The Little World of Oscar Levant

"There is a thin line between genius and insanity," Oscar Levant said recently. "I have erased that line."

Levant -- pianist, wit and schizophrenic -- has made psychological history by carving a full-time career out of madness. He is also making money. Los Angeles, where Levant telecasts, is populated with many lunatics. Levant is one of the few who not only admits he is one, but exults in it. Few cultural phenomena of our time are as weird as the Oscar Levant Program, seen and heard over KHJ-TV, Tuesdays and Fridays, from 7:30 to 9 P.M. On this program, Levant bangs a piano, interviews celebrities, and expresses his sarcastic opinions on a variety of subjects. He is a compulsive talker. On some evenings he has held forth in a soliloquy for the full 90 minutes. His favorite subject is himself. The aspect of himself that he finds most fascinating is his insanity.

Levant opened one show with these words: "I'd like to welcome you tonight on behalf of the mentally deranged of southern California and the outpatients of all the mental hygiene clinics."

Another time he boasted: "I'd just like you all to know that I'm now in the middle of a severe mental and emotional breakdown. It's my fifth in two years." He paused and smiled -- Levant's smile resembles nothing so much as the bared fangs of a wolf -- and continued: "My life is like a rondo. A rondo is a musical form in which the same theme repeats and repeats and repeats. That's the way it is with my psychosis. It comes back again and again." He went on to explain: "I've been in four hospitals in the last six years. I have had insulin shock therapy, electroshock therapy and psychotherapy. One of these days I'm going to do this show in white tie and straitjacket."

He describes -- sometimes in morbidly clinical detail -- all his hypochondriacal symptoms. "I just had an intolerable palpitation in my heart," he will say, clutching at the left side of his chest and looking terrified. "I may have a heart attack at any moment." He suffers from chronic insomnia and often paints graphic pictures of the torments of his sleepless nights. When he does fall asleep he has terrible nightmares. "My nightmares," he says, "make the average horror movie look like Little Women." He suffers from hallucinatory visions and auditory delusions as well. Once, while in a mental hospital, Levant and a group of other patients were taken to nearby Disneyland. "I resented Disneyland very much," Levant recalls. "My own hallucinations are so much better. I could clean up on my hallucinations if I wanted to commercialize on them."

Levant is cleaning up plenty. With a panel of rotating sponsors -- about 10 -- he takes in $1800 a week for just three hours of being himself. Although as Levant once said, "Being myself is not easy." Being a sponsor of Levant isn't easy either. Like Henry Morgan and Bob and Ray, he has no respect for his sponsors. Unlike them, however, Levant has raised disrespect to the level of high art. One of his sponsors is a packager of bat guano, a powdered fertilizer very popular on the West Coast. Levant's method of pushing the product is to leer at the audience and chortle, "Bat guano is delicious. I spread it on my cereal every morning." Or: "Four out of five doctors recommend Geritol. The fifth one recommends bat guano." The sales of bat guano have been spreading.

One night he read the commercial for an Emerson portable radio, which vaunted the fact that it was unbreakable. "I'll show you how unbreakable it is," Levant shouted. He then picked it up and hurled it at the studio wall. The case shattered. Sales of the radio went up anyway. When a commercial for an air-conditioning portable unit claimed that it was lightweight, Levant picked it up to demonstrate it and pretended to collapse from the strain. One of his sponsors is White Front Stores, a chain of budget-priced furniture stores. "And remember," he said one night, "they have free delivery service." He sighed. "That's the reason I'm so tired all the time." Quite a few television viewers took this statement literally and complained to the sponsor when Levant did not personally deliver their orders.

Once Levant ran into a non-masochistic sponsor, Philco. Philco did not see the humor in Levant's jibes at their products. A typical crack was that when he started to do Philco commercials they had promised him a radio and he had never got it. "But it's just as well," he said, "because it wouldn't have worked anyhow." Finally, Philco sent over a beautiful young girl to read the commercials. Levant insulted her so severely she never came back. Then Philco stopped sponsoring him. Levant told his fans the tragic news and then added somberly:

"Don't buy any of the Philco products -- until they stop persecuting me."

