City of Nets Read online

  Disney had wanted from the beginning to include some sort of legend of the creation, volcanoes and tidal waves and lumbering dinosaurs. He assigned his research assistants to discover some appropriate music, but all they could offer him was Hadyn’s Creation, which somehow didn’t seem sufficiently epic. Disney presented the problem to Stokowski, and Stokowski offered a bold solution.

  “Why don’t we do the Sacre?” he said.

  “Socker?” Disney asked. “What’s that?”

  “Sacre de Printemps—Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky,” said Stokowski. He told Disney about the famous ballet, which Stravinsky had originally conceived as “a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death,” and which the riotous audience at the Paris premiere of 1913 had turned into one of the delicious uproars of its time. And if Stravinsky’s work wasn’t actually about dinosaurs, well, caveat emptor.

  Igor Stravinsky was the only composer being featured in “The Concert Feature” who was actually alive and might have some opinions on the subject, so the Disney studio sent a message to France, offering to pay the composer $5,000 for the legal right to use Le Sacre in the planned film. The offer, Stravinsky later recalled with some bitterness, was “accompanied by a gentle warning that if permission were withheld the music would be used anyway,” since the prerevolutionary Russian copyrights no longer protected it. The offer of $5,000 was certainly modest, since the production cost of Fantasia was $2,280,000, but Stravinsky had other things on his mind—his struggle with tuberculosis, the death of his wife and daughter, the threat of imminent war—so he took the money and signed the contract.

  By this time, Disney was so involved in Fantasia that if his adjutants had not been able to produce the creation music that he wanted, he probably would have tried to write it himself. He summoned paleontologists like Chester Stock of Cal Tech for expert advice on protozoic life and sent his technicians to the Mount Wilson Observatory to study the shapes of nebulae. “A herd of pet iguanas and a baby alligator wriggled over the Burbank lot, while animators studied their lizardy movements . . .” according to a rather feverish cover story on Fantasia in Time. “The Disney zoo contained eusthenopterons, brachiosaurs, brontosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs, diplodocuses, triceratopses, pterodactyls, trachodons, struthiomimuses, stegosaurs . . . and enough plain run-of-the-Jurassic dinosaurs to people a planet. Studio cameras groaned under the burden of the whole story of evolution.”

  Stravinsky had made occasional forays to distant America during the 1930’s, reaching as far as Los Angeles in 1935, meeting Charlie Chaplin, and even then he “thought of living somewhere in the hideous but lively Los Angeles conurbation . . . for reasons of health primarily, but also because Los Angeles seemed the best place in America for me to begin my new life.” That December of 1939, during the Christmas break at Harvard, Stravinsky returned to Hollywood to see what Disney had done with Le Sacre. The studio provided him and his friend George Balanchine with a private showing of Fantasia. “I remember someone offering me a score,” Stravinsky recalled later, “and when I said I had my own, the someone saying, ‘But it is all changed.’ It was indeed. The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns play their glissandi an octave higher in the Danse de la Terre. The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of them eliminated.”

  Stravinsky seemed to realize his helplessness and stifled his grievances. When he published his account of the scene nearly twenty years later, Disney expressed benign surprise. Disney’s recollection, according to an associate, was that Stravinsky had come to the studio and seen the original sketches for the Fantasia version of Le Sacre, had been “excited” over the film’s possibilities, had even observed that “the concept of the world’s creation and prehistoric life were what he ‘really’ had in mind when he wrote Le Sacre,” and that he had agreed to “certain cuts and arrangements” of his music. When Stravinsky saw the final film, according to the Disney version, he “emerged from the projection room visibly moved.” Furthermore, said Disney, “we paid him $10,000, not $5,000.” Stravinsky denied all this, except the statement that he had been “moved” by the showing. He declared that Stokowski’s performance of his music had been “execrable,” and that Disney’s illustrations were “an unresisting imbecility.” That he should ever have said anything different was “highly improbable—though, of course, I should hope I was polite.”

