The Magnificent Elmer (7 page)

The schedule gave us two days to get acclimated before the day of the opening of the concert hall. On Day One we found an old Roman road into the Judean hills. We explored the ruins of Caesarea, the ancient Roman capital that Caesar’s legions had constructed. We looked at the wide walls of the aqueduct that the Romans had built to carry water to the village. We visited a
kibbutz
, a lush communal farm, and tried to learn serenity from the camels.

On day Number Two we were taken to Jaffa, an artist’s colony south of the city of Tel Aviv. We saw artists, painters, sculptors, potters. But there were no fences. The Arabs seemed to be staring down our throats.

“Where does Jordan begin?” I asked our guard.

He pointed. “The brown area is Jordan. The green is Israel.”

“Shouldn’t we be afraid?”

“
They
should be afraid, not
us
,” he said complacently.

He was right. Just how right the world would learn four years later during the Six-Day War, when Israel would overpower the surrounding Arab armies.

The Six-Day War was fought between June 5
^th
and June 10
^th
in 1967. On one side was tiny Israel. On the other were Egypt, the United Arab Republic, Jordan and Syria. The outcome was a swift and decisive Israeli victory in which Israel took control of Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

***

The night before the concert hall opening event, we dined with Isaac Stern. During the day-long ceremony, Stern performed, as well as a choral group that had won a statewide competition among Israeli Kibbutzim (collective farms). Elmer and I sat among a group of dignitaries from the arts and government. One of the dignitaries was an amiable middle-aged woman from Milwaukee who happened to be the Prime Minister. Her name was Golda Meir.

The modern new hall was filled to the rafters. Golda took the stage and made the awards to Stern, to the chorales, and to Elmer. The hall roared its approval.

By 1963 Elmer had been nominated for six academy awards and had lost them all, but I suspect that this award was more important to him than the ones that had eluded him on the red carpet. After the ceremonies, a few special guests were invited back to Golda Meir’s home. It was in a row of houses, and aside from a tiny guard shack outside the front door, you would never know that it was the home of the Prime Minister. Inside Golda’s home was a swarm of dignitaries. She disappeared into the kitchen and emerged holding a large tray of soft drinks. She offered it to Elmer and me. “Have a glass of soda,” she said. “It’s good.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ODETS, WHERE IS THY STING?

“We’re paid as much for obedience as talent.”

—Ben Hecht

We had arrived back in Hollywood to learn that Clifford Odets was dying. He was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital suffering from colon cancer and he was not expected to survive.

We had first met Clifford at a party at the Beverly Hills home of Danny Kaye. When Clifford met me he grasped my hand and said, “We should go to a mountain cabin in a snowstorm. We’ll bring along a lot of steaks and plenty of Beethoven.” It was Clifford’s way of saying hello.

I had always been easily seduced by Beethoven. When Elmer first said, “I dedicate
The Appassionata
to Pearl,” I was doomed. And when Clifford mentioned a cabin in a blizzard with the Emperor Concerto playing, I was putty in his hands.

And now Clifford lay in a small hospital room on Fountain Avenue, fighting for what remained of his life. His chest and arms were wafer thin. A tube led from his side, removing the wastes from his frail body. A nurse rubbed ice on his dry lips.

“His father was here earlier,” she said dourly. “He seemed bothered by all the attention Mr. Odets is getting from the staff. He said, ‘You know my boy isn’t exactly Eugene O’Neill.’” I had often reflected, as I watched our sons sit in awe of Elmer at the keyboard, that it was tough having a brilliantly successful father. Now I thought: Yes, and it’s tough for some having a brilliantly successful son.

Clifford kept flexing his fingers, those same long fingers that had invoked the sirloins in our fanciful mountain cabin. His friend Elia Kazan would later recount how the playwright had extended his arm at full length, shaken his fist at the hospital ceiling, and shouted, “Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” I suppose he was anxious to redeem the sixteen years he felt he had wasted in Hollywood.

When Clifford went to the hospital, his fifty-seventh birthday was approaching. He had a bellyache. Of course, gastric distress was not an unfamiliar complaint of Hollywood writers. The scribes were at the bottom of the totem pole. They learned to live with gastric distress. (“We’re paid us much for obedience as talent,” said Ben Hecht.) A third of them became alcoholics. But Clifford was not that concerned when he went into Cedars of Lebanon for some tests. He feared it was ulcers. The red badge of courage for copywriters and screenwriters. It was somewhat worse than ulcers.

