The Magnificent Elmer Read online

  “What?”

  At which point loud-sports-jacket descended to his knees, stretched out his arms and sang, “I love Paris in the springtime—”

  “What does that have to do with a basset hound?” said Elmer.

  “Keep an open mind, Elmer. I love Paris in the springtime—”

  The second of Elmer’s Broadway musicals was How Now, Dow Jones, on which he collaborated with lyricist Carolyn Leigh. Some of the lyrics that Carolyn Leigh handed Elmer to musicalize rhymed “Gina Lollobrigida” with “they’d only get fridgider,” and “Saud Araby” with “hock the baby.” Where’s Yip Harburg when you need him? How Now, Dow Jones was a Wall Street satire and Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times said the show was “shy a few things, like an amusing book, melodic songs, lyrics with life, and dancing.” And Walter Kerr in the Trib, recalling the corporate musical whose success had inspired the show, suggested “the show should have been called How to Try in Business Without Really Succeeding.” Well, you know how people love to criticize.

  Elmer’s third and final assault on the beachhead of Broadway was less an Anzio than a Gallipoli. It was a musical called Merlin that was a sort of showcase for illusionist Doug Henning, and it too closed after a brief run. Elmer’s infectious melody for the show’s big song, “Put a Little Magic in Your Life,” failed to put enough magic in the show. Don Black, who had written the lyrics for the title songs in several of Elmer’s movies, did the show’s lyrics. In one of them Doug Henning levitated magically and flew above the stage with no visible support. I always felt this was a metaphor for Elmer on Broadway. Not enough good support.

  ***

  There was even a time when Elmer’s frustration with Hollywood drove him out of music entirely. He turned from music to words. Elmer decided to write a novel. He was scoring a movie that Clifford Odets was writing and directing at Fox. It was called The Story on Page One and starred Rita Hayworth and Gig Young. He asked the famous dramatist to give him some tips on construction and dialogue in entering the unfamiliar terrain of the novel. For about three weeks, Elmer attacked the keyboard of his typewriter as ardently as he usually attacked the keyboard of his Steinway. Then the machine-gun bursts of typing went to small-arms fire, and finally gave way to the familiar sounds of melodies and chords.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “HER OR ME”

  “When you reach a fork in the road, take it.”

  —Yogi Berra

  Elmer always got what he wanted, whether it was a string of race horses, a 40 foot boat, or more violins in the string section. It stood to reason. He always felt he should have anything he wanted. It was that way during his childhood, when he was merely precocious. Now he saw no reason why at this stage in his life, when he had become Hollywood’s hottest composer, he should not be entitled to indulge his every whim.

  Now, so far the attentive reader will have noticed that everything I’ve said about Elmer has been pretty laudatory. He was funny, talented, charming, affectionate. But I suspect some of my less credulous readers may be saying: Wait a minute. Had this guy no faults? No vices? No weaknesses? What was he anyhow, a saint? Was he the perfect husband?

  Well, no. Elmer wasn’t perfect. You take Agatha Christie. Now, she had the perfect husband. He was an archaeologist. Agatha always said: “With an archaeologist, the older a woman gets, the better she looks.” But alas, Mrs. Christie’s experience was rare. Young women look good to men. It is nature’s little joke.

  Now, I have an announcement to make. We have reached the moment in our story where Eve enters stage right, smiling gently and exuding aplomb.

  ***

  Eve was a young woman of twenty. Long legs, tiny waist, high cheekbones, her hair rippled when she walked, a bit of elegance, British accent. Eve had poise, charm, education, all the things that women need if they don’t have looks, and she had looks too.

  Throughout our marriage, Elmer was not exactly a monk. There were a few others along the way—actresses, Agnes DeMille dancers, women who were overcome by the sensual qualities of his music. It is a scientific fact that women are often swept away by the power of music played by large orchestras. Music could be quite an aphrodisiac. But this was different. This was a woman who Elmer would marry and love for the rest of his life. Not exactly a fling.

  But I didn’t know any of this the day I confronted Elmer about Eve. At that moment she was “the other woman.” And I was “the wife.” The loyal willing helpmate. The woman who stood by him, never leaving his side, even in the darkest moments. I was “the little woman,” determined not to let her husband ruin his life by trying to get along without her.

  “I hear you’ve been seeing another woman,” I said. “Do you love her?”

  “I think I do,” said Elmer.

  He stood there, hands deep in his pockets.

  “It’s her or me, Elmer.”

  Elmer begged me not to present him with this painful choice.

  “Her or me,” I said.

  Elmer and I had grown up together, we had shared the hard knocks going up and coming down. He taught me a lot of things. He was my Pygmalion, and now he had found a new Galatea. And I sensed that she was something special. Well, Elmer was no longer a child and it was time for me to teach him about being a grownup. He had to make a choice.

  “Got to make a decision, Elmer,” I said. “Her or me.”

  Elmer chose her.

  Oops.

  ***

  It was what the romance novelists used to call a pregnant moment. Elmer stared out the window, and speaking with the speed of a man dictating to a stonecutter, God bless him, he tried to explain.

