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...
The time I spent in Los Angeles coincided with a period of huge prosperity in show business and in just about all other kinds of California business. Money seemed to be available for everything that counted in L. A., for movies, for TV shows and for music. Everybody got paid-and paid very well. I never saw such a rich period in my entire life.
I could measure the wealth of the times by the size of the houses my family lived in. We went from the house in Laurel Canyon to a bigger house in Canoga Park, which was a family community in the San Fernando Valley. Then we upgraded to the Woodland Hills community, which was still in the Valley but more upscale. And finally we landed south of Los Angeles in Laguna Beach where we had a gorgeous two-story house overlooking the Pacific. The bottom floor was one big bedroom where we put the piano, and I worked in there with this marvelous view down to the ocean. We paid four hundred bucks in monthly rent, which was a lot, but the value for dollar was phenomenal. It must have been the most affluent time in the history of the world. Driving into Los Angeles was a long commute for me, but I didn't mind because I was driving my wonderful Porsche 356B convertible. I bought it from Jack Elliott. He was an orchestrator, conductor and all-round busy guy with Andy Wlliams and other people in Los Angeles music circles, and he got the car in the first place from the gorgeous actress Elke Sommer. The Porsche was for me to scoot around in. For more family purposes, we had another great car, a 1959 Chrysler 300E. These cars were just one sign of the high old times we were living through in California in the 1960s.
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Gene DiNovi and Dinah Shore on the Joey Bishop show, 1968)
If I had listened to Dinah Shore, I might even been even more prosperous. I became Dinah's accompanist in 1967. It was a real treat for me because Dinah was without doubt the nicest person I ever worked with. I had been referred to her by another pianist named Jack Elliott, and when Dinah and I got together, it was musical love at first hearing. I went with her when she played the Plaza in New York and a bunch of other high-class rooms. Dinah was thoughtful, easy to get along with, without an ounce of temperament in her makeup. And she was generous, so generous that she offered to pay me a year's salary even though she would only need me to play with her for twelve weeks of the year. She could afford such lavish payment because she made herself very rich as the spokesperson for Chevrolet, singing, "See the USA in your Chevrolet..." on radio and television. Dinah was great, and she made me this great offer.
But I turned her down.
Why? Was I nuts?
I told her I wanted to devote my time to writing songs and marketing them. It sounded a little crazy when I repeated that reason to myself later. But I was absolutely sincere at the time. I wanted to emphasize my own writing. And that was what I did.
Still, I continued to work gigs with Dinah through much of 1967 and had a wonderful time. With her, it was always first class in everything, in travel, in accommodation, in working conditions. When we played the Waldorf Astoria, we had rooms at the Plaza Hotel. Nothing but first class.
