Word: levanter
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When pudgy, pugnacious Oscar Levant went to Manhattan from his native Pittsburgh in 1922 with a copy of Romain Holland's Jean Christophe under his arm, he expected to start a heavyweight musical career. Earning a living playing the piano in speakeasies and theatres, he spent his leisure studying with famed Music Teacher Sigismund Stojowski...
...years went by and Pianist Levant showed no signs of becoming another Paderewski, he drifted off to Hollywood. As a friend of the late George Gershwin, he became successively a: 1) cinemactor, 2) assistant to a producer of Westerns, 3) composer of cinema scores, 4) one-hit tunesmith (Lady Play Your Mandolin), 5) one-piece piano virtuoso (the famed Gershwin-Grofé Rhapsody in Blue), and an intermittent pupil of famed Arnold Schönberg, who taught him how to write complicated high-brow music. When, nine years later, he returned to Manhattan to conduct and arrange music for shows...
Married. Oscar Levant, 32, composer, pianist, glib-libbing expert on Canada Dry's Information Please program; and June Gilmartin, 24, cinemactress (June Gale); he for the second time, she for the first; in Fredericksburg...
Last week Canada Dry staged a birthday broadcast and shindig at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria for its experts of the year, guests and regulars, and for close friends and associates of Information Please. With Postmaster James Aloysius Farley as the guest, Kieran, Adams & Levant for the first time in their career missed not a single question (although Jim Farley caused a few anxious moments by hemming & hawing over the identity of faces on new U. S. stamp issues...
...question: Identify the contemporary ruler or political bigwig who is i) a shoemaker's son, 2) a baker's son, 3) a blacksmith's son, 4) a bastard's son. They got the first three in short order: Stalin, Daladier, Mussolini. For No. 4, Oscar Levant's candidate was Adolf Schickelgruber. A woman in the audience disagreed.* "Wasn't he, really?" queried Fadiman, glancing owlishly around. "Well," spake John Kieran, beating Fadiman to the evening's punch line, "he is, if he wasn...