Gene Di Novi played piano for the greats of the 20th Century: Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
This is his biography spoken to the fine writer Jack Batten.
"I played piano with Bird and Diz...
Everything came naturally to Lennie. He could handle every role in music-play piano, compose tunes, write orchestrations, conduct a band of any size, provide the accompaniments for singers-and he had no trouble doing each one without seeming to put much effort into it. This was a sort of constant ease that, with Lennie, sometimes crossed the line into laziness. All the jobs in music, no matter how tough they may have been for other musicians, were so basic to him that he had a tendency now and then to slough them off.
Lennie started his musical life as a kid playing piano with some of the early jazz greats, people like Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer and Joe Venuti. These were hard-drinking guys, and it was probably with them that Lennie developed his love for hoisting a glass. He wasn't an offensive, full-blown drunk, but all of his life, he knocked back bottles of beer, martinis and glasses of brandy through most of the day and night. He could drink most people under the table. Also like Beiderbecke and a lot of his other young drinking pals, Lennie joined the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, which was the most celebrated band of the 1920s and early '30s. In addition, Lennie wrote orchestrations on assignment for other bands, and he was the arranger who helped Artie Shaw score his famous recording of Stardust.
By 1940, still in his early thirties, Lennie was named music director for Metro Goldwyn Mayer in Hollywood. Under him and a cast of great musicians, MGM became the number one studio in producing movie musicals. Lennie personally won four Academy Award nominations in the 1940s for his work on the movies, most of them starring Judy Garland. In 1950, he took the Oscar for his orchestrations for On the Town.
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Lennie and Lena in Vancouver, 1960s.
During the time he was at MGM, he fell in love with Lena who had also been signed by the studio. Much of Hollywood regarded the match as a scandal, a gorgeous black woman stepping out with this handsome white Jewish guy. But both Lena and Lennie were single at the time, and they didn't see anything remotely wrong with their romance. When it came to marriage, though, they held the wedding ceremony in Paris where they found people to be much more racially enlightened than in the U.S..
