Along the Cherry Lane: Tales from the Life of Music Industry Legend Milton Okun

Copyright © 2011 by Milt Okun

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2011 by

Classical Music Today, LLC

499 North Canon Drive, Suite 201

Beverly Hills, California 90210

All photos and memorabilia in this book are from Milton Okun’s collection unless otherwise noted.

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Okun, Milton.

Along the Cherry Lane: tales from the life of music industry legend

Milton Okun / as told to Richard Sparks.

p. cm.

1. Okun, Milton. 2. Music publishers—United States—Biography. I.

Sparks, Richard. II. Title.

ML427.O38A3 2011

780.92–dc22

[B]

2011013366

To the memory of two great musicians, the conductor Dean Dixon and the violinist Louie Graeler, who started me on a life in music; and to my wife, Rosemary, who joined me on the journey and made it successful and exciting.

—Milton Okun

Contents

1. Pete Seeger’s Boot

2. Dean Dixon’s Gift

3. A Summer Job

4. Mrs. Roosevelt’s Song

5. Beetlejuice, Beatlemania

6. An Unexpected Success

7. Two Rabbis and a Hooker

8. Another Rabbi—and a Yogi

9. John

10. Perhaps Love

11. Number One

12. Along the Cherry Lane

13. Foreign Fields

14. Plácido and the Chipmunks

15. Ones That Got Away

16. Managers and Muppets

17. The Music and the Business

18. Other People’s Stories

19. Music Lessons

Afterword: The Master Singers

Appendix One: Favorites

Appendix Two: Milton Okun Discography

Photo Insert

Chapter 1

Pete Seeger’s Boot

I found Milt a bit alarming when I first met him, nearly three decades ago. He is tall and dignified and quiet. He has about him an air of gravitas—all somewhat unnerving to a prospective son-in-law. I soon learned, though, that a very different Milt lives behind that senatorial facade. We went to a student matinee of La Bohème at the L.A. Opera recently. As we waited in our seats for the curtain to go up, I heard a stifled sob beside me. I looked at Milt, who was wiping his eyes. He’d been reduced to tears by reading the synopsis—of an opera he’d seen dozens of times.

   He dresses soberly and conservatively—unusual in an industry that has such a close relationship with whatever is new and fashionable. Would your archetypical flash music producer have been mistaken for a panhandler outside Nate ’n Al’s deli in Beverly Hills?

Milton Okun My car was being repaired, so I had gone there by taxi. After lunch I was waiting outside for my cab. There was a panhandler on the street, collecting money from people. We nodded at each other. A few moments later, a couple came out, and while the valet got their car, the husband looked at me, turned and looked at the panhandler, looked back at me…and peeled off a dollar—and gave it to me.

I said, No, you don’t understand.…

He held up his hand to stop me and said, very sympathetically, "I understand.…"

And they got into their car and drove off.

So I went to the panhandler and handed him the dollar.

He wouldn’t take it. He said, No, no! You earned it fair and square!

Just then, my taxi came up, and I got in and rode off.

Would have been even funnier if it had been a limo.

Milt’s deceptive appearance is one reason why his practical jokes are so deadly. You never expect someone who looks like that to be doing this. Milt fooled Pete Seeger once so perfectly—and over such a long expanse of time—that Pete, while everyone else was doubled up with laughter, gurgled with rage, leaned down, removed his boot, and hurled it at Milt across the dinner table.

M.O. I was very friendly with Pete. He had come to my parents’ resort at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks many times when I was in my teens and twenties. I loved his songs. Loved his singing, loved his stories. There were several other camps in the area that catered to progressive people and had live music. But we were the first one that really concentrated on folk music. Each summer we had a folk song festival and invited well-known singers—the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, some lesser-known people. This was the forties—before, during, and after World War II.

They would give performances in the evenings, or sometimes in the afternoon on the lawn. Woody was marvelous at that. He would come for a couple of weeks at a time and then just head off down the road. He was a true hobo. A delightful man, very kind and interesting. He came for three summers. Pete and Lee Hays of the Weavers came a little more often, and they were also marvelous. Pete was particularly good at involving the hotel guests. Before his performance he would gather together those who wanted to participate and teach them the choruses of several of the songs he was going to sing.

My first job after college was as a junior high school music teacher in New York City, and I played Pete’s records to my classes, as well as the classics. My students also loved him. One evening, the night before Easter vacation, Lee Hays invited me to dinner. He had several rooms in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights that belonged to relatives of the composer Earl Robinson. The next day I was leaving for California, for a ten-day visit with my high school friend, George Bernard. It was the fifties, long before people hopped about all over the country—at least, before the kind of people we all knew did. Lee was an excellent cook. And there was Earl Robinson and Pete and Lee, and maybe four or five other people. Among them was the actor Alan Arkin, who was living there at the time.

At that dinner, Lee mentioned that Pete was performing that Sunday in Los Angeles. When I got out to the coast, I found out that George had bought tickets for the concert, at the Unitarian church in Sherman Oaks. So he and his wife Maxine and I went to hear Pete sing.

It was a hall of about 350 people. Afterward, in the vestry, coffee and pastries were served to some of the guests. We went back there, and George and Maxine introduced me to the many people they knew. After a few minutes, Pete came into the room with his banjo slung across his back. He was signing programs and thanking people. He saw me. Our glances crossed, and he started to wave hello—and I stared at him, without any recognition. He stopped waving and looked at me, uncertain…and I showed no sign of knowing him. I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, checking me out, for the next fifteen or twenty minutes. He just couldn’t get over the resemblance. So we never spoke a word to each other that evening. I left with George and Maxine, and I can still see Pete’s head, following me.… But I didn’t even glance at him on my way out.

About two years later, we were having another supper at Lee Hays’s house. And Pete was there. And the first thing I said to him was, "Pete, that was a great concert you gave in Sherman Oaks!" Everyone else knew about the joke by then, so they all fell about laughing. Pete was so stunned, then so fired up, and so lost for words that he leaned down, took off his boot, and threw it at me.

Milt was born on December 23, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York, the second son of William Okun and Leah Seligman Okun. William, born in 1893, had come to the States at age twelve. His father had immigrated a year or two earlier and was working as a carpenter; William traveled from Russia all the way to New York by himself.

M.O. And when the boat docked, there was no one there to meet him. My grandfather either had the wrong date of arrival, or the boat came in a day earlier than he expected. My dad spoke not a word of English. Fortunately, one of the immigration officials took pity on him and took him home. Dad stayed with the man’s family overnight and the next day went back to the dock, where his father picked him up. Interestingly enough, when I was twelve, Dad wouldn’t let me get on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan on my own.

My mother, Leah, arrived in the States when she was fifteen. She and William were first cousins, so they had known each other in the old country. No one is quite sure exactly where that was—Russia, Ukraine, Poland: The borders were constantly changing. They lived in a shtetl. They married on July 1, 1916, and both lived to be ninety-six.

There was a small celebration of the wedding at my grandfather’s house. The bride and groom had gone that afternoon to a doubleheader at Ebbets Field, between the Dodgers and the Giants. The game went into extra innings, and they came late to their own wedding.

My father—and, later, my elder brother, Dan—graduated from Cooper Union. Both become engineers specializing in water sanitation. Almost his entire career Will worked for New York City in the department of public works. He was in charge of the water-treatment plants around New York, and the water up in the Catskill Mountains that came into New York.

He was well known as a leftist, even though he was a civil servant. One day he was criticizing one of his subordinates, who complained, answered back.

My father told him, "Comes the revolution, and you can decide these things." Comes the revolution was a phrase very much in use in those days.

And the guy looked at him, and said, That’s just the problem—comes the revolution, you’ll still be sitting in that seat!

Milt’s earliest memories are, appropriately, of music.

M.O. The music happened very naturally. I started playing piano at four. My mother played, I don’t think particularly well, but both she and my father were avid music lovers. They often went to concerts, and soon started taking me, because I obviously adored it so much. They had subscriptions at several places. Washington Irving High School, to chamber music. The New York Philharmonic. And later on, they had a subscription to the Metropolitan Opera.

I was about six when I saw my first opera there. My mother took me almost every week for the season on Saturday nights, and I loved it instantly. We went to standing room, at the back of the orchestra stalls, which at that time cost twenty-five cents. But—a six-year-old boy and his mother? Some kindhearted usher always took pity on us and found us seats—usually wonderful seats, sometimes right at the front of the orchestra, near the stage. And I would sit there, enraptured, and just bathe in the music. I couldn’t get enough of it. By this time I was very advanced at the piano, so the music all made sense to me.

I’d outstripped anything my mother could teach me by age six. I had two particularly brilliant teachers. One was a man named Maddy Abramov, who was short, with a mustache, and a wonderful pianist. And then, at eight, I switched to a school called the Music School Settlement, on Third Street in Manhattan. I studied there for three or four years with a spectacular teacher, a young woman named Sylvia Smith. She was also a marvelous pianist, and I was absolutely in love with her. I remember hoping she would wait till I was old enough to marry her. She must have been in her mid twenties. So beautiful, and played just like an angel.

There was never any doubt I was going to be a concert pianist. None. It came so easily to me. I practiced three or four hours a day. One time, when I was about eight, I was playing football in the street with my cousin Tommy. I said, I have to go practice. Some day, I’m going to play at Carnegie Hall.

Later that evening, Tommy’s mother called my mother. I called Carnegie Hall; they don’t know anything about Milt playing a concert there Sunday.

I played four-handed with Leo Smit and Leon Fleisher, both later great piano virtuosi. We were all of the same standard. I started giving recitals. At first they were part of group recitals; then I was featured. I remember my first starring concert. I did the Mozart C Minor Concerto, with the school orchestra. And there’s nothing like it. Performing a great piece of music, with all those musicians…

And then, at age fourteen, I contracted nephritis [a kidney infection]. There was no cure, in those days. Antibiotics had not yet been invented. It was a dangerous condition, for which the only cure was enforced bed rest—for two years.

The piano is a demanding instrument, and Milt was forbidden to play. He was sent from Brooklyn to Miami for two further years, to convalesce in the warmth, and to finish high school. When he was cleared to play the piano again, he assumed he could just pick up where he had left off. He was wrong. Hard though he worked to make up lost ground, he eventually realized that he was now never going to be as good as he could have been—as good as he needed to be, to perform at the very highest level. That is the standard he was convinced he would have achieved but for his illness. Anything less was unacceptable.

   His great gift was gone, and it was a shock.

   He says, It was like losing both a limb and a language.

   Recently, Milt and I went to Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, to hear the Norwegian virtuoso Leif Ove Andsnes, playing Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto. Before the concert, over lunch in the canteen, I said that I bet Milt was glad he wasn’t backstage at that moment, warming up, getting nervous—and how fortunate he was to have not had the lonely, demanding, difficult life of a concert pianist.

   He replied, I would trade everything I’ve achieved in music for that.

   But, because of his illness, it was not to be.

M.O. There was no medicine; there was no pain. But for two years I was confined to bed. I’d been an active kid. I played touch football, baseball. I couldn’t do anything like that. I couldn’t play the piano.

Richard Sparks Enough to bring on depression in anyone…

M.O. In those days ordinary people had never heard the word depression except in relation to economics. But it knocked the stuffing out of me, certainly. It was a very bewildering event. There was suddenly this big void, where before there had been certainty.

Once it was clear that it was over, that I’d never get to where I needed to be, I went into analysis. I spent a couple of years talking about all the kinds of stuff that psychiatrists think important—family, sex, dates.… The basic problem, as I saw looking back some years later, was that I was depressed about my career.

Milt’s two years lying in bed, though, were not all misery and boredom.

M.O. I became an expert on horse racing.

This came about because I read everything I could get my hands on. I probably learned far more from my reading than I would have done in school. One of the things I read every day, from cover to cover, was the newspapers. In those days they had much more about horse racing in the papers. They had a full page, the day’s races, each horse’s odds, and the form. Just for fun, I started handicapping them. I soon realized that I was doing well, and that if I could bet I’d be making money.

So I spoke to my aunt Rose. She owned a little candy store with a soda fountain on the east side of Manhattan. I showed her my notes and tables and results, and she got quite interested. Once she saw that I was winning consistently, she became my partner.

She would come over to the house, and I would give her the next day’s bets. We soon had a very good thing going. She didn’t make a ton of money, but she was coming out ahead. There was a cop who was a regular patron of the store, and he would take her bets to the bookie. This was New York in the old days.…

Unfortunately, this cop was not too smart. To save him the trouble of going to her store, Aunt Rose would have him call me to get her bets. I was fifteen, bed bound, and making bets with a bent cop. And it was all going swimmingly, until one time he called, and my dad picked up the phone. And this dumb cop asked him for the day’s bets.

So the whole thing came unraveled. In those days it was considered not nice to bet on horses. A bit seedy. So the cop ruined it for me. And for Aunt Rose. Who had been giving me money when she won.

When Milt’s two years of bed rest were over, the doctor said he had to avoid catching colds. He transferred to Miami Beach High School.

M.O. I went to live there, by myself, age sixteen. I had a small apartment. My high school friend George Bernard [later a professor in the schools of dentistry and medicine at UCLA] lived three or four streets away and eventually came in and bunked with me, so we lived together all week and he’d go home on weekends.

I never touched the piano those two years I was in bed in Brooklyn, or for the next two in Florida. It was considered too strenuous. George and I listened to a lot of music and went to a lot of concerts, but I never told him in all that time that I was a pianist. One summer he came to stay with us in New York. I went to meet him at the station, and when he walked into the house with me, he saw the piano and said, Who plays the piano? And I said, None of us. I’ve often thought about taking lessons. So George leaned over and played Chopsticks, or something really simple. I said, Wow. How do you do that? He said, It’s easy, and he showed me. See? You try it. So I said, Okay, and I sat down and hesitated, and then played a Beethoven piano sonata.

He started cursing me: How come you never told me?!

Milt’s short-lived gambling career continued—and came to a spectacularly sticky end—during his two years’ recuperation in Florida.

M.O. George and I worked out this betting scheme on the greyhounds. It was much easier than the horses—you didn’t need to know how good they were. There were eight dogs in a race, starting from traps. We discovered that, at this particular track, the Miami Beach track, it was a big advantage to be trap number one, on the inside; then two, three, et cetera, all the way out to trap eight. If you bet every race on the number one dog, you’d come out ahead.

So we’d go to the track and bet the number one dog. We were only sixteen, but there was always someone there who would make the bets for us. We made quite a bit of money.

George Bernard We’d play our greyhound system until we won, and whenever we won, we walked away. Even at age sixteen, Milt combined a good gambling instinct with real intelligence. He understood how to put the two together, and when you do that, you have the perfect combination for a businessman. Bad gamblers keep playing until they lose.

M.O. One day, the oldest student in the school came up outside my classroom window and looked at me and signaled, Come on out.… He was twenty-one already, but he had been away in the merchant marine for a couple of years and had come back to graduate. I didn’t know him really. His name was Aubrey. A very big, redheaded guy. Someone had told him I was a good math student, and he wanted to pick my brain.

He took me to Penway across the street, the drugstore, to get a soda. There was a slot machine there, a one-armed bandit. It was a new model. There was one in every store, all over town. They’d just arrived, and they were very popular.

Aubrey pulled out a notebook. It was a series of tables and numbers.

He said, I’ve been playing here all week, and I think I’ve figured out how to beat the machine.

He gave it to me and explained what it all meant and said, Okay, watch this, and tell me if I’m right.

The machine had three wheels, and there were forty or fifty possible results. Each time you put in a coin, you had to choose what win you were going for. So if, for example, you were going for three cherries, which paid six to one, and three oranges came up, you wouldn’t win. Well, obviously the three cherries were common, but they came up once in ten or twelve times, not seven—terrible odds. What Aubrey had discovered was that a couple of the big odds winners came up more frequently than their odds. Say, three oranges or three melons, I forget which. And that would pay forty to one and would come up every twenty-five or thirty times.

Aubrey told me he had been playing the machine for hours and had suddenly noticed that the numbers that opened up came in a certain order. And by deciding which of the big winners to go for when, you couldn’t lose. You just kept on winning.

So he played, and I watched him, and really, there was very little I had to do with it. He’d already cracked it; I just confirmed his findings. He’d done all the work. He had his list, and according to how the machine was displaying, he’d say, Now you bet on this one or that one. And you’d keep playing that choice until it came, which was always in fewer spins than the payout odds.

It was the gravy train, pure and simple. And there were thousands and thousands of machines. They were all over Florida.

So I helped refine the system, then copied out a second set of tables, and we decided to go into action the next morning. I called in sick and we went into Miami. Aubrey went along one side of the street, and I went along the other. And we cleaned out the machines in each store as we went up the street.

Within an hour, you broke the machine. So we’d each do one machine on a block, meet at my car, lock the money up, and go to the next block. And each do another machine. We played first nickels, then dimes, and worked our way up to quarters.

The trouble was, we didn’t think our strategy out too well. By the end of our second day, we had cleared over $1,800. It was in the car in coins. On the third day, we got arrested. The dumb mistake we had made was emptying the machines. If we’d got ahead ten dollars and then gone to the next machine—well, there were thousands of machines. We could have gone on and made a fortune. But every time a machine was empty, the next guy who played and didn’t get the payoff would complain to the proprietor.

So suddenly, the vending