voice to Elmer. “John Landis.”

  “Oh, hello, John, what have you been up to?”

  “Well, Mr. Bernstein, I’d like you to take a look at a film I just shot. It’s called Animal House.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s a wild comedy set in a frat house.”

  “I think you’ve got a wrong number.”

  “Well, Mr. Bernstein, I’ve got a little idea. I was thinking it might be fun if you scored the movie. And scored it like a drama.”

  “A drama.”

  “Yes, score the scenes as if they were high drama.”

  John Landis did not tell Elmer that he was running into the same raised eyebrows among the blue suits at Universal. Elmer Bernstein? Comedy? It was the same tone that Frances Ford Coppola encountered when the Paramount brass said, “Marlon Brando as The Godfather?”

  Elmer went down to Universal Studios and looked at a rough cut of Animal House. It starred the great John Belushi as the campus barbarian with a cast of lovable cretins. At the time, the movie ran for three hours and it was very, very, very funny.

  Elmer was quite the iconoclast himself. He did not find the idea of scoring a farce with dramatic music all that absurd. Certainly no more absurd than speeding up a languid army with up-tempo music. Elmer composed and conducted in his familiar dramatic way, and the result was quite funny.

  So it came to pass that Elmer Bernstein, creator of the music for To Kill a Mockingbird, The Magnificent Seven, and The Ten Commandments, wrote the musical score for Animal House.

  Animal House was the most successful movie of the summer in which it appeared, and Airplane!, which Elmer scored as a melodrama, was the most successful comedy of the following summer. And over the next decade, Elmer found himself scoring a whole raft of zany comedies, including Ghostbusters, Trading Places, Three Amigos, Stripes, and The Blues Brothers. He became the most successful composer of comedy music in town. Now you couldn’t make a comedy without music by Elmer Bernstein, as in decades past you couldn’t make a western without him, or a drama, romance, or jazz-oriented movie about junkie drummers or Broadway lowlifes.

  ***

  Now, a word about Elmer’s creative gifts. A reading of critics on Elmer’s work will reveal an overuse of words like “versatile,” “prolific,” and twisted phrases like “a man for all genres.” It was hard to get your arms around the scope of his talent.

  Then one evening at a dinner party, over the chatter, I heard the voice of another composer. Elmer had just won an Emmy for his score to The Making of the President, a TV documentary on Kennedy’s 1960 preside
ntial campaign.

  “God, the man will do anything for money. Television, Westerns. Now I hear he’s writing comedies! Did Eugene O’Neill write comedies? Does Neil Simon write dramas?”

  I didn’t want to dignify this backbiting with a reply. I am essentially a benign person. But if I did, I would have said, “Well, yes, O’Neill did write a comedy, and Neil Simon did write a drama.” As it was, I am not a vindictive person. So I didn’t respond to his remarks. I didn’t sink to his level. I just slipped some arsenic in his Chardonnay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE MAESTROS

  “I have to keep reminding myself that music is the least important part of the movie.”

  —Leonard Bernstein

  Troubled marriages, bacchanalian tastes, left-leaning politics, princely fees, insatiable hungers, great good humor. Bernstein East and Bernstein West had not a few things in common.

  As the wife of one of them, and madly in love with both of them (with Lenny, alas, from afar), I had a chance to observe the talents and tastes, the triumphs and trials, of the Maestros Bernstein.

  Of course, the two celebrated composers were not related but they knew one another and were friendly rivals. Indeed, many said they shared a certain physical resemblance, which I could never see. Lenny and Elmer had a similar gusto and charm, they were both composers, pianists and conductors, and their work formed musical parentheses that embraced the second half of the twentieth century.

  Bernstein East and West both were into progressive politics. Elmer played the piano for Paul Robeson at the famous Madison Square Garden concert that landed him on a Hollywood blacklist. The liberal Lenny triggered “radical chic,” as Tom Wolfe labeled it in a derisive New York magazine article. Lenny had thrown a notorious party at his swank uptown apartment for the leaders of the Black Panther movement.

