Such Happy Songs : Oscar Levant dreamed of making great music, instead he became a genius of talk : The Life and Times of Oscar Levant, <i> By Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (Villard Books: $25; 518 pp.)</i>

Oscar Levant, from all accounts (and especially his own), was not a happy man: “Instant unconsciousness has been my greatest passion. . . . My life is a morbid rondo. . . . Every moment is an earthquake to me.” He was all words and few artistic deeds: “I am a throbbing wound waiting to be aggravated. . . . Anger is my chief raison d’etre. “ Anger against success and anybody who mentioned roses, death, the number 13, Sara Lee cakes, Pittsburgh. If you wished him good luck before a concert, you’d be in line for a smack in the kisser and a Levantine exit with the famous scowl. Once, pilled to the gills, he tried to throttle his ever-loving wife. He was not a happy man.

Yet looking at the tally of his professional life, the fellow seemed to have it made. A Renaissance prince of all media, Levant racked up hit songs (“Blame it on My Youth”), boffo movies (“Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris”), early-shock TV shows (“The Oscar Levant Show”) and best-selling chat-books (“The Memoirs of an Amnesiac”). His All-Gershwin concerts were SRO. A household name by the ‘40s, he also had a loving wife and family plus a swell home in Beverly Hills. Who could ask for anything more?

But, as he said in the movie “Humoresque”: “It’s not what you are but what you don’t become that hurts.” He didn’t become a great American composer, like the buddy he envied, George Gershwin. He didn’t become a world-class pianist like his friend Vladimir Horowitz. And though he “loved songs more than anything” and knew everything about them, his musically illiterate colleague Irving Berlin outclassed him by light years.

The New Grove Dictionary of American Music awards him one small paragraph, the same space as Eddie Leonard, minstrel writer of “Ida! Sweet as Apple Cider.” Gershwin gets 13 pages.

But as Scott Fitzgerald said about Gatsby, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gesture, then there was something gorgeous about him.” Levant was a Gorgeous Man, a genius of talk. For he left a legacy of verbal humor, a well of truth, a stand-up comic’s dream of one-liner bull’s-eyes--Doris Day: “I knew her before she became a virgin”; Elizabeth Taylor: “Always the bride and never the bridesmaid”; Leonard Bernstein: “He has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well-known for over four hundred years.”

When he was a kid his mother said cuttingly, “You’ll never be (the charismatic Polish pianist) Paderewski, but you’ll never be lonely.” Knock-kneed, damp-haired and shop-soiled, Oscar was nevertheless considered sexy by many women. He also had limpid eyes, a sensuous mouth and helpless air. Despite his devilish tongue, he had adoring friends who had the privilege of experiencing his fine arts offstage, at home--the best setting for Oscar, the indoors man: slouched at the piano, fingering the keys as if they were voluptuous anatomy, wearing his trademark rumpled dark suit with its filigree of cigarette ash, playing Bach while reading Camus and humming along to a Beethoven sonata on the phonograph. His friend Harpo Marx, at whose house Oscar had encamped, once walked in on him in this supreme act of a Renaissance man. Without raising his head from his book, Oscar grunted, “Harpo, why don’t you loath me like everybody else? Don’t you like me?”

“A Talent For Genius,” written by two married poets, is a straightforward, serious and sensible account of a shambolic life. Levant’s own chat-books, reeking of his personality and both sunnier and funnier, are much used and quoted. But this long book, full of cautionary tales, is the definitive tale of Oscar. Even though there are times when one begs for no more “Rhapsody in Blue” or descriptions of “bipolar illness” and “obsessive-compulsive disorder,” one’s eyes are misty at the end: old Oscar struggling up his stairs, worn out from piano practice, breathing with difficulty, to die peacefully on his bed, his beautiful hands of stained glass folded neatly on his chest.

When the Beverly Hills cop was told the name of the deceased, he registered no recognition. For this was the forgetful world of the 1970s when rock culture was steamrolling over the old world of witty, literate Broadway/Hollywood. Today in the noisy and meaningless wasteland of talk television, we need more than ever the well-read, well-tempered presence of Oscar Levant (sparing, of course, his nicotine habit and slight homophobia).

Oscar Levant’s Time is evoked only sketchily here, mostly in long laundry lists (and there’s a lamentable ignorance of Tin Pan Alley, one of Oscar’s favorite places). So we shall concentrate on the Life side of this night-loving, pavement-hugging romantic.

His was the typical background of a turn-of-the-century American entertainer: Russian-Jewish parents, outsiders, who demanded orthodoxy within their Pittsburgh ghetto and a future in the professions for their sons. Luckily there was music in the home and a get-up-and-go spirit. Three of the sons, including Oscar, would provide music for Al Jolson, another outsider and full of chutzpah.

