Oscar Levant defined a politician as a man who will “double-cross that bridge when he gets to it.” Has anyone read hs book Memoirs of an Amnesiac? It’s the sort of book I must have read, but I can’t remember doing so. I have a feeling that I would have liked it. I am sure of it in fact. Putnam published it in 1965. Three years later came The Unimportance of Being Oscar, another bravura performance — not too wild, not too earnest, but full of self-deprecatory wit and wisdom. “I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients,” he confided. He was very fast, very smart and knowing, a good guest on a talk show, a mordant foil to Gene Kelly’s native optimism in An American in Paris. He wrote these lines that he says in the movie: “It’s not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.” He also wrote “Blame it on My Youth” and other songs and was a buddy of George Gershwin. The jokes were spontaneous and delivered deadpan. When he said that he knew Doris Day “before she was a virgin,” it was a valuable reminder of the band singer’s brilliance — with the Les Brown Orchestra in the 1940s, as Ruth Etting in “Love Me or Leave Me,” in duets with Sinatra in “Young at Heart” — which preceded the virginal image projected in the sugary pillow-talk movies of the 1960s. After Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism, Oscar said, “now that Marilyn Monroe’s kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her.” — DL
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Author: The Best American Poetry
