Almost all the dads in my family are gone now, with the exception of my son and two sons-in-law, and I marvel at how much the dad’s role has changed for them. When I was a child, a dad was expected to “bring home the bacon,” offer occasional words of wisdom and stern disapproval when warranted.
Dads of this generation are expected to be “involved”–before, (at Lamaze classes), during (wearing green scrubs in the delivery room), as well as following the birth of their children — and they’ve mastered everything from diapering newborns to coaching soccer teams.
My father had trouble communicating with average adults, much less children, and the only sports in his world were skiing and tennis. He was a strange role model for three daughters. He paid for my tennis lessons, a total waste for someone with the eye-hand coordination of a bat– the pro suggested I take up golf. I was 35 before I learned to ski. And I was a lot older than that before I really understood Dad.
By all accounts, he was a musical genius, in a world where geniuses of all persuasions were more the rule than the exception. If he had been a concert pianist, a Rubenstein or a Horowitz, it would have been easier to appreciate his talent. But his gift was for orchestration, laboring alone in a bungalow at 20th Century Fox, drawing zillions of pin-dot notes on long yellow sheets of paper, able to hear in his head what those complicated directions would sound like when played by strings and woodwinds and brass.
Neither the family from which he came nor the family he raised had any way of understanding what he was about. Most of the time, that stratospheric I.Q. just made him inaccessible, impatient and unrealistic. I mean, he was way out there, and for the rest of us, that could be a real pain.
He came from parents whose sole knowledge of music came from a church hymnal. If it weren’t for the strong physical resemblance to his father and sister, he might have been switched at birth. He had taken up clarinet in school and paid for most of his education playing in a small jazz band. His parents viewed this as depraved, and he left East St. Louis for Columbia and the bright lights of Broadway, falling in with the likes of Richard Rodgers, the Gershwins and Robert Russell Bennett. It was heady company, and he was the fair-haired boy.
He married a beautiful, bright Vassar grad, who was, unfortunately, tone deaf, as was their first child. He pinned his hopes on me, realizing I had an ear, but alas, I hadn’t the talent to play or sing half of what I could hear. I was, however, the first one in his family who had a clue what he was doing. From the age of 10, I went with him weekly to the opera (everything from “La Boheme” to “Lulu”), the symphony, musical comedy or jazz. If he couldn’t teach me to play, I would at least learn to listen.
Occasionally, when he had written something he knew was really good, he would allow me to attend the recording. While Al Newman was conducting the rehearsal, reading the score and watching the scene projected on a huge screen above the orchestra, Dad would sit at a table, brown pencil to yellow score sheet. Every so often he would say something like, “No, in bar 57, the first horn plays B flat.” One day, I realized he was actually working on charts for the next day’s recording. I never did understand how he could do that.
Recently, I heard a re-release of the dream ballet for “The King and I” and remembered being on the sound stage the day they recorded it. Dad had really sweated over it and knew he had something fresh and exciting. At the end of the first run-through, the musicians applauded, string players tapping their bows on their music stands. It was a rare moment, and I was really proud of my dad. I hope he knew that.
He struggled for years with alcohol addiction and, though he remained sober for almost 10 years, he was ultimately overcome by paranoia that alienated most of his friends and relatives. Still, I remember some of his advice as being right on the mark: Don’t follow the crowd; go your own way. Always mix your own drinks. Don’t plan on inheriting anything. Don’t marry for money. Figure out how to make your own living doing something you really like. Film scoring is not a suitable profession for a girl. (I guess I found that out on my own.) Make it a habit to write something every day. Thanks Dad, I really was listening.