‘You mentioned you wrote a couple of songs,’ I say casually. : Play Laura For Me

I am sitting across the room from a pink-faced man with thinning white hair and a slight paunch. His name is David Raksin, and he is madder than hell.

For the past two years Raksin, who is 74, has been fighting a $35 traffic ticket and has just been informed by an appellate court that he has lost the case.

“It’s so damned stupid, and I feel so stupid for going ahead,” Raksin is saying, peering out from behind tortoise shell-rimmed glasses.

“I have been an honorable man all my life, and now they’re calling me a bum because of the word of a liar!”

“Easy, Dave,” I say, trying to calm him.

“I prefer David,” he says, still fuming.

We are in the garage of his Van Nuys home, which has been turned into a studio. Raksin had told me earlier over the phone that he teaches music, which explained the grand piano and the sophisticated recording equipment behind him.

I am trying to get him off the traffic ticket for a moment because it makes him so damned furious, and I want a little cooler assessment of his problem.

“You mentioned you wrote a couple of songs,” I say casually.

I do not get too excited about that sort of thing because L.A. abounds in unpublished songwriters who turn out tunes like “The Ballad of Ollie North” and “Moonlight on the Basin.”

“Yeah,” he says, coming down from his raging high, “I’ve written a couple.”

“Like what?” I ask politely.

He thinks about it for a moment, shuffling through court papers he is collecting for me, then finally looks up and says, “ ‘Laura.’ ”

I say “What?” thinking I have not heard him correctly and he says, “ ‘Laura.’ ”

I stare at him like an idiot for several minutes, because if there is one piece of music that has haunted my life, it is that one.

Laura to me is what the Lost Lenore was to Edgar Allan Poe, a kind of dreamy vision of perfection that can never be, a memory of something that never was.

I knew that Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics but up until that moment I hadn’t even thought about who composed the almost hypnotic melody for the movie of the same name more than 40 years ago.

“I’ve got it here somewhere,” Raksin is saying, plowing through a stack of documents in search of a legal deposition.

“Wait,” I say. “You composed the music for ‘Laura’?”

“Right,” he says, a little annoyed that he has to keep repeating that.

He is more interested in talking about the two years spent fighting a traffic ticket than the 51 years spent composing music, but I am not easily thrown from a course of questioning.

I learn that Raksin has scored about 100 feature films and four times that many television movies. “Laura,” “Forever Amber,” “Carrie,” “Separate Tables,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and, more recently for television, “The Day After.”

He began by arranging Broadway musicals, then came to Southern California at age 23 to help Charlie Chaplin score “Modern Times.”

The man has more honors that I have felt-tipped pens, and I have hundreds of those because I live in fear that someday I will come across the story that could win me the Nobel Prize and not have a pen.

“Can you play it for me?” I ask, which is probably the height of boorishness, but I don’t care.

Raksin shrugs and says “Sure,” and puts aside the legal papers, the whereases and to wits , and turns to his Yamaha grand piano.

Mercer’s lyrics drift through my head like butterflies in the sun as music fills the studio, and pretty soon I am a thousand miles away from a $35 traffic ticket.

. . . a laugh that floats on a summer night, that I can never quite recall . . . .

When he finishes I sit there entranced for a minute before realizing that Raksin is shuffling through legal papers again. So I begin listening and taking notes and basically this is the story:

Raksin was cited for using a car-pool lane at a freeway on-ramp but says he used it only to clear an intersection and even then got into the proper lane as soon as he could.

He went to traffic court and lost, Raksin says, because the highway patrolman lied and said he had actually entered the freeway in the wrong lane.

Raksin came up with a witness, took a deposition, filed all the documents himself and spent two years in a morass that included an appearance before a four-judge appellate court, but still lost the case.

I guess there’s more to it than that, actually, because here is a man of high reputation who thought enough of truth and justice to spend his time fighting a $35 traffic ticket.

He lost, Raksin says, not because he was wrong but because a policeman lied, and he can’t take that.

“I had a witness!” he says, shoving the deposition at me, but all I can think of is a face in the misty light, footsteps that I hear down the hall . . . .

I’m sorry, Dave, I mean David. I could have written one hell of a column about a guy who fought a traffic ticket for two years on the basis of honesty and principle, but I just can’t get Laura out of my mind.