July 21, 2018
Today a friend recommended watching West Side Story and the video about the making of West Side Story.
By coincidence, last evening I spent an hour on the phone with a chum and roommate from my college days, Irwin (Irv) Kostal, who is living in Indio.
We met and were pals when I was on vacation from college and was working that summer at home in New Jersey. Irv was then going to the local college in my home town and we met at the local ice cream shop.
I soon met his family on Long Island and learned that his father was the music director for several TV variety shows, (Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Gary Moore). During several visits I got to know his dad, who had the same name as his son and was known as “Big Irv. My pal was “Little Irv”, which was pretty funny since they were both several inches over six feet tall. Irv transferred to the University of Chicago and we became roommates in an off-campus apartment.
At some point in those early months of our friendship, Big Irv began working with Leonard Bernstein as the orchestrator for his new broadway musical then in production, West Side Story. Later, when West Side Story was made into a movie, Big Irv went to Hollywood and began a career as musical director, making movies that included, Mary Poppins, Sound of Music, Charlotte’s Web, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His Oscar, as I recall was for Mary Poppins but I could be wrong about that.
In the early days when they were working on the stage version of West Side Story I was hearing Big Irv at the piano working on the music arrangements at their home, which was an ordinary suburban home to which a previous owner who was a dance teacher had attached a 30 by 40-foot dance studio. That studio became a living-room/work room with a Steinway grand piano and a huge hi-fi system (before “stereo” came along).
Big Irv died in the early 1990’s, and Little Irv lost his second wife a few weeks ago, but my glancing exposure in 1953 to the entertainment world, and music at that level of brilliance seems as if it happened only yesterday.
One other connection. Though it had always been an open secret in the movie world, most people weren’t aware of the fact that leading ladies often had their singing voices dubbed by vocalists well known in the industry, but who never got a line in the credits. Such a one was Marni Nixon, who sang for Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (another one of Big Irv’s films). I last exchanged e-mails with Ms Nixon a few years ago, when she was still performing in clubs.
On one weekend visit, I had taken two of my favorite records over to Long Island to share them with Big Irv. I wanted him to hear two unknown singers I thought were great. One was Julie Andrews, a young British understudy who had brought “The Boyfriend” to New York when the London star didn’t want to risk it flopping in America. Big Irv didn’t like the ’20’s “flapper” music. And the other was singing on a kids record called “The Mother McGoo Suite”, featuring the Mister McGoo cartoon character. Big Irv scoffed that anyone could sound good using an echo chamber and brought out his example of a great singer, on a record of tone poems by Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he had once studied. His singer was hitting each note perfectly in sequences of impossibly difficult intervals.
I was impressed, and the voice began to sound familiar to me. We checked the records. It was Marni Nixon singing on both of them.
Of course he later worked with both those women in wildly famous films, and, years later, pretended not to remember how he resisted listening to them that day.
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