Clifford held court every day in his hospital bed, seeing the array of theatrical and movie royalty who were his friends. As the days stretched into weeks, Clifford grew weaker. He gathered his strength to try for an understanding with his father. They had been estranged for a long time. And with his son struggling to survive, Louie Odets reminded his boy’s caregivers that he never wanted his son to be a writer. “He didn’t choose to follow his father’s good advice,” he scowled.

***

As Clifford’s condition worsened, his friends sat helplessly by. My thoughts roamed back to the summer that Elmer and I met at camp. The staff had staged Clifford’s riveting labor play
Waiting for Lefty
. We were all profoundly moved by this radical Depression-era play about a taxi strike.

When they produced
Finian’s Rainbow
, Elmer played the leprechaun. And in
Waiting for Lefty
he was a cab driver desperate for a raise. “Strike! Strike! Strike!” he yelled as the curtain fell.

Looking back across the decades, I can’t help comparing Clifford and Elmer, the man who changed the theatre of the thirties and the man who changed the movie music of the fifties. Both were radical in their thinking, both wanted to swallow the world, both were very appealing to women. But their backgrounds differed. Clifford came out of an unread family and was a high school dropout. Elmer’s parents were teachers and their friends were educated Bohemians. Elmer would often wake up with a poet reading Yeats at his bedside. Clifford would often wake up with a drunk nearby. Elmer’s father thought he was another Mozart. Clifford’s father thought he wasn’t Eugene O’Neill.

When Clifford died, the obituaries adopted a variety of attitudes, from the dismissive to the panegyric.
Time
magazine, which had put Clifford on its cover back in the thirties, was having second thoughts about his place in American culture. It dismissed his passing with a few contemptuous lines, “A man of promise had sold out to the fleshpots of Hollywood.”

When George Gershwin died in his thirty-seventh year, John O’Hara said, “I read that George is dead. I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.” And that’s how I felt about Clifford. America had lost a playwright of real stature, and Elmer and I had lost a wonderful friend.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SWEET SMELL OF HOLLYWOOD

“I’d like to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

—J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco

Look in the 2000 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and you will find an expression called “sweet smell of success,” the seductive power of money over principle. It is what they will tell you lured Elmer away from Carnegie Hall, Clifford away from the Broadway theatre, and many other good men from Faulkner to Fitzgerald, to the tinsel of Hollywood.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is a phrase invented by an assistant to a Broadway gossip columnist. His name was Ernie Lehman and before he graduated to writing such great thrillers as
North by Northwest
and such saccharine stuff as
The Sound of Music
, he wrote a corrosive novella about a malignant gossip columnist in the tradition of Walter Winchell. Ernie worked for celebrity press agent Irving Hoffmann. He knew the sleazy world of nightclubs and cigarette girls, and he serviced the columnists of the time with gossip items. Winchell was a rabid anti-communist who resided in the side pocket of J. Edgar Hoover.
Sweet Smell of Success
appeared in
Cosmopolitan
magazine in 1950, ten years before Helen Gurley Brown would turn
Cosmo
into catnip for working women.

Clifford had always been cynical about the sweet smell of success in the movie business. So when Ernie Lehman grew sick during the filming of
Sweet Smell
, Odets was called in.

Burt Lancaster played the odious columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and he produced it along with his pal Harold Hecht. I always found Lancaster a bit of a bully, conversationally and physically. Ernie Lehman had bowed out of the screenwriting chores of
Sweet Smell
when he suffered from a tension-induced spastic colon the size of a fist. (It is fitting, I suppose, that writers should have problems involving the colon.) Ernie planned a therapeutic cruise to Tahiti, and Burt Lancaster confronted him. “You’re not that sick! You’re ruining my movie! I’m going to beat you up!”

“Go ahead,” said Lehman. “I could use the money.”

