The Magnificent Elmer (6 page)

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
Times
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.

***

The Tverskaya Hotel at 2 Pushkinshaya Square in Moscow was an old and elegant affair. Security checks were heavy. A sturdy middle-aged Russian woman sat at a desk on each floor, checking the comings and goings. A young KGB agent was our constant companion and he saw that we took no photos of sensitive military installations. Although we, as international guests, had relatively easy access to the festival screenings, tickets for movie-crazed Muscovites were hard to come by. At the main ceremonies, Stanley Kramer was given a special medal by the Soviet government for building a cinematic bridge to peace between the Russian and American people.

More moving for me was the presentation of an award to a Russian director who had recently been released from a Russian gulag in order to be present at the festival. His release was part of the détente and liberalizing spirit of the Soviet government in the early sixties on the heels of Cuban Missile Crisis. He sobbed about having gained his freedom and described his incarceration.

When Elmer and I deserted our enormous high-ceiled hotel suite, it wasn’t to attend a screening of
Czarne Skyrzdla
in the original Swedish. Some of the screenings held scant appeal to even such eclectic souls as Elmer and me. We spent a lot of our time doing what Americans like to do best: sightseeing. We had never visited Moscow before and naturally had to see the stores. Gumm’s was the city’s famous retail emporium, but we were surprised and depressed to see that the massive Gumm’s, like the many less famous stores, were as empty of merchandise as they were of customers. The major outlet for Russia’s manufacturers at that time seemed to contain little beside ball-point pens, picture postcards, and nested figurines.

The mercantile market had moved outdoors onto Moscow’s grim gray streets. A black market was thriving. Venders who had rescued product from the backs of trucks were busy on the spider streets that grew out of Red Square. That summer the big deal was blue jeans. The citizens of Moscow that had survived Hitler’s armies had just surrendered to the comfort and strength of blue jean fabrics, and this formed a sartorial kinship with their American visitors.

One evening the visitors to the festival were invited to a nearby movie theater to see another American film that had recently been released to great acclaim in the Soviet Union. It was the American version of the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim musical
West Side Story
. It had been hailed in Russia as a movie landmark. American musicals had usually been attacked by Soviet critics—in story, in literature, in content, they were considered insubstantial. That was the basic criticism in Russia of all things American—a lack of
substance
. We offered a sports car to the Soviet tractor. But after all,
West Side Story
was Shakespeare updated to the mid-century world. And it didn’t hurt that it painted a picture of American prejudice and poverty.

The movie-mad buffs in the Moscow audience were thrilled by the camera work in the film’s opening shot of New York City. It established the slum locale and brought applause from the audience, an ovation before the movie had even begun. Then I heard a whispered commotion begin at the front of the theatre. Heads turned as word spread of something epochal at work. Finally we learned its cause as a thick-set Soviet woman in the row ahead of us turned and whispered to us in an agony of excitement.

“Bernstein—he’s here!”

There was evidently some confusion. In Moscow all those Bernsteins looked alike.

“Bernstein—he’s in the audience!” said a bald, black-bearded Russian in our row.

I saw Elmer’s hands grip the arms of his seat. I detected a naughty look in his eye that I knew too well.

“Don’t you dare stand up!” I hissed.

***

On the first day of the festival, I picked up a copy of the
New York Times
at a kiosk on Red Square and read a story about a speech that President Kennedy had just delivered as a commencement address at American University. It seemed to augur well for our relations with the Soviet Union. Without a recommendation from Congress, Kennedy had announced that America would cease testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. It was a bold unilateral step, and JFK took it, he said, “to make clear our good faith.” America had just lived through a toxic era of McCarthyism. Kennedy had decided to make a speech about peace. We had lived through a lot of warnings of Soviet treachery and imminent destruction. It felt good to hear an American president insist that war was not actually inevitable. He said, in the soaring rhetoric that I would come to miss, “Our problems are man-made, then they can be solved by men… If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is the fact that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

“It’s possible,” I said to Elmer. “Maybe he can do something.”

Four months later, Kennedy was shot down by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.

CHAPTER TWELVE
NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

“Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.”

—Golda Meir

Elmer and I were not the most religious of Jews, but we could not help but be moved by the efforts of the Jews to create a verdant country in the sand. In 1948, the United Nations, with a strong assist from Harry Truman, took a sliver of the desert and created the state of Israel, totally surrounded by angry Arabs.

By the early 1960s, Israel was ready to declare their culture in a new concert hall in Tel Aviv. Jews had always had a taste for fine music. Dorothy “Buff” Chandler learned this when she set out to raise $18 million to build the Los Angeles Music Center and bring culture to the wasteland. Buffy liked music, which is why she saved the Hollywood Bowl when they threatened to turn it into a parking lot. She found her strongest supporters, it was said, not in the cultural elite of her Pasadena neighbors, but in the show-business Jews of Beverly Hills. Jews know three things: Suffering, good Chinese food, and classical music.

When the Israeli government was ready to open its beautiful new concert hall it invited the celebrated concert violinist Isaac Stern, and the well known Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein. Elmer and I flew to Tel Aviv from Moscow at the conclusion of the film festival.

***

I grew up in Philadelphia during an era when bigotry against Jews was pronounced. It was W.C. Fields who said, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” but he wasn’t Jewish, and he was being sardonic. So, as a vulnerable teen, I was always looking over my shoulder in fear of imminent assault. When my parents, my brother and I visited nearby Atlantic City, gateway to glorious Camden, I could not ignore the signs outside certain distinguished hotels that read: “
No dogs and Jews allowed
.” When I graduated high school and got my first job as a dispatcher at a Philadelphia cab company, the first thing my employer told me, along with the location of the restroom, was that I was the first Jew they had ever hired, and they “would be keeping their eye on me.”

The events of our arrival at the airport in Tel Aviv must be seen in the context of this life experience. As our plane circled in its approach to Ben Gurion Airport, the cabin was suddenly rich with music. They were playing “Hatikvah.” Two uniformed Israeli army officers met our flight in an olive-drab sedan. In Russia the guard assigned us kept us under surveillance, but in Israel, they were making sure we were secure and protected. Not that there was anything to protect us
against
. Everywhere there were Jews! The policemen, the doormen, the sales clerks, the children, the teachers, everyone! What a feeling of security and acceptance.

And what a sense of humor our protectors had. With the border this close, Elmer felt a little apprehensive about the proximity of fanatic groups that might not wish us well.

“What would you do if the terrorists tried to kidnap us?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Bernstein,” said the guard. “We won’t let them take you alive.”

The Ben Gurion Airport is on a thin sliver of land between Jordan and the Mediterranean. If the plane had overshot its landing strip by a hundred yards, we would either be surrounded by enemies or in the water. And yet, with my new feeling of empowerment, I was sure that if the plane came down at sea, I could get out and walk.