Double Life

Hold Miklós

Double Life -
The Autobiography
Of Miklós Rózsa
by Miklós Rózsa
The Baton Press ISBN: 0859361411

Miklós Rózsa is, or rather was, one of the great film music composers of Hollywood from the 1940s through to the 1980s. He was much loved by the studio system the older he got and, by the time he moved over to MGM studios and signed a contract with them, he was pretty much allowed the pick of most MGM scores he wanted... or at least that’s what I’ve heard in the past. Rózsa tells it slightly differently here in terms of receiving projects in a more hap hazard manner but, either way, his music is always brilliant and stands alone as great composition.

For me personally, while I love the scores I’ve heard by him over the years, I have to say that he’s not a composer whose style really changes as time goes by but, since the style of the movies most certainly did, he does seem to be better serving the needs of the films he wrote for on the scores he penned back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and even some of 70s as opposed to, say, the late 70s and 80s. What I mean by that is that, while I love his later scores such as Time After Time and Last Embrace, these just look to me like 1980s films over-scored with 1940s style music. I know many would disagree with me (and one or two of the directors of these movies themselves would certainly disagree outright with that sentiment) but that’s just the way I see/hear it. That being said, he is a fantastic composer... who can forget his scores for great movies like Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound or William Wyler’s Ben Hur. 

Double Life, his autobiography, is something I’ve wanted to read for many years but I’ve only just gotten around to it, thanks to finding a very cheap, second hand copy at The Cinema Museum* for the princely sum of £3.50. In this, Rózsa at the very end of his career divides the chapters of his life first into locations and, when he finally gets to America due to having to finish Korda’s famous The Thief Of Baghdad in Hollywood, it’s split into tenures at studios and so on. I’d just assumed he’d named his autobiography after his famous score to Double indemnity but, in actual fact, it derives from a film he scored called Double Life and he uses it here as a metaphor for his own double life, by which he means the two kinds of musical artist he was. So, the scores he wrote for films for the studios versus the concertos, symphonies etc that he wrote purely as musical entitles in their own right, for concert performance. This book gives a healthy balance of both and, at one point when his contract with MGM was about to expire, details the lengths he went to in order to achieve a high standard of writing for both projects.

And it’s a book chock full of little sketches of people and situations as he journey’s through his life, mostly in chronological order with the odd flash-forward or flash-back to add an appropriate commentary about something else he’s talking about. So you have things like his chance encounter with a ‘growing in popularity’ Adolf Hitler in Paris and his disbelief at how the rest of the world were just not catching on to just where that was heading when, in the places he was passing through, it was being made pretty obvious that invasion and war would soon be coming. My favourite story here is when he gets to London in the 1930s and he immediately sees a newspaper headline reading, “Great Britain Under Attack”, which promptly scares him and gives him visions of having to flee our fair isle when he’s only just arrived. He hastily bought a copy of the newspaper and read it from cover to cover, expecting the worst (which was to come but... not before he was already living in Hollywood) and then found, finally, that the headline was talking about the cricket scores. This has got to be a good demonstration of just how ‘British’ our country is and I love this... it’s just so typical, even today, of my snoozy country’s mindset.

Rózsa made the decision to try and pursue a career in films because, although a very successful and critically recognised composer, you just couldn’t make any money from composing for the concert hall. A little anecdote he tells of his time in France is very pertinent to the sentiments I see expressed almost every week on Twitter in regards to working in the arts and it’s when he asked what a composition of his would pay out for him. He was told that... “In Paris, you do it for publicity!” His response? “Well publicity is fine but it is difficult to buy groceries with it.”

The book also tells of his friendship with the famous movie making family of the Kordas, of course and how he went with them to America to finish up on The Thief Of Baghdad and ended up staying there for over 40 years. It also details some of the political intrigue and things he was asked to do or, in some cases, ways in which he pulled the wool over certain studio staff’s eyes in order to get results. Such as the way he ousted Strauss as the composer for The Thief Of Baghdad and the way he fooled William Wyler to keep the music he’d written for the famous ‘rowing speed’ scene in Ben Hur by letting him reject it and then reintroducing it as it was later in exactly the same levels and mix which, he was told, was much better.

One of his pet hates, it seems, is the use of the term ‘main titles’. This is because, as he says, it harkens back to silent movies when the opening credits and titles weren’t the only titles (or inter-titles) throughout the film and are a completely meaningless thing today. Something I’d not thought of before but I’m happy to be educated by one of the best. Another thing I learned of was his absolute dislike of the click track on a film (which is a device used in Hollywood to help composers keep time with the events of a scene) and he only ever had to use one on the odd occasion for certain scenes. He declared it a mechanical device and, therefore, anti-musical.

In fact, my biggest surprise when reading this was that... Rózsa just wasn’t into films. He sought them out to try and put bread on the table and he liked some of them and had good words to say about a few of the projects he got involved in. Most of them, though, it seems he didn’t have a great deal of respect for, including many of the ones he personally scored but, similar to more or less the same sentiment I’ve heard expressed by Bernard Herrmann on one occasion, he never did anything but his musical best for them... so at least I can take comfort to the fact that he wasn’t ‘writing down’ for his pictures. Instead, he was doing what every other score composer does, I guess... try to elevate them and make them better.

Similarly, he doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about most of the Hollywood composers of the time although, he’s always quite discreet in that he often doesn’t name names. He does, however, mention some of his film composing friends who he did have a lot of respect for so... he talks about André Previn and there’s a very typical Bernard Herrmann story in there. He also says a lot of good things about the musical writing talent Frank Skinner, who is probably not best known for writing scores to A list pictures but, frankly, is another score composer I love and I was genuinely surprised that someone like Rózsa appreciated him so much.

So there you have it... Double Life is a charmingly written autobiography, which is nothing if not polite but also very witty and conjures up a man who wasn’t afraid to tell the odd studio executive off and who carved a niche writing some very distinctive periods of styles of film music in his career (Noir, Epic etc.). He seems somewhat shy about writing of his personal life in Hollywood and you won’t hear too much, if anything, of his wife and children and although he mentions the music from The Killers being ‘acquired’, shall we say, for the TV show Dragnet, he doesn’t mention his successful law suit against it or say much of anything about certain types of problems in his life. This is not a kiss and tell book... but it does give some idea of what it was like in different countries in certain decades and, at the very least, its invaluable for this stuff. I thought it was a great read and anyone interested in both film music and any other kind of musical composition could do a lot worse than get their hands on a copy of this book and read it cover to cover. I’m glad I did and I’m not even a musician.

*Details of further stalls, screenings and events can be found at the Cinema Museum’s website here.