  The week after this revelation, Stravinsky cabled money from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to Vera Sudeikina, whom he had described to the U.S. ambassador to France as “my best friend,” so that she could come to America. They were married in March of 1940, and after establishing themselves in Los Angeles, they went to Mexico in July so that they could reenter the U.S. on the Russian quota and apply for citizenship. “I remember that one of the immigration officials asked me whether I wished to change my name,” Stravinsky wrote later. “It was the most unexpected question I had ever heard, and I laughed, whereupon the official said, ‘Well, most of them do.’ ” The Stravinskys lived first on South Swall Drive in Beverly Hills, and then, after a two-month stay at the Chateau Marmont, moved into a pleasantly terraced one-story house behind a white picket fence at 1260 North Wetherly Drive. It was “an American transposition” of his European habitat, according to the Polish composer Alexandre Tansman. “Two pianos, one a grand, the other a half-muted upright, occupy a good half of [the workroom],” Tansman wrote. “The work desk is encumbered by a quantity of odd objects: multicolored pencils, inks, erasers, clef makers, chronometers. . . . The drawers contain manuscripts, business papers, documents, his correspondence, everything arranged in irreproachable order. . . . On the walls pictures and drawings by his son Theodore, by Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Eugène Berman . . . together with a framed extract of a contemporary newspaper containing a very bad criticism of a new work by ‘Herr Ludwig van Beethoven.’ ”

  Unlike Schoenberg, Stravinsky was almost accustomed to exile—no one ever gets completely accustomed to it—and these Hollywood years, the sixties of his own life, proved extremely fruitful. He finished here the marvelous Symphony in C, begun in Paris while his first wife was dying. One passage in the last movement, he later observed, “might not have occurred to me before I had known the neon glitter of Los Angeles’ boulevards from a speeding automobile.” Here he wrote the Sonata for Two Pianos and the Symphony in Three Movements and the mysteriously powerful Mass. Yet Stravinsky was always tempted—also unlike Schoenberg—to gather in some of the money that seemed to lie scattered all around him.

  “I wonder if you’d like to do a little ballet with me,” said George Balanchine on the telephone, long distance, “a polka, perhaps.”

  “For whom?” said Stravinsky.

  “For some elephants,” said Balanchine.

  A pause.

  “How old?” said Stravinsky.

  “Very young,” said Balanchine.

  Another pause.

  “All right,” said Stravinsky. “If they are very young elephants, I will do it.”

  Thus was born “Circus Polka,” which was actually performed in 1942 by a troupe of fifty elephants of the Ringling Brothers Circus. Then there was the “Ebony Concerto,” commissioned by the jazz clarinetist Woody Herman. And “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which Stravinsky arranged for chorus and orchestra in 1941 and later conducted in Boston, where, as he recalled, “I stood with my back to the orchestra and conducted the audience, who were supposed to sing but didn’t. . . . Just before the second concert, a police commissioner appeared in my dressing room and informed me of a Massachusetts law forbidding any ‘tampering’ with national property. He said that policemen had already been instructed to remove my arrangement from the music stands. . . . I do not know if my version has been performed since.”

  But it was the movies that provided the great temptation, the movies that constantly promised riches if only the terms could be negotiated. Stravinsky was not an amateur in these matte
rs. According to one account of a meeting with Sam Goldwyn, the producer acknowledged that the composer’s fee was $25,000, and then the conversation “went something like this”:

  GOLDWYN: “Well, you have to have an arranger.”

  STRAVINSKY: “What’s an arranger?”

  GOLDWYN: “An arranger! Why that’s a man who has to arrange your music, who has to fit it to the instruments.”

  STRAVINSKY: “Oh.”

  GOLDWYN: “Sure, that’ll cost you $6,000. And it’ll have to come off your $20,000.”

  STRAVINSKY: “I thought it was $25,000.”

  GOLDWYN: “Well, whatever it was.”