  “When you and I met, Pearl, I had just come out of the army. I had played the piano at that officer’s club in North Carolina.”

  “Taking requests from second lieutenants.”

  Elmer nodded. “Then we moved into our walk-up on 110th Street. Then the excitement of New York. Rehearsing for my debut at Town Hall. Then the sudden offer from Hollywood. The thrill of hearing my own music on the Columbia sound stage. Losing the Oscars, the House committee, DeMille…”

  “The Egyptians playing Jews marching to Onward Christian Soldiers…”

  “In some crazy way, Pearl, when I met Eve, it made me feel young again. I guess that’s how I’m feeling now. I’d like to take it from the top—I have the urge to start it all over again.”

  “Frankly, Elmer, I can’t see you playing piano in an officer’s club today.”

  “You know what I mean, Pearl.”

  And God help me, I did know what he meant. The trouble with us liberals is we can always see both sides of the question, even our husband leaving us. I could understand wanting to relive those years when love was young and life was full of promise. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

  On the other hand, as we liberals also say, it was a shock. Our lives seemed very good. What could be missing? We had a lovely home in the Hollywood Hills, two sweet boys, a great basset hound, we played charades with Danny Kaye, we had dinner with Gregory Peck, we drank cream soda with Golda Meir, we were tracked down at Dodgers games by Viennese directors, Elmer kept losing the Oscar, the Philip Morris Company was paying him an obscene sum to use his music to spread emphysema throughout the world. What could be wrong? Was something missing? Evidently.

  ***

  After Elmer moved out of the house, my life seemed to go into slow motion. The days were long and my ego was bruised. I passed a pawn shop on Ventura Boulevard, saw a revolver in the window, and thought fleetingly of buying it and shooting Eve. But no. The feeling passed. I decided that murder led to theft and theft led to deceit. Besides, I couldn’t bear the thought of the headline in tomorrow’s Hollywood Reporter: ELMER BERNSTEIN’S WIFE SLAYS HIS LOVER. The kids would be teased unmercifully at school.

  Our friends chose sides. Try to guess which side. Most were musicians who worked for Elmer. From the day we separated, I never heard from them again. Not so much as a grace note. I can understand their
loyalty, but that did not assuage the pain. I got the children and the in-laws. Elmer got the orchestra.

  ***

  I had always admired Elmer so much. He had opened the world of music to me. Music was his bible. So I was a little disappointed. Yes, I thought, Eve is attractive. But what about his love for music? Why didn’t Elmer have a fling with someone in the orchestra? Some nice girl in the string section. Perhaps a cellist. Then I could have kidded him about the instrument between her legs, we could have had a good laugh, and that would have been the end of it. But no. I had to say the memorable words. “Her or me.” Probably not even grammatical.

  ***

  Elmer and I had come a long way together. But it was time to move forward along different paths. As Yogi Berra so wisely said: “When you reach a fork in the road, take it.” I took it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SCORE ONE FOR ME

  “You’re a lonely, misunderstood woman who’s been getting a lot of dirty breaks.”

  —Groucho Marx

  When your marriage has fallen apart, you have lost your husband, your friends have cut you off, and your life is a shambles, if you can pick yourself up and dust yourself off and start all over again, then you don’t understand the extent of the problem.

  For myself, I understood the problem all too well. And I had, if not a remedy, at least a poultice for the wound—something I always did in the face of calamity. I would get behind the wheel of my car and drive along Mulholland Drive until it ended. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the topography of Los Angeles, Mulholland is a road that winds its way through the green hills of the city. On one side you look down on the West Side, on the other the vista of the San Fernando Valley. Driving along Mulholland it is impossible to feel anything but blessed. It is also very dangerous, since if your mind wanders even for a moment, you will find yourself in a ravine.

  Hence I took a drive along Mulholland. It helped, for about twenty minutes.

  ***

  The year Elmer and I broke up, Gregory was eight and Peter was twelve. I did not want them to suffer unduly from the rupture of their family. I knew that broken homes could have a harmful effect on kids, nearly as bad as the effect of intact ones. Says Holden Caulfield: “I keep picturing all these little kids playing in a big field of rye. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. And I’d be the catcher in the rye.” Well, every mother is a catcher in rye. I wanted to catch my boys before they went off the cliff of our separation. So Elmer and I never had a formal visitation agreement for him to see the children. He came over to the house almost every day. It was almost as though he had never left.

  ***

  If there is a secret to life after a midlife crisis, it is reinvention. I should have learned this from Elmer. He was always reinventing himself. After the biblical epics and the jazz opuses of the fifties, when his career lay temporarily fallow, he reinvented himself with westerns, and then with comedies.

  All through the years of our marriage, I was the little girl from Philadelphia married to the iconic composer. In the company of Hollywood’s elite, I would be careful never to contradict or challenge him. I was living in the shadow of the composer. But as Nietzsche said, what the fire doesn’t destroy, it hardens. And the breakup had led me to an important discovery: I had a brain. My thoughts had value and even, on occasion, wit. On a trip to London, Elmer asked me to join him and a lady friend for dinner at the Savoy. He would bring a date for me. We had a great time at dinner, and Elmer called me the next morning. “You were wonderful—They loved you!” he exclaimed. What a vote of approval. My ex-husband and his lady friend found me great company. Like winning the Good Housekeeping Seal.

