Deconstructing Dad: The Unfinished Life and Times of Jerry Goldsmith
By Carrie Goldsmith
Important Notice
The following previews are copyright by Carrie Goldsmith and are reproduced here with her permission. Reproduction of this page and its content without the express permission of the author will be an infringement of applicable laws and subject to criminal proceedings.
Prelude
My father was a renowned Hollywood film composer. If he were alive, and not recently dead of cancer, he would read the preceding words and correct me irritably: “Don’t call me a ‘film composer’,” he would have said. “I’m a composer. You don’t refer to Mozart as an ‘opera’ composer.”
My father never minded admitting that once I had saved his life. He would recount a night I called and woke him out of an almost endless slumber fueled by Nembutal and Vodka without a trace of self-consciousness; to him, it was just another amusing anecdote—and he did give me credit for being a hero.
And now I’m saving his life again; this time, to disc, hard drive and paper. According to some cultures and traditions, when you save a person’s life, you become responsible for that life until it ends. Some might argue that my father will live on forever through his music, but I think forever is far too long to be held responsible.
In 2004, I left my home in New Hampshire and my job as a high school English teacher, to live in Los Angeles and research my father’s life for a biography. During five of the seven months preceding his death in July, I taped my father’s stories and recollections. In addition, I interviewed and taped his friends and associates.
When I started writing, I was surrounded by stacks of notes, files of Xeroxed copies, blurry photographs, a couple of sheets of ancient correspondence, and two shoeboxes full of micro-cassettes. I had pages and pages of transcripts about creative brilliance and originality, charm and charisma, integrity and decency, good times and laughs. Of course, I had my own version of the story as well, and I found the task to reconcile all of it—daunting.
Stories have a way of taking on a life of their own no matter how unbiased the teller’s intent; everybody has a story, and each beats with a pulse beyond any kind of doubt in the teller’s soul. When I started writing about my father, others’ stories kept poking through between the double-spaced lines. Even though I quote from taped interviews, retell from personal experience, and refer to reliably documented sources, versions and interpretations of the same event don’t always align; each teller is the hero of their own story.
When I interviewed one of Dad’s associates, writer/director Michael Crichton, he said to me, “I want to know what drives Jerry.”
I wanted to know the same thing, but “…while death ends a life,” as Robert Anderson writes in his play, I Never Sang for My Father, “It does not end a relationship which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution which it never finds.”
Unlike most literature and movies, endings are not always tidy.
“...If I were a producer or director and I was looking for someone to score a film, my first choice would be Jerry Goldsmith. Jerry is uncompromising in his drive for excellence, uncompromising in his bravery to experiment with other media. He is the kind of composer that makes a film.”
Elmer Bernstein, composer
Chapter 1: February 2, 2004
When I interviewed Dad for the first time, we sat where we would sit for most of our sessions, in the den of his house in Beverly Hills, under a giant, brazen Lichtenstein. The painting of juxtaposed triangles and lines dominated the western wall of the room, and the early, afternoon sun filtered in through opposing French doors. In spite of all that light, in spite of the broad expanse of white backing up the blue, black, and yellows in the Lichtenstein, in spite of the beige being more than the darker spots in the faux-leopard-skin patterned carpet, the den, like many of the rooms in my father and step-mother’s house, felt cool and dark. Maybe it was the dark wood floors, or the almost black marble of the never been burnt in fireplace, or the black cashmere couches where Dad was lying with his legs up. A veteran of many interviews, he directed how I should set up the microphone and tape recorder with a detached professionalism, and wisely suggested that I test the volume and quality of the pick-up.
He was wearing one in a succession of jogging suits, which he was wearing everyday, although jogging was the last thing he was doing. The elasticity of the material and waistline were designed for comfort whether the wearer were running or reclining, and for my father and his distended abdomen—unsightly evidence of his cancerous liver—the loose fabrics hid a host of ills. Carol, my father’s wife, kept Dad supplied with a huge wardrobe of high-end sweats by Adidas, Nike, and Ralph Lauren. Every day was a different color, and I thought as I noticed what my 75 year old father was wearing, there were few men who could pull off bright orange or yellow. Dad could. He could dress up, he could dress down, he could go funky, and he could go classic. Through the years, however, his favorite uniform had been jeans and a shirt with its sleeves rolled up— Oxford, Polo, maybe with a sweater. Dad preferred sneaker type footwear, but his twelve by sixteen foot walk-in closet was filed with a huge collection of designer shoes, shirts, jackets, and suits. He didn’t have to share the space with Carol because she had an even larger dressing room, equally stuffed with designer apparel.
As a kid, I remember thinking that my father looked more like a movie star than a composer. Pictures of Beethoven portrayed a sloppy man with wild, crazy hair, not all that different from some of Dad’s contemporary composer friends. But my father was always manicured, groomed, and stylish. His hair went from dark to silver early, but he always had it clipped according to fashion in the trendiest of salons, moving effortlessly from crew-cut to a Beatles-cut to his later-in-life signature white pony tail. And although his skin was ruddy, his nose Romanesque, my father’s face was handsome, long, and square. His blue eyes crinkled when he flashed his charming, thin-lipped smile, and he always retained a certain boyish charisma to the day he died.
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