His ‘Hollywood Songbook’ reflected his physical and spiritual exile, but he wrote music beautiful and melodic, for ‘someone who is actually listening.’

Hanns Eisler stood on the beach in front of his Malibu house looking at the Pacific Ocean and pronounced ‘Nature is boring!’ This, from a man who escaped Hitler’s purge, who enjoyed the comfort of success in Hollywood, but who never abandoned his alignment with the common man, and who was ultimately deported, a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eisler, who was one of the most able composers of art songs of the 20th century, yet he remains almost unknown in the United States. Hoping to rectify that oversight, Villa Aurora and the St. Chamber orchestra are dedicating a weekend to this prodigious composer of both classical and film music on March 26 and 27 in Pacific Palisades. Members of St. Mahew’s orchestra will contextualize Mahler’s ‘Songs of a Wayfarer’ by fellow exile Arnold Schoenberg, and ‘Appalachian Spring’ by American composer Aaron Copeland, who fought to prevent Eisler’s deportation. Also featured on the March 26 program will be Eisler’s satirical song, ‘Sputnik,’ that he composed while living in the former East Germany following his deportation in 1948. Villa Aurora will then host a Saturday afternoon roundtable on Eisler’s Hollywood years, which spanned 1942 to 1948. His musical diary ‘Hollywood Songbook’ and his investigation by the HUAC, will be the subject of a discussion moderated by Villa Aurora Director Imogen von Tannenberg. She will be joined by Johannes Gall, who edited Eisler’s study of film music for the Rockefeller Foundation; John McCumber, who has published on the effect of the McCarthy hearings. Saturday evening, mezzo-soprano Kristina Driskil and pianist Mark Robson will perform pieces from the ‘Hollywood Songbook.’ Eisler was born in Leipzig in 1898 and studied in Vienna. After two years fighting in World War I, he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in the late teens and early 20s. At this time Eisler and fellow students, including Weber and Berg, and music lovers coalesced around their teacher, who had formed the Society for Private Musical Performance, a group devoted to private, critic-free performances of new music. At that time, when the Vennese economy was recovering after the war, there was little support for large orchestral programs. ‘Schoenberg and several of his students made arrangements of orchestral music for smaller ensembles,’ St. Matthew’s Music Director Tom Neenan explains. ‘Among the works for chamber ensemble to come out of the society’s activities was Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s ‘Songs of a Wayfarer,’ which will be performed Friday night with baritone Edward Levy.’ Fortunately, Eisler was in Vienna when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Bertolt Brecht, with whom he had forged both a personal and creative partnership in the 1920s, managed to escape Germany and joined Eisler and many other anti-fascist Germans in exile. The two men continued to collaborate, Eisler writing protest songs and music for Brecht’s plays. Soon, the composer began to incorporate Schoenberg’s 12-tone style, but eschewed his teacher’s ‘pure’ music, emphasizing instead texts that were more popular and focused on social reality. Eisler spent the last five years of his exile in Los Angeles, from 1942 to 1948, supporting his family by composing film scores for RKO Studios. Settling at the beach with his wife Lou, he wrote music for eight motion pictures, and received Oscar nominations in 1943 (‘Hangmen Also Die,’ directed by Fritz Lang) and 1944 (‘None But the Lonely Heart,’ directed by Clifford Odets). ‘I first met Hanns in New York in 1940, where I was starring with Dorothy McGuire in ‘Medicine Show,” recalls veteran actor, producer/director Harold Lloyd. ‘Hanns was doing the music. A few years later, I came out to L.A. to work when I was under contract with Metro, and a friend of ours knew of a house on the beach that had been owned by Myrna Loy and Gene Markey. It was in the Malibu Colony, but on the north end. We took the house and Hanns and Lou were our neighbors, so we had a nice reunion. He was a wonderful person, the wittiest man I have ever met. In a given room of great stars, he got the laughs, and he was the most perceptive.   ’I remember he had a big accident on Pacific Coast Highway, and he was recuperating in the hospital,’ Lloyd continues. ‘Chaplin and Charles Laughton came to visit and got into an argument, across Hanns. Hanns was outraged: ‘There you are discussing high-minded things over my body.” Lloyd, a Pacific Palisades resident, whose own career has spanned seven decades, credits Eisler for his own acquaintance and collaboration with Brecht. ‘Hanns used to have these salons on Sunday afternoons at his house. And since his house was smaller than ours, Lou would often come and ask us if we would host the events, so naturally we were invited. I met Brecht on one of these occasions. I learned that he had a play called ‘Galileo’ that various people, including Kazan and Welles, had backed away from. I read it, and to me it seemed like a major work. John Houseman read it too and we decided to produce it at our theater, the Colony, on La Cienega. Hanns wrote the music for the play, which ran for four weeks, during which time Stravinsky must have come more than half of the run. He came for the music.’ Lloyd, who has worked with many a composer over his career, regards Eisner as not only a gifted film composer but also a superb scholar. ‘He was exceedingly modern in his musical approach,’ he says, noting that he added a rich melodic line to the 12-tone system. ‘His music had enormous energy; even in the Hollywood songs you will hear such a beautiful melody of sorrowful and melodic nature.’ The ‘Hollywood Songbook’ is a cycle of art songs (lieder) written in a mixture of styles’12-tone, romantic, blues’and based on poems by Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare and others. Despite the great support from friends including Stravinsky, Copland and Leonard Bernstein (all of whom organized benefit concerts to raise money for Eisler’s defense), Eisler’s position as a leftist and certainly pro-Communist artist of foreign birth was vulnerable, and he was deported in 1948. ‘I think that the House Un-American Activities Committee simply felt that because his brother Gerhart was accused of being a Communist agent, Hanns must be contaminated,’ Lloyd says. ‘His music was certainly of a left- wing persuasion, and in his songs he identified with the working man. So pile that all together and the committee said ‘We don’t want him in the country.” Eisler returned to Europe, initially to Vienna and Prague and ultimately to East Berlin, where he continued to compose, writing the music for the National Anthem of the GDR, which is said to be the most beautiful anthem in the world. He died in 1962. Upon his deportation in 1948, Eisler said, ‘I feel heart-broken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way….It is terrible to think what will come of American art if this committee can judge which art is American and which un-American. Hitler and Mussolini attempted just that. They had no success, and the committee to fight un-American activity will also not succeed.’ Hanns Eisler Weekend Friday, March 26: Concert, 8 p.m. at St. Matthew’s, 1031 Bienveneda Ave. Admission is $35 at the door or visit: MusicGuildOnline. Saturday, March 27: Eisler roundtable, 3 p.m. at Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar. ‘Hollywood Songbook’ concert, 7 p.m.   Admission: All Saturday events, $35; Friday concert and all Saturday events, $60; Saturday concert, $20. For reservations, leave name and contact information at 310-573-3603 or email invite@villa-aurora.org.   Shuttle service for Villa Aurora is available from Los Liones Drive, between 2 and 9 p.m.

Hi-yo, Tony! Tom Mix rides again!   Ted Ashby, a retired police officer who lectures on the Old West, returned to L.A.’s present day West”Pacific Palisades”to deliver his latest lecture, ‘The Amazing Tom Mix,’ to members and guests at this month’s AARP meeting. Held at the Woman’s Club, last Wednesday’s proceedings were conducted by Tina Schroeter, the new president of the Palisades AARP chapter.   After acknowledging the one-year anniversary of the passing of Jackie Diamont and the recent passing of former president Daisy Crane, the AARP’s top brass welcomed Ashby to the podium to discuss the life of Mix, the cowboy star of some 336 movies. His talkies included ‘Destry Rides Again’ (1932), ‘The Fourth Horseman’ (1932), and ‘Terror Trail’ (1933). (Bruce Willis portrayed Mix in the 1988 Blake Edwards film ‘Sunset,’ with James Garner as Wyatt Earp.   Of course, Ashby is no stranger to these here parts, pard’ner. Last year, he lectured about stagecoaches, the pony express, and The Lone Ranger at AARP and Pacific Palisades Historical Society meetings.   This time, Ashby came back equipped with the latest technology: a flash drive-driven slideshow projector. He told the Palisadian-Post beforehand that his Mix talks have been particularly popular. And no wonder: a better title for Ashby’s lecture might have been ‘The Amorous Tom Mix,’ as it was less about the particulars of Mix’s career and more about his active love life, as Ashby recounted Mix’s five wives and various trysts in between.   In his day, Mix, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood during the ’10s and ’20s, was an internationally recognized celebrity and a lifelong friend of cowboy philosopher and actor Will Rogers. He was a frequent visitor of Rogers’ Pacific Palisades ranch, where the pair played polo together.   Mix, ‘5’10 and 175 lbs. his entire [adult] life,’ lived from 1880 to 1940 and, according to Ashby, ‘in those 60 years, he affected each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not.’   Ashby described the flamboyant actor who ‘dressed in fancy high hats and owned over 600 pairs of custom-made boots,’ Ashby said. ‘He was an unusual man who lived in an unusual time.’   Growing up in Dubois, Pennsylvania (his father Edwin was Irish, his mother was Welsh), young Tom learned how to train horses. ‘He went to school through 4th grade and never went to school again,’ Ashby said, ‘but he wasn’t dumb.’   Instead, Mix joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at age 10, when he accidentally shot himself in the knee and tried to use a pocket knife to extract the bullet. That bullet stayed lodged inside his leg until he was 18.   ’The ladies liked Tom and Tom liked the ladies,’ Ashby said, before launching into the back story on Mix’s marriages.   While married to school teacher Grace Allen and working in Guthrie, Oklahoma, as a physical education teacher by day and bartender by night, Mix met wife #2, Kitty Perrine, a pretty hotel clerk.   In 1904, Mix met Will Rogers at the World Fair in St. Louis, where the two exchanged rope-trick secrets and developed a rivalry over a cute half-Cherokee girl Rogers had met. But it was Mix who won the heart of Olive Stokes (‘Poor Will could see that he didn’t stand a chance here,’ Ashby said), even though five years went by before he saw her again. Stokes, a talented rodeo queen who became wife #3, ‘was Tom’s equal in the female form.’   Shortly after he and Stokes had a daughter, Ruth Mix, in 1912, Mix met Victoria Ford, the 17-year-old who would, in a year, become wife #4. They married despite the fact that cinema’s cowboy was two decades older than she.   Unhappy with their spacious Hollywood digs, Ford ‘started nagging on him about Beverly Hills,’ Ashby said. And so, Mix bought 12 acres and built a mansion at 1018 Summit Dr. that included an eight-car garage and spacious closets ‘just for his hats and boots.’   In Hollywood, Mix made movies with Tony, a steed so smart, Mix would verbalize complicated stage directions and the horse would follow them to a tee.   While Mix’s movie career was firing on all cylinders, his personal life began to unravel. In a fit of pique over Mix’s affairs, Ford shot and injured her husband. Soon, Mix was onto wife #5, Mabel Ward, with whom he had daughter Thomasina. Mix fell into debt despite having earned $17,500 a week during the height of the Depression. He was killed in a car accident near Florence, Arizona, dying not from the crash but from an aluminum suitcase sitting on the back seat that struck him from behind.   Ashby’s juiciest tale centered on Marion Morrison. Ashby said that when Morrison, a USC football player, was sidelined by a surfing injury, Mix promised the popular college athlete a studio job upon his recuperation. Weeks later, after Morrison had made a full recovery, he arrived at the studio gates only to learn that Mix had not followed through on his promise. He became livid, but as he shouted down the guard, he impressed a filmmaker passing by. That director was John Ford, who asked Morrison if he could recreate such gusto on film. Despite Mix inadvertently leading Morrison to a successful movie career, the man who would become screen legend John Wayne forever held a grudge against Mix, according to Ashby.   But not according to a man in attendance at the AARP meeting whose relative had been Mix’s chauffeur. The man suggested that there was more to the rivalry between the cowboy actors. Silent film actress Clara Bow, who had an affair with Mix, had also been known to have a penchant for USC athletes. Perhaps some more research awaits Mr. Ashby.   With a mix of education and entertainment typical of Ashby’s amusing lectures, ‘The Amazing Tom Mix’ did not disappoint AARP attendees. And true to the spirit of the horse opera serials, Ashby even left off on a cliffhanger: the historian promised that his next lecture will spotlight Tony the Wonder Horse. To be continued!

  The Pacific Palisades Library Association will host Dick Van Patten, stage, film and TV actor, and star of the popular TV family series ‘Eight Is Enough,’ on Tuesday, March 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the library’s community room, 861 Alma Real.   Van Patten will discuss his new book, ‘Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor’s Journey Through American Entertainment,’ and share his personal memories in a moderated conversation that will include audience participation.   ’Eight Is Enough’ was the first family series to address real-life issues such as sex, drugs and single parenthood. Such topics had previously been considered taboo for family audiences. Tackling sensitive subjects most likely contributed to the program’s success as one of the top-20 TV shows for five consecutive seasons.   Earlier this month, 81-year-old Van Patten was featured in two segments of NBC’s ‘Today Show’ for a 20-year reunion with the other stars of ‘Eight Is Enough.’ Most recently, Van Patten was cast in an HBO pilot titled ‘Mr. Lucky,’ a prospective series starring Dustin Hoffman.   Co-authored with Robert Beer and published by Phoenix Books, ‘Eighty Is Not Enough’ tells the story of Van Patten’s modest childhood in Queens, his rise as a childhood star on Broadway during the Great Depression, and his road to television and film fame.   Van Patten will autograph copies of his book, which will be available for purchase at the event through Village Books. Refreshments will be served.

Rich Capparela, the familiar voice on Classical KUSC 91.5 FM weekday afternoons, will service as master of ceremonies at the Brentwood-Westwood Symphony program on Sunday, March 21 at 3 p.m. at Paul Revere Middle School, 1450 Allenford Ave. The program, free to the public, features the works of J. S. Bach, Mozart, Dvorak, Schubert and Puccini. The orchestra, under the direction of Alvin Mills, will feature assistant conductor Cary Belling, Armen Anassian, violin, Brad Cohen, clarinet, Michael Master, cello, and Bonnie Bowden, soprano. For more Information, call 661-248-3885.