What you don't become: Good Night, Oscar

On that play about Oscar Levant

I originally intended for this newsletter to be a follow-up to last week’s New York Cultural Consumption Report, but as the week went on, I realized I mainly wanted to write about Oscar Levant, the subject of the play Good Night, Oscar currently running on Broadway and which I saw last week.

Oscar Levant was famous for a lot of things — he was once the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States and a comic sidekick character in some great Hollywood movies — but in the mid-20th century, those things coalesced into being known primarily as a personality. He was a frequent guest on TV talk shows, where he’d deliver scathing and funny one-liners (often at his own expense) before knocking out a little Gershwin on the piano. His persona was a specific one: today, we’d put it in kinder and more progressive terms and praise his openness about his struggles with addiction and mental health, but when you watch his appearances, they can seem a bit like pained self-immolation. He was publicly a mess and made being a mess his biggest joke.

I spent much of this past week digging up Oscar Levant clips on YouTube. The one that sticks in my head is his monosyllabic cameo on What’s My Line, his final appearance on television (embedded below, with Levant’s appearance beginning at 22:06). The show’s panelists are blindfolded. Their game is to guess the identity of the celebrity guest (Levant) by asking him questions. Levant replies “nope” to most of their guesses, even to some questions that might reasonably apply to him (“Are you a movie star?” “Are you a comedian?” “do you do anything besides appear on television and movies?” — his host overrides his answer on that last one, though he was no longer a working pianist by that time). Eventually, one of the panelists asks the revealing question: “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” When he answers “yes” to this one, his identity is guessed correctly, but there’s heavy irony in this moment. In this clip, he’s clearly a very unwell man, puffing on a cigarette and twitching like Slavoj Žižek, looking to the show host for approval before every answer. His illnesses weren’t something he made use of; they destroyed his ability to play the piano or do any other kind of work.

The play Good Night, Oscar concerns the period when he was famous for his illnesses, touching in flashbacks on the things that brought him to fame in the first place: his close friendship with George Gershwin and position as the primary interpreter of his music, his movie acting, his best-selling memoirs, his reputation as a wit.

I first became familiar with Levant because of his appearances in two movies I love: the Joan Crawford/John Garfield melodrama Humoresque and the Gene Kelly dance-fest An American in Paris. He was no actor, but delivering laconic lines from the piano bench between flurries of notes was enough to make every movie he appeared in a little bit better. Then, the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. Despite the barbed and often extremely funny jokes, the snippets we have of his radio and TV appearances show him as someone always eager to self-deprecate while praising the people he worked with. I found this recording of an appearance on the radio quiz show Information, Please, where he does a bit of stunt piano: another pianist plays the first few bars of various famous piano concertos, and Levant’s task is to identify the concerto and jump in with the soloist part. He correctly identifies the first concerto, by Tchaikovsky; then says, “You’d better listen to somebody else play it. Listen to Horowitz play it; you wouldn’t want to hear me play it.” When he fails to recognize the second piece (by Grieg), the host describes the misfire as “a most unusual occurrence,” to which Levant immediately replies: “No, it isn’t.”

On one TV appearance (you can listen to the audio here), Jack Paar, as host, invites him to joke about Leonard Bernstein. Oscar pauses thoughtfully and replies: “Before I make any cracks, Leonard Bernstein is the most spectacular phenomenon on television. He’s just dazzling.” He talks briefly about how he “divorced himself” from music for the sake of his mental health, stopped even reading about it, and then encountered Bernstein’s television show by accident and was deeply impressed. Then, because it’s part of the contract of the conversation, he makes a few cracks. This is also an appearance that’s a bit troubling to listen to; Oscar had spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals by this point and admits that his memory has been impaired by electroshock therapy. In many places, he’s struggling for words.

I remember reading a quote about the actor Edward G. Robinson (who I also love) that I can’t find now. It went something like, “he had the face of a catfish and the soul of a romantic lead.” The same perhaps might be said of Levant, who was profoundly talented and bore great affection for his friends but was also very sensitive and insecure. His friendship with George Gershwin, who died suddenly of a brain tumor in 1937 at the height of his powers, was complex. While researching this post, I drew on this doctoral dissertation by Caleb Taylor Boyd that argues that Oscar Levant’s status as a popular “middlebrow” pianist was enormously influential in securing Gershwin’s jazz-classical compositions a place in the concert-hall canon. Levant was deferential to Gershwin but was also envious of what he saw as his friend’s superior genius — a view that George, who had a healthy ego and loved to hear his own music performed, did absolutely nothing to dispel. By all accounts, Gershwin was kind of a dick to Levant, who worshipped him. Levant was also a songwriter and composer and had more classical training. Still, Gershwin was openly dismissive of Levant’s efforts and was much happier when he stuck to playing Rhapsody in Blue. An oft-repeated story from Levant’s memoirs has them sharing a train car, with George claiming the desirable lower bunk while Oscar climbed into the upper bunk. “Upper berth — lower berth. That’s the difference between talent and genius,” George gloated. The fact that the bulk of Oscar’s popularity as a pianist came from playing his dead friend’s music, while his own compositional efforts came to nothing, clearly ate at him. He was haunted by the idea that he might have achieved better things. A line from his memoir: “It’s not what you are; it’s what you don’t become that hurts.”

