CHICAGO — Oscar Levant detested success as much as he craved it.
He was a singular, sardonic mid-20th century cultural phenomenon — the first and still the most authentically revealing reality television star, sweating away in front of the cameras, spilling bean after bean, joke after joke about his mental health crises, his uppers, downers, phobias and rampant, head-spinning self-destruction.
What would Levant have made of his newfound fame, 50 years after his death?
Maybe he answered that question back in 1958, on his Los Angeles-based program “The Oscar Levant Show.” Fred Astaire, his co-star in the MGM musicals “The Barkleys of Broadway” and the beautiful, melancholy backstage romance “The Band Wagon,” was on for a guest shot, with Levant and his co-host, wife and endlessly self-sacrificing caretaker, June Levant.
“Success” came up in conversation. Levant, plainly phobic about the word (and so many others), lost whatever composure he had. Success, he barked, is fleeting. Useless. “To function,” he says — that’s what matters.
Against the odds, he’s now functioning as a comeback kid. Continuing at the Goodman Theatre through April 24, “Good Night, Oscar” is playwright Doug Wright’s well-carpentered fictionalization of the night, in late 1958, a drug-addled, tic-ridden Levant scammed his way out of his doctors’ care at Mount Sinai (now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center) to do NBC’s “Tonight” starring Jack Paar.
The program had relocated temporarily from New York to L.A. Levant already had acquitted himself as a famously unpredictable and uncensurable talk show wag. Three years earlier on the Steve Allen edition of “Tonight,” Levant spoke of his most recent institutionalization, where he came up with the idea for a new color-coded quiz show: Name This Pill.
Allen: “What’s red?”
Levant: “Red’s Seconal.”
Allen: “What’s Seconal do for you?”
Levant: “Seconal is a very light sedation. It’s supposed to put you to sleep very quickly and have no residual toxic effects, but it doesn’t put you to sleep quickly and it has residual toxic effects.”
This was not run-of-the-mill television. Writing about the Levants’ program based in L.A., Time magazine in 1958 noted: “Some call it the ‘sick-sick show.’”
Levant pointed the way to, among others, Lenny Bruce’s further-out effrontery and “sick” humor, says Ethan Thompson, author and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi professor of media arts.
Levant, he notes, didn’t exist in a vacuum.
“This was at a time,” Thompson says, “when the country was becoming conscious about mental health. There was a reassessment going on in the postwar era. The war was over, there was all this prosperity” (for some, anyway), but “there were doubts about the conformist culture and whether we were as healthy as we seemed. Or wanted to seem.”
Levant’s career trajectory was unique. “He was very well known since the late 1930s,” says Thompson, whose book “Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture” contains a terrific chapter on Levant titled “Black Tie, Straightjacket.”
He didn’t come out of nowhere. He was a national figure because of radio broadcasting and the quiz show “Information, Please!” He’d developed this persona as a wit who could deflate the pretensions of high culture, while directing the humor at himself as not just a neurotic, but a drug addict.
There is no real modern equivalent to Levant, Thompson posits, in a time when “anyone can make a smartass comment on Twitter and it spreads.” Crucially, he says, “we crossed a line with Trump — the destroying of all norms.”
Those of us too young to meet Levant on TV knew him from the movies or movies on TV. In “An American in Paris” and “The Band Wagon,” director Vincente Minnelli’s early ‘50s musicals, Levant played variations on his own well-established public personality.
Beginning with the early sound era film version of the 1927 play “Burlesque,” titled “The Dance of Life,” Levant was the sardonic piano player, here and there cracking wise, always complying when someone said something like: “C’mon, Jerry, play something!”
In the 1946 Joan Crawford/John Garfield melodrama “Humoresque,” Levant received rare (for him) third billing. He played a pianist and sounding board for Garfield’s character, a gifted violinist. “I can be unhappy in any key,” Levant says at one point. “’Depress’ is my favorite word.” New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, never a man for rough edges, deemed him “a gifted vulgarian.”
