Biography for
Oscar Levant More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

27 December 1906, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Date of Death

14 August 1972, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA (heart attack)

Mini Biography

Pianist, composer and bizarre wit in movies, radio and TV.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Bill Takacs

Mini Biography

Oscar Levant's own versatility may have helped to cloud his memory as a sort of Hollywood utility man - perhaps in the worse sense - one among many personalities - he was so much more. It is particularly forgotten that he was foremost a brilliant musician and very competent composer. He was from an Orthodox Jewish Russian family, growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Like his siblings, he started music lessons at an early age - and on various instruments - first taking piano from his older brother (Benjamin). At seven he continued piano under Martin Miessler, originally of the Leipzig Conservatory. Levant was giving public recitals within a year. He attended music lessons at the Fifth Avenue High School, where he was exposed to classical performance by his instructor Oscar Demmler. This included going to recitals of the great Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and concerts conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Demmler invited Levant to accompany him in violin and piano repertoire which was Levant's first public playing - he was only twelve.

Levant dropped out of high school (Fifth Avenue) in 1922 when his mother decided to take him to New York to continue music instruction. There he studied with Zygmunt Stojowski, a compatriot and disciple of Paderewski and a student trained by Wladislaw Zelenski, Louis-Joseph Diemer, and Clement Philibert Leo Delibes. By early adulthood Levant had evolved an engaging and opinionated personality that was attracted to the social life of the city. One great influence on him was the glamor and allure of Broadway which he saw at first hand hiring out as a pianist for the stage pit and nightlife. He was in the musical play "Burlesque (1927) and had his first stint at Broadway composing as co-composer for "Ripples" (1930). Though he gave a private recital in early December 1922 for Paderewski and kept up a schedule of attending mainstream classical musical events, Levant was also becoming something of a bon vivant in popular music circles-and ever game he was attracted to the edge - including the rough and ready side of society in New York that included acquaintance with a few mobsters. His mobility in social circles was to say the least, surprising. Later Levant became a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the exclusive club of New York wits and writers-the likes of Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott

It would seem natural that the glitter of the movies also attracted Levant. He was exposed to film making as early as 1923 when he appeared with pop orchestra leader Ben Bernie and his band All the Lads in a little known experimental sound effort by DeForest Phonofilm in New York City. Touring in cabaret in London from 1926, Levant heard about New York composers and musicians going west to Hollywood, where music was in big demand. He left for the coast in 1928. From that year he wrote songs - with some performing in 21 films, and from 1929 he composed music for 19 films, regularly through 1937, and sporadically from 1939 to 1948. In mingling with the musical elite in town, he met and became a close friend of George Gershwin. The association produced a profound musical relationship. He was still keeping a foot in New York music - Broadway and Tin Pan Alley (he co-wrote many pop songs). He also returned to some concertizing (1930 and 1931) at two large venues: the Hollywood Bowl and Lewisohn Stadium in New York.

By 1932, Levant was turning his attention to classical composing and limited concertizing. His "Sonatina for Piano" caught the ear of composer Aaron Copland, who persuaded him to premiere it (April, 1932) at Copland's festival for contemporary American music. Gershwin asked him to play second piano in a duet version of the "Second Rhapsody" under conductor Arturo Toscanini. He also played - almost as his own - Gershwin's signature "Concerto in F" in 1932. Although Levant launched into a crowded schedule of radio performances of popular and easy listening classical music, he did no more public concerts for some five years. He did take Gershwin's advice and refreshed his theory skills with Joseph Schillinger, who was a resident Hollywood Russian theorist/composer. Levant was not alone in using Schillinger's music school services; at that time some of Big Band's most famous names appearing on the silver screen-including Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller - were also using the Russian. This was in 1934 - the same year Levant's "Sinfonietta" (in three movements) was premiered with Bernard Herrmann conducting in New York.

