Word: levant
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...hands noodle out a few bars from Gershwin's Concerto in F; then the man in the crumpled suit says: "This is Oscar Levant speaking. It's an identification that I have to make because I suffer from amnesia." Twice a week, in a pint-sized studio at Hollywood's KCOP-TV, Levant snaps at his guests, snarls at the camera, squints at the "20 outpatients" of his audience, sneers at his sponsors, scowls at the world, sits at his piano, twitching, squirming, blinking, playing. Says he: "I'm a study of a man in chaos...
After a 1952 heart attack, Levant's road went downhill. He tried recuperating with a bottle, got encircled with more troubles-"at the instigation of a psychiatrist who obviously hated me." He was tossed out of the Musicians' Union for missing concerts, and though quickly reinstated, "I went on drugs because I was deeply hurt. I had been a good union man." After a last concert at Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium in July 1953, Levant packed off to a Pasadena sanitarium. In 1956 he managed to last 18 weeks on a Los Angeles KNXT show, Words About...
...Author Shulman looks rather like a hale Oscar Levant, but he writes like a much younger man, say, the undergraduate editor of the University of Minnesota's defunct humor mag Ski-U-Mah. In this book Ski-U-Mah's ex-editor decided to double his literary smileage by combining the thoroughly worked drolleries of army life with the equally well-publicized foibles of exurbia...
RHAPSODY IN BLUE (Gershwin): Oscar Levant, pianist; Eugene Ormandy conducting Philadelphia Orchestra...
Sugar Candy. Oilman Getty, 64, is one of the least known among the world's oil giants, usually breaks into the press only with news of his marriages and divorces (five of each). An expatriate, he lives in hotel rooms from Europe to the Levant, has little social life, usually eats alone and frugally, wears out-at-the-elbow sweaters. A notorious penny pincher, he passes out tips sparingly, constantly grumbles about the high cost of everything from restaurant food to taxi fares. But he freely pays thousands for such hobbies as his private art museum (Rubens, Titian, Gainsborough...