The merry-andrew of mental illness does not work from a written script. He does not rehearse. He does not chat with his guests either before or after the program. The show is completely spontaneous. Levant can -- and does -- say anything that enters his disordered mind, and it makes no difference how high the target.

"I'm like Eisenhower," he once cracked. "Once I make up my mind, I'm full of indecision."

"Ralph Edwards," Oscar says, "wanted to do my life -- but he couldn't find any friends." Since he has no friends, he has no compunctions about saying nasty and sardonic things about everybody. Dinah Shore is noted for her sweet, sugary personality. Discussing her, Levant remarked, "My doctor told me it was dangerous for me to watch the Dinah Shore program as I have a tendency to diabetes.... The trouble with Dinah is she suffers from euphoria. Someday I'm going to give her sadness lessons." Of Debbie Reynolds, he said, "She never has to worry about losing her voice. She hasn't got one."

Why eminent persons are willing to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous Oscar by going on his show is one of those mysteries of human nature which are insoluble. He has had la crème de la crème on his show, ranging from Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley through Peggy Lee, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Pappy Boyington, Sammy Davis, Jr., stripper Tempest Storm, Sugar Ray Robinson and Fred Astaire. Well-known guests not only submit, but volunteer. When Astaire offered to appear, Oscar said, "Fred, I'm so suffocated by nostalgia and so unhappily happy that I can't speak -- which is one of the great public services of all time."

Usually when he asks his victims a question, he never lets them answer. Jack Lemmon says, "That's because Oscar thinks so fast that when he asks you a question, he knows what you're going to answer before you answer, and he's off on some other subject."

Leo Durocher says, "Being on Oscar's show is like arguing with four umpires at the same time." Twenty-five years previously, Alexander Woollcott, himself possessed of a biting wit, said something similar: "Talking to Oscar is like fighting a man who has three fists instead of the regulation two." Oscar traveled in fast company in those days, parrying ripostes with such famous scintillators of the Twenties and Thirties as Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Moss Hart, Robert Benchley, Noel Coward. He met and bested his opponents on their own ground and finally Woollcott admitted, "Oscar Levant is the wit's wit."

The hero of this saga is also irresistible to women. The unsophisticated male may find this hard to believe, since physically Levant is not exactly handsome. In fact, some people might even describe him as downright repulsive. He stands, or rather sags, five feet nine inches, and weighs 155 pounds. His posture is terrible. He has a slight limp in the left leg, the result of a childhood accident. He owns only three suits -- all dark blue single-breasted models. The suits are never clean and always rumpled. His hair is black turning to gray and he rarely gets a haircut. He slaps a greasy dressing on his hair and sometimes when the studio kliegs highlight his head he resembles a tango dancer who has grown fat, aged and depraved. His ears protrude. His nose is large and irregular. His cheeks are slack and fat. His lips are gross and sensual. "I am an epic in bloat," he once said. His eyes, though, are dark and soulful, and women go for Oscar. Oscar, in his turn, has often been attracted to beautiful women -- dancers, singers, actresses -- and he has married two of them. His first wife was Barbara Smith, a voluptuous musical comedy dancer. They were divorced after a few months of matrimony. Harpo Marx asked him why the marriage had broken up. Oscar shrugged his shoulders.

"We were incompatible," he explained, "And besides I had a definite feeling she loathed me." Another time he said, "I'm a controversial person. My friends either dislike me or hate me."

The first Mrs. Levant later married Arthur Loew, the theatre owner. Shortly after they got back from the honeymoon, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Oscar.

"How dare you wake me up at two in the morning?" his ex-wife said.

"I just wanted to ask you something," he said.