By the time of Levant’s last screen role, in director Minnelli’s recovery clinic soap opera “The Cobweb” (1955), the man who wrote and spoke so often about the pain of never measuring up to his friend and idol, George Gershwin, looked all too comfortable on-screen as a lifetime patient hobbled by mother issues.
“Incompleteness: That’s the only triumph worth the while,” Levant’s character says to the tormented artist of “The Cobweb” played by John Kerr. “With the finished work you subject yourself to public scrutiny: praise, ridicule, and all the other vulgarities that go with accomplishment.”
“Good Night, Oscar” starring Sean Hayes glances at these themes as they apply to Levant’s own thwarted careers as a composer and songwriter. It is a solid, quippy play about a disheveled, brilliant, dangerous soul. Author Wright invents some characters (there are seven in all, most of whom set up a nicely delayed entrance for the star in high panic) and pulls dozens of things Levant said, or wrote, across many years, into its pressure-cooker framework of getting ready for the Paar show while Levant combats his demons, along with some contrived appearances by his old frenemy, Gershwin.
Levant, who could never entirely separate his devotion to Gershwin (who died at 38 in 1937) from his own corrosive self-esteem, once wrote that his George-worship “eventually (reduced) me from industry to inertia.” Levant also said a lot of rude, brash, outlandish things for just for laughs, often with whipcrack timing. He also came up with a peerless description of an atheist: Someone with “no invisible means of support.”
In his early TV study, Thompson points out that in the late 1940s through the late ‘50s — roughly the first decade of television’s rocket-to-the-moon popularity — America increasingly fixated on “distinguishing between the normal and the sick.” The vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross scored with a new version of an early ‘50s vocalese tune, “Twisted.” Films such as “Rebel Without a Cause” (and the even better Nicholas Ray drama “Bigger Than Life”) brought characters’ nervous systems uncomfortably close to the surface. For millions, life was not really akin to “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” — the other conspicuous reality TV success of the decade, and more advertiser-friendly than Oscar Levant.
As Thompson wrote: “Social scientists wrote bestsellers diagnosing the suburbs and the corporation as cultural structures producing profound psychological changes in Americans. Vice President Richard Nixon declared mental health the number one problem facing the nation.” This was not quite a generation before Nixon himself became National Problem Number One.
In the Levant biography “A Talent for Genius,” authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger write compellingly on Levant’s unsteady but indelible place in a rapidly changing culture. By the time of his late ‘58 Jack Paar appearances, Levant had become a retired concert pianist while becoming a good talk show “get.” But as Kashner and Schoenberger write, by then Levant had become accustomed to “retailing remarks he had made on other occasions. Television was now beginning to recycle what was left of a brilliant era of earlier 20th-century witticism. The medium, as Kashner and Schoenberger put it, “only succeeded in embalming it.”
Too much has churned, and ballooned, and diversified in television since then to kiss it off there. It’s cold comfort that an Oscar Levant would’ve likely found a welcoming home on any number of networks, cable stations, streaming platforms had he stumbled along a generation or three later.
Meantime, our own era’s definition of reality TV keeps bleeding into something new. We caught a bizarre whiff of Levant’s old, dangerous air last month at the Oscars, when an actor a half-hour away from winning his first Academy Award assaulted presenter Chris Rock. This was outwardly directed violence, not inwardly-aimed anguish. But the suspense — what’s next? What does the Oscar winner say now, with the statue in hand, about what just happened? — seemed to be attached by an unseen thread to a distant, messy era of live television, when millions tuned into to see what America’s unlikeliest star, our Disorganization Man, would have the reckless nerve to say next.
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“Good Night, Oscar” continues through April 24 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.; 312-443-3800 and www.goodmantheatre.org. Levant’s films, including “Humoresque” (1946), “An American in Paris” (1951), “The Band Wagon” (1953) and “The Cobweb” (1955), are widely available online.
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