Stan Freeman; Pianist Known for Levant Impression

Pianist, composer, raconteur, pungent wit. The name was Oscar Levant.

Or was it. The acerbic Levant, known for radio’s “Information, Please,” his wry books, concerts and motion pictures, died in 1972.

But he was resurrected memorably in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the equally multitalented--some critics thought more talented--Stan Freeman in his one-man show, “At Wit’s End.”

Freeman, the lauded Levant impersonator, concert pianist, composer of two Broadway shows, conductor for Marlene Dietrich and contributor to the television variety shows of Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, died Saturday in his Los Angeles home of complications from emphysema. He was 80.

When Freeman took the stage as Levant at Los Angeles’ Coronet Theater in 1989, then-Times drama critic Dan Sullivan wrote: “Stan Freeman, of the baggy eyes and the strong piano technique, is just the man to portray him. Freeman isn’t the grouch that Levant was, but he understands the disappointment that lies under so much of Levant’s wit.”

Even better, Sullivan said, Freeman sang with “a good saloon-singer’s voice,” rather than Levant’s “one-note” droning, and exhibited “a fine feeling for jazz.” Occasionally, the critic added, the production seemed more about Freeman than Levant--and happily so.

One-Man Show

Freeman’s act, which he personally called “The Oscar Show,” was a collaboration by Levant’s widow, June, writer Joel Kimmel and producer Ron Lachman. It played for several years in such venues as UCLA’s Royce Hall, New York’s Michael’s Pub, Boston’s Charles Playhouse and Chicago’s Halsted Theatre Centre.

Nervous about the acting requirements of “At Wit’s End,” Freeman told The Times in 1993 that the program nevertheless had become “the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever attempted.”

Freeman actually knew Levant slightly, meeting him while playing piano with Paul Whiteman’s Army band on a war bonds tour during World War II.

“Oscar was one of the celebrities with us. He played ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ every night,” Freeman said in 1992. “Except on those nights when he had seen blood, or heard the word death, or something like that, and he’d refuse to go on. He was very, very neurotic. I’d go on in his place. . . . We’d talk about music, the fingering of a certain passage, that kind of thing.”

More balanced in temperament and longer-lived than Levant, Freeman may have shared the better-known entertainer’s frustration over scattered talents.

“I coulda been a contendah,” he said, mimicking a famous Marlon Brando movie line, in the 1993 Times interview. Although he performed with symphony orchestras in New York and other cities, Freeman said he often regretted diverting his talents into so many kinds of entertainment instead of focusing solely on piano concerts.

Born in Waterbury, Conn., Freeman studied classical piano and composing at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Conn. After serving in the Army during the war, he joined Tex Beneke’s jazz band in 1946, and then made his classical piano debut at Carnegie Hall in 1947.

Through the late 1940s and the 1950s, Freeman did nightclub shows at New York’s Blue Angel, London’s Colony and Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau. He also played piano and joked on such radio shows as “The Piano Playhouse” and “Refreshment Time” and on early television variety shows.

And Freeman recorded, under his own name and as accompanist--playing harpsichord, for example, on Rosemary Clooney’s hit “Come on-a My House.”

For Broadway, Freeman composed the music for “I Had a Ball,” which ran for a respectable 199 performances in 1964-65, and “Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen,” which closed after 16 performances in 1970.

Recommended by Burt Bacharach, whom he replaced, Freeman joined Marlene Dietrich in the mid-1960s and conducted her orchestra for 12 years.

After their first concert, Freeman recalled, Dietrich telephoned Bacharach and said in front of the replacement: “Come back; he’s terrible.” She put Freeman on the phone, and Bacharach begged him to stay on a week, noting that the difficult star had already fired five conductors. Freeman lasted.

Freeman is survived by two brothers, Marvin and Fred, both of Florida.

Jim Brochu of El Portal said a memorial service will be planned in Los Angeles.