  Both Bernsteins were captivated by J.M. Barrie’s classic story of perennial childhood, Peter Pan. Elmer was the rehearsal pianist for the Mary Martin production that produced a long run on Broadway. I attended every rehearsal in its Los Angeles tryout run. (“You can still see the wires!” complained producer Leland Heyward.) And a few years later, Lenny wrote all the songs for a different stage version of Peter Pan that starred Jean Arthur, who at 49 was a bit long in the tooth to play a flying pixie. (“You can still see the wires!” complained Lenny.) Now, I wouldn’t want to imply that Elmer and Lenny were both attracted to the Peter Pan fable because they were both middle-aging children who refused to mature. I wouldn’t say that at all. But you’re welcome to draw your own conclusions.

  Both of the Bernsteins brought their gifts to the Broadway musical theatre, Lenny with somewhat greater success. In On the Town and Wonderful Town (with Betty Comden & Adolph Green), in West Side Story (with Steve Sondheim), and finally in Candide (with Lillian Hellman, which became a cult musical), Lenny had a spectacular stage career. Elmer would have settled for a cult musical.

  It was early in 1956 when Lenny’s and Elmer’s orbits intersected briefly in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Lenny was visiting town with his parents, Sam and Jenny; Elmer had been writing The Ten Commandments. Elmer and I were coming out of a meeting of arrangers when we encountered Lenny and his folks in the lobby. Their greetings were warm as befits a musical axis.

  “I still get some of your ASCAP statements,” mused Lenny.

  “And I yours,” said Elmer.

  “Your checks are bigger.”

  Both Bernsteins were remarkably prolific. I would marvel at Elmer’s productivity, and if anything, Lenny was even more so—conductor, pianist, composer of symphonic and show music, and recently he had become America’s music teacher in a series of lectures on TV’s Omnibus. Lenny joked about his strategy for disarming competitors: “When I’m with composers I say I’m a conductor. When I’m with conductors I say I’m a composer.”

  Elmer mentioned that he had just been invited to be a guest conductor at the Prague Symphony Orchestra. Lenny had some advice: “Try to keep the five violinists who hate you away from the five who are still undecided.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” said Elmer.

  I asked Bernstein East what had brought him west. He explained that he was here to meet with film producer Sam Spiegel for whom he was writing the score for On the Waterfront. (Spiegel boasted that he “had given Leonard Bernstein his big break,” which he had done in the same sense that he had given Lawrence of Arabia his big break).

  “My last visit to town was fortuitous,” said Lenny. “I met Arthur Laurents at the swimming pool here and we decided to work on a Broadway musical about gang warfare in New York.”

  “That turned out well,” I said.

  Elmer praised Lenny on his brilliant young collaborator in West Side Story, Steve Sondheim. Lenny observed that their work habits did not always mesh.

  “Steve likes to work late into the night, and with my conducting schedule, I prefer to work in the morning.”

  “When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way,” I said.

  The Maestros fell into a heated discussion about the dubbing process that Lenny had discovered when On the Waterfront had been dubbed with his music. It happened that the facility was the same one where Elmer’s first few scores had been mixed, the huge dubbing room on the third floor at Columbia Studios. Elmer, having had his own experience with composing for movies, could commiserate.

  “At a certain stage,” said Elmer, “you become so wrapped up in your score that the music seems the most vital part of the movie.”

  “But it isn’t, is it?” said Lenny.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Elmer.

  “I had to keep reminding myself,” said Lenny, “that to the producer and everyone else, the music is the least significant thing in the movie. To them, a spoken line of dialog that is buried under music is lost. But a bar of music that’s lost because of a line of dialog—well, it’s only music.”

  Elmer nodded ruefully.

  “The moments I resent,” said Lenny, “are when they have a general discussion about cutting a piece of your music, and they talk about it as though you weren’t even there.”

