The black, seen-it-all eyes of Larry Adler have focussed on Charlie Chaplin and Salvador Dali across a tennis net; caressed Ingrid Bergman looking up from his pillow, stared into the hard face of Al Capone.
Body now a little bent after 83 years, he walks with small steps to applause on to the stage, lips pursed over the reeds of his German, hand-tuned $7,000 mouth-organ, 15 years old, tarnished and slightly pitted from his spittle. ‘For Crissakes don’t call it a harmonica.’ Out from London on an Australian tour, Adler - wearing a black wool roll-neck sweater and black trousers despite the 30-deg. Queensland heat - confesses he can still be effected by audience attitude.
‘I enjoy applause. But any enjoyment I might have depends on what I consider to be the musical intelligence of the audience. Some audiences you can impress by just being a good showman. I would not do that. I would not give them disrespect any less than I would respect myself following an act of showmanship. But if I sense the audience is musically sophisticated and if they like what I am doing, it gives me great pleasure.’ He revels in memories of performance; with Django Reinhardt in the 30s and lately, Sting, Meatloaf and Elton John. But the impenetrable eyes are waiting for the next question, the brain in gear, the answers unhesitant; replies, like his music, composed. There isn’t a question he hasn’t been asked; he has a thousand dollars for an original one.
If he talks in journalism "takes", it is because print has, for 50 years, provided a second income for the world’s greatest mouth-organist. At home in Chalk Farm he writes on his computer for a string of magazines, including ‘The Oldie’. He recently stopped writing restaurant reviews, but warns complacent London restaurateurs that he may take it up again.
His reporting started in 1943 when the Chicago Sun asked him to do a weekly column from London, "where I’d gone with Jack Benny." ‘It soon became a daily column and when I got back, the Foreign Editor told me he had submitted my work for a Pulitzer Prize. They said: "Come on! He didn’t write those pieces, he’s just a mouth-organ player." ‘Writing is a hobby. I am first, a performer,’ he says, stroking a black-and-grey eyebrow.
When he is not practising a difficult concerto he plays tennis, either at the Paddington Club or at Queen’s where his pal, Victor Lowndes, the Playboy Club owner, is a member. ‘And I get time for other enjoyment; somebody asked me on TV the other day: "Larry, there’s a story that you still chase girls?"
‘I told him that I not only chase, but sometimes I catch. But at my age I can’t remember what to do next.’ He looks at you, unblinking, waiting to be asked how he manages it at such an age. ‘I love my work. And I think it’s love of what you do, if you are doing it well, that keeps you relatively young, no matter what your years happen to be. It is a great mistake for men when they reach 60, or 65, to throw it in and say that’s all about life. You see, my father died in his 60s when he retired from being a plumber. He had no other interests. I’ve never been tempted to retire, I don’t think good musicians do retire. You might die on the stage - or in my case, the tennis court - but you don’t retire.’
Larry Adler’s hooded eyes behind the heavy-framed spectacles narrow a little when he is asked about being blacklisted by the Senator McCarthy witch hunt when he refused to distance himself from communism; soften when you bring up his own Oscar-nominated composition for the 1953 movie Genevieve.
He assures me that his million-dollar lips never need treatment from the sucking and blowing and he believes the work he pushes his lungs to do, gives him good health. ‘I don’t think it’s any accident that I am rarely ill.’ He has five mouth-organs and keeps a spare in his trousers pocket on stage in case there’s a problem with the veteran he is performing on. ‘The German Hohner is the best; they hand-tune the reeds. It has a steel and silver frame which means it’s like being able to tune a Stradivarius violin. The old frames were made of wood and weren’t all that reliable.’
He will never change instruments in view of the audience. ‘They’d say you kept a special mouth-organ for effects. I’d never play one of those tiny trick mouth-organs, they are not instruments. And I don’t know whether they’ve perfected electronic mouth-organs; but if they have I’d never play one. You can only be a musician and sound like a musician by playing a normal instrument.
He still has to practise. ‘In October I’ll be in Pittsburgh to do the Arthur Benjamin concerto that was written for me and I haven’t played it in a long time. I want to be in shape before I go there.’
