The Magnificent Elmer (9 page)

“You’re kidding me.”

“It’s true,” said Danny solemnly. “Zeke Bonura was the worst fielding first baseman in baseball, but every year he ended the season with the best fielding average in the major leagues.”

Elmer was skeptical. “That isn’t possible, Danny. The worst fielder and the best fielding average? How is that possible?”

“Because,” said Danny, “he understood one rule in baseball better than anyone else. You can’t be charged with an error unless you touch the ball.”

“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 presidential 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.