"Yeah?"

"What's playing at Loew's 86th Street tomorrow?"

Oscar's second -- and current -- wife is the former June Gale, one of the Gale Sisters, who were a singing and dancing act of the 1930s. She's still a lovely, charming woman, gentle and soft and well made. They met in November 1939 at a party. The courtship was intense (continued on page 90)Oscar Levant(continued from page 38) and they eloped, a few weeks later", in a chartered plane to Fredericksburg, Virginia. Screenwriter Charles Lederer was best man. The Justice of the Peace was a solemn individual, and every time he came to a "do you" he intoned the phrase with drama. After the tenth "do you," Oscar leaned forward and said he had a question to ask.

"What is it?" asked the J.P.

Oscar boomed, "Do YOU?"

So they were married and, as the ancient pun goes, they lived scrappily ever after. Mrs. Levant is forever leaving her husband -- and forever returning. Once, after June had left him, Oscar told a friend, "I don't blame her. Can you imagine what it must be like living with me for even an hour?"

In 1947, she sued for legal separation and maintenance. She said he earned $200,000 and possessed $500,000 in property, cash and negotiable securities. Oscar is an extremely slow man with a buck. He has amassed a lot of money from his concerts, his recordings and his radio-television appearances. He spends very little of what he makes and may be worth a million dollars. The Levants occupy a 10-room Spanish-style Moorish pillared mansion at 905 North Rexbury Drive, Beverly Hills, California. The place is disintegrating, inside and outside. The plaster is flaking off. The house needs painting. The furniture is falling apart.

Getting back to the marital merry-go-round of the Levants, she changed her mind about the separation in 1947 and returned to Oscar's bed, board and badinage. Since then they have carried on, privately and publicly, a running guerilla war. Once, in Miami Beach, Oscar became so unbearable that, before a large and interested group, she cut her wrists and flung herself into a swimming pool. The cuts were superficial and June swims well so no harm was done. For several weeks Oscar behaved like a gentleman.

I first encountered Levant about 10 years ago in his New York pied-à-terre. As we started conversing, I asked if I might have a drink. He summoned his wife, introduced me, and told her to break out a bottle of good Scotch. Mrs. Levant said there was no Scotch or other alcoholic refreshment in the house. Oscar then gave his wife a dressing down such as I have never heard a husband give a wife -- especially before a stranger and for such a trivial reason.

Levant himself does not drink. "I tried being an alcoholic," he says. "I once drank steadily for a whole year -- but it didn't take." Oscar's kick is sleeping pills. He digs nembutal, seconal and sodium amytal. Mrs. Levant is in charge of the pills. When he has been a good boy he is allowed two pills at 11 P.M. When he has been a very good boy he is allowed three. He is also a big caffeine man, swallowing about 60 cups of coffee a day. He doesn't eat much. His main form of sustenance is black coffee. He calls this liquid refreshment "drunch."

Not long after the Scotch incident, Mrs. Levant decided to get a divorce. But soon after, she withdrew the divorce action. The battles continued. Last spring, they reached a high point. In May, during one of his telecasts, Oscar rubbed his sides, groaned, and told his audience, "I have a broken rib. My wife hit me with a shoe and she cracked my rib."

However, June Levant has her own television program, on KCOP, Monday through Friday, 3 to 4 P.M. She rebutted his accusation. "I didn't hit him," she said. "He's exaggerating. I just gave him a little push. He's a hypochondriac anyway."

Two nights later, Levant replied on his own show: "We were playing emotional ping pong and she hit me with the paddle.... The secret of a happy marriage is that your wife murders you and then you're supposed to apologize for it."

But they were soon reconciled. Levant announced it on his program and added, "I really don't blame her for hitting me. How would you like to be my wife?"