This frenemy relationship would have been a good subject for a play on its own, with echoes of the Mozart-Salieri relationship in Shaffer’s Amadeus. Ghost Gershwin (or hallucinated Gershwin) does appear in Good Night, Oscar, as part of the origin story for Levant’s troubles, but it doesn’t go much deeper than what I’ve described above.

As for the play itself: it was developed specifically for its star Sean Hayes, a comedian and classically trained pianist most famous for playing Jack on the sitcom Will & Grace. Hayes, who has said in interviews that people kept telling him he should play Oscar Levant, is good in the part, delivering Oscar’s best one-liners at a rapid clip, imitating his tics and his voice (although this occasionally veers more towards sounding like a deranged James Stewart), and even performing a concert-quality Rhapsody in Blue near the end. His performance has been nominated for a Tony award and was a delight to watch.

The play itself doesn’t quite rise to its potential. The plot is a fictionalized account of one of Levant’s appearances on the Jack Paar show, which he made after being given temporary leave from the psychiatric hospital to which he had been committed by his wife. I’m not sure how many of the details are true; some of the drama comes from his having been released from the hospital on false pretenses, accompanied by an orderly who frets about his professional ethics. The plot threads include the aforementioned Gershwin friendship but also draw on other sources of dramatic tension: Will Oscar keep it together? Will he be able to finagle pills from the orderly? Will he be able to play the piano, and if he does, will he play Gershwin or one of his own neglected pieces? Will his wife permit him to return home, or will he go back to the hospital? Will his off-color jokes scandalize America? Will the orderly’s complicity in Oscar’s appearance jeopardize his medical school prospects?

All these questions are treated shallowly, with the result being a play that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be about — it feels a bit over-workshopped, like the writers wanted to squeeze in as much situational conflict as possible rather than risk alienating the audience with anything too pensive or difficult. All the best lines come directly from Oscar himself, from his memoirs, movies, and appearances. The short sequence representing the actual TV appearance is a rapid-fire compilation of Levant’s funniest one-liners. Remarkably, they hold up — almost all of them got big laughs.

As I mentioned above, one of the sources of dramatic tension concerns the fictional audience’s reaction. Will Levant’s dark humor scandalize the white-bread TV audience? Will he be able to restrain himself on hot-button topics? The Paar character, in a monologue, defends the right of comedians to make whatever jokes they like, even if it makes the audience uncomfortable. But he doesn’t acknowledge the real source of the discomfort: that putting an obviously unwell man on TV and mining his condition for laughs is unkind and exploitative.

The New York Times’s reaction to the real-life TV appearance fictionalized in the play is less concerned about Levant’s quip that Arthur Miller can eat the newly kosher Marilyn Monroe than about the ethics of allowing him to appear at all in his condition. From the newspaper:

On balance, it is to be questioned whether the good moments were quite worth the accompanying tasteless excursion into humor at the expense of the mentally and emotionally disturbed… It is not for the average viewer to judge Mr. Levant’s condition. But if he was able to go on the program, then Mr. Paar’s calculated emphasis on the element of the pianist’s unpredictability was unnecessary. If there was genuine doubt as to his appearance, then the prolonged build-up was cheap and unkind. What Mr. Paar did was play a public game of cat-and-mouse on the subject of emotional instability. Would Mr. Levant make it or wouldn’t he? Was the pianist putting on “an act” or was he genuinely upset? Mr. Paar in so many words was inviting the viewer audience to dabble in cliffhanging psychiatry and and derive some laughs from the pianist’s dilemma.

A little while ago, this image made the rounds on twitter: a concert program from the first performance in America of Mahler’s 6th Symphony, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos (1947). The post-intermission selection? Gershwin’s piano concerto in F major, performed by none other than Oscar Levant. This program (an 8:45 start time for a symphony almost an hour and a half long? A Gershwin pairing for one of Mahler’s most morose compositions?) is absolutely absurd, but delightful — it implies the existence of a classical concert audience that was willing to stay out until midnight to hear something they hadn’t heard before. There was a time when American pop culture could produce someone like Oscar Levant and put him on stage both with Mahler and with Milton Berle. For him to go from beloved entertainer to someone famous mostly for being troubled in public is surely a tragedy, though not a unique one; Judy Garland trod the same path at much the same time. I’m glad that Good Night, Oscar makes a case for him, even if it’s not the one he might have wanted — I only wish the play had been as multifaceted and intelligent as he was.