I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Thirty-Four

Rose Marie of The Dick Van Dyke Show came from a background of old-time show biz. She began her career as a child performer under the stage name of Little Rose Marie, and even as a kid, she had her own radio program. Her career expanded in later years into movies and television. But it was on the Van Dyke Show, with her playing Sally, one of the show's regular characters, where her popularity really got a boost. To capitalize on that, she put together an act, and on weekends, after shooting on the TV set all week, she played one-nighters in Bakersfield and every other California town she could think of. She often hired me to go along as her accompanist.

The thing about Rose Marie is that she really knew what was good musically. Her act was something you would expect from an old-time comedienne who introduced music into the mix as well as gags and funny routines, but the music wasn't cheap or boring or inconsequential. Rose Marie was knocked out by good music, and that helped to make her a pleasure to work with.

She liked to perform a kind of soliloquy as a major part of her act. She would take a nice song like Call Me Irresponsible, and work in all sorts of humourous asides. She'd sing "Call me irresponsible..." Then she'd say, "So I burned the pot roast, the house caught on fire, and the flames destroyed the place...You call that irresponsible?" Her audiences loved this kind of stuff.

My job at the piano was to create the right mood, shifting and changing when Rose Marie did. We seemed to work well together. She was married to a trumpet player named Bobby Guy. So between him and her own experiences in show biz, she knew who could play well and who couldn't. As far as Rose Marie was concerned, I fit into the former category.

In those years when I lived in Los Angeles, I worked with a long list of different kinds of entertainers. Some of them were straight ahead singers, some of them were more off-beat in the Rose Marie manner. Frank Gorshin definitely fell into the off-beat category. Frank was an actor and comedian, and later became quite famous for playing the Riddler on Batman. He could also be a strong actor in the traditional sense. I always associated Frank with a scene he did in an episode of Naked City that was as powerful as anything I ever saw from an actor.

The major part of his comedy act was built around impressions of different actors. He was brilliant at them, and he could do people you didn't expect him to even try to impersonate. He did Kirk Douglas and Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster. Those were all incredible, and Frank took great pride in his impressions.

When I was working with him, I thought, what the heck, I'd show Frank an impression I could do. The person I imitated was Thomas Gomez. This guy wasn't a well-known actor, but he played supporting roles in dozens of films. He was in Key Largo and Captain From Castile and all kinds of other movies, sometimes playing the bad guy, sometimes an innocent victim, sometimes a priest. It happened that I could do a very good impression of Thomas Gomez, and one day I laid it on Frank.

Frank's mouth hung open when he heard me. He was knocked out.

"What?!" he said, "I hire you to play the piano, and you do impressions?"

In the studios, the work I took often involved me with tough musical challenges. That was the case in late 1962 when I worked on the score for a movie called The Chapman Report. The movie was based on an Irving Wallace novel which was itself inspired by the famous Kinsey Report on human sexuality. George Cukor directed the film, and the cast included a lot of interesting people, Claire Bloom, Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda. Claire Bloom played the nymphomaniac of the piece.

The composer of the movie's score was a very good writer named Leonard Roseman, and he threw some difficult twelve-tone stuff into his music. When I realized what was ahead, I used a strategy that I often fell back on in my studio days: I went into the studio the afternoon before the recording and studied my part of the score. In some cases, I even copied the score and took it home with me for more study that night.