Two months later, the volcano erupted again. On Wednesday evening, July 9, Levant telephoned the police department of Beverly Hills. He asked for protection. Two squad cars tore over to Roxbury Drive. Chief of Police Clinton Anderson led a posse of officers into the house. "Levant," Anderson later reported, "was yelling and screaming. You could hear him a block away."

Levant told the police: "That woman attacked me with a scissors. She tried to cut me. She's dangerous." Mrs. Levant had locked herself in the bathroom. Anderson talked her into emerging, which she did, when assured that Levant would leave right away. On July 17, in Superior Court, Mrs. Levant filed for divorce. She said she could no longer endure living with this genius. "He's gotten too big for one woman," she said. "I have decided to give him to the world."

On television, Levant said, "My wife is Irish. We have quite an emotional range at our house. From begorra to oi veh."

Five days later they were together again. A New York paper headlined the reconciliation: Oscar Levant and Wife Hiss and Make Up.

Levant told reporters: "I am magnificent. I cannot hold a grudge. Of course she should get a divorce. Not from me -- from that lawyer of hers. I am an open-minded man. All I want is my own way."

When he signed a contract with Columbia Artists, president Frederick Schang told him, "Oscar, as long as you're with us, there will never be any trouble. Whenever there is any dispute, it will always be settled in your favor." Levant thoughtfully considered the proposition. "That seems quite fair," he said finally.

Oscar's appraisal of himself and his endeavors is typically modest. "My show is perhaps the greatest in the history of television," he tells inquirers. He once told me, "I gave up reading because it takes my mind off myself."

The Levants have three children, all girls. During his wife's first pregnancy, Oscar told Ira Gershwin, "She's trying to poison the mind of our child against me." Gershwin said, "How can she do that? The child isn't even born yet."

"She's writing nasty letters about me and swallowing them," Levant explained.

Oscar is devoted to his daughters and their photographs hang in every room of the house. With them he is charming, adoring. He takes an interest in their education and growth. The family has dinner together every night. Often, after dinner, he plays the piano. His favorite composers are Gershwin and Chopin. "This Chopin," he once told me, "this is genius. He gets right down to the guts of the music. He doesn't give you that intellectual crap like today's composers."

By his own testimony, he is a bad father, however. Even here he is superlative. "I'm the worst father in history," he said not long ago. "I have one rule with my children and it works. I tell them, 'You can come to me only when you don't have problems. If you have problems, go to somebody else.' Well, at least it gives my children a good reason to hate their father and this is very therapeutic."

Oscar Levant has good reason to know the emotional dangers in a situation of overbearing parental love. He was born in Pittsburgh on December 27, 1906, the son of Max Levant, who ran a small jewelry store at 1420 Fifth Avenue. The youngest of four boys, he was mama's darling. Oscar was the restless, nervous one but Mama Levant, though he was her favorite, kept him rooted to the piano practicing three hours a day. At 10, according to his first teacher, Oscar showed signs of great talent, being able to interpret Bach fugues with "adult intelligence." He also displayed prodigious memory. He could memorize any piano piece after two readings. By the time he was a high school freshman, he was the leader of a dance band that played school hops. During his youth, his only escape from mama's success drive was baseball. He played hooky from Forbes Public and later Fifth Avenue High to go to Forbes Field and see the Pirates. To this day, Levant is a passionate baseball fan. Baseball is the frame of reference for two of his classic maxims:

"Sleeping with your wife is like striking out the pitcher."

"Ballet is the fairies' baseball."

