The Magnificent Elmer (10 page)

“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 20
^th
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?”

“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 110
^th
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.