I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Gene and Patsy, Brooklyn, 1953.

In early 1961, I was primed for a new adventure. I wanted to do something different with my career, and a shift in location seemed the logical move in a fresh direction. I decided to switch coasts.

    The way I looked at my prospects, there had to be more work for a guy like me in Los Angeles than in New York. L. A. had movies and television. The studios turning out the films and the TV shows needed piano players who had a good range of talents. Another point in favour of L. A. was that great songwriters tended to make their homes out there. Many of the best movie composers were Jewish Europeans who settled on the west coast after they escaped from Hitler's Europe in the 1930s. Los Angeles blossomed as the headquarters for creative musicians of all kinds who wanted to earn their livings as songwriters and composers. That made it sound like my kind of town.

    Pat and I decided she would stay in Parkway Village with the kids while I checked out the L. A. scene. I'd put up in a hotel for the time being, and when I found the right place for us to rent, the rest of family would join me on the coast.

    Little did I realize, at the time when Pat and I were discussing the future, I'd already stumbled on the contact that opened up the Los Angeles scene to everything I dreamed of even before I left New York.

This lucky sequence of events began a few weeks earlier with a phone call from a guy named Lou Stein. Lou was a very good piano player around New York, and he told me he'd been talking with Pete Candoli, the Los Angeles trumpet player I knew from my Boyd Rayburn times (though Pete's younger brother and fellow trumpeter, Conte, was my closer Candoli friend). Pete's girlfriend was coming to New York for a one-night singing date at a club called the Living Room, and she needed a piano player. Lou was booked for another job that particular night, so he asked me if I'd like to accompany Pete's girlfriend. I'd never heard of the girl-her name was Rosemary Edelman-but the Living Room was a posh club on the West Side where very good people like Felicia Sanders and Blossom Dearie sang.  So I took the gig.

    Rosemary turned out to sing in what I would call a Hollywood make-believe style. I gathered from our conversations that she grew up on first-name terms with movie actors and scriptwriters and composers. The magic of those people rubbed off on Rosemary's way of singing. It was quite charming, and she was a very sweet person. She and I hit it off as friends.

    "Call me when you get to L A," Rosemary said at the end of her night at the Living Room. "My dad'll love to meet you."

    At that point, I had no idea who Rosemary's father was, though I felt pretty sure he had a few bucks.

Not many weeks later, I flew to Los Angeles and checked into a hotel on Wilcox Avenue called, appropriately, the Wilcox. It was reasonably priced without actually being seedy. It might have been a sign of something in the air that the Wilcox's desk clerk was in love with the great lyricist Lorenz Hart even though Hart had died almost twenty years earlier. The desk guy, when he talked about Hart, got teary-eyed every time. It was kind of a weird situation.

    The first thing I did at the hotel was get on the phone, calling my contacts to let them know I was in town and keen for work. A call near the top of the list went to Rosemary Edelman. Without wasting a minute, Rosemary invited me to a party at her father's home the following Sunday. She told me to come prepared to play some piano. The house, she said, was in Beverley Hills. The address was the first tip that Rosemary's father, Lou Edelman, might be somebody important in Hollywood circles.

    The second tip came when I sat down at the piano keyboard in the Edelman living room. Attached to the piano was a little plaque that read "From Mrs. Jerome Kern to the Edelmans." I looked around the living room. A good-sized party was going on, and among the guests, I spotted Johnny Mercer over on one side, Harry Warren talking to Rube Bloom on the other side, and Harry Ruby lifting a drink off a waiter's tray right in front of me.