  ***

  Then one evening at a dinner party, I met a writer who had been having his own share of post-marital anguish. His name was Michael Morris. He was good-looking, smart, and funny. Mike and I were two people with broken hearts. “It’s the old story,” he said. “You’re a lonely, misunderstood woman who’s been getting a lot of dirty breaks. Well, we can clean and tighten your brakes and change your oil, but you’ll have to stay in the garage overnight.” Mike confessed he had borrowed the line from a Marx Brothers movie. I knew he had character because he attributed the source, something Hollywood writers seldom do.

  I started to feel like my old self, which some of my friends would observe is the worst thing you could say about anybody. After my relationship with Mike had matured, I told Elmer I wanted a divorce. He was stunned. He wanted to continue to enjoy the best of both worlds—a loyal wife to care for the kids, and a tall, skinny British girlfriend. But that isn’t how it works. Life has a way of moving on.

  Eighteen months after my separation from Elmer, Mike and I flew to El Paso, and took a cab across the border to the town of Juarez, where (a) I got a divorce, (b) I had a taco, (c) I got married. Juarez is a dangerous town. The Americans who came there for quickie marriages often found their nuptials marred by violence, promiscuity, and even murder. And the town was pretty dangerous, too.

  Then we drove back to El Paso and flew to San Francisco where some friends had flown up for a wedding celebration; thence we drove back to L.A. Mike’s arrival seemed to bring an element of stability to the home that had been shaken by our passing storm. So I was glad to see that the boys seemed to have survived the melodrama. For a long time I had been submissive and broadminded. But the streets of Juarez were littered with the bones of men whose wives were no longer submissive and broadminded.

  Mike was occupied as a story editor for the television sitcom Bewitched, where co-star Paul Lynde was hilarious when he wasn’t infuriating. Paul’s infectious sarcastic wit made him stand out as one of the show’s most memorable characters. But Paul tended to read Mike’s lines in erratic ways, and when Mike’s eyebrows climbed his forehead, Paul would say, “You’ll learn to like it.”

  As reality returned to our household, I realized I couldn’t go through the rest of my life hanging out at home. By this time, Peter was at college and Greg had reached the age of self-sufficiency. Mike was at the studio all day and into the evening. My life had no focus. I was not one of “the ladies who lunch” who spend their day choosing a hat. If I may be excused for using the C word, I was looking for a career.

  After much soul-searching, I decided to attend a seminar at UCLA for “directionless women.” One of the speakers was the dean of the USC law school. But I was ambivalent. I raised my hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you realize, when I graduate law school I’ll be fifty-one?”

  “Do you realize,” said the dean, “that if you don’t go to law school, you’ll still be fifty-one?”

  That line closed the deal.

  ***

  As I write this, the women who are getting law degrees outnumber the men. But when I graduated law school in the late seventies that was not the case. I recall wearing my navy blue credibility suit and low-heeled shoes, and with the handful of other new lady lawyers, receiving cautionary instructions from a judge in the Los Angeles Courthouse.

  “Women lawyers are not to wear pants in court.

  “They are not to wear heels.

  “They are not to wear red.

  “They are not to wear bows. But if they must wear bows, the bows are to be tied snugly about the neck. And on no account are said bows to be thrown over the shoulder.”

  I decided that at my age—I was pushing fifty-one—I was too old to take instructions from others. So I hung out my shingle in my own office. I was practicing general law. Some of my more credulous friends sought my help in legal matters—a will, a trust agreement, a real estate document. Then I joined a small practice that focused on intellectual property and patent law, and in an era before computers and data bases, this meant trips to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. Other cases took me to other world capitals, from Bombay to London, from Rome to Paris. I practiced family law, and usually represented the wife. I sought to secure the rights of women in society, their
social and political empowerment.

  With every fresh document and legal challenge, the soap opera of my breakup with Elmer faded further from my conscious thoughts.

  Now, there is a theory that has been propounded by my son Gregory that had Elmer never left me I would’ve never become the woman I became. Which explains, I suppose, why the Chinese use the same symbol for the words “crisis” and “opportunity.”

  Or as Mr. Sondheim says in a lyric from a song about marital breakup: “That’s the killer—Now you grow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I’M STILL HERE

  “The accordionist knows three songs—‘New York, New York,’ the theme from The Godfather, and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’”

  —Minister at the Venetian Hotel

  After a long struggle with colon cancer and Alzheimer’s, Mike died in 2003 at the Motion Picture Home.

  I met Gerald Gardner at a birthday party that our friend Bernie West threw for his wife Mimi at the Peninsula Hotel. In one of those “what if” moments, Bernie seated us together. We talked and laughed all evening. We spoke about politics and show business and other things. Gerry loved music—he was caught in a time warp bounded by Gershwin and Cole Porter—he admired Elmer’s work. When Gerry told me he lived on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, I started thinking about a boat and a beach house. I didn’t realize till later that Camden Drive runs all the way to the airport.