Levant was back in Hollywood in 1935 for more film composing. But part of the time was spent studying under one of the great musical minds who came to Southern California, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's time was already crowded with local academia commitments and study for some of Hollywood's brightest composers, including Alfred Newman and Franz Waxman. Levant's study ranged from 1935 to 1937. Part of the result was the inspiration for completing his "Piano Concerto", his first of several string quartets (among other pieces he composed, including a woodwind trio), and the "Nocturne for Orchestra" (premiered in LA in 1937). The latter was released by New Music Editions in 1936 - this was his only orchestral score to be published. In the meantime Levant was doing music for Hollywood. His "Crayon est sur la table", was a sort of parody of French opera in the style of Debussy. It was a centerpiece (though transformed as "Carnaval" with an Italian libretto) for the 20th Century Fox film Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936).

Then in July of 1937 Gershwin passed away, opening a new period of recognition for Levant, for he was immediately crowned sole interpreter and virtuoso performer of Gershwin's music - the beginning of a quixotic twenty year reign. That same year Levant started his "Suite for Orchestra" and finished its orchestration by early 1938. In October of that year he returned to the east to debut as a Broadway conductor while replacing his brother (Harry) for 65 performances of Kaufman and Hart's "The Fabulous Invalid". He augmented that by seeing to the Broadway stage as composer and conductor a new Kaufman and Hart work "The American Way" in January of 1939.

By the middle of that year, Levant returned to concertizing in all the big American cities, showcasing, Gershwin's "Concerto in F" and the "Rhapsody in Blue", for instance, but also a whole repertoire including an occasional throwing in of his own works,including his two 1940 pieces "Caprice for Orchestra" and "A New Overture and Polka for Oscar Homolka" (the actor). Caprice was particularly showcased by British conductor Thomas Beecham. But these were his last major concert works. Nevertheless this marked a decade of concertizing, radio broadcasts, and recording significantly with Columbia Records and great conductors such as Reiner, Ormandy, Kostelanetz, Wallenstein, Efrem Kurtz, and Morton Gould.

Occasionally Levant appeared on film in a showcase piano piece - but there are only a handful of film roles where he showed his substantial skill as an actor. He played himself in the highly fictionalized Gershwin bio Rhapsody in Blue (1945), highlighted by his playing of the piece. He was still himself but convincingly in character in one of his best dramatic roles as wise-cracking (he often wrote his own lines for his film characters) concert pianist Sid Jeffers in Humoresque (1946) with John Garfield and Joan Crawford. He went into the studio to record a set of excerpts from Wagner's "Tristan" arranged for piano, violin, and orchestra with violinist Isaac Stern, and conductor Franz Waxman as part of the sound track for the film. He was able to play two of his favorite pieces (Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Khachaturian's Sabre Dance) when he got around to doing the sophisticated comedy The Barkleys of Broadway (1949). A few years later he did his last two films. In An American in Paris (1951) the focus is on Gene Kelly - but a close second was Gershwin's music, the title of the movie taken from his extraordinary montage of movements visualizing Paris. Levant was his usual carefree pianist character, but during a fantasy concerto sequence, he is spotlighted as playing the piano soloist, the conductor, and representative musicians for each orchestra instrument-a great sight gag tour de force of his musical know how. On his final film, Levant is a caricature of himself mixed with the film's co-screenwriter Adolph Green. This was the comedy musical The Band Wagon (1953) in which friend Fred Astaire was also a caricature of himself as a legendary but essentially washed up song and dance man who has a stellar comeback.

Levant seemed to have fun with this film and its bright script that poked fun at entertainment in general, but his dialog - obviously more of his own input - included hints at his progressing decline - the accumulative neuroses with accompanying hypochondria. His extraordinarily glib and incisive tongue had evolved from earlier life-of-the-party witty repartee to increasingly self-critical and acerbic patter which showed up sometimes most inappropriately in his recitals from the late 1930s. His spontaneous remarks bordered and often flowed over into downright rudeness and sometimes only slightly veiled invective. He seemed unable to resist putting down his own musical efforts - a compulsion to parody himself, revealing his insecurities and a rather knee-jerk need to be funny and play the clown at his own expense. He had renamed his "Poeme" for Piano, "Insult for the Piano" or "The Lone Ranger in Vienna." In answer to friend/musical promoter Robert Russell Bennett's radio interview with Levant (1940) asking what he thought about the reception of his first string quarter, he replied: "Violently. It not only brought me obscurity but many enemies." Such was typical of his sometimes inextricably extreme one-liners. During the height of his concertizing, Levant was the highest paid concert performer, but after 1951 he canceled many commitments which finally brought a temporary banning by the American Federation of Musicians. There were still occasional concerts in the 1950s; one of the most memorable being Royce Hall at UCLA (1958) when he launched into the first movement of the second piano concerto of Shostakovich only to forget his place and stop - "I don't even know where I am. I'm going to start all over again" - he did with great triumph. His final public effort that same year was the "Concerto in F" in which it took all the urging of conductor Andre Kostelanetz to keep Levant from simply stopping mid course and walking off stage. Levant prefaced his encores with the quip that he was "playing under the auspices of Mt. Sinai" (the high profile Los Angeles hospital often patronized by the stars).

