I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-Two

No matter where the DiNovi family lived in Los Angeles, the phone was always ringing with somebody offering me a job. The calls began on only my second day on the coast, when I was staying on my own at the Wilcox Hotel. I got a call from a music contractor asking me to record a commercial the next day with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle who had also written the music.

This turned out to be a slightly weird assignment. I was supposed to get an old-time honky tonk sound on the piano, and for that purpose, somebody drove nails into the studio piano's felt hammers. That did the job as far as the honky tonk effect was concerned, but to add to the strangeness of the occasion, the piano was positioned in the studio in a way that my back was to Nelson Riddle when he conducted. I had to keep peeking over my shoulder to make sure I was playng what he wanted.

It was an odd welcome to the L. A. music scene.

In a more orthodox introduction, I discovered almost immediately that the best jazz club in the city-one of the very few LA jazz clubs still in business at the time-was on Cahuenga Boulevard right around the corner from the Wilcox. This was Shelly's Manne-Hole, named after my old drummer pal. I got in the habit early on of spending afternoons at the club, just playing some jazz with another old friend Red Mitchell on bass and a guy named Frank Butler on drums. We worked a few jazz gigs, enough for me to recognize that Frank was a magical drummer with a great feel. He was a lovely guy, but like too many jazz musicians of the period, he had a heroin addiction that gave him terrible trouble. As great as Frank was on drums, he was pretty much out of luck as far as studio work was concerned. Guys with drug problems didn't have the concentration and stamina to handle the demands of recording movie scores that could sometimes be long or complex or both. The drug guys didn't get the call for the well paying commercial gigs in L.A.

As for straight jazz jobs in general, there weren't nearly as many of them in Los Angeles (or anywhere else across the United States) as there had once been. Jazz's popularity was in decline, and that lack of work hit jazz musicians hard. In the following years, for as long as I lived in LA, I played very few pure jazz gigs. My career, as I had recognized a few years earlier, was headed in different directions. One direction led me into the studios.

A major chunk of the studio work came to me by way of Desilu Productions. My connection with the company lasted for most of my time in Los Angeles, providing a terrific variety of jobs, and it was, once again, Lou Edelman who got me through the Desilu door. It had been people like Danny Thomas, Sheldon Leonard and my new patron Lou who had played huge roles in making Desilu the power in TV production that it became. Lou's specialty, as I eventually understood it, was in dealing with the big banks and other money institutions in New York who supplied much of Desilu's financing.

The Desilu people didn't have studios of their own. They rented space to shoot their shows in a huge place on Vine Street near the local muscians' union offices. The Vine Street location was once home to RKO Studios, an ancestry that was verified by a large spot on a wall where you could make out the giant-sized but fading initials, "RKO." At any rate, Lou took me around to these studios, and in no time at all, I found myself hooked up with the groups that supplied whatever music was needed on a whole list of shows. These were the programs that most of America watched: the Dick Van Dyke Show, Danny Thomas's Make Room For Daddy, Andy Griffiths's show and a bunch of others.

The Van Dyke program was probably my favourite as far as general work conditions were concerned. Dick was a great guy, always good natured, interested in what the musicians played, a totally agreeable person to work with. For the show, I was part of a quartet that had a variety of small jobs. The group was made up of Abe Most on reeds, me on piano, Monty Budwig on bass and Norm Jeffries on drums. Before the taping of every show, we would entertain the people in the live audience who gathered to watch the shooting of the show. Mostly it was a matter of us playing a few jazz tunes. We did the same thing during breaks in the show, giving the audience a little diversion while the actors, the director and everybody else prepared the set, camera angles and the cast for the next scene.

On some rare occasions, we would actually be on camera during a scene. This would happen when somebody on the show-Dick or Mary Tyler Moore or Rose Marie who played one of the writers on the show within the Van Dyke show-sang a song or danced a number as part of the story line. That was always fun.

One other chore of a more humble kind that we musicians handled was to play what were called "cues." These were musical interludes, no more than five or six seconds, that came up during the course of the show.

"It's not great art," Herb Spencer, the composer and orchestrator I'd first met at the Brown Derby lunch with Hugo Friedhofer and Rosemary Edelman, once said of my Dick Van Dyke job, "but it's a pretty good living."

I couldn't have put it better.

Herb Spencer became a valued friend and mentor through my entire Los Angeles period. He himself had a career that was amazing for the length of time it lasted and the variety of music it covered. He started out arranging the music for the early Shirley Temple movies in the 1930s, and he was still going strong when he orchestrated John Williams's music for the Star Wars movies in the 1970s. In between, he did the orchestrations for a whole bunch of movie musicals. Among them were major successes like Holiday Inn, Carousel and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

When I met Herb, he'd been in partnership with another orchestrator and composer named Earle Hagen for several years. They made a lot of albums with an orchestra called simply the Spencer-Hagen Orchestra. It played mainly a romantic type of music, and it backed a number of singers on recordings. The orchestra was a success for them, but a bigger money-maker was their company, Music Scoring Inc., which scored the music for many of the early sitcoms and other TV shows. They were pioneers at this, working on The Ray Bolger Show, It's Always Jan starring Janice Paige, and My Sister Eileen.

By the 1960s, Music Scoring Inc. was doing a lot of work for Desilu, notably for The Danny Thomas Show. At the time, it was pretty obvious to everybody that Hagen was in the process of easing Herb out of the Music Scoring picture. Herb was several years older than Hagen and a more old-fashioned type of guy. He was English but had been born in Chile, a combination of cultures that gave him great style and wonderful manners. He gave off such an elegant air that Lionel Newman, another important composer for the movies, nicknamed him "the Sash" because Herb reminded Newman of a diplomat, the kind of guy who dressed in formal clothes with a sash across his chest. Herb was generous and kind to everybody. He used to take other guys at Desilu, including me, out to lunch. He was an excellent host and a beautiful mentor.

The one area where Herb and I differed was in politics. I was of course a Democrat, Herb a staunch Republican. Neither of us allowed this difference to have any impact on our affection for one another, but it did lead to some very funny situations. The best was probably the time in 1964 when George Shearing and I and a few other people were over at Herb's place. George was, like me, a liberal Democrat, and since the country happened to be coming up to a presidential election with the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater running for the Republicans against the incumbent Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, George got into a rant about the horrors of Goldwater. While he was in mid-rant, all of us fell silent when Herb's two young daughters came into the room. George wondered why it was suddenly so quiet in the room, apart from stifled laughs from a couple of us. It was because the girls, on their way to a political rally, were wearing Goldwater hats.

In style, Earle Hagen was entirely different from Herb. Hagen was hard-nosed and all business, the last guy who'd invite any of us out to a convivial lunch the way Herb did. So Hagen and Herb, these two increasingly different types, eventually split up, but both of them continued to work in television, and Herb got back to movies, too, orchestrating Funny Girl and Hello, Dolly! and some other hit musical films.

Earle Hagen, though not my favourite guy on a personal level, gave me plenty of work as the pianist in the bands that played the scores for the Desilu shows. One program, I Spy, provided me with a ton of work. It was an action show with comic elements. It ran weekly for three seasons, 1965 to 1968, and starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby. From a musical standpoint, what was outstanding about I Spy was that each show had a new and different music score, adding up to a total of about ninety separate scores over the three seasons. That's a lot of music. Earle Hagen, who was a demon for work, wrote the scores for an amazing sixty-three episodes, and it was none other than my great pal, the inimitable Hugo Friedhofer, who handled another twenty-six of the episodes. With both men, the music was both fun to play and, as Herb Spencer had put it, "a great living."