City of Nets (9 page)

Out of such conferences, “The Concert Feature” evolved. One of the first selections was Mussorgsky's “Night on Bald Mountain,” for Disney believed that he could “build a beautiful thing based on the devil's orchestra [with] a lot of these little devils playing instruments with one big devil conducting.” That eventually led to Schubert's “Ave Maria,” presented as a torchlight procession in the wake of the Mussorgsky, which prompted the critic Richard Schickel to observe that in Disney's fancies “nothing is sacred, not even the sacred.” Ponchielli's “Dance of the Hours” became a ballet for prancing elephants, alligators, and ostriches, and Beethoven's “Pastoral” Symphony turned into a frolic for fauns, nymphs, centaurs, “centaurettes,” and other inhabitants of Disney's Mount Olympus. When Disney saw the final version of what his animators had done to the “Pastoral” Symphony, he was impressed. “Gee, this'll
make
Beethoven,” he said.

Disney had wanted from the beginning to include some sort of legend of the creation, volcanoes and tidal waves and lumbering dinosaurs. He assigned his research assistants to discover some appropriate music, but all they could offer him was Hadyn's
Creation,
which somehow didn't seem sufficiently epic. Disney presented the problem to Stokowski, and Stokowski offered a bold solution.

“Why don't we do the
Sacre?
” he said.

“Socker?” Disney asked. “What's that?”

“
Sacre de Printemps—Rite of Spring,
by Stravinsky,” said Stokowski. He told Disney about the famous ballet, which Stravinsky had originally conceived as “a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death,” and which the riotous audience at the Paris premiere of 1913 had turned into one of the delicious uproars of its time. And if Stravinsky's work wasn't actually about dinosaurs, well,
caveat emptor.

Igor Stravinsky was the only composer being featured in “The Concert Feature” who was actually alive and might have some opinions on the subject, so the Disney studio sent a message to France, offering to pay the composer $5,000 for the legal right to use
Le Sacre
in the planned film. The offer, Stravinsky later recalled with some bitterness, was “accompanied by a gentle warning that if permission were withheld the music would be used anyway,” since the prerevolutionary Russian copyrights no longer protected it. The offer of $5,000 was certainly modest, since the production cost of
Fantasia
was $2,280,000, but Stravinsky had other things on his mind—his struggle with tuberculosis, the death of his wife and daughter, the threat of imminent war—so he took the money and signed the contract.

By this time, Disney was so involved in
Fantasia
that if his adjutants had not been able to produce the creation music that he wanted, he probably would have tried to write it himself. He summoned paleontologists like Chester Stock of Cal Tech for expert advice on protozoic life and sent his technicians to the Mount Wilson Observatory to study the shapes of nebulae. “A herd of pet iguanas and a baby alligator wriggled over the Burbank lot, while animators studied their lizardy movements . . .” according to a rather feverish cover story on
Fantasia
in
Time.
“The Disney zoo contained eusthenopterons, brachiosaurs, brontosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs, diplodocuses, triceratopses, pterodactyls, trachodons, struthiomimuses, stegosaurs . . . and enough plain run-of-the-Jurassic dinosaurs to people a planet. Studio cameras groaned under the burden of the whole story of evolution.”

Stravinsky had made occasional forays to distant America during the 1930's, reaching as far as Los Angeles in 1935, meeting Charlie Chaplin, and even then he “thought of living somewhere in the hideous but lively Los Angeles conurbation . . . for reasons of health primarily, but also because Los Angeles seemed the best place in America for me to begin my new life.” That December of 1939, during the Christmas break at Harvard, Stravinsky returned to Hollywood to see what Disney had done with
Le Sacre.
The studio provided him and his friend George Balanchine with a private showing of
Fantasia.
“I remember someone offering me a score,” Stravinsky recalled later, “and when I said I had my own, the someone saying, ‘But it is all changed.' It was indeed. The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the
Danse de la Terre.
The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated.”

