Man of Note in L.A. Musicals

Longevity seems to smile fondly on those in the arts. Despite the stresses and strains of creativity, and quite possibly because of the way the challenges keep the blood pumping, the men and women of the lively arts have a way of staying lively.

Hal Roach, who teamed Laurel and Hardy and launched the “Our Gang” comedies, recently celebrated his 98th birthday and remains feisty as ever. Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount, famously lived to be 102, nourished by a taste for goulash so spicy it made strong men weep.

Young conductors are now the fashion but the Toscanini-Monteux tradition is that they don’t really hit full stride until they pass 70. Luis Bunuel made several of his finest films in his 70s. Bertrand Russell was writing eloquent and often angry prose into his 90s. George Burns at 94 has made a new career out of old age.

In a sense Edwin Lester, who will be 95 on Friday, has outlived his monument. The Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, which he founded in 1938 and from which he retired in 1977, has only a fraction of the 260,000 subscribers it had at its peak here and in San Francisco, and it no longer offers a San Francisco season at all.

Yet in its day and at its best, the CLO was a kind of cultural bridge between the Los Angeles that was and the Los Angeles that emerged in the postwar era and is indeed still emerging.

Lester, who is frail of step but sharp of mind and memory, said the other afternoon that “The mere fact of being 95 is utterly silly,” adding that he had accomplished nothing of consequence in the last 10 years. At 95, that’s an allowable vacation, of course, but Lester continues to dispatch a stream of letters to his friends in the press, keeping the record straight about the CLO and its contributions to the cultural growth of Los Angeles.

The Civic Light Opera, most notably, was a significant factor in the birth of the Music Center. “The important thing was our agreement to occupy the Pavilion for the six worst months of the year. That was what sold the county supervisors. The Stanford Research Institute had done an analysis for them and we were what was required.” The CLO also contributed $250,000 to the Music Center. “It wasn’t much compared to some of the other donations, but it helped,” Lester says. When finances were tight in the early days, the CLO sometimes advanced the rent, Lester remembers.

In his 39 years with the Civic Light Opera, Lester produced 90 shows himself, and there were another 50 or 60 he didn’t produce. Critics often complained that as lavishly mounted and starry as the CLO productions were, they represented musical theater as it had been rather than as it was coming to be.

But Lester argues that he knew his subscribers and there is evidence that he was right. When he booked “West Side Story,” not without trepidation, 200 subscribers canceled. When “Kiss Me Kate” was imported, Lester spotted some risque lyrics he thought would not sit well with his customers. The New York producer Saint Subber was aghast at the idea of asking Cole Porter to change the lyrics. “I called Porter directly and he couldn’t have been nicer,” Lester says. “He said he understood and would make some changes, and he did.”

Lester, born in New York, raised in Providence, R.I., and in Detroit, came to the founding of the CLO by a long road that began with piano lessons. “My problem has always been laziness,” he says, unconvincingly. “I wouldn’t practice enough, and someone said that I played the piano but I wasn’t a pianist, and that was about right.”

Still, he got a job at $15 a week as intermission pianist at the Cafe Frontenac, a huge Detroit restaurant that had two orchestras. On his opening night, Lester made a grand entrance through the front door in a new-bought set of tails and white kid gloves and wearing a monocle (“which was useless”). He was 19.

“Moebs, the manager, said, ‘You’re a showman!’ ” He made Lester the talent booker on the spot, quadrupled his salary and gave him a magnum of Champagne. Lester kept the job, playing the piano and booking singers, for four years.

When that palled, he tried his hand at vaudeville, working smalltime circuits as a singing pianist. He married (“a beautiful singer, naturally”), served briefly in World War I but did not get overseas. Afterward, he moved to Los Angeles because of his wife’s failing health; she had tuberculosis.

In Los Angeles he talked his way into producing prologues for Sid Grauman’s Million Dollar Theater. Then he became a wizard piano salesman, earning upwards from $10,000 in commissions when that was significant money.

His success as salesman led Carl Laemmle to hire Lester as a sales manager at Universal Studios, but Lester didn’t stay long. “Didn’t like the movies,” he says. In the early ‘30s, Lester began to manage singers; Nelson Eddy was briefly a client. To keep them busy, Lester started arranging events for them.

He produced a Light Opera Festival, doing four shows for a week each. “I didn’t know any better,” says Lester. He persuaded 10 friends to guarantee $500 apiece against losses, but he managed to end the season with $2,500. Emboldened, he did another season and ended up $10,000 in the red.

“I learned a lesson,” he says: “Los Angeles demands stars. Just doing musicals wasn’t enough.”

He raised fresh capital, persuaded John Charles Thomas to appear for the unprecedented sum of $7,500 a week, announced four shows for the price of three for subscribers, the four being the operettas “Blossom Time,” “The Student Prince” and “The New Moon,” and, as the added started, “Roberta” with its new star, Bob Hope, directly from a triumphant run in New York.

The Civic Light Opera was off and running. In 1957, Mary Martin did both “South Pacific” and “Annie Get Your Gun.” In 1965 there was a 700,000-seat advance sale for a season that included Ricardo Montalban and Florence Henderson in “The King and I.”

There were some bombs along the way, including “1491,” the Meredith Willson musical about Columbus getting ready to sail, and “Magdalena,” a CLO original operetta based on the music of Villa-Lobos.

“I still think it’s the finest thing we ever did,” Lester says, “and after all these years it’s just come out on a new CD. But it may have been ahead of its time.”

The musical scene was changing. Rising costs have made it increasingly difficult to break even on the limited runs that were the CLO’s custom. The Schubert, with unlimited runs, could outbid the CLO on the big hit musicals. The CLO patrons, with their conservative tastes, were declining in numbers. There simply weren’t many new musicals coming along except the megaproductions and even the revivals are more expensive all the time.

Like a good showman, Lester bowed out at right time, leaving himself and his audiences with some fine memories.