Deconstructing Dad: The Unfinished Life and Times of Jerry Goldsmith
By Carrie Goldsmith
2
As I organized my notes, Dad and I talked a little about his upcoming birthday party—the one my step-mother was throwing for him in a private dining room at the Beverly Hills’ Four Seasons—and we talked a little about his 75th birthday concert in London, with the London Symphony Orchestra. He still seemed intent on going and conducting the concert, but I found it difficult to believe he could travel 12 hours to a different time zone and conduct a full concert program; his disease had progressed to a point where he spent every third or fourth day completely bedridden. Of course, I didn’t share my doubts with him; instead, I pushed the record button.
“I want to make something perfectly clear, before we begin,” Dad said, and I said okay.
“You can ask me anything and tape it, but I don’t want you to share anything about our conversations with your siblings right now.”
I told him that was fine.
“I know your brother Joel will be hounding you for details, but what’s said between the two of us during these interviews is to remain between the two of us for the time being.”
My brother Joel, a composer for television and film as well, spoke with my father on the phone at least two or three times a day. They mostly gossiped, about the people they worked with, who was an asshole, who was fucking whom, and they talked about us—my sisters and I and our families. But they also talked about their works in progress, the composing process, and the idea of a biography about Dad. It was Joel, not me, who first approached our father about me writing a book of his life. While the concept was mine, I never mustered the nerve to ask Dad’s permission.
Instead, Dad called me in the fall of 2003, and after the usual small talk about work and kids, he asked, “So, what are you thinking about with this book thing that Joel told me about?”
I explained that I wanted to write a scholarly work about him, Jerry Goldsmith, the music, his career, his immigrant heritage, his part in the American Dream…
Dad interrupted me: “Who would want to read about me?”
He asked in a way that was supposed to negate any kind of arrogance on his part, but we both knew that there were plenty of film music freaks who could potentially be readers. I acknowledged his doubts, but insisted there was an audience for his story.
“Fine,” Dad said, “but I don’t want a book filled with platitudes. I don’t want page after page about how wonderful I am.”
I suggested I could find someone who would say he was an asshole, and that would offset the platitudes.
Dad ignored me, continuing, “And I’ve been reading Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography. He makes it sound as if he were personally responsible for the Civil Rights Movement. I don’t want to sound that self-important.”
I assured my father, before we hung up, that I would do my best, without pointing out that it wouldn’t be difficult since there wasn’t a thing I could think of that he had ever done humanitarian-wise.
“…and I’m not telling you anything that I haven‘t already shared with Carol,” Dad was saying as he re-adjusted his legs on the sofa. “We have no secrets between the two of us. So; what do you want to ask me about?”
I told him I wanted to start at the very beginning, with early family history.
“Why do you think anybody would want to read about your great-grandparents?” Dad said with an air of dismissal. “I’m reading a book about Frank Sinatra, and I could give a shit about his childhood in Hoboken; I want to get right to the good stuff. I want to get right to the stuff about Vegas and the showgirls and Ava Gardner. I don’t care about his mother and father, although he was very good to his mother.”
“And his first wife,” I pointed out. “Nancy Sr.”
“Yeah, but people want to read the juicy stuff. Now, I could tell you the real story about Frank and Mia Farrow.”
Dad paused expectantly; he was dying to tell me about his experiences with Frank Sinatra.
In fact, Dad was dying.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me about Sinatra.”
Both my parents loved to tell stories about their-oh-so brief sojourn with Frank Sinatra. They went out to dinner with Sinatra a couple of times, and Dad did three pictures with Sinatra: The Detective, Von Ryan’s Express, and a television movie called Contract on Cherry Street.
“Sinatra had music approval on all of his films,” Dad said, “and he was terribly musical.”
My father made this understatement to end all understatements without realizing it. When it came to the finer technicalities of music mechanics, Dad was a Black and White literalist: people without formal training were illiterate—they weren’t musicians. Frank Sinatra could be musical, according to my father’s unwritten evaluative code, but the century’s most iconoclastic songster was no musician.
In 1964, we had just moved back to Los Angeles from Catalina Island and were staying at a hotel in Westwood while the construction on our new house in Encino was completed. Dad had gone to a Monday Night Concert at UCLA, and when he returned after the concert, he found Mom dancing around, trying to contain her excitement in the quiet of sleeping children and shared hotel walls.