Stravinsky seemed to realize his helplessness and stifled his grievances. When he published his account of the scene nearly twenty years later, Disney expressed benign surprise. Disney's recollection, according to an associate, was that Stravinsky had come to the studio and seen the original sketches for the
Fantasia
version of
Le Sacre,
had been “excited” over the film's possibilities, had even observed that “the concept of the world's creation and prehistoric life were what he ‘really' had in mind when he wrote
Le Sacre,
” and that he had agreed to “certain cuts and arrangements” of his music. When Stravinsky saw the final film, according to the Disney version, he “emerged from the projection room visibly moved.” Furthermore, said Disney, “we paid him $10,000, not $5,000.” Stravinsky denied all this, except the statement that he had been “moved” by the showing. He declared that Stokowski's performance of his music had been “execrable,” and that Disney's illustrations were “an unresisting imbecility.” That he should ever have said anything different was “highly improbable—though, of course, I should hope I was polite.”

The week after this revelation, Stravinsky cabled money from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to Vera Sudeikina, whom he had described to the U.S. ambassador to France as “my best friend,” so that she could come to America. They were married in March of 1940, and after establishing themselves in Los Angeles, they went to Mexico in July so that they could reenter the U.S. on the Russian quota and apply for citizenship. “I remember that one of the immigration officials asked me whether I wished to change my name,” Stravinsky wrote later. “It was the most unexpected question I had ever heard, and I laughed, whereupon the official said, ‘Well, most of them do.' ” The Stravinskys lived first on South Swall Drive in Beverly Hills, and then, after a two-month stay at the Chateau Marmont, moved into a pleasantly terraced one-story house behind a white picket fence at 1260 North Wetherly Drive. It was “an American transposition” of his European habitat, according to the Polish composer Alexandre Tansman. “Two pianos, one a grand, the other a half-muted upright, occupy a good half of [the workroom],” Tansman wrote. “The work desk is encumbered by a quantity of odd objects: multicolored pencils, inks, erasers, clef makers, chronometers. . . . The drawers contain manuscripts, business papers, documents, his correspondence, everything arranged in irreproachable order. . . . On the walls pictures and drawings by his son Theodore, by Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Eugène Berman . . . together with a framed extract of a contemporary newspaper containing a very bad criticism of a new work by ‘Herr Ludwig van Beethoven.' ”

Unlike Schoenberg, Stravinsky was almost accustomed to exile—no one ever gets completely accustomed to it—and these Hollywood years, the sixties of his own life, proved extremely fruitful. He finished here the marvelous Symphony in C, begun in Paris while his first wife was dying. One passage in the last movement, he later observed, “might not have occurred to me before I had known the neon glitter of Los Angeles' boulevards from a speeding automobile.” Here he wrote the Sonata for Two Pianos and the Symphony in Three Movements and the mysteriously powerful
Mass.
Yet Stravinsky was always tempted—also unlike Schoenberg—to gather in some of the money that seemed to lie scattered all around him.

“I wonder if you'd like to do a little ballet with me,” said George Balanchine on the telephone, long distance, “a polka, perhaps.”

“For whom?” said Stravinsky.

“For some elephants,” said Balanchine.

A pause.

“How old?” said Stravinsky.

“Very young,” said Balanchine.

Another pause.

“All right,” said Stravinsky. “If they are very young elephants, I will do it.”

Thus was born “Circus Polka,” which was actually performed in 1942 by a troupe of fifty elephants of the Ringling Brothers Circus. Then there was the “Ebony Concerto,” commissioned by the jazz clarinetist Woody Herman. And “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which Stravinsky arranged for chorus and orchestra in 1941 and later conducted in Boston, where, as he recalled, “I stood with my back to the orchestra and conducted the audience, who were supposed to sing but didn't. . . . Just before the second concert, a police commissioner appeared in my dressing room and informed me of a Massachusetts law forbidding any ‘tampering' with national property. He said that policemen had already been instructed to remove my arrangement from the music stands. . . . I do not know if my version has been performed since.”

