AT WIT’S END
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In the days before rock ‘n’ roll and the Betty Ford Clinic made celebrity drug addiction a common topic of conversation, Levant was famous for his chemical dependence. Before Lenny Bruce blurred the line between stand-up comedy and psychodrama, Levant tested the boundaries of public taste by veering eccentrically between mordant humor and morbid obsessiveness on radio and live TV shows. And well in advance of Liberace’s brazen mixing of “serious” and pop music, Levant was championing the two genres’ equal legitimacy. To this end, he was supported by his idol and friend George Gershwin, who revolutionized American music with his classical-jazz hybrids.
Freeman’s Levant, seated at a grand piano and framed by a campy pair of potted palms, puffs on cigarettes and pops pills as he lets loose with a steady stream of once daring, still hilarious, and always self-deprecating one-liners. His topics are sex (“I prefer nymphomaniacs. I always have. They’re so grateful for small favors”), drugs (“The day I met Judy Garland for the first time may have been the greatest single moment in the history of pharmaceuticals”), booze (“These days I just keep a small supply of liquor nearby. In case I’m bitten by a snake. [Pause] Which I also keep nearby”), music (“high-class dope”), politics (“The only difference [between Democrats and Republicans] is the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt too”), and, always, his own delicate psychology. “I’m prevented from my compulsion to jump off theater balconies by my fear of mingling with strangers,” he says at one point, and you know he’s only half-kidding. Not even his musical talent offers solace; after ripping through a thundering rendition of Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” he shrugs: “Well. Wasn’t that–loud.”
