Free The Magnificent Elmer by Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner

portable sewing machine I had brought West for just this kind of situation.
    If you will cast your mind back to 1955, you know that Marty swept the Oscars, winning best actor, best director, best picture, best nearly everything. Elmer lost to Alfred Newman for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing . I lost the best gown award to an extra from Republic Pictures. And that was the ’55 Oscars in a nutshell, a fitting receptacle.
    The most exciting moment for me? It was when the ceremony ended and the horde of famous folks strode up the red carpet, in triumph or humility, and boarded their stretch limos. It was then that the platoon of valets in serried ranks assembled, hustled off to bring the cars. It was then that Little Pearly stood unabashedly by the valet’s podium.
    “Mr. Peck’s car,” said the chief usher.
    And I watched breathlessly as Mr. Peck slid into the back seat.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THOROUGHLY MODERN ELMER
    “Thousands of voices saying silently:
    ‘Let it be me… but if not me, not him.’”
    —Bob Hope at the Oscars
    Stop the presses! Alert the media! Elmer was finally nominated for an Oscar and won. Was it a tale of searing injustice? A challenge to the human spirit? A story of high adventure? Not exactly. It was a movie about a flapper with bobbed hair in twenties America.
    Thoroughly Modern Millie was the only score Elmer ever wrote that won the Academy Award. “To think,” he mused, “I lost with To Kill a Mockingbird . I lost with The Magnificent Seven . I lost with The Man with the Golden Arm . Then when I finally won it was with, of all things, Thoroughly Modern Millie .”
    Millie was the only major score Elmer ever wrote that has never been recorded in its entirety. Coincidental? I don’t think so.
    Elmer loved the music of the twenties, and in scoring the Ross Hunter spoof, he put a lot of love and nostalgia into his work. “I had a wonderful kind of Paul Whiteman sound in that score,” he recalled. “There were no highs and no lows, it was like the old radio sound. It was a very tinny sound of the period and I worked hard to get it. And then Ross Hunter recorded it with Andre Previn and a thousand strings.”
    Mind you, I love Elmer’s delightful theme, which thankfully was included in a collection of his work released by Film Music Masterworks three years after his death. This compilation was the only collection in which any of his Millie music ever appeared, with its wonderful gaiety and spirit.
    ***
    The music of the twenties had always held a special appeal for Elmer. When we first returned to New York from our new home in Hollywood, it was to catch up on the shows on Broadway. We saw Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny Court Martial , Maxwell Anderson’s Bad Seed , and Clifford Odets’ The Flowering Peach . And of course there were the musicals. By this time we were able to afford tickets to see complete shows, unlike during our impecunious days in a walkup. We saw all of The Pajama Game , Fanny , and Threepenny Opera . But the show we enjoyed the most was The Boy Friend , the buoyant British musical for which Sandy Wilson wrote the songs. Feuer & Martin, who were like a brand name for hit musicals in those days, brought The Boy Friend to America as one of their extraordinary string of smashes, most of them by Frank Loesser and Cole Porter.
    Elmer was delighted by the sound of the show, the twenties-era moaning saxophones that got standing ovations for the overture. Elmer loved the music and the beat, the banjos and the wood blocks. Cy Feuer had found a young music-hall performer named Julie Andrews to star in The Boy Friend , and a few years later, film producer Ross Hunter was determined to make his own takeoff of the twenties. He signed Julie Andrewsto star, and when he was unable to secure the screen rights to The Boy Friend , he concocted his own send-up of the jazz age. He called it Thoroughly Modern Millie .
    The movie soundtrack album, if you listen to it today, includes the title