The troubled genius who flirted with Garbo and popped pills with Garland

Telegraph

2 days ago

'There is a fine line between genius and insanity, I have erased that line,' said Oscar Levant.
Feted through the 1940s as both the highest paid concert pianist in America and one of the wittiest voices on the nation's radio, Levant charmed everyone from George Gershwin (with whom he often shared a piano stool) through Harpo Marx and Dorothy Parker (with whom he traded wisecracks) to Judy Garland (who regularly raided his bathroom for the prescription pills to which they were both addicted).
Doug Wright's Tony Award-winning play, Good Night, Oscar, reminded audiences in New York earlier this year that Levant was also the first American celebrity to speak frankly on 1950s chat shows about his severe struggles with 'a regularly laundry list of mental health issues'.
Pivoting on a virtuosic performance from actor and pianist Sean Hayes (best known for the sitcom Will & Grace), the play is based on a real event in 1958 when TV producers checked Levant out of a psychiatric unit for four hours to make an appearance on The Johnny Carson Show. The play's spine-tingling climax sees Hayes (in character as Levant) seated at the piano to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety, revealing the brilliance and melancholy lurking beneath his erratic and self-deprecating humour.
'I think one can draw a direct line from Levant's television appearances in the 1950s to the modern craze for reality TV,' says Wright over the phone between rehearsals for the London run. 'Because although a lot of what Oscar said shocked a culturally conservative audience, he also proved that a real person could be as compelling as any fictional character. Some would argue he exploited his problems for entertainment value. Others claim he was de-stigmatising them and bringing them to a greater public awareness. But I don't think those aims were mutually exclusive and Oscar preferred being on television to living his real life.'
Born in Pittsburgh in 1906, Oscar Levant was the youngest of four sons of aspirational Russian Jewish immigrants. 'I paid thousands of dollars to psychiatrists to forget my childhood,' he would later say. His autocratic father, Max, was a watchmaker who disdained emotion and expected his sons to take up middle-class professions. His more rebellious and charismatic uncles and older brothers – the eldest of whom defied their father to become a professional violinist – took him to brothels.
Meanwhile his mother Annie – a devotee of romantic music and elegant performers – insisted that her boys all learn instruments. She took them to see her brother conducting the then-20-year-old George Gershwin in 1918 and little Oscar – tutored in strict, classical style – was bowled over by the young composer's 'fresh, free, inventive' style. He was also pierced for the first time by an agonising jealousy that he would nurture for the rest of his life.
Oscar's electric talent at the keyboard had been evident from the first but he loathed practising. He had to be dragged from games in the streets and literally tied to the piano stool and forced to play. Because his physical appearance – with his knock knees, big ears and general clumsiness – did not conform to her ideal of an elegant pianist, Annie would often turn her biting wit on her youngest. After the sudden death of his father when Oscar was 15, Annie sent him to New York to study a strict classical method.
By the time he turned 18, he'd made a name for himself in the Big Apple's louche, arty salons as both a pianist (increasingly influenced by jazzier composers such as Irving Berlin) and a wit. He dropped bon mots with the quick-tongued intelligentsia who gathered around the Algonquin Round Table including Robert Benchley, George S Kaufman and Dorothy Parker (of whom he said 'at her cruellest her voice was most caressive – she was one of my favourite people').
But he fretted that he was sabotaging his career by playing court jester: 'I don't want to be known as a wag… I want to be known as a serious musician. But there I go. Jokes. Silly stories. It's a disease. Beethoven was deaf, Mozart had rickets and I make wisecracks.'
He would also find himself distracted by the glamour of Hollywood, where he worked as a jobbing composer and dated a series of starlets. In 1930, he began a passionate affair with Virginia Cherrill while she was also being courted by Cary Grant (whose film I'm No Angel was breaking box office records at that time). Grant (who would later marry Cherrill) was so furious with Levant that he repeatedly rammed his car into the pianist's while it was parked outside the house where the lovers slept.
'I thought it was a peculiar way of any one showing his strength, even though I sympathised with his mood,' said Levant. His way with women (who found him a tender lover, although requiring extensive mothering) saw him able to charm even the most elite of beauties. Once, when spotting the famously aloof Greta Garbo dining alone in a restaurant, he summoned a waiter: 'Please tell Miss Garbo to quit staring at me…' She was so amused she invited him to join her.