Oscar sacrificed his boyhood to learn classical piano, and he was soon sight-reading like nobody’s business and smoking 5-cent cigars. This was at age 12. At 15, with a phobia for lemons and the 1812 Overture, he was left in New York to finish his piano studies. Here he blossomed as a musician, despite Paderewski’s judgment that though he had technique he’d never have “the soul of a concert pianist.” This hit hard in his already hypersensitive gut. He found solace in vaudeville, ragtime and Al Jolson. The self-styled “World’s Greatest Entertainer” was the epitome of sassy syncopated American pop culture and an antidote to snobby East Coast Establishment attachment to all things European.

Soon Oscar was playing “flash” piano with dance bands, elbowing with the one-fingered songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and suffering an attack of the vapors upon discovering George Gershwin songs and “Rhapsody in Blue.” A romantic fascination was about to begin. With cockiness and word-power, he won his way into the salons of the emperors of Broadway, making them laugh when he described Sigmund Romberg’s ballads as music “you whistle on the way into the theatre.” Columnists like Walter Winchell came begging for his one-liners; the press started a love affair with Oscar and he adored an audience.

Eventually he wangled his way into the Gershwin household. The first meeting established the perimeters of the relationship: Oscar played George his recording of “Rhapsody in Blue” and the composer said, “I like mine better.” Everybody knew Oscar was by far the better pianist. Even so, Oscar was hooked, and worship of Gershwin became, in his own words, “a neurotic love affair.” For weeks he would camp out at the Gershwin family home. George never returned the love, but he did find Oscar useful as a rehearsal pianist. Self-confident, sartorial and sporting a fake upper-class accent, George was the opposite of rumpled, crumpled Oscar. He had him around as an all-licensed Fool, allowing the boy to barb at him: “Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?”

George got his revenge when they shared a railroad sleeping car and the great composer assumed the comfortable lower berth. “Upper berth--lower berth,” said George. “That’s the difference between talent and genius.” Oscar’s own art music was praised for its “high seriousness,” and his movie songs were good but not great. He suffered from artistic inertia, and while his contemporaries forged ahead with their songs and scores, he was filled with rage followed by regret. He phoned his friend David Raksin about Raksin’s “Force of Evil” score: “That is what I should have been writing!”

With Gershwin’s death in 1937, Oscar came into his own--as the best interpreter of his idol’s concert works, as America’s highest-paid concert artist and as a top seller on Columbia Records. But with success came excess--too many sleeping pills, phobias and silly rituals. When he became a household name through his appearances as a music/sports expert on the popular egghead radio quiz show “Information, Please,” he also wore the same clothes, washed or not, and tipped the same legless beggar. Some demon was telling him that this fame was fleeting and worthless, even though Average American Joe got a kick out of Oscar’s easy street erudition.

Radio fame catapulted Oscar into movie roles, as the hero’s sidekick, and he turned out to be excellent at the art of being Oscar. But, as usual, when success beckoned he liked to self-destruct. The shadow of Gershwin and the “left undone” enveloped him in darkness. Seconal, Nembutal, Demerol--the witches were ready to take him to that paradise of unconsciousness.

If the 1940s were his peak, then the 1950s were a downhill slide. A temporary therapy for his drug addiction came in the shape of local L.A. television appearances--buttoned-up Eisenhower era viewers had witnessed nothing like it: when Marilyn Monroe was married to Arthur Miller by a rabbi, Oscar commented, “Now that Marilyn is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.” On “The Oscar Levant Show,” the blinking, shaking host was able to show his all-round intellectualism: Aldous Huxley talked up LSD, Christopher Isherwood reeled off Baudelaire and Jerry Lewis read “The Waste Land” in an effeminate voice.

But the almighty networks would have none of this elevating, though popular, brew--they stuck to chewing gum. When he was suspended for insulting a local sponsor, Frank Lloyd Wright, not noted for his TV viewing, telegrammed support for Oscar. It must be admitted that his washing of dirty family laundry in public presaged the confessional tabloid TV to come--his video accounts of battles with June were a voyeur’s dream: “It’s too late for sweets and too soon for flowers.”

However, lily time was nigh, though there were to be no flowers at the Westwood Memorial Cemetery when his abused body was laid to rest in August, 1972. Wrote journalist Burt Prelutsky: “Behind the facade of the world’s oldest enfant terrible lurked the sweetest, warmest, most vulnerable man.” Vanished was not just the waspish intelligence of the epigrammatic pianist but also a civilized era when mass entertainment could embrace a figure capable of connecting high and low culture, who could talk as easily with Al Jolson as with Dmitri Shostakovich.

“Happiness is not a thing you experience but something you remember,” said Oscar in a softer moment. As he slouches around somewhere in oblivion, I’d like the old curmudgeon to know he’s made a new friend happy--whether he likes it or not.

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