But it was the movies that provided the great temptation, the movies that constantly promised riches if only the terms could be negotiated. Stravinsky was not an amateur in these matters. According to one account of a meeting with Sam Goldwyn, the producer acknowledged that the composer's fee was $25,000, and then the conversation “went something like this”:

 

GOLDWYN
: “Well, you have to have an arranger.”

STRAVINSKY
: “What's an arranger?”

GOLDWYN
: “An arranger! Why that's a man who has to arrange your music, who has to fit it to the instruments.”

STRAVINSKY
: “Oh.”

GOLDWYN
: “Sure, that'll cost you $6,000. And it'll have to come off your $20,000.”

STRAVINSKY
: “I thought it was $25,000.”

GOLDWYN
: “Well, whatever it was.”

 

Stravinsky thereupon stood up, according to this account, stuffed his black cigarette holder into his pocket, jammed his hat onto his head, and walked out. So there was no deal. In fact, Stravinsky never actually wrote the music for a single Hollywood film. But some of his gyrations and maneuvers were worthy of his new surroundings. He composed, for example, some hunting music for Orson Welles's version of
Jane Eyre,
and when the contractual negotiations came to nothing, he frugally used the same music to fulfill a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for an Ode to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky's wife. The recycled piece suggested, Stravinsky explained, Mrs. Koussevitzky's love of outdoor concerts. Then there were negotiations for Stravinsky to write incidental music for a film on the Nazi occupation of Norway,
The Commandoes Strike at Dawn.
Stravinsky hastily began arranging a collection of Norwegian folk tunes that his wife had picked up in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles. When, once again, the negotiations faded, the Boston Symphony performed what Stravinsky had stoically turned into a piece he called “Four Norwegian Moods.”

Perhaps the most astonishing example of Stravinsky's accommodation to the ways of Hollywood was his accommodation to that same Walt Disney whose transformation of
Le Sacre
he considered “an unresisting imbecility.” On October 23, 1940, two of Disney's aides—not even Disney himself—came to call on Stravinsky to discuss an animated version of his musical folk tale
Renard,
and a week later he sold them an option on not only
Renard
but
The Firebird
as well.

No matter how venal Stravinsky became, though, Hollywood always managed to surprise him. “They want my name, not my music,” he said. “I was even offered $100,000 to pad a film with music, and when I refused, was told that I could receive the same money if I were willing to allow someone else to compose the music in my name.” Recalling that offer reminded Stravinsky of Schoenberg's encounter with Thalberg. Twenty years had passed by now, and both antagonists were dead, and their meeting had acquired encrustations of legend. “The great composer, who earned almost nothing from his compositions, was invited to supply music for
The Good Earth,
at a fee that must have seemed like Croesus' fortune to him, but with impossible artistic conditions attached,” Stravinsky said. “He refused, saying, ‘You kill me to keep me from starving to death.' ”

 

It was natural enough for the movie producers to treat major composers like hired servants, since they treated everyone that way. Most of the composers they dealt with were already on the payroll, and everyone acted accordingly. Dimitri Tiomkin, for example, was a native of St. Petersburg, just like Stravinsky; he played the piano and composed ballet music, just like Stravinsky. But he came to Hollywood in 1929 and began producing what ultimately became a total of more than 160 film scores. (It was Tiomkin who, on winning an Academy Award in 1954 for
The High and the Mighty,
gave thanks for help not to the usual array of agents and producers but to Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, the composers he had so often found so helpful.) David Selznick summoned Tiomkin to his studio one day and asked him to become the seventh composer to try writing the music for
Duel in the Sun
(1947). He wanted, he said, eleven main themes: a Spanish theme, a ranch theme, a love theme, an orgasm theme—

“Orgasm?” Tiomkin said. “How do you score an orgasm?”

“Try,” said Selznick. “I want a really good
shtump.
”

Tiomkin labored for weeks on his eleven themes, then assembled an orchestra and played them for Selznick. Selznick was pleased. Tiomkin labored for weeks more to produce a complete score. It included forty-one drummers and a chorus of one hundred. Selznick kept worrying. He asked Tiomkin to whistle the love theme for him. Tiomkin whistled.