  Stravinsky thereupon stood up, according to this account, stuffed his black cigarette holder into his pocket, jammed his hat onto his head, and walked out. So there was no deal. In fact, Stravinsky never actually wrote the music for a single Hollywood film. But some of his gyrations and maneuvers were worthy of his new surroundings. He composed, for example, some hunting music for Orson Welles’s version of Jane Eyre, and when the contractual negotiations came to nothing, he frugally used the same music to fulfill a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for an Ode to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky’s wife. The recycled piece suggested, Stravinsky explained, Mrs. Koussevitzky’s love of outdoor concerts. Then there were negotiations for Stravinsky to write incidental music for a film on the Nazi occupation of Norway, The Commandoes Strike at Dawn. Stravinsky hastily began arranging a collection of Norwegian folk tunes that his wife had picked up in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles. When, once again, the negotiations faded, the Boston Symphony performed what Stravinsky had stoically turned into a piece he called “Four Norwegian Moods.”

  Perhaps the most astonishing example of Stravinsky’s accommodation to the ways of Hollywood was his accommodation to that same Walt Disney whose transformation of Le Sacre he considered “an unresisting imbecility.” On October 23, 1940, two of Disney’s aides—not even Disney himself—came to call on Stravinsky to discuss an animated version of his musical folk tale Renard, and a week later he sold them an option on not only Renard but The Firebird as well.

  No matter how venal Stravinsky became, though, Hollywood always managed to surprise him. “They want my name, not my music,” he said. “I was even offered $100,000 to pad a film with music, and when I refused, was told that I could receive the same money if I were willing to allow someone else to compose the music in my name.” Recalling that offer reminded Stravinsky of Schoenberg’s encounter with Thalberg. Twenty years had passed by now, and both antagonists were dead, and their meeting had acquired encrustations of legend. “The great composer, who earned almost nothing from his compositions, was invited to supply music for The Good Earth, at a fee that must have seemed like Croesus’ fortune to him, but with impossible artistic conditions attached,” Stravinsky said. “He refused, saying, ‘You kill me to keep me from starving to death.’ ”

  It was natural enough for the movie producers to treat major composers like hired servants, since they treated everyone that way. Most of the composers they dealt with were already on the payroll, and everyone acted accordingly. Dimitri Tiomkin, for example, was a native of St. Petersburg, just like Stravinsky; he played the piano and composed ballet music, just like Stravinsky. But he came to Hollywood in 1929 and began producing what ultimately became a total of more than 160 film scores. (It was Tiomkin who, on winning an Academy Award in 1954 for The High and the Mighty, gave thanks for help not to the usual array of agents and producers but to Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, the composers he had so often found so helpful.) David Selznick summoned Tiomkin to his studio one day and asked him to become the seventh composer to try writing the music for Duel in the Sun (1947). He wanted, he said, eleven main themes: a Spanish theme, a ranch theme, a love theme, an orgasm theme—

  “Orgasm?” Tiomkin said. “How do you score an orgasm?”

  “Try,” said Selznick. “I want a really good shtump.”

  Tiomkin labored for weeks on his eleven themes, then assembled an orchestra and played them for Selznick. Selznick was pleased. Tiomkin labored for weeks more to produce a complete score. It included forty-one drummers and a chorus of one hundred. Selznick kept worrying. He asked Tiomkin to whistle the love theme for him. Tiomkin whistled.

  “Fine, fine,” said Selznick. “Now the orgasm theme.”

  Tiomkin whistled. Selznick shook his head somberly.

  “That isn’t it,” Selznick said. “That’s just not an orgasm.”

  Tiomkin went away and worked some more. He combined the sighing of cellos and a brassy stirring of trombones, all in the rhythm of what he later described as a handsaw cutting through wood. Once again, he was summoned to Selznick’s studio, once again the orchestra assembled, and this time Selznick ordered Tiomkin’s music played during a screening of a stormy love scene between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones (whom Selznick was to marry three years later). Everything seemed to go splendidly until the orgasm theme, which Selznick wanted to have repeated, and then repeated again.

  “You’re going to hate me for this, but it won’t do,” he finally said to Tiomkin. “It’s too beautiful.”

