I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty

It was Hal Schaefer who gave me a valuable piece of Los Angeles advice. Hal and I had a lot in common. He grew up in Queens playing the piano at the same time I was a kid doing similar things in Brooklyn. Hal played bebop, then worked as an accompanist to singers like Billy Eckstine, Vic Damone and Peggy Lee. It was of course Hal who couldn't make Peggy's gig at the Baltimore Theatre in 1951 thereby leading to my chance with Peggy. Several years before I got to Los Angeles, Hal had already settled there. He played in the studio orchestras, wrote TV and movie scores (The Money Kill from 1977, starring Robert Mitchum, had a score by Hal), and he coached many actresses to become decent singers. His vocal students included Betty Grable, Jane Russell and, most fatefully, Marilyn Monroe.

Hal was hired in 1952 to guide Marilyn through her vocal on Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend for the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This happened just after Marilyn had broken up her marriage to Joe DiMaggio. Then trouble came down on Hal's head when he and Marilyn fell into a romance in the course of their work together.

DiMaggio hired a private eye to keep an eye on his estranged wife. It was the PI who got wind of what was going on between Marilyn and Hal. One night, DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, the PI and a bunch of heavies set out to beat Hal to a pulp. Fortunately for Hal and Marilyn, the DiMaggio-Sinatra crowd got the addresses mixed up and stormed into an apartment where an older woman lived next door to Hal's place. The arrival of the DiMaggio heavies terrorized this innocent older woman (she later collected damages of seventy-five hundred dollars from DiMaggio and Sinatra), and during all the fuss in the wrong apartment, Hal and Marilyn managed to beat it without getting caught. But Hal paid a penalty for months afterwards in worry and nervous exhaustion over the fear that the DiMaggio people still intended to do something terrible to him.

By the time I arrived in Los Angeles several years later, he had long since recovered from the Monroe incident, and he was generous enough to steer me on to a very important step in my musical education. From Hal's own experience composing for TV shows and movies, he advised me to study orchestration and counterpoint with a top teacher in the city. His point was that a lot of competition existed among composers in big studio recording sessions. A guy had to be able to handle whatever the studios wanted or he'd never be invited back for future work. All composers needed the musical knowledge to survive.

"Find the best teacher who's available," Hal told me. "Take lessons in orchestration and composition."

"What teacher?" I asked. "You got somebody you recommend?"

"No question in my mind about the very best guy," Hal said. "Tedesco."

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, born in Florence, Italy, was Jewish, a biographical fact that eventually changed the path of his life. As a young guy, he won a big reputation in Europe for his compositions. He wrote everything--operas, concertos, the whole spectrum--and he developed a special talent in writing for the guitar. Such guitarists as Andres Segovia said that, as far as their instrument was concerned, Tedesco was the greatest composer of the twentieth century.

In 1938, Mussolino and the fascists banned all Jews from performing in Italy. Tedesco, then in his mid-forties, beat it out of his native country the following year, finally settling in Los Angeles where he got into writing movie scores. Altogether he worked on a couple of hundred movies over the years. He scored And Then There Were None, from the Agatha Christie mystery, Ten Little Indians, in 1945. And Rita Heyworth insisted that only Tedesco could write the music for her 1948 movie, The Loves of Carmen. Despite the big boost from Rita, Tedesco probably enjoyed the work on the Christie movie more than on the Heyworth film. That was because he couldn't stand American movie directors, but the Christie movie had the merit, in his view, of being directed by a Frenchman, Rene Clair.

As I was to learn when I started taking lessons with Tedesco, he and the other European guys who worked in Hollywood often had biases of different kinds against America and American products. One time, the great Brazilian guitarist and composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was visiting at Tedesco's Los Angeles home. Tedesco's wife asked the visitor if he'd like a cup of coffee.

"Never!" Villa-Lobos said. "American coffee tastes like pepe du chat!"

To supplement his income, Tedesco gave lessons in orchestration and counterpoint. He trained a whole generation of promising young American movie composers, people like Andre Previn, John Williams, Henry Mancini and Marty Paich. Some of the pupils came out of jazz backgrounds, but all were keen to improve themselves in movie work. Tedesco was the guy they sought out for help. I became one of the seekers, and studied with Tedesco for a year and a half.

He lived on South Clark Drive in a modest house in a modest part of Beverley Hills. The house's most obvious architectural feature was a big Gothic window at the front. If passersby happened to peek through the window, they might see someone famous in the music world taking lessons in music-making. When I arrived for my first private session, I discovered, as all his other pupils had discovered before me, that Tedesco didn't allow any note taking or tape recording during the lessons. He insisted that we remember everything. This was an impossible circumstance, and it called for a simple but nerve-wracking strategy. What each of us students learned to do at the end of our one-on-one lessons was to rush out to the car and write down all the parts of Tedesco's coaching we could remember. We made sure our cars were parked around the corner, not in viewing range if Tedesco happened to look out at the street from his big Gothic window. To one another, we pupils referred to the spot where we parked the cars as "Tedesco corner."

At this stage in his life, Tedesco was by no means coasting to the end of a composing career and getting by on his teaching. He kept active, still writing at a really impressive rate. Marty Paich used to drive along South Clark Drive late at night on his way home from gigs, and he always made a point of checking the Gothic window as he passed Tedesco's house. Just about invariably, he'd see the old man-Tedesco was well into his sixties by then-with his head bent over whatever he was writing. One summer, he wrote fifty guitar pieces for Villa-Lobos.

In my eighteen months with him, Tedesco asked me to orchestrate thirty or forty pieces. He would pick a simple Ravel composition and instruct me to write a full orchestration for it. Then, when I had done my assignment, he would come up with suggestions about how I could improve it. At the end of all the suggesting, I bolted out of the house, rushed around to Tedesco Corner and wrote out all of the great teacher's notions I could scrape out of my memory. It was a very demanding process.

Demanding, but unbelievably valuable and rewarding. The lessons I took away from the Tedesco sessions have lasted with me for the rest of my musical life. The very first thing I orchestrated for him was a Schumann theme from childhood called The Poet Speaks. I loved the piece, and over the years, I wrote an arrangement that began with the Schumann, then segued into Hoagy Carmichael's I Get Along Without You Very Well, then returned to the Schumann. It worked beautifully, and I arranged a version that I played with my clarinetist pal Jim Campbell. In the summer of 2013, we performed the piece at the Festival of the Sound at Parry Sound, Ontario. It's amazing, but altogether understandable, that something that began for me in lessons from the wonderful Tedesco still had the power to move me and everybody else a half century later.