ExclusiveDavid Raksin: The Composer Behind Hollywood's Most Haunting Melody

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans A melody can be a powerful thing. It has the ability to spark your imagination and evoke deep feelings. When that melody accompanies a dramatic work, whether on stage or screen, it further has the potential to make characters come to life, giving them three dimensions instead of just being two-dimensional characters. One classic film composer lived in obscurity in Hollywood for almost 10 years, despite having a very prodigious background, before becoming famous due to one highly successful and unforgettable melody. Although his name isn't as well known of other film composer giants like Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and John Williams, his reputation is certainly memorable. This composer is David Raksin. David Raksin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1912. He came from a musical background since his father was a conductor who worked in silent films. This gave David a touch of what his future would be. As a very young boy, he began his musical studies with his father, learning the piano and to play clarinet. He also began composing at a young age. By the time he was 12, Raksin was already working professionally as a musician, playing the clarinet in professional groups, and sometimes acting as a band leader on the radio when he was still in high school. He then went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied composition with Harl MacDonald. He worked as an arranger and orchestrator in New York before making his way to Los Angeles. He had done a bit of work on the Broadway stage, orchestrating and conducting some scores for Broadway before he made his way to Hollywood. In a 2000 article for the University of Southern California's magazine, David Raksin said, what you can't do with the camera or dialogue, music has a way of taking care of. It gets to the deeper emotions that aren't always expressible on film. People who are skeptical about the value of film music should be condemned to watch films without it. Ironically, Raksin began his film career with a movie that was almost the opposite of a film without background music, a film almost entirely without dialogue. Few people in the film business could say that they got their start in silent films in 1936, since the silent era was eclipsed by talking pictures in the late 1920s. Nevertheless, David Raksin's first film was Modern Times, a 1936 film which was made by silent comedian Charlie Chaplin. Despite the title of this film, Chaplin was very reluctant to get up to date with Modern Times, so he continued to make silent films throughout the first half of the 1930s, even though they'd been out of style for over six years by this point. Modern Times was the last outing of his famous little tramp character, who Chaplin insisted wouldn't work in a sound picture. Now, Chaplin was a very creative, multi-talented man who liked to do just about everything in his productions. He would write them, he would star in them, and he also liked to write music. But he wasn't a trained composer, he didn't know how to write down music, he would just kind of hum or whistle tunes, so he relied on trained musicians to help him take his vague ideas and make them into actual music that could be read by musicians. Alfred Newman was the head of the studio's film department at the time, so he hired the talented young composer slash arranger David Raksin to be one of the composers who worked on this film. He co-collaborated with Edward B. Powell as the people who helped Chaplin put his musical ideas down on the paper. This proved to not always be an easy task, because Chaplin was a very opinionated, strong-willed artist, and Raksin, although only 23, was also very opinionated. Apparently, he told Chaplin that his ideas didn't work at one point, so Chaplin fired him. Newman got him back on the project, but because of the bad blood between them, it wasn't the best experience, and Raksin ended up not having any credit for the film. Nevertheless, he continued working in Hollywood for the next several years, oftentimes not receiving credit for his work. In those days, the head of the sound or music department would often get the screen credit for the music, usually just saying music director and not necessarily a separate credit for the composer, so he would arrange, he would co-compose, he'd write an occasional song. When he did write scores for which he was credited, they usually were either horror films or sci-fi pictures, because he was known for being a bit on the avant-garde side. When he'd gone to Los Angeles, he began studying with Arnold Schoenberg, the rather contemporary classical composer, and he integrated some of those styles, so most filmmakers thought he was a little out there for what they wanted. He got his big break, interestingly, by working on a picture that nobody else wanted to do. In 1944, 20th Century Fox was working on a production of a rather run-of-the-mill detective mystery, Laura. It would star Dana Andrews and Jeanne Tierney. Newcomer Jeanne Tierney ended up getting the title character because several better established actresses turned it down. For instance, European beauty Hedy Lamarr turned it down because she didn't think it looked like much. When later asked why she turned it down, she said, they sent me the script, not the score. As Lamarr's quote indicates, the score ended up being the thing that elevated that movie from a rather typical detective drama to a brilliant and captivating masterpiece. Otter Preminger produced and directed the film. He first asked Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann to write the score, but they both passed on the project. As a result, it was offered to quirky sideman David Raxson, who jumped at the chance to do a project that could turn out to be more important than a lot of the other things he'd been doing. After all, Preminger was a renowned director. Laura is not only the title character, but the most captivating thing about the film. What's particularly dramatic about her is that she begins just as a painting, a dream seen only in flashbacks, since the character supposedly has died before the beginning of the movie. To capture this overwhelming presence, Preminger wanted a particular song to be used as her theme, or her leitmotif, as they say in classical music. He suggested both Sophisticated Lady by Duke Ellington and Summertime by George Gershwin. Both would have captured the big city aspect of the character, since she's a sophisticated young woman. Now, some accounts say that he just couldn't get the rights to either song, but Raxson himself, in many interviews, later said that it wasn't that he couldn't get the rights. But Raxson later stated that he argued against both because, quote, of the accretion of ideas and associations that a song already so well known would evoke in the audience. This is something that you see most of the