Word: levante
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...OSCAR LEVANT...
...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...
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...
...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...
Died. Oscar Levant, 65, composer and pianist whose dour, waspish wit nourished a turbulent career in radio, television and films (see SHOW BUSINESS & TELEVISION...