Levant's obsession with Gershwin's music quickly developed into a 'neurotic love affair' and the two became close friends. He was the first pianist after the composer to record Rhapsody in Blue with many preferring the giddy panache of his version, so the rivalry was fierce. Doug Wright categorises their relationship as 'fraternal. Profoundly loving, intimately connected and a little sadistic, Gershwin always had the upper hand and Levant submitted to that like a lapdog.' Only one of Levant's songs – 'Blame it On My Youth' had become a standard and at parties where Gershwin was playing piano, he liked to invite his young lapdog of a friend over to 'play a medley of your hit'. In revenge, Levant would quip: 'If you had to do it all over again, George, would you still fall in love with yourself?'
Both men accepted that while Gershwin had 'genius', Levant had only 'talent'. Levant tried to cash in his superior classical education by studying with Schoenberg, under whose tutelage he wrote a piano concerto. But he continued to self-sabotage and 'inserted a boogie-woogie strain in the middle of it. It spoiled the whole thing.'
Levant enjoyed a more casual friendship with Harpo Marx, inviting himself to the comic's Hollywood home in 1936 for just over a year during which he ran up huge phone bills and monopolised Marx's guests. 'He was a leech and a lunatic – in short a litchi nut,' recalled Marx. 'But I loved the guy… for all his sarcasm and sullen cracks [he] didn't mean to hurt anyone except himself.'
In the mid-1930s, Levant met the act­ress June Gale, who would be­come his second wife (his first, another actress, Barbara Woodell, had lasted less than a year), but their on-off courtship was threatened when the young Judy Garland – then filming The Wizard of Oz – developed a crush on him. Their affair was not consummated and they remained friends – confiding in each other about stage fright and swapping prescription pills. Levant would later joke that, 'If we had ever married, she would have given birth to a sleeping pill instead of a child – we could have named it Barb-iturate.' Levant finally married Gale in 1939 and their marriage (during which they raised three daughters) would become the bedrock of his life as his phobias multiplied and depression deepened.
In Wright's play the audience sees the couple's snarky repartee as Levant jokes that 'marriage is like retail – you break it, you bought it' while June rallies back 'Marriage is about commitment – it's just a question of who commits whom first.'
Wright says he felt qualified to dramatise their relationship because 'my own beloved father was bipolar and a large part of my mother's life was taken up in navigating that, trying to create a normal environment around a very abnormal temperament. After my father died, my mother said: 'I never told you children this, but for 55 years I kept a secret suitcase packed in the boot of the car. I was always ready to leave.'
Levant was at his most successful across the 1940s, working as a touring pianist and making regular appearances on popular radio panel show, Information Please (on which witty and well-read panellists attempted to answer questions submitted by listeners). But his mental health was in free-fall. A desperate June turned to Dr Greenson – the psychiatrist who also treated Marilyn Monroe – but the medic appears to have increased his reliance on prescription drugs. 'He was getting everything,' June later recalled. 'Demerol, paraldehyde and handfuls of pills, when he couldn't even find his mouth.' His daughter Lorna later recalled him as 'a kind of spooky figure in pyjamas'.
Levant would spend the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric institutions – 'a sad sack in a dressing gown who could barely get out of bed,' says Wright. Although he could still turn on his charm when pressed: he began appearing on chat shows in 1950 after moving to California. He appealed to a new generation of Hollywood stars and in their 1996 biography A Talent for Genius Sam Kashner and Nancy Shoenberger describe a night on which Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins and James Dean dropped in to visit with Dean staying much later to discuss music. In her autobiography Collins later wrote that: 'James Dean and Oscar Levant got along famously. Each relished the other's unusualness.' Levant remained friends with Taylor throughout her first four marriages, joking she was 'always a bride, never a bridesmaid'.
Chat shows like the one dramatised in Good Night, Oscar often saw Levant, in his own words, 'saying something outrageous enough to get me thrown off air'. He also hosted his own show, Oscar Levant's Words about Music, which was cancelled in 1956 after he led off on Marilyn Monroe's conversion to Judaism joking that: 'Now Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.' A second show, The Oscar Levant Show saw him sparring with writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, with whom he discussed hallucinogenic drugs and the best musical accompaniment for suicide.
The last decade of Levant's life saw him slow down, swapping pharmaceutical addictions for sudden obsessions with various sweet foods, from chocolate to tapioca. He last appeared in public at an event honouring Charlie Chaplin in 1970 and died at home in Los Angeles in 1972, aged 65.
'Writing about such a witty man was a challenge,' admits Wright. 'He gave me some terrific lines to use and I had to write my own to match. It brought out all my writerly insecurities. There are nights when I've stood in the back of the theatre keeping score: two for Oscar, one for Doug.'