I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-One

The entire DiNovi family-Pat. Denise, Michelle and me-settled in Los Angeles long before I began my lessons with Tedesco. Altogether, in our dozen years on the coast, we lived in four houses. The first was in Laurel Canyon, on Walnut Drive deep in the Hollywood Hills. It was a magical kind of neighbourhood with a bohemian feel to it. The bohemian reputation went all the way back to the 1940s when Robert Mitchum was busted at a house in Laurel Canyon for smoking marijuana. The whole thing was a big scandal at the time, and Mitchum actually served a jail sentence. By the time we moved in, Laurel Canyon wasn't quite so naughty, and few movie stars hung out up there, though James Coburn regularly visited the house across the street from ours, always arriving in a spiffy Morgan automobile, which fascinated me.

I installed my Weber piano in the Laurel Canyon house's living room, and that was where I practiced and wrote my orchestrations. The Weber remained in great shape, and I had the most prized of piano tuners tending to it regularly. His name was Mr. Munch, and he tuned the pianos for all the major Los Angeles composers and songwriters. He looked after Jerome Kern's piano and everybody else's from Kern down the line. People would kill for Mr. Munch's service, and I was lucky enough with the contacts I'd made to get on his list of customers.

    Mr. Munch had one other talent-he made the best writing boards in the world. A writing board was what a composer attached to the piano just above the keyboard. The board made it easier to write while the composer was sitting at the piano. Mr. Munch's products were especially in demand because they were very firm-no danger of them slipping out of position-and because they were easy to move way up or way down, whatever position the person at the keyboard wanted.

    I got my Munch writing board by way of a failed romance. When Pete Candoli was Rosemary Edelman's boyfriend, he went through a phase where he thought he would become a composer and orchestrator rather than just a trumpet player. To help him out, Rosemary commissioned one of Mr. Munch's writing boards. That was no problem for Rosemary since she was best friends with practically everybody on the Hollywood music scene.

    Pete never really got around to using the board, and when he and Rosemary broke up, he left it at Rosemary's house. She moved the board into her garage where the thing sat, neglected and unused. Then it occurred to Rosemary that maybe I'd like it. Like it?! I was crazy about the board, and I put it to immediate work.

    Several times, Pete asked me about the board, moaning that the lack of it was keeping him from his career as a composer and orchestrator. I told him he could have it back any time. All he had to do was come by my house, and lug the board out to his car. Pete never took up the offer. I didn't expect that he would. He was destined to remain a trumpet player-and not a bad one.

The person who put me on to Mr. Munch in the first place as the man to tune my Weber was the dean of all Hollywood film composers, the remarkable Hugo Friedhofer.

    As his name indicated, Hugo had a German background, but he was born in San Francisco, and when he began his career as an orchestrator and composer, he proceeded to spend practically his entire lifetime in the Hollywood movie business. He started at the end of the silent movie era and continued through to the early 1980s. At first, he was strictly an orchestrator, working regularly for such greats as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner and the other early European movie composers, many of whom spoke only German (Hugo was bilingual). Then Hugo wrote his own scores for dozens and dozens of films. He won nine Academy Award nominations, getting the Oscar once, for his music in The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 (by a nice coincidence, the Oscar for that years's Best Song went to a tune from The Harvey Girls; it was On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer).