Lost Issue Wednesday: Interview with Liliane Covington, Session Player in the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra

Liliane Covington was only 19 years old when she joined the famed Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra in 1936. Over the next 29 years, she played first oboe on literally hundreds of films, cartoons and short subjects, and she rubbed shoulders with some of the musical giants of Golden Age Hollywood. The love of music came naturally for Liliane; her father, Fernand Lhoest, played cello in the MGM Studio Orchestra and the Lost Angeles Philharmonic for many years. Although she has been retired from session work since 1965, Liliane keeps busy by playing the piano for residents of the retirement home where she lives. Her favorite piece of music? "Tara's Theme" from Gone With the Wind.

Bill Powell: Let's begin at the beginning. How did you become interested in music and what made you choose the oboe?

Liliane Covington: Well, it was easy to be interested in music because that was really all that was going on in my family. My father was a professional musician in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and he and his friends would often have string quartets in our house, and so I was hearing music from the time I was a little tot. When my father was the orchestra manager at KHJ, which was a big radio station in Los Angeles about 70 years ago, he often played exotic, oriental-type music and that was how I became intrigued by the unusual sound of the oboe. I also wanted to play the flute, but he steered me away from that. He adored the sound of the oboe, but in Belgium where he studied (at the conservatory of music), his mother insisted that he play the cello. It's funny how your parents can have such an influence on what you do.

BP: The oboe can be quite melancholy at times.

LC: Very much so. But it can also have a lovely, pastoral type of sound, as in some of Beethoven's work.

BP: The oboe has a reputation for being a very difficult instrument to play. Did you find it to be that way?

LC: Well, playing it can create quite a pressure on the brain, because you have to hold your breath for so long and then let it out very slowly. But the most difficult part is the doggone reed! You have to make your own to certain specifications, and you have to arrive early wherever you might be playing to make sure the room isn't too cold, because that can be very uncomfortable. But that's really the hardest thing about the oboe -- making your own reeds.

BP: The ill woodwind that no one blows good.

LC: (Laughs) Yeah, I like that one! Everybody is always kidding me about that one!

BP: Tell me about your earliest job in Hollywood.

LC: In the days before my contract, I played at Paramount, RKO, and MGM, but the earliest job I can remember was in 1935. I was called in to do some retakes on Top Hat because the oboist at RKO was unavailable to do them. I also did some work on 100 Men and a Girl (1936). That was a Deanna Durbin film and Leopold Stokowski conducted the orchestra. I remember I played on She for Max Steiner in 1935 and on The Good Earth for Herbert Stothart in '37. I played for Irving Talbot quite a lot, too.

BP: How did you get your job at Warner Bros.?

LC: Well, I played on The Garden of Allah (1936) for Max Steiner and had many solos in that film, and I guess he liked what he heard because he helped me get my job at Warner's. They were looking for a reliable oboe player (the one they had kept fouling up and making mistakes), so I got signed for my first contract in 1936.

BP: Were there very many women in the orchestra at that time?

LC: No, there were only the harpist and myself. Later, they hired another harpist, a cellist and a pianist, but there were never more than three or four women in the orchestra.

BP: Did you ever feel intimidated being around so many men?

LC: (Laughs) No, no, they were all very nice to me, thank goodness!

BP: There's been some dispute about the exact number of musicians in the Warner orchestra. Do you recall how many there were?

LC: We had 50 under contract. But on some of the bigger pictures they'd go up to 90 or 100, to get the big sound. For instance, when we did Gone With the Wind (1939) at the Selznick studio, Maxie brought in players from the other studios, as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I remember at Warner Bros. we had two pianists -- one for the classical music and one for the jazzy type. David Klatkin was one of them; he could play just about anything! Nowadays, though, they use so much of the synthesizers and that's awful.

BP: Let's talk for a minute about some of your favorite composers. At Warner Bros. you were around some of the best in the business.

LC: Max Steiner was my favorite. He was very sweet, and he really knew how to write for the oboe. I remember he always smoked a big cigar and liked to go to Las Vegas to gamble. When he got older his eyesight began to fail and he used a huge stopwatch when he conducted. I also loved Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his magnificent musicianship -- and such a lack of false ego! I don't know, he just didn't have the ego a man with his talent should have had. He would play the piano for us, to show us how we should play his music, and he would make it sound like an orchestra! Such a talent! I liked Bernard Herrmann, too. He came to Warner's for a film [The Wrong Man (1956)], but he usually worked over at Fox. And I liked Bernhard Kaun, who sometimes did ghostwriting for Max Steiner. Kaun wrote an oboe concerto for me, but I can't find it anymore. Heinz Roemheld was another gifted musician, and he did quite a bit of ghostwriting, too. I also liked working for Daniele Amfitheatrof; he was a very gentle and undemanding composer. (Sighs) And then there was Dimitri Tiomkin.

BP: Not one of your favorites, I take it.

LC: Well, he didn't like women very much for one thing. I remember our sound-man, David Forrest, used to go crazy because he [Tiomkin] kept asking us to play softer, softer, softer, until finally the voices wouldn't come through; and it's very hard to play that softly on the oboe.

BP: That's interesting, because Tiomkin is generally remembered today for his full-blown, symphonic sound.

LC: Yes, that's true but I remember he used to make us play so softly in the intimate passages that we could barely play. Then at other times he had the sound too loud for the dialogue.

BP: Yes. I recently saw one of his films on tape [The Dark Mirror (1946)] and there was just too much music. It overwhelmed the action.

LC: That's right, because you go to the movies to see -- and hear -- the actors, not just listen to the music! Sometimes the composers went overboard.

BP: But then Jack Warner loved wall-to-wall music in his films, didn't he?

LC: (Laughs) Well, yes, but he didn't like the way things would cost. For instance, on Land of the Pharaohs [a Tiompkin-scored film from 1954] we had so much overtime because all Tiomkin wanted to do was rehearse, rehearse, rehearse; and it took several sound stages to get the sound just right. I remember we had the strings in one, the winds in another, and the percussion in a third. We would literally rehearse all day until our lips were bleeding!

BP: That's terrible!

LC: Yes. I still have nightmares about that one.

BP: Let's talk about the heads of the music department. I believe your first boss at Warner Bros. was Leo Forbstein, right?

LC: Leo Forbstein was a doll. He wasn't much of a musician -- he was more of a good businessman -- but he knew which composer was good for which project. His brother, Lou Forbes, was the music director for David O. Selznick. A cute thing about Leo was that he loved brass bands. Whenever there was a brass band in a movie he made sure he was leading it! That was his thing; he loved brass bands.

BP: When Forbstein retired, Ray Heindorf took his place. Heindorf, of course, was a talented musician.

LC: Oh, yes. He was a wonderful musician and a very talented pianist, too. He was a dynamic individual, but he could be very demanding at times.

BP: I take it he did most of the conducting.

LC: Yes, especially the musicals. He was very good at following all the dance routines; that takes a lot of talent. He had a gifted son, too, but I never hear about him.

BP: Now let's talk a little bit about cartoons. As serious musicians, did the members of the orchestra look down on that kind of music?

LC: Oh, no! They were a lot of fun to do, and good practice, too. The only thing I'm sorry about is that they didn't have us down for the re-use fees. By golly, those things are on all the time!

BP: You'd all be millionaires by now!

LC: Wouldn't that have been great? But they were a lot of fun to do. And of course, Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn were a pleasure to work with.

BP: The tempos were amazing in some of them.

LC: The tempos were incredibly fast! And everything had to be so mechanically perfect. I remember one time the first flutist from the Los Angeles Philharmonic was substituting in the band, and he couldn't keep up with it! I think most of them were done as well as they were because all of us were such good readers. We had to be! But one of the biggest treats occurred when the scoring sessions were over. Mel Blanc would come in and record the dialogue, and many of us would stick around to hear him. Great fun!

BP: What about rehearsal time? Did you have much time to rehearse all those different pieces?

LC: There was a great deal of variety in the rehearsal time. Maxie liked to rehearse a lot -- it wasn't quite the mood he wanted or it wasn't quite this and that. And then there were others -- like Korngold and Bill Lava -- who would go to the piano, show us how they wanted it played, and before you knew it you were making takes. Of course you can over-rehearse, too, as I mentioned with Tiomkin, and this can cause the music to lose some of its spontaneity.

BP: And of course the fewer the rehearsals, the more money the studio would save.

LC: Exactly. I remember the studio brought in some so-called efficiency experts one time, and oh how we hated them! They thought we were bungling takes to make more money, and believe me we were not!

BP: Which leads us to the 1958 musicians' strike. Do you remember what brought that about?

LC: Well, you'll get different opinions about that one. Frankly, I thought we were making enough money, but somebody in the union thought we should strike to get even more. I remember walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Phantages Theatre, carrying my sign with all the rest of them. It was a bad time for the musicians, but the studios just went to Germany and England and recorded all their scores over there. While the strike was going on, my father and I gave music lessons to earn money; but fortunately it didn't last too long. There are always inner-workings in things like that, but I think it was just a put-up affair. I think the studios came out better in the end, not the musicians.

BP: Let's talk about something pleasant now. What were some of the most memorable moments or films for you?

LC: Oh, boy, there are so many of them! I remember on a picture I did for Heinz Roemheld there was a very complicated oboe solo and he let me play it the way I wanted to. He had confidence in me and as a result I was able to play it beautifully. I remember one of my biggest jobs was on Lost Horizon (1937). We recorded that one on a huge sound stage -- like a giant barn! Maxie conducted for Tiomkin, and we had an enormous orchestra. But one of my fondest memories was when I did a long oboe solo in The Wrong Man, and the entire orchestra gave me a standing ovation at the end. It's always a great compliment when your peers acknowledge your work -- especially after a long day when everyone is tired and ready to go home.

BP: I want to thank you for sharing all of your memories with us.

LC: It's been a pleasure for me. As you know, there aren't very many of us left any more, so to be able to sit down and share my memories has been a real treat. Thank you..

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