That statement was rather pathetically true. Along with real and imagined illnesses, Levant's mental sate resolved into classic stage fright as well. By this time he was long addicted to prescription drugs and was in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. His faithful second wife of 33 years, actress/singer June Gale had to commit him to mental institutions on several occasions. Yet Levant continued. There was a series of album recordings in the late 1950s. He made the rounds of a few prime time game shows and late night TV, particularly that of friend Jack Parr. Between 1958 and 1960 he had his own prime time local Los Angeles TV show called The Oscar Levant Show which sometimes offered a rather subdued and intimate look at the restive mind of Levant. A talk show with guests and Levant, usually ringed in a cloud from his chain smoking, playing impromptu pieces on the piano, inevitably it was canceled because of Levant's controversial monologues and off-color and inflammatory remarks about personalities. He wrote three memoirs: A Smattering of Ignorance (1940), Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965), and The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968), each incisive as well as outlandish in the context of Levant's lifelong self-analysis and skewed view of humanity. He increasingly retired from any sort of public exposure over the last decade of his life. Vital and original music - an extraordinary individual - in whatever interpretation one might use - Oscar Levant was one of the most intriguing entertainment mysteries of the 20th century.

IMDb Mini Biography By: William McPeak

Spouse

June Gale	(1 December 1939 - 14 August 1972) (his death) 3 children
Barbara Woodell	(1932 - 1932) (divorced)

Trivia

A close personal friend of George Gershwin's, Levant's performances of Gershwin's piano works are still considered definitive by many.

A composer as well as a pianist, he had more than fifty published songs to his credit, most notably the standard "Blame It on My Youth," and several short instrumental works, including the whimsically titled "A Polka for Oscar Homolka."

A lifetime sufferer of real and imagined ailments, his frequent stays in mental hospitals provided grist for his frequently biting humor.

At the time of his death in August, 1972, he had been off the entertainment scene for so long (almost a decade) that the police and ambulance attendants had to be told who he was.

Was a regular panelist on the popular radio quiz show "Information, Please" in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as a semi-regular on Al Jolson's radio program in the late 1940s.

Recorded for Columbia and American Decca records.

Some of his last public appearences were on the television quiz show "The Celebrity Game" in 1964, he also appeared October 17, 1965 on "What's my Line" as the mystery guest promoting his book 'Memoirs of an Amnesiac'. It was around this time that he increasingly withdrew from the public eye (although he continued to write and his book 'The Unimportance of Being Oscar' was published in 1968) and lived remainder of his life (he died in 1972) with his second wife June and their three daughters out of the limelight.

The role of Cosmo Brown in Singin' in the Rain (1952) was written with him in mind, but was instead immortalized by _Donald O'Connor_.

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording at 6728 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

Personal Quotes

Strip the phony tinsel off Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

I made a comment to a newspaper about therapists saying that people should not become dependant on them and it got printed as, 'The rapists say...'.

My psychiatrist once said to me, 'Maybe life isn't for everyone'.

A musical is a series of catastrophes ending with a floor show.

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.

I hate cold showers. They stimulate me, and then I don't know what to do.

To his friend Gershwin: "Tell me, George, if you had it to do over, would you fall in love with youself again?"

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

I am no more humble than my talents require.

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

I admire Leonard Bernstein, but not as much as he does.

I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

[on Perry Como] I'm convinced that his voice comes out of his eyelids.

It's not what you are but what you don't become that hurts.

[on Steve Allen] When I can't sleep, I read a book by Steve Allen.

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