“Frank Sinatra’s trying to get a hold of you!” she whispered loudly. “He’s called three times!”
Dad called Sinatra back.
“So, your wife tells me you’ve been at a concert," Sinatra said.
“Yes,” Dad replied.
“Were you giving the concert, or attending?” Sinatra asked, which at the time was a fairly uninformed question; my father was a studio composer, he didn’t concertize. “Attending,” Dad replied.
“Oh,” Sinatra said. “What are you doing in February?”
“Nothing,” Dad said.
“Then you’d better see me,” Sinatra said. “At Fox. I’m shooting there on Stage 14, 3:00 tomorrow.”
Dad went to Fox the next day, and when he walked on the set, he was surrounded by men in German military garb—a slightly disconcerting feeling for a Jewish boy from the Crenshaw district. Dad looked around and finally heard his name called out. He turned, and a man in a German uniform introduced himself as Frank Sinatra. The famous singer and Academy Award winning actor recognized my dad before Dad recognized him.
“I can’t tell who anybody is,” Dad always said, and his sometimes states of oblivion were legendary within the family. Mom liked to tell about the party they once went to when my dad first worked for Blake Edwards. The party was crowded, elbow to elbow, and my parents were mostly separated, schmoozing with people across the room from each other. On their way home, my dad ruminated about the conversation he held for most of the evening.
“That English broad I was talking to,” Dad said, “she was pretty nice.”
My mother pointed out that the “English broad” was the star of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins: Julie Andrews.
Sinatra told Dad that he would be with him in a moment, but first he had to finish an interview with Life Magazine about Sammy Davis Jr.
Dad waited as Sinatra told the reporter how, “Sammy smokes too much, and he drinks too much, and he’s going to ruin himself, but I love Smoky like a brother.”
“And now,” Dad told me, speaking closer to the winding tape recorder. “This is the real story of how Frank Sinatra met Mia Farrow.”
Dad and Sinatra went to his trailer to talk, and there, sitting at the bottom of the stairs leading up to his trailer, was a young, blonde girl. It was Mia Farrow, and she was just sitting there. Dad and Sinatra walked by, walked up to the trailer steps, and once inside, Sinatra said to one of his cronies: “Who’s the broad down there?”
“I was there, I saw the whole thing; she was staked out there waiting for him!” Dad told me smugly. In my father’s recent biography reading frenzy, including one on Sinatra, he had read a very different version of Sinatra’s and Mia Farrow’s first encounter. Supposedly, Mia Farrow was taking a little break from her own show (Peyton Place) and was visiting the set of Von Ryan‘s Express. Her purse fell, the contents rolled out, Sinatra leaned over to help like a gentleman, their eyes met, and the rest was history.
“But that’s total bullshit,” Dad said with the authority of someone in the know. “She was lying in wait for him, and he didn’t even recognize her—her, the Paris Hilton of her day.”
But Frank Sinatra recognized Dad.
“I had a few more weird encounters of with Mia Farrow,” Dad continued. “Years later, when she was married to Andre Previn, we all had dinner together in London with mutual friends, one of whom was very pregnant…”
After dinner, someone brought out a joint, and Mia Farrow took a huge drag, exhaled, and said, “I smoke to your baby…”
“She was,” Dad said, pausing for emphasis, “interesting.”
“But so is your early history,” I said. “I want to make you more than a one dimensional character. Your early history is part of who you are and can help add depth and texture.”
“Fine,” he said, just a little petulantly, and he hesitated a little before offering, “I remember there was an oil painting of a man in an Austrian uniform. I think it was one of my grandfathers…My mother always told me that my father’s father was a lady’s man.”
“That’s interesting information to share about a kid’s grandfather,” I said.
Dad was quiet; if he were still smoking and drinking, this would have been the moment when he would have rattled the ice in his vodka and tonic, taken a sip, and then inhaled and exhaled a long drag off his cigarette. But the cancer had made him give all that up.
“Your grandmother was an interesting person,” he said.
Just like Mia Farrow?
“She told me that she had to trick my father into getting her pregnant.”
“What?” I said.
“Your grandfather never wanted children. My mother had to trick my father in order to get pregnant.”
“She told you this? Why would a mother ever tell her child anything like that?”
My father shrugged and grinned a sort of self-satisfied smile, like he’d proven a point with this revelation about his mother.
“Like I said, your grandmother was an interesting person.”
