Larry Adler

On the short list of musicians who have played the harmonica at a virtuoso level, Larry Adler (1914–2001) ranks at or near the top. His musical skills were matched by an outsized personality that delighted interviewers, attracted some of the top musicians of the 20th century as collaborators over his seven-decade career, and awakened memories of the classic era of Broadway entertainment in which Adler's career got its start.

Adler brought a level of respectability to the harmonica, often regarded as primarily an instrument played by enthusiastic amateurs. He preferred the term "mouth organ" to "harmonica," and he crossed into the realm of classical music, playing with symphony orchestras and commissioning works from prestigious composers. His playing was lyrical, often melancholy. Yet the public also prized Adler for his fund of stories about the rich, famous, and beautiful. He numbered physicist Albert Einstein and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff among his friends, and, an enthusiastic tennis player, he once participated in a doubles match with comedian Charlie Chaplin, actress Greta Garbo, and surrealist artist Salvador Dali. He and Chaplin won.

Family Changed Name to Advance Alphabetically

Lawrence Cecil Adler was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 10, 1914. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants (and fluent Yiddish speakers) who had changed the family name from Zelakovitch because they were tired of waiting at the end of long alphabetically organized lines in offices. Though they had faced discrimination in Russia, they told their son not to play with any of the African-American children in the neighborhood. Adler showed his stubborn streak for perhaps the first time by trying to make as many black friends as he could find, and he often spoke out in favor of civil rights later in his life.

Adler seemed to show musical talent, becoming a cantor in the local synagogue by the time he was ten. His parents signed him up for piano lessons and were even talked into buying a piano on an installment plan. The owner of the music store where they made the purchase threw in a harmonica as part of the deal, and Adler took to that instrument enthusiastically. When he enrolled in classes at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music, however, it was with the intention of studying piano. His lessons there came to an end after one semester (according to London, England's Guardian newspaper) when a teacher at a recital offended him by asking "What are we going to play, little man?" Adler substituted "Yes, We Have No Bananas" for the Grieg waltz he had planned, and he was thrown out of the program. Undaunted, Adler entered a Baltimore Sun harmonica contest and won, playing a minuet by Beethoven instead of the simple folk tunes the other contestants offered.

Not long after that, at the age of fourteen, Adler left Baltimore for New York with seven dollars in his pocket. Playing on the streets and auditioning wherever he could, he was turned down by a group called Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals but was befriended by singer Rudy Vallee, who steered him toward work playing on the soundtracks of Mickey Mouse cartoons. That led to a nationwide tour playing the harmonica at intermission in movie houses, and then to opening-act slots for the likes of Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, and Fred Astaire—top entertainers who straddled the divide between live musical shows and the growing world of cinema.

The teenage Adler was spotted by a British promoter and invited to try his luck across the Atlantic. Before he left, he managed to improvise a performance of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the harmonica, with Gershwin himself accompanying on piano, although he had never tried to play the highly virtuosic piece before. Adler became an instant hit in England, spending several years there in the mid-1930s as the featured attraction in a musical revue called "Tune Inn." Larry Adler fan clubs were formed all over Britain, and his popularity there would stand him in good stead later on. At the time, however, Adler decided to return to the United States and reactivate his Broadway and Hollywood connections. He had no trouble landing parts in such films as The Singing Marine (starring Dick Powell), The Big Broadcast of 1937 and St. Martin's Lane (1938). Gangster Al Capone was another Adler friend.

Claimed Affair with Ingrid Bergman

At that time, Adler did not know how to read music. He did learn the skill, however, around the early 1940s, saying that he had been inspired to do so by either French composer Darius Milhaud or Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (depending on the interview). Adler entertained U.S. troops on USO tours during World War II, and at one appearance in Augsburg, Germany, he was quoted as saying in the San Diego Union-Tribune, that Bergman entered the room, complimented him on his playing, and asked him if he was going to notate the tune. "No, I can't, and I don't need to," Adler recalled saying, to which Bergman retorted, "You're very smug, aren't you? You're ignorant, and you're proud of your ignorance." According to Adler, he and Bergman embarked on a two-year affair although each was already married; Adler and his first wife, British model Eileen Walser, had three children before divorcing; his second marriage, to British journalist Sally Cline, produced another daughter.

After the war, Adler's increasing musical sophistication began to show. He once filled in for Miles Davis at New York's famous Village Vanguard jazz club when the trumpeter failed to show up for a gig, and he appeared with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. But his efforts on behalf of the troops during the war were not enough to save him from the anti-Communist frenzy that overtook the U.S. in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Adler found that jobs were drying up as left-leaning performers such as himself and Paul Draper, a dancer with whom he often worked, were blacklisted by Hollywood studios that tried to avoid running afoul of crusading Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his campaign to root out the Communist influences he perceived as having infiltrated U.S. politics and culture.