great film composers saying, really, in arguing with filmmakers. In the early days of filmmaking, particularly during silent films, they would frequently use classical music, or whatever the hit song of the day was, as background music. It was easy, it was recognizable, and they figured it would instantly evoke some kind of a feeling and tell audiences what they were supposed to be sensing. But the great film composers, who usually had a very rich composition background, didn't want to just keep rearranging the same old tunes, and they argued that an original tune could be much more powerful. So, in this case, Raxson got his way, and he wrote this original haunting theme, which became the Laura theme. The score for Laura is quite unusual in the fact that it's just that main theme, there's nothing else. It's just that theme, 17 times played throughout the film, but it's never finished. Every time it gets interrupted, or it breaks off, or just doesn't complete the feeling. And Raxson did this on purpose, because he thought it would create a connection between the ephemeral girl and the interrupted melody. Many people say that the reason why this melody was so powerful and so haunting, speaking about longing and lost love, is that Raxson wrote it the day after his wife left him, so he had that feeling of loss and longing. Contrary to all predictions, the movie ended up being a huge hit, largely credited to the haunting nature of that beautiful song. And the studio began being flooded with requests for an album of the music, because people loved it so much, so they had to make a recording. And hit lyricist Johnny Mercer was hired to write some lyrics to go along with it. The song was then published as a popular tune, and recorded by just about every great artist of the day. Frank Sinatra credited it as one of his favorite tunes, and composer Cole Porter said it was the only song he was jealous that he didn't write himself. During Raxson's lifetime, Laura was the second most recorded popular song, second only to Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust. Because of the hit that that song became, Raxson's reputation in Hollywood was solidified. Now, he did later acknowledge that he really became a pigeonhole, at least for a while, as a songwriter. He was usually hired when a great song needed to be written, but he began to have much better film projects because of that. He didn't receive any Academy Award recognition for Laura, but he did end up receiving two Academy Award nominations throughout his career. The second most famous work that he wrote was another main theme. This was for the 1953 film directed by Vincent Minnelli, The Bad and the Beautiful, a Hollywood drama starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner. When Raxson first played the main theme he had written for director Vincent Minnelli, he wasn't impressed. He said, what is this? He thought it was too avant-garde, too strange, too dissonant. He just didn't like it and he wanted Raxson to throw it out and write something new. Thankfully, the songwriting team best known for Singing in the Rain, which was Betty Comden and Adolph Green, was also there. They heard the theme and they convinced Vincent Minnelli that it was brilliant and it needed to be included. That main theme is sometimes called Love is for the Very Young. Raxson had always resented the fact that he only got half of the profits from the theme because he had to split them with Johnny Mercer. He figured that it was his melody and not the words that had made it so famous. So he was insistent that the theme for The Bad and the Beautiful not be a vocal piece, it would just be instrumental. It wasn't quite the hit that Laura was but it was also very successful and remains one of his better known tunes. This was just one small chapter of Raxson's very long and very impressive career since he lived to the age of 92, dying in 2004, and he remained quite active throughout his career. During his long career he wrote about 100 film scores and 300 television scores. He also wrote several Broadway works, arranging other people's music or writing scores later for more dramatic works on the stage. He even wrote some classical pieces, such as what he considered an oratorio based on the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex. Because he lived so long, he gave many fascinating interviews, which can be heard in recordings online or can be read, talking about his theories on music, how he thought music had changed over the years, and the role he thought music should play in the world. He wrote an astounding amount of different pieces, just very different styles. He could write light-hearted tunes. One of the more unusual things that he did was writing a comedic novelty piece for Jerry Lewis to sing in one of his comedies, in which he's supposed to be a sort of rock and roll star, and the song was I Left My Heart in a Drive-In Movie. Raxson himself thought of the title and the concept and he referred to this as a ya-ya-ya song, and he said it was basically the same as writing anything else, just put yourself in that frame of mind and write it. During his later years, in addition to continuing his composition, he was a lecturer and a composition teacher at USC. Because of his outstanding work in cinema, Raxson has been called the grandfather of film music. I find that ironic because he was younger than several of the other great classic film composers, but probably because he continued living and working until he was well into the grandfather years, whereas many of the other great composers died when they were younger. In 1992, his body of work was honored by a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards. Whether writing a novelty song for a comedy or the background music for a Greek play, Raxson combined his dedication to doing his job with a strong belief in the power of music to communicate and express things without words. In a 1988 interview with Bruce Duffy, he said that the purpose of music is expression of one kind or another to the extent that it expresses a noble soul or even an ignoble soul doing something wonderful. So you're expressing something and you're hoping that somebody else will listen. Maybe there's a message in it. The message in it is not going to be something that Western Union can carry, but it's going to be a message. It's going to say things to people which in such a way that it can actually penetrate their defenses, which are rigged against speech and sight much more than sound. Raxson had a long and very impressive career doing a large number of different things with his musical talents, from being a professional musician at age 12 to finishing up his compositions and teaching at the age of 92. But if you were only remembered for one thing, he still would be very impressive just for writing the beautiful and unforgettable theme that is Laura. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you join me next time for more American Legends.