ABSTRACT
In 1958, Oscar Levant hosted his own popular Los Angeles television talk show and seemed poised to do one of two things: 1) become a national sensation as a network talk show host or 2) suffer a debilitating mental and emotional breakdown that would fi nally end his long, varied, and unpredictable career. Today he is almost forgotten, but in the late fi fties Levant was truly a “sick” star. As discussed throughout this book, the American culture of the late 1950s was a culture preoccupied with distinguishing between the normal and the sick. Social scientists wrote bestsellers diagnosing the suburbs and the corporation as cultural structures producing profound psychological changes in Americans. Vice President Richard Nixon declared mental health the number one problem facing the nation. In movies and television dramas, characters struggled with mental health and fought to keep their personal demons at bay. Perhaps the area of popular culture best remembered as part of this preoccupation was that form of humor termed “sick comedy.” Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, and others turned comedy not into a diversion away from normal life, but a diagnosis of the standards of normalcy themselves as sick. In this culture where everyday Americans were asking themselves whether or not they or their culture were sick, the pianist, composer, actor, and radio and TV personality Oscar Levant was the real, sick thing. Levant wasn’t just sick in some metaphorical or “bad taste” way. He was sick in the clinical sense. Levant had done time both on the couch and in mental institutions, and though some called him a hypochondriac, he suffered throughout his life from depression, a variety of neuroses, and prescription drug addiction.
