And There I Stood with My Piccolo

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f9. ABE MEYER, MY GOOD FRIEND AND THE fellow who helped to get me my first publisher, was now musical director of Tiffany-Stahl, a Hollywood picture company. I deposited my transfer card in the local musicians' union and went to see Abe. He said I could help him at the studio in various odd things and do some picture scoring and conducting later on. In those days (early 1929) Hollywood was a glorified fish fry, and the important thing was to look busy, so at Abe's suggestion I took up cigar smoking and spent my mornings walking around the Tifrany-Stahl lot, knitting my brows and smoking cigars. I scored some of the music for the talking version of Peacock Alley with Mae Murray, and a horrible thing called The Lost Zeppelin with Conway Tearle. Didn't know much about picture scoring—in fact, didn't know anything about picture scoring—but my cigar gave out the proper smoke screen. 129 I went up to San Francisco to see a football game and ran into a heck of a talented girl I had met in Seattle by the name of Merle Matthews. She was writing programs for the Don Lee radio station, KFRC, at that time, and introduced me to Harrison Holloway and Fred Pabst, the managers . We hit it off just fine and they hired me as musical director of the station. One of our big radio shows was called Captain Dobbsie's Ship of Joy. Dobbsie was a wonderful fellow full of inspiration and sweetness—and full of a slight tendency to forget where he parked his car—or parked his hat—or parked Mrs. Dobbsie. On one of his programs he had as his guest an eminent ethnologist who had just returned from the South Sea Islands, and with him he brought a lala, not to be confused with a lulu. This lala was made from the trunk of a tree and was about sixty-five feet long. When the natives hit it, it gave out a deep throbbing sound that carried for ninety or a hundred miles. It was used as a sort of telegraph, and when the natives in the next village picked up the beat, they'd relay the messages on their lalas to other villages, and pretty soon it got noised all through the South Seas that Montgomery Ward was selling men's underwear at seventynine cents, or whatever they wanted to noise all through the South Seas. Well, came time for the broadcast. Before hit130 ting the lala, Dobbsie asked the listeners to go down in their cellars or up in the attic or out in the garage—he wanted to prove that the sound of the lala was so penetrating that no matter how far away they went from their radio sets they'd hear it anyway. "While you're getting there," Dobbsie said, "the orchestra will play a tune," which we did, whereupon Dobbsie went into a talk about the ancient Peruvian stone carvers—and completely forgot everything else. That was fifteen years ago, and so far as I know those poor people are still in their cellars and attics, waiting for the sound of the lala. . . . Dobbsie had a lot of guest stars, including Nina Koshetz, who sang "Estrellita" with the Ship of Joy orchestra, not, however, before indulging herself in a lifelong ceremonial which consisted of breaking—literally breaking—the neck of a bottle of champagne over the microphone and drinking a toast to "Orpheus," Dobbsie, the orchestra, and the astonished engineer, who was not exactly prepared for a real "glass-crash" sound effect within such startling proximity to his beloved equipment. On that same program I learned that Josef Lhevinne could really set your cork a-bobbin' with Chopin's "F-Minor Concerto"—also, that the bigger the artist, the easier he is to work with—and if they're like Mr. Lhevinne they are courteous and 131 mild and kindly and gentle. Mr. Lhevinne's gentleness turned into uncompromising steel, however, the moment the performancebegan and the chips were down. He sat at that piano like a granite mountain till the last note was played, and then he instantly relaxed into the modest, almost apologetic personality that was so characteristic of this great man. I also learned that a blond young Philadelphian named Nelson Eddy was getting good and tired of hanging...