The Magnificent Elmer (2 page)

***

When we arrived in Los Angeles after seven days on the road, we had seventy-five cents and the car. We were immediately confronted with an important decision. Would we spend the seventy-five cents on gas or on breakfast? We decided to put gas in the car. We drove to the producer’s office and told him our problem. He thought a moment and said, “It’s Friday and I can’t get to the bank. Would two-hundred handle you for the weekend?” That was five months rent in New York. Elmer said it would probably do. From the producer’s office, with seventy-five cents worth of gas in our tank and two hundred dollars in our jeans, we drove to the offices of George Wilner, Elmer’s new agent. In the waiting room there was an actual palm tree. I had never seen a palm tree, let alone in an office. George Wilner smiled and suggested we all go out to the Beverly Hills Tennis Club where he was a member. The sparkling swimming pool was surrounded by lounge chairs, many of them occupied by actual writers, actors, and directors. Everyone looked very healthy and solvent. With all these successful people, I wondered where tomorrow’s failures were going to come from.

As we were leaving the club that afternoon to return to the apartment that Columbia Pictures had rented for us, Agent Wilner invited us to come to his Beverly Hills home for brunch that weekend. We arrived there Sunday morning prepared to be impressed, and we weren’t disappointed. Their living room was as spacious as the Grand Canyon and brimming with elegance, a symphony in gold and beige.

We had barely settled onto a sofa when George Wilner said: “How would you like to buy a practically new eight-millimeter camera?”

It seemed an odd question. Wilner knew we had no money to spend on a camera. Food was even a challenge. Before we could answer, he gestured toward the two club chairs that flanked the fireplace.

“Would you be interested in a sofa and two chairs for next to nothing?”

These curious offers continued to punctuate the morning until nearly everything in the house had been placed on sale. We never did get around to brunch.

Next day we realized what had triggered this odd behavior. The year was 1950 and the subpoena servers of the House Un-American Activities Committee were out in force all over town. To escape their clutches, George Wilner and his family were preparing to leave the country. They were trying to rid themselves of all their possessions.

***

Columbia had made arrangements for Elmer and me to stay in an apartment on Rossmore Avenue. The studio also rented a battered upright piano on which Elmer could compose the music for his football drama.

Columbia Pictures was the skid row of Hollywood. Indeed most of the major movie studios were not in Hollywood at all—MGM was in Culver City, and Warners and Universal were in the San Fernando Valley. When Elmer and I reported to Columbia’s sprawling music stage, we found Morris Stoloff, director of the studio’s music department, on the podium facing the large Columbia Studio orchestra. The motion picture
Saturday’s Hero
would be projected on a screen, and an orchestra of eighty musicians would play the music cues that Elmer had written on the upright piano in our apartment. When Stoloff brought his baton down and the music poured forth, well, what can I say? Elmer’s music was romantic, melodramatic, fantastical, colorful, comic, tragic, melodic!

Harry Cohn was head of Columbia. Cohn’s combative nature was such that when doctors found a tumor in his alimentary canal, many were disappointed when it proved to be benign. After the surgery, Herman Mankiewitz said, “What a pity—to remove the one part of Harry Cohn that is not malignant.”

His corrosive reputation notwithstanding, I always had the utmost respect for Harry Cohn’s creative instincts. Midway through the music session for
Saturday’s Hero
, a Columbia executive crossed the sound stage, bent over Elmer, and whispered something urgently in his ear. Elmer shook his head a decisive no and the man retreated.

“What was that about?” I said.

“Harry Cohn likes what he’s hearing about my music. His man just offered me a contract as a staff composer at twenty-five thousand a year. What do you think?”

Our income in New York was three thousand a year. Hollywood offered year-round sunshine, oranges, and you could make right turns on the red signal. There was only one intelligent response to such an offer.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Elmer said.

Elmer prized his independence. He did not want to surrender his right to say no. He did not want a job where he was required to score whatever lousy movie showed up on the schedule.
Tarzan’s New York Adventure. Andy Hardy Goes to Prison.

Hence, the next day we were back in our apartment on Rossmore Avenue, making plans to return the rented piano, and gas up the car for our return to New York.

