In Search of Frenzy

During his Army physical, a psychiatrist inquired: "Do you think you can kill?"

"I don't know about strangers," replied the draftee. "But friends, yes."

For more than four decades, Oscar Levant slew his friends--with insults, wisecracks and backchat. When he died at 65 last week, Levant had become a Hollywood legend: the Oscar that no one could win.

It was an image that Levant nurtured like a hothouse nightshade. The son of a Pittsburgh jeweler, he dropped out of high school at 15 to seek a concert pianist's career in New York. He caromed from dance bands to luncheon orchestras, waiting for his big break. Whenever opportunity knocked, Levant immediately bit its hand. Upon greeting George Gershwin, for example, Oscar went Wilde: "George, if you had it to do all over again, would you fall in love with yourself?"

The composer laughed off the insult --possibly because he saw worship in the puffy face of the speaker. Levant soon became a freeloading guest of George and Ira Gershwin until Leonore, Ira's wife, ordered him out of the house. Levant rose, paused, then sat down. "I'm not going," he told Leonore. "Why?" "Because," he mourned, "I have no place to go." Oscar stayed another two years.

Eventually he found another place: George S. Kaufman's. Mrs. Kaufman finally hinted: "I thought the servants were beginning to look at you peculiarly, and I know you haven't any money, so I gave them $5 and said it was from you." Oscar exploded: "$5! You should have given them $10. Now they'll say I'm stingy."

It was a symbiotic relationship: Oscar and his hosts dined out on remarks like that. Levant swiftly became a fixture at Beverly Hills parties: the lap dog with rabies. Though he continued to play and compose (he once studied with Arnold Schonberg), Levant's musicianship was never taken very seriously --except, of course, by Oscar. His classical composition had a sweet, derivative aura, reminiscent of movie scores. (He wrote several, including a mini-opera for Charlie Chan at the Opera.) His pianistic enthusiasm was showy but, except for Gershwin's music, Levant tended to pound the instrument like the back of an old crony.

Indeed, his concerts were less appreciated by critics than by hoods. Mobster Frank Costello was one of his biggest fans. In New York's Lewisohn Stadium, Levant annually played Gershwin to a bench of discriminating cauliflower ears.

But as the Don Quixote of insult comics, Levant was unexcelled. He became a regular on the radio panel Information Please, where his cranky voice identified almost any piece of music after one bar. His sallow, discontented expression became familiar to audiences when he appeared in a series of films. The movies varied from An American in Paris through Humoresque to the Gershwin bio Rhapsody in Blue, in which he played himself. In a sense, that was his perpetual role: the man whose pan was not dead but dying --of pain distinctly complicated by ennui. It was a role that he later expanded in three autobiographies and a series of TV talk shows with his long-suffering second wife, June.

The galvanic twitches, the hand reaching for the heart, the chainsmoking, the downing of quarts of coffee--all the Levantine habits went public. He became to mental illness what Segovia is to the guitar. In clinical detail, Oscar replayed his repertoire of classical and flamenco hypochondria, apostrophized his nervous collapses ("chaos in search of frenzy") and multiple devotions to paraldehyde, Dexedrine, Thorazine, Demerol, Benadryl and insulin. Before he disappeared into a series of sanatoriums, he turned out a catalogue of malice.

Leonard Bernstein, he said, "uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting." Also: "We have seen the era of the common man; Nixon represents the age of the commonplace man." Proposing a movie based on his own life, Levant mentally cast Rosalind Russell in the title role, then decided that she was too masculine. But far too many of his remarks were self-loathing turned outward. As he once half-joked, "Ralph Edwards wanted me to be on his program, This Is Your Life, but he couldn't find one friend."

In the end, that estimate was a bit short. As a performer Levant had made millions of friends--because audiences were too remote to put down. And because behind the gargoyle there always seemed a tortured and sympathetic soul. It takes little psychoanalytic skill to understand why Levant was so fond of recalling his argument with Toscanini. The maestro differed with him over the interpretation of the Concerto in F. "But Mr. Gershwin wanted it this way," protested Levant.

"That poor boy," replied Toscanini. "He was-a sick."

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