THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 4, 1994 TAG: 9407020020
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
IT WAS PARTLY necessity that turned two poets into a team of biographers.
When Nancy Schoenberger and Sam Kashner came to Williamsburg five years ago, both were published poets who had been married only days before. She'd been offered a year's appointment as writer in residence at the College of William and Mary; Kashner accompanied his bride, but needed a new writing project.
Before too long, Kashner hatched the idea of a biography of Oscar Levant, a pianist and composer whose wit sparkled in the '40s. A proposal and sample chapter got them an agent, then a contract and with it a deadline. After three years of research and a year of writing, ``A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant'' was published in May.
Oscar Levant still lingers in the couple's home, just blocks from the campus. Their writing room contains an original poster from one of Levant's films. And with little prodding they will play a tape of his famous appearance in ``The Jack Paar Show'' in the early 1960s.
In his time, Levant would have filled the pages of a People magazine - he appeared with Gene Kelly in ``An American in Paris,'' recorded dozens of albums as a classical pianist, displayed his knowledge on TV quiz shows and knew everyone from Chaplin to Prokofiev, from Harry Truman to Frank Costello.
His witticisms were classics: ``I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.''
Today, he is nearly forgotten. But that's just fine with his biographers. They say it's more fun ``to try to resurrect someone who should be better known than to do the 15th book about Sylvia Plath.''
The writers are spreading the word; they just returned from the West Coast, where they taped a TV segment with film critic Leonard Maltin that will air in July.
The team is in some ways a study in contrasts. Kashner is Brooklyn Jewish. Schoenberger is a military brat from Louisiana who was raised all over the place. Kashner says that makes them a ``How's bayou'' couple.
She can turn on an engaging Southern vivacity. He's quiet and diffident on the surface but possesses a dry wit he deploys stealthily.Schoenberger is an extrovert who takes pleasure in teaching. Kashner, who now also teaches at William and Mary, finds the performance aspect of the job painful. Her career path has been academically correct - a series of teaching and research jobs. He has followed a more eccentric route - he spent seven years writing sketch comedy for such Canadian programs as ``Autograph Hound'' and ``Fran's Millions.''
The couple met when Kashner sat in on a creative writing course for adults Schoenberger was teaching at Columbia. He married the teacher.
When they began the Levant biography, Schoenberger was teaching full time so Kashner did much of the preliminary research. A lot of it was conducted at the Library of Congress, ``an invaluable resource.'' Not only did it contain periodicals, newspapers and books from Levant's heyday in the '30s and '40s but spools of the sometimes obscure films he appeared in and radio material.
The couple also conducted 70 interviews with people who'd known Levant, and even hired a private detective to find Levant's first wife. Even though that marriage ended in divorce 61 years ago, the writers discovered she could reveal unexpected insights. They were surprised by how many of his acquaintances retained a loyal affection for a man largely remembered for his acid wit and biting put-downs.
One interview made Kashner so anxious he almost bailed out. Halfway up the walk to the Los Angeles home of the legendary Gene Kelly, with whom Levant co-starred in ``An American in Paris,'' Kelly told Schoenberger to do it without him. She refused and Kelly turned out to be ``very down-to-earth.''
The couple's task was eased by the cooperation of Levant's widow, June, who secured introductions and made private material available. Levant was famous for his neuroses, his ills - real and imagined - his addiction to prescription drugs and his repeated hospital stays for detoxifications and psychiatric treatment. He made mordant jokes about all that, but Kashner says the depth of Levant's suffering became real to him when the biographers read hour-by-hour nursing logs detailing his condition. Both authors say it was hard to write about the darker passages in Levant's life.
The actual work of turning so much material into a narrative was begun by organizing it decade-by-decade and year-by-year. Kashner says the research provided them with two parallel tracks - the events of Levant's professional and personal lives. Their task was to interweave the two seamlessly.
Because Kashner did so much of the early research, the actual writing often began with a fast, inelegant first draft by him. Schoenberger would rewrite, they'd read their work to each other in the evening and resolve disagreements. Approaching their deadline, they were averaging six to 10 pages a day. They say much of the pleasure of collaboration came from having someone with whom to share the labor and the journey.
Kashner says their subject was at times ``daunting'' because Levant was a polymath who appeared on ``Information, Please'' as an expert on everything from baseball to psychiatry. In turn, his biographers also had to cultivate that same wide range of interests. But the team emerged undaunted and ready to do it again.
One subject they are considering is the actor Claude Rains - best known today as Louis in ``Casablanca.'' It looks like the Levant biography was the beginning of a beautiful cottage industry. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Motoya Nakamura, Staff
Husband-and-wife team Nancy Schoenberger and Sam Kashner published a
biography of Oscar Levant.
Photo
Oscar Levant
by CNB