That’s when the phone rang. It was an agent at George Wilner’s office. Columbia business affairs had phoned. Would Elmer be willing to write the music for a new racetrack movie that starred William Holden, one of the studio’s up-and-coming stars? And after that, would Elmer be available to score the new Roz Russell movie?

“Better keep the piano,” Elmer said.

***

Elmer’s career in movie music was on the rise. Hard on the heels of
Saturday’s Hero
came
Boots Malone
,
Never Wave at a WAC
,
The Eternal Sea
,
Dieppe Raid
,
Make Haste to Live
, and
Sudden Fear
. But Elmer’s fecundity was not confined to the piano. All during our walkup years, we had been trying to add to the baby boom, but to no avail. Then suddenly Peter arrived… and then Gregory. “By God,” said Elmer, “this place really
does
make things grow—not just avocadoes and casabas.”

But the sunny weather had a way of attracting more than storks. All those glittering movie stars tended to attract the attention of congressmen driven by ambition unmarred by conscience. It was proving a good season for blacklisting and witch-hunting. The Red Scare was at its most intense, as our furniture-shedding agent demonstrated.

Neither Elmer nor I had ever been members of the Communist Party, but we both were liberal in outlook and that made us fair game for the House Un-American Activities Committee. I had knitted socks for the Russians during the war and Elmer had accompanied Paul Robeson when he sang at Madison Square Garden.

Hollywood is the only town in America where every lease came with a tube of sun block and a subscription to the
Hollywood Reporter
. Suddenly a story appeared in the
Reporter
that a “cooperative witness” to the dreaded House Un-American Activities Committee had testified that he had seen Hollywood’s hot young composer and his wife at a left-wing ranch in New Mexico. The witness was an undercover FBI informer. (He later recanted his testimony, was prosecuted for perjury, and went to prison. But by then the damage had been done.) I remembered the ranch. On our first drive west, someone had suggested we visit “this great ranch” in New Mexico where we could spend a free night. It is my subversive recollection that we spent the evening singing folk songs around a campfire. Jimmy Crack Corn and I Don’t Care.

Suddenly we cared a lot. When the story appeared, our life changed. We were suddenly on the lookout for men in dark suits serving subpoenas. Here’s how it worked. The word would be out that the Committee was planning to hold hearings in Hollywood. All over town the engines would roar. Elmer and I would rent a motel room outside of Hollywood, take the baby, the cocker spaniel, and the necessities of life, and remain there until word reached us that the emergency had passed. We chose a motel that was nestled in a grove of Eucalyptus trees so we could park the car under a canopy of leaves where it couldn’t be seen from the street.

On one occasion we didn’t get out of town soon enough. One afternoon, when our son Gregory was three months old, I was home taking care of him while Elmer was at a studio meeting. The doorbell rang. I opened the door to find two men dressed in dark suits and ties. I sensed something was wrong. The only people who wore dark suits in Hollywood in the summer were representatives of the William Morris Office.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“FBI,” he said. “Are you Pearl Bernstein?”

I admitted I was.

“Did you teach at the School of Music on Seventy-Third Street in New York?”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“Did you know Pete Seeger who taught at the school?”

“I met him.”

From that point on the conversation went downhill. Gregory started spitting up.

“Did you know about a Communist cell at the school?”

“Garble,” said Gregory.

“Did you ever encounter Pete Seeger at a cell meeting?”

“Mergle,” said Gregory.

“Look,” I said, “I have a baby to feed, so if you have any questions about Pete Seeger, I suggest you ask him.”

And with that I slammed the door.

CHAPTER THREE
THE DE MILLENNIUM

“There were the ten commandments in easy-to-take tablet form.”

—Elmer Bernstein

The major studios refused to hire Elmer. Work dried up and the only assignments he could get were sci-fi cheapies. He was reduced to turning out music for low-budget movies like
Robot Monster
and
Cat Women of the Moon
.

“I’m not important enough to be blacklisted,” said Elmer wryly. “I’m being grey-listed.” The movie producers who hired him were willing to take a chance because they could hire Elmer to score their movie for only six hundred dollars. And we sure needed the money.