***

Clifford sat in the back of a prop truck outside New York’s 21 Club on West Fifty-Second Street, a typewriter in his lap, and a blanket thrown over his shoulder for protection against the midnight cold. The street looked like the staging site for the Anzio beachhead. There were equipment trucks, trailers, honey wagons, lights, extras, grips, detail cops, and a nest of cables. In the midst of all this glorious debris, Clifford sat typing his acidic dialog for the next scene in the schedule. “Falco enters club, looks about for J.J.’s table…”

Elmer had been hired to write the movie’s score and the result was the hottest sound since he had brought jazz to Otto Preminger’s
Man with the Golden Arm
. There was a lot of perilous jazz around the year they filmed
Sweet Smell of Success
. And of course, Elmer knew New York well. We had lived two miles north of the action of the story. “The section is between Columbus Circle and Times Square,” observed Elmer, “and in
that tiny area careers were made and destroyed by the gossip columnists.” Elmer’s music reflected the anguish that was in the air.

The movie was American
film noir
of the highest order, and it created the most exciting words and music team you’ll ever see—words by Clifford Odets, music by Elmer Bernstein.

The movie presents the bitter relationship between J.J. and Sidney Falco, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. For ninety minutes you sit and watch two despicable guys tearing one another to pieces with their bile and cynicism.

Elmer really took to this setting, and Clifford really took to this Manhattan melodrama. Clifford stretched the two-week assignment to four months, deconstructing every one of Julie Epstein’s scenes and virtually every one of his sentences.

In capturing the big city Elmer and I had deserted for Hollywood, I thought that
Sweet Smell
captured better than any film I’d ever seen the atmosphere of Times Square, the excitement of big-city journalism. When I urge friends to see the movie, as I do to this day, the main incentive is the chance they’ll have to hear Clifford’s pungent dialog and Elmer’s wonderful music. We live today in an age of digital magic and special-effects illiteracy. So you will have to forgive my special affection for good words and good music; I was corrupted early by them.

A lot of people took some cheap swipes at Clifford Odets for “selling out” to Hollywood, for wasting himself on the celluloid city. Arthur Miller, a pretty fair playwright himself, was never one of Clifford’s detractors. He never blamed him for squandering his gifts on screenplays, or for not returning to his roots in the theatre. “I mean,” said Miller, “to what theatre was he supposed to remain faithful? There was very little to return to—only show business and some real estate.”

Watching Clifford Odets huddled over a typewriter in a prop truck on Broadway was a graphic reminder of what was for me the greatest by-product of marriage to a successful Hollywood composer—the propinquity to genius. As wonderful as it was to see Clifford at parties in an old tuxedo and a vest and a martini in his hand, he was more romantic still in that prop truck at 3 a.m.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ART ISN’T EASY

“Movie producers have to ask for changes.
It is how they justify their existence.”

—Budd Schulberg

Hollywood, as everybody knows, is the great defrauder of genius, enticing it away from purity and virtue with counterfeit promises and easy money. Of course, this is not quite true. All this talk about Hollywood as the giant money pot, where the gravy train never stops, is a lot of nonsense.

Take the case of Elmer. Here was a man of immense talent whose music had moved millions. He had written the music for
The Magnificent Seven
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
The Great Escape
,
The Man With the Golden Arm
,
The Ten Commandments
. Yet his work to a lot of directors was just a dispensable product on the open market, to be approved or rejected.

Elmer’s unused work offers an absorbing picture of a Hollywood system that often ran amuck, squandering talent right and left. Here is a brief review of Elmer’s rejected music that occurred at the collision points of trade and talent.

Martin Scorsese threw out Elmer’s complete score for
Gangs of New York
. Robert Redford threw out Elmer’s complete score for
A River Runs Through It
. Roland Joffe rejected Elmer’s score for
The Scarlet Letter
. Charles Shyer rejected Elmer’s score to the Julia Robert’s romantic comedy
Love Trouble
. Robert Houston rejected Elmer’s entire score for
Murder in Mississippi
. Pat O’Connor threw out Elmer’s score for Daniel Day Lewis’
Stars and Bars
. William Richert rejected Elmer’s score for
A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon
. The Disney studio threw out his score for the coming-of-age drama with John Cusack,
The Journey of Natty Gann
. Marty Ritt discarded his score to the Walter Matthau romantic comedy
Casey’s Shadow
about a boy and his race horse.