  “Well, nobody ever asked me to come to the dubbing sessions,” said Elmer. “I usually have to fight my way in.”

  Bernstein East sighed.

  “You score a lot of movies, Elmer. How on earth do you handle the frustration?”

  Elmer shrugged.

  “Screaming, sobbing, and cursing work for me,” he said. “And then I call my agent.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BERNSTEIN’S COMPLAINT

  “It should have been called How to Try in Business Without Really Succeeding.”

  —The New York Herald Tribune

  Along with his immense talent and versatility, I sometimes think that the other qualities that drove Elmer to excel were his frustrations and impatience. One sensed that he always felt the music of motion pictures deserved more prominence and respectability than it received. The so-called “invisible art” had its fans and aficionados, of course. But it was Gershwin and Porter and Kern who were called “the masters.” Elmer sensed that the talents of Victor Young and John Williams and Bernard Herrmann were just as great as that of the composers who wrote thirty-two bar melodies for Ethel Merman and Fred Astaire.

  Elmer was an advocate for film composers and that led him into more crusades than the Holy Roman Empire. He actually sued the major film studios in an attempt to get them to grant composers some ownership of the music they wrote. It took a lot of nerve to sue Goldwyn and Mayer and the brothers Warner. Elmer led a composers strike and it cost him some work. But he was always willing to put his money where his music was.

  ***

  Elmer made it better to be a composer in Hollywood and he made his own career seem thrilling at a time it threatened to sink like a stone.

  When the 1960s ran into the ’70s, his big pictures were few and far between. He did smaller films and a lot of television cop series. He waited for another
break. And while he waited, he led a composer’s strike. And he recorded other composers’ scores. And he financed a library of LPs. Hell, he virtually invented the film scoring business. And he preserved the thoughts of his peers in a series of published interviews that he called The Notebooks.

  Was he a promoter? An entrepreneur with an artist’s flair? In musical terms, I prefer to think of Elmer as a swashbuckler. What a book publisher he would have made. Or a magazine editor. Or a Kamikaze pilot. He was so incredibly eclectic. I always felt he would succeed at whatever he tried. His detractors, and they were few, said he hungered for success. Well, he didn’t hunger for failure.

  ***

  Elmer’s “Film Music Notebooks” were quarterly journals that contained interviews with the great film composers of the 20th century, most of them conducted by Elmer himself. There were also analyses of scores, profiles of the composers, and historical assessments of the world of movie music.

  Elmer’s “Film Music Collection” contained the scores of Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, Alex North and Dmitri Tiomkin. He conducted all this music himself in England, and how he enjoyed it!

  Elmer was a chameleon of movie music—composer, conductor, impresario, historian, publisher. And wherever his curiosity led him he was a true and faithful servant. He was brash at the age when other composers were becoming dyspeptic, and boyish when they were becoming irrelevant. “After I’m dead,” said Cato the Elder, “I’d rather have them ask why I have no monument, than why I have one.” Elmer has his monument, several of them. And no one has ever had to ask why.

  ***

  There were times when Elmer reached out for the validation of Broadway. He judged, I think, that a Broadway musical would bring to his work the independence and luster it deserved. On Broadway, music drove the action, it didn’t merely underline it. But Elmer’s Broadway exertions were never successful. Perhaps he was a Rodgers in need of a Hart, no pun necessarily intended. The first time at bat was with actor Vic Morrow as his collaborator. Elmer and Vic wrote a musical called Everybody Loves Willie. Willie was a basset hound, like our dog “Thurber” who crouched by Elmer’s piano bench. I baked mountains of ruggalah and brewed oceans of coffee for the backers’ auditions at which Elmer and Vic narrated and played their show for prospective investors. One of the “angels” was less than angelic. Elmer ground his teeth at the middle-aged vulgarian in the loud checked jacket who crossed his arms, chewed a piece of ruggalah, and said: “It’s a nice show, Elmer. Don’t get me wrong. But you know what it needs?”