Elmer was never able to disguise the talent he brought to these terrible pictures. Elmer used to say, “If I’m going to do a really bad movie, at least I’m going to do one that is at the top of the bad-movie lists.” Then he would add ruefully, “I guess
Robot Monster
would qualify.” It certainly did. I remember that it was about a little boy named Johnny who dreams that the earth has been attacked by an alien named Ro-Man who uses a “calcinatory death ray.” I also seem to recall that Ro-Man was an actor in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet. Today they would do it with computer graphics.

The downward spiral of Elmer’s career continued. I felt like Dorothy in the tornado. I was supplementing our plummeting income by teaching piano again. I was able to line up three young students, and on one occasion I was in the den with my pupil with the TV on in the next room. Suddenly I heard a familiar voice. It was Sidney Buchman, the man who had brought us to Hollywood. I went in the next room. Sidney was appearing before the Committee and taking the Fifth Amendment. I had only seen him twice, once when he and his beautiful vicuna coat visited our apartment, and once when he came to the sound stage during the scoring of
Saturday’s Hero
. I never saw him again.

As Elmer’s fortunes declined, he got a job as rehearsal pianist for Agnes DeMille who was choreographing the dances in the screen version of
Oklahoma!
One evening I looked out of our bedroom window and saw Elmer, Agnes, and the entire
corps de ballet
assembled on our front lawn. And they were
singing
. No, they weren’t singing “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow…” Nor were they singing “Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry…” All those apple-cheeked lasses, those corn-fed ballerinas, had raised their voices in a chorus of that Rodgers and Hammerstein perennial, “
Happy Birthday to Pearl
.” What a guy, Elmer. “People will say we’re in love.”

Agnes realized that somehow Elmer seemed a little overqualified to be leading her dancers through the brothel ballet. How did she know? Well, there was the Copland Connection. Agnes had gotten her start when she choreographed Aaron Copland’s
Rodeo
, and that led to fame on the Broadway stage with
Oklahoma!
,
Carousel
,
Brigadoon
, and
Paint Your Wagon
. Agnes knew that Copland had discovered Elmer and predicted a luminous career for him. That and the emanations that one genius gives off to another. So one afternoon on a drafty soundstage she said, “You should meet my Uncle Cecil.”
Uncle Cecil was at that moment shooting a movie. It was called
The Ten Commandments
.

***

It happened that Cecil B. DeMille needed some incidental music for the dances in his biblical epic. Elmer came home from his interview with C.B. and told me about his conversation with the famous director. Some of the props from the grandiose new saga were scattered around DeMille’s office—Moses’ staff, Dathan’s cape, a stone containing the Ten Commandments in easy-to-take tablet form.

“How did the meeting go?” I asked.

“DeMille had only one question. He said—‘Mr. Bernstein, do you think you could do for ancient Egyptian music what Puccini did for Japanese music in
Madame Butterfly
?’”

“What did you say?”

“I gave him the only answer that would have gotten me the job. I said, ‘I don’t know, Mr. DeMille, but I’d like to try.’”

And so Elmer got the assignment to write the incidental music for the songs and dances that were spotted through the movie.

DeMille’s usual composer of choice was the very talented Victor Young and he had been signed to write the score for
The Ten Commandments
. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Red Sea. Victor Young had gone to New York to work on a Broadway musical called
Seventh Heaven
. The show was a turkey and had placed Victor under great stress. It was very debilitating. As Larry Gelbart said, “If Hitler is alive, I hope he’s on the road with a musical.” When Victor returned to Hollywood he was ill and decided he wasn’t up to scoring
The Ten Commandments
. Not even a few of them. So DeMille turned to Elmer for the whole enchilada. Wow!

***

History has a sense of humor. Mr. DeMille was Hollywood’s most legendary director, but he was also a dinosaur in his ultra-conservative politics. As such, he was one of the principal architects of the blacklisting that tyrannized a generation of moviemakers. He was the hard-hearted fellow that had poisoned the atmosphere and driven Elmer from the Steinway grand to the rehearsal piano. As a robust crusader against Communism, C.B. was devoted to keeping red propaganda off the screen. But as a sound businessman, he was as anxious to keep Paramount out of the red as he was to keep the reds out of Paramount. So one day he summoned Elmer to his office.