At 15, Levant quit high school and struck out for New York. He studied composition with the noted theorists, Sigismund Stojowski and Arnold Schoenberg. Oscar aspired to be a Rachmaninoff, a great concert pianist and a composer of serious music. He didn't have the financial backing a young musician needs to get a foothold in the highly competitive field of concertizing. An interviewer in Florida once asked him what advice he would give young pianists: "Marry a rich woman," he snarled. In despair, young Levant began playing in dance bands and taking any one-night club dates he could get. Once, hired to play at a stag party at the Astor Hotel, he started tinkling a Mozart sonata while two babes were disrobing and he was thrown out. He wrote one popular song hit: Lady Play Your Mandolin. In 1928, he did his first acting bit, the role of a pianist in a speakeasy in Burlesque, a Broadway melodrama. He was hired to repeat the role in the movie version, was then cast as pianist in other films such as Rhythm on the River, Humoresque, The Barkleys of Broadway, An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue (in which Levant played George Gershwin's pal, Oscar Levant). He wrote the musical soundtracks for many films and his tune, Until Today, from the Nothing Sacred score, won him the Academy Award for the best song. Oscar's winning an Oscar impressed him not one whit.

What did impress him was George Gershwin. Gershwin was a versatile man, a man of irresistible charm, of demonic vitality, and of creative inventiveness. To Levant, Gershwin possessed the quality of genius and personality that Levant neurotically believed was missing in himself. For 10 years -- until Gershwin's untimely end in 1937 at the age of 38 -- Levant and Gershwin were inseparable. Gershwin is the only person to whom Levant has ever played second fiddle -- or second piano. Levant was Gershwin's confidant, companion and sometime stooge.

Musically, Levant was the foremost exponent of Gershwin's longer works. From about 1927 on he began performing the Rhapsody in Blue with symphony orchestras. For years he played nothing but Gershwin in public. When Gershwin wrote his Concerto in F in 1932, Levant's enthusiasm ran high. "Now," he chortled, "I can double my repertoire." He played the concerto at its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic. One of Levant's prize possessions is a gold watch bearing the inscription, From George to Oscar, Lewisohn Stadium, August 15, 1932. "I've been late by this watch to every important appointment I've had since then," Oscar says.

The unexpected death of Gershwin, from a brain hemorrhage, was a terrible blow to Levant. A few weeks later, many of the leading singers and instrumentalists in Los Angeles played at a Gershwin Memorial Concert in the Hollywood Bowl. Ira Gershwin, George's brother and the lyric writer for his musical comedies, observed: "Everybody else was playing for the audience -- but Levant was playing for Gershwin." After the concert, Levant broke up backstage and went into a state of crying hysteria. He had to be carried home.

From then on, he began to experience acute states of anxiety, nightmares, psychosomatic heart ailments and a general neurotic maladjustment that became progressively worse. One of the first signs of Gershwin's ailment had been a loss of finger coordination during a concert. Levant now became obsessed by the belief that his own hands were losing their coordination. Through the next two decades -- through his years of triumph as the most witty panelist on Information Please, through his successes as one of the highest paid concert pianists on the circuits, Levant lived with his inner torments. During all this time, he went to psychoanalysts, having, at one time, an analyst on both coasts.

Then, in 1953, while playing the Rhapsody in Blue in concert, he was suddenly filled with the conviction that his fingers were paralyzed, that his brain was affected like Gershwin's. He fled the concert. He began seeing things and hearing things. He became a recluse in his Beverly Hills home, not answering the phone or opening the mail. By now Levant was not only deeply in love with his wife, but emotionally dependent on her as well. She used to comb his hair before a concert. She gives him haircuts even now, as he is mortally afraid of barbers. She once cut his hair on the television program. It was Mrs. Levant who compelled Oscar to go to a sanitarium for shock treatments. She said if he didn't, she would divorce him. He consented to go, but not before yelling, "You make The Shrike look like Blossom Time!"

And yet the admirable aspect of this man and his miseries is that out of his tormented soul he is able to draw laughter. "I am the verbal vampire of television," he said not long ago. He is able not only to laugh at the world, at all its hypocrisies and stupidities, but he is able to laugh at himself, at his ego, at his mental disorders, at the hospitals where he's been confined, at the disorderly raggle-taggle of his life.

Recently, columnist Earl Wilson asked Levant, "When are you going network?"

"Everybody asks me that," Levant replied, "except the networks."