rhapsody in blue: oscar levant, ocd, and me

George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski) offers advice to Oscar Levant (Sean Hayes) in Good Night, Oscar (photo by Joan Marcus)

While the rest of the crowd at the Belasco Theatre was immersed in Sean Hayes’s dazzling portrayal of Oscar Levant in the Broadway play Good Night, Oscar, I was struck by one key aspect of the real-life raconteur’s life.

When we first meet him in the dressing room at Jack Paar’s Tonight Show — he’s seriously late because his wife, June (Emily Bergl), had to finagle a four-hour pass from the mental ward she’s signed him into — he takes a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket, taps the front three times, then the back three times, before pulling out a smoke. A moment later, production assistant Max (Alex Wyse) brings Levant a cup of coffee, and Levant performs an intricate ritual, unfolding a napkin, arranging the cream and sugar around the cup, measuring the distance between the objects, adding the cream and sugar to the coffee, and picking up a spoon and rotating it clockwise four times, then counterclockwise four times as he counts to four up and then down.

Max is mesmerized by the punctilious attention to detail, as was I.

“You do the same goddamn thing!” Oscar shouts at him defensively. “Everybody does!”

“I don’t drink coffee,” Max says.

“Forget the coffee. Your shoes, then,” Oscar replies. “Your front door.” He describes how people put on their shoes and tie their laces a certain way every day and double or triple check that their door is locked when they leave the house, “like clockwork.”

I don’t smoke cigarettes or drink coffee, but I do have a specific way of putting on my shoes and locking the door, among a myriad of other seemingly silly routines and habits.

Levant continues, “I do it, goddamn it, and you know why? So I don’t get hit by a bus! So my aging mother gets to live another day. So the asteroids don’t penetrate the earth’s atmosphere and knock us all into oblivion.”

I’m not going to get into why I do it, as that’s just too painful to admit, but it’s not too far off from why Levant does it. (I’m not delving into this for pity, sympathy, or miracle cures, so please don’t make such posts in the comments, no matter how well meaning.)

Oscar turns to the orderly (Marchánt Davis) watching over him and says, “Your pal —[Dr.] Greenleigh — he’s got a word for it, hasn’t he? ‘Obsessive-Compulsive,’ eh? That’s the clinical term, yes? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, page four-hundred and sixty-seven, paragraph nine. ‘A common, chronic disorder in which a person pays oppressive attention to detail, suffers uncontrollable, recurring thoughts, and repeats certain behaviors — usually pointless — over and over and over again’? That’s it, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I? Am I right? Am I? Am I?”

I knew a little about Oscar Levant through Vincent Minnelli’s 1958 MGM musical, An American in Paris, and Jean Negulesco’s 1946 drama, Humoresque, in which he played significant supporting roles. When I took my mother to the Broadway adaptation of An American in Paris at the Palace in 2015, she loved Brandon Uranowitz’s Tony-nominated performance as Adam Cook, the role played by Levant in the film, which led her to tell me more about Levant.

The Pittsburgh-born son of Orthodox Jewish emigres was a talk show regular, an actor, and an extraordinary pianist most famous for his rendition of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” But his life and career were deeply affected by mental illness, which he often discussed openly through acerbic jokes, sharing his neuroses and fears, which eventually led to his dependence on prescription drugs and institutionalization.

In an unforgettable scene from An American in Paris, Levant, as cynical, struggling concert pianist Cook, has a dream sequence in which he performs Gershwin’s Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra, portraying every member of the orchestra, including the conductor. Director Vincente Minnelli and writer Alan Jay Lerner might not have meant it in this way, but it’s hard now not to see this as a scan into Levant’s brain, where he believes he has to control everything that is happening around him.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 1.2% of American adults have OCD, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as “a disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas, or sensations (obsessions). To get rid of the thoughts, they feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions). The repetitive behaviors, such as hand washing/cleaning, checking on things, and mental acts like (counting) or other activities, can significantly interfere with a person’s daily activities and social interactions.”

OCD can range from a nonsensical repetitive act or two to a crippling malady. My father used to walk into the den, then walk out, then walk back in. I noticed it but never questioned it. In third grade, John Lupo asked me why I sat down in my seat the same way every time, with three twists; I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but after that I started seeing that I was doing a whole lotta things in repetitive ways. And it was more than just wearing the same socks, shirt, or hat so your favorite sports team can keep winning in the playoffs.