When a Connecticut woman wrote a letter to a newspaper accusing Adler and Draper of Communist sympathies in 1948, Adler and Draper sued. The case dragged out for three years, draining the resources of the pair, and it ended in a hung jury in September of 1951. Shortly after that, Adler departed for Britain. Though he would sometimes return to the U.S. to perform after McCarthy was discredited and the anti-Communist hysteria died down, he lived in Britain for the rest of his life.

Building on the name he had made for himself in the 1930s, Adler succeeded in adapting his performing repertoire to the greater frequency with which classical music was heard in Britain. Some of Europe's best-known composers expanded the tiny classical harmonica repertoire with new compositions for Adler, including the Romance for Mouth Organ, Piano, and Strings by Ralph Vaughan Williams and concertos by Malcolm Arnold an Darius Milhaud. Composer William Walton (as quoted in the Guardian) even said that "the only two young musical geniuses in the world are [violinist] Yehudi Menuhin and Larry Adler." Adler composed the score for the 1953 film Genevieve, which garnered an Academy Award nomination even though Adler's name was stripped from American prints of the film. He composed scores for several more British films, including The Hellions (1961) and King and Country (1963). In 1963 he premiered "Lullaby Time," a George Gershwin work given to him by the composer's brother Ira.

Wrote Restaurant Reviews

The positive side of Adler's exile in England was that he fit easily into British life. He learned to play cricket, and when he tried to explain the rules of that arcane British sport to Einstein, the great physicist said (according to an Adler recollection quoted by a letter writer in London's Independent), "You know, Larry, I used to think time was relative, but suddenly I'm not so sure." Adler branched out beyond music, writing a book called Jokes and How to Tell Them and contributing articles to the Spectator and New Statesman periodicals. He served as restaurant reviewer for a magazine called Harpers & Queen. Quick with a one-liner, he told the same Independent letter writer, when she asked whether he had been christened Larry, "Honey, they've done some terrible things to Jews over the years, but christening wasn't one of them."

Adler had played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on the balcony of Adolf Hitler's abandoned headquarters as American troops overran Berlin at the end of World War II, and he became a supporter of the young nation of Israel, performing there during the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Harboring little bitterness toward the U.S., he frequently returned there to perform, and he and Paul Draper staged a reunion at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1975. He never renounced his American citizenship, but he deplored the country's new rightward drift during the later decades of the century. "I come from a generation that revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and I admired Harry Truman" (with whom he had once performed "The Missouri Waltz"), Adler was quoted as saying in the San Diego Union-Tribune. "But look who they had later on—Nixon and Reagan. Wow. This does not encourage respect." Though he had lived the high life in California in the 1930s, his life in Britain, in a small apartment in London's Hampstead district, was more modest.

Adler's performing career slowed in his old age but never came totally to a halt. He issued several albums that mixed classical music and pop standards, and he wrote a book of memoirs called It Ain't Necessarily So. In 1994, to mark his 80th birthday, he joined with a host of pop stars—Sting, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush, Jon Bon Jovi, and Meat Loaf among them—to record a new album, The Glory of Gershwin. Becoming acquainted with rock musicians prompted one of Adler's rare self-deprecatory sentiments. "I knew their names but not their work," he was quoted as saying in the Union-Tribune. "That is not the kind of music I usually listen to. I realized there's more to this music than I thought. I don't like admitting I was prejudiced." The album made its debut at No. 2 on British pop charts, making Adler the oldest person to ascend to top chart levels in Britain. In 1997 he recorded a new film score, one for a compendium of silent-film chase scenes called The Great Chase.

Surviving cancer and two strokes, Adler returned to the studio to record with other rock stars. In his 87th year, he cut a duet with Cerys Matthews, a Welsh rock star. "I'm surprised not only I'm still playing, but that I'm improving as I get older," the irrepressible Adler told Simon Hattenstone of the Guardian in April of 2001. A bout with pneumonia that summer, however, ended his life in a London hospital on August 6, 2001. "Resist the pressure to conform," he advised young people, as quoted in his New York Times obituary. "Better be a lonely individualist than a contented conformist."

Books

Adler, Larry, It Ain't Necessarily So, Collins, 1984.

Periodicals

Daily Telegraph (London, England), August 8, 2001.

Guardian (London, England), April 12, 2001; August 8, 2001.

Independent (London, England), October 22, 2001.

New York Times, August 8, 2001.

San Diego Union-Tribune, August 12, 2001.

Variety, August 13, 2001.