  “Mr. Selznick, what is troubling you?” Tiomkin protested. “What don’t you like about it?”

  “I like it, but it isn’t orgasm music,” Selznick said. “It’s not shtump. It’s not the way I fuck.”

  “Mr. Selznick, you fuck your way, I fuck my way,” cried Tiomkin. “To me, that is fucking music.”

  On this one occasion, Selznick relented, and Tiomkin had it his way. More often, the producers simply decreed that the traditions of the factory were the law, that whatever they decreed must be obeyed. Hanns Eisler, a Berlin radical who had written the music for a number of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, was astonished, on his first visit to Hollywood in 1935, to see the system at work. “Every factory has five or six music specialists who . . . have to keep punctually to their office hours,” he later wrote. “Number one is a specialist in military music, number two in sentimental love songs, number three is a better trained composer for symphonic music . . . number four is a specialist in Viennese operetta, number five is for jazz. So if music is required for a film, then every composer has to work on a certain section, according to his specialty. The composers have no idea of what is happening in the rest of the film.”

  André Previn, who was working for $250 a week at M-G-M in those days, was a bit less indignant about the system, but his recollections were no less tart. He recalled that one of M-G-M’s top officials had complained about some musical passage in a biblical epic, and he had not been mollified when the composer explained that it was “nothing but a minor chord.” From the producer’s office came an announcement that remained for years on the bulletin board of the M-G-M music department: “From this date forward, no M-G-M score will contain a minor chord.”

  Music, major and minor, had been an essential element in movies from the beginning, for even the earliest silent films were shipped out with suggested programs for the hired pianist to thump at in the darkness of the neighborhood theater. When sound came, and Hollywood began buying all the writers it felt it needed, it bought all the composers too. George Gershwin was hired to write the score for The Goldwyn Follies, and Aaron Copland for Of Mice and Men, Darius Milhaud for The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, Virgil Thomson for Louisiana Story. In Europe, too, the new art of film exerted a magnetic attraction on all kinds of composers: Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Honegger and Vaughan Williams and Poulenc.

  The Hollywood authorities bought anyone they wanted, but, like David Selznick, they all had definite ideas of what they wanted done. Their idea of a truly distinguished musician was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had been earnestly composing since the age of six. While still an adolescent, he saw his operas performed at the Vienna State Opera and praised by Mahler, Strauss, and Puccini. In Hollywood, where he arrived in 1934, his first assignment from Warner Bros. was to doctor Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt�
�s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From there, it was only a short move to Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

  Korngold’s scores were lush and melodious imitations of Brahms, not to say Rachmaninoff. So were those of his most successful colleagues, like Max Steiner, another Viennese, whose works extended from King Kong to Gone With the Wind to Casablanca, or Franz Waxman, a Pole, who orchestrated Friedrich Holländer’s songs for The Blue Angel, achieved his first Hollywood success with The Bride of Frankenstein, and eventually composed the theme performed on each of the five hundred-odd television installments of Peyton Place.

  These were the stars, who succeeded from time to time in having their background music performed and recorded as symphonic suites, but when the M-G-M factory reached its height in the mid-1940’s, it had about fifteen films in production on any given day. Its music department, Hollywood’s largest, boasted twenty full-time composers on the payroll, as well as twenty-five arranger-orchestrators and forty copyists. “The music department,” said André Previn, “was no more nor less important than the Department of Fake Lawns.” Previn’s first success for M-G-M had been to write some jazzy variations on “Three Blind Mice” for José Iturbi to “improvise” in a film called Holiday in Mexico, to demonstrate, as was generally required in such films, that classical musicians were not snobs. M-G-M’s hired composers couldn’t afford to be snobs either. “We shaped up at the Music Department each day like truckers waiting to see who had tomatoes to be driven to Chicago or furniture for Delaware,” Previn recalled. “We never knew who might need what. If some composer was in trouble with a prize-fight film that had to be finished immediately, we might all be rushed over to that set to pitch in for a few days.”