In addition, OCD sufferers can be susceptible to suggestion. I distinctly recall reading Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia and adopting one of his compulsions, which I continue doing to this day, knowing it was what Gray did.

It wouldn’t be until college when I started figuring out why, and it escalated tremendously after my father passed away in 1985 at the age of forty-seven, shortly after I graduated from the school he had dreamed of attending when he was a teenager but his immigrant parents couldn’t afford to send him to.

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life,” Joan Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking, her National Book Award–winning 2005 account of the loss of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. “Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots.”

During the pandemic, I watched Keen Company’s virtual presentation of David Hare’s theatrical adaptation of Didion’s memoir, performed by Kathleen Chalfant in her home. Tragedy only makes OCD worse, particularly for those who believe their rituals have an impact on loved ones and the world itself. Miming his coffee ritual late in the show, Oscar tells June, “You know what we did, you and me? . . . Just saved six hundred coal miners from an avalanche in Mongolia.”

In March 2020, I saw Young Jean Lee’s fantastic We’re Gonna Die at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. The show consists of stories about loneliness and death that Lee collected from friends and relatives, but, instead of being morbid, it’s life-affirming. At the end, balloons with the title on them dropped from the ceiling; I took two home and kept them on a shelf in our living room. For more than two years one was still there, refusing to give up as the coronavirus spread across the globe. I felt like as long as that balloon survived, so would all of my friends and relatives.

Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife, Grey Gardens) and directed by two-time Obie winner Lisa Peterson (An Iliad, Slavs), the hundred-minute Good Night, Oscar stuffs various parts of Levant’s personal life and professional career into one night as he prepares to appear on his friend Paar’s (Ben Rappaport) live television program, broadcast for the first time ever from California. Paar battles with network executive Bob Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) over whether to replace the tortured Levant with Xavier Cugat. Meanwhile, Levant has visions of his mentor, Gershwin (John Zdrojeski), who urges him to play his own compositions, which he’s terrified of doing, afraid of failure, of being called out as a fraud only able to copy others.

Rachel Hauck’s set morphs into a large white-padded space, merging soundstage with a room in a psychiatric hospital; it’s a brilliant depiction of what might be going on inside Oscar’s mind as he sits at a piano, considering what he should do next, as if he has a choice.

Hayes, a three-time Emmy winner (Will & Grace) and Tony nominee (Promises, Promises), might not perfectly mimic Levant’s voice and face but he captures the essence of this tormented creative genius who could have been so much more than he was. His performance, complete with Levant’s disorienting blinking, made me think of myself — not as a tormented creative genius but as someone who worries every day about losing his functionality, about being a fraud, about becoming dependent on prescription drugs, about curling up into a fetal position and not getting up for days or weeks. (I have done that for hours.)

In July 2017, I was electrocuted at the Panorama music, art, and technology festival on Randall’s Island when I was leaning on a metal bar at the food court and lightning hit; the bar was not grounded properly and the strike sent me flying back several feet in the air. I was rushed to a hospital and underwent several tests.

Shockingly — pun intended — nearly all of my compulsions suddenly went away. My cognitive behavior therapist tried to get a study of my situation authorized by a major medical organization but it never happened. (In the play, Oscar notes that he has received electroshock treatment for his ailments.)

In the meantime, I was concerned with how the electrocution would change my life. While I suddenly had a freedom I hadn’t experienced since I was very young, I wondered how my day job in book publishing would be impacted; it requires a nearly obsessive attention to detail, and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that anymore. I was also anxious about my writing, for which I have a frightening amount of rituals, involving how I type words and sentences, input punctuation, and do online research.

(You don’t want to know how long it took me to write many of the above sentences, not because of basic editing, but because of humiliating self-imposed protocols that I understand make no sense but cannot refrain from.)

Over time, the OCD returned, and it unfortunately reached higher levels during the pandemic and stressful periods at my job, although I could hide it from my colleagues because I was working from home. I once even joked to a doctor that maybe I should stick my finger in a socket and get a minor shock to see if the OCD would disappear again.

It’s all thoroughly embarrassing, even though no one else can see me doing any of it (fortunately, my amazing wife came to grips with it decades ago, although it’s not easy for her to watch me go through this on a daily basis), but I’m not about to let six hundred coal miners in Mongolia perish because of some strange procedure I skipped in writing this post.

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