We open on the hands of Oscar Levant.  At the piano, playing a Gershwin tune.  An offscreen voice announces it’s “The Oscar Levant Show,” with Oscar Levant, June Levant (his wife), and “Oscar’s special guest,” Fred Astaire.  As the camera pulls back, we see Oscar finish the piece, then rise from the piano bench as he grabs a lit cigarette from an ashtray.  A hand is pressed to his chest.  Heard offscreen is scattered applause.  “Thank you,” says Oscar, in that familiar, sing-song rasp.  “Gee, I forgot my name.”  His wife obligingly laughs.  Oscar continues:  “This is the first time I haven’t walked out on the show one minute before.  It’s an unprecedented situation,” he says, “but I quit.”  Then he introduces himself:  “This is Oscar Levant, the irreligious Billy Graham of Los Angeles.”  Now he sits down—”I’m worn out and I can’t think, talk, or breathe, and what an irresistible combination of events.”  And he inhales a slow drag on his cigarette.

Thus starts—in a uniquely stream-of-consciousness style—what may be the most unique American TV show ever.

I can’t think of a better way—or maybe a better antidote—to ring out the benighted year of 2025 than with Oscar Levant.  From 1958-1960, Oscar had his own TV talk show—called, unsurprisingly, The Oscar Levant Show—broadcast live, from one to three times a week, on a local Los Angeles TV station.  Only one complete kinescope of one show episode survives (in a wretched, wambly, watery print), recorded May 6, 1958, when guest Fred Astaire appeared.  It was Astaire’s first TV appearance, and his agent recorded the show (thank you, Mr. Agent, whoever you are) to, per Levant’s biographers, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, get an idea of how he came across on TV.

Astaire comes across as fine (the shows’s a must for Astaire fans).  He’s suave, charming, elegant, and (unlike Oscar) looks as calm as if reclining in his bath.  Astaire had been in show business, as he says on the show, since he was five-and-a-half-years old, and I’m sure little could faze him by now—not even one of Oscar’s out-of-left-field remarks:  “We’re now doing a show without the elements of time and space,” says Oscar, “we’re floating in our own orbit.”  Which could describe the experience of watching Oscar Levant…

Unlike the deft, dapper, impeccable Astaire, Oscar on TV is a mess.  A witty, caustic, endearing mess, but still…a mess.  From almost his opening shot, the rumpled, crumpled Oscar skews expectations of what a TV talk show host is like.  It doesn’t end there.  Oscar smokes—constantly, throughout the show’s 70-odd minutes (minus commercials), a cigarette always in hand.  If the hand isn’t holding a cigarette, then it’s pressed on the piano keys or against his chest.  He’ll also slouch, shake, blink, twitch, grimace, bare his teeth, and prowl restlessly around his tiny set, even walking off camera (much of the show is watching Oscar not keep still).  It’s the proverbial slo-mo train wreck from which you can’t shift your eyes; you watch because, as Oscar’s biographers note—you have no idea what’s coming next.  His performance is fascinating, if alarming, to watch.  Because you sense it’s not a performance.  Or, if such, it’s one springing from the reality happening within Oscar, right before us.  Oscar’s not acting; he’s being himself—pure Oscar.  You cannot…not watch.

For those who remember him, how best to describe Oscar Levant?  Composer, pianist, conductor, actor, writer, wit, raconteur—all true.  But beyond that, he might best be described by the title of a 1938 Broadway play on which he worked as a conductor:  The Fabulous Invalid.  Oscar was the nearest to a professional hypochondriac we had; “My health,” he said on a quiz show, “is the concern of the nation.”  He spent the latter part of his life, Josh Getlin writes, “as a confessional trailblazer, a man who spoke freely and outrageously about his deteriorating mental state.”  He was also, says NPR, “America’s first publicly dysfunctional celebrity.”  Today, says Getlin, he’d be “a social media star.”  But in the 1950s, such dysfunction—and the admittance of it—was unheard of.  Yet Oscar bared it all to the American public.  His TV appearances were revelations from the psychiatric couch for gossip-rag consumption; as his biographers observe, Oscar knew that “part of his whole appeal lay in his unpredictable behavior.”  Of which he took knowing advantage.

Though he was a reputed hypochondriac, Oscar was also really ill.  By 1958 he’d already suffered a major heart attack (rising from his sickbed literally six weeks later to make a film); he was in and out of at least five mental institutions for severe depression (the kind in which you literally can’t get out of bed) and undergone electric shock treatments (which affected his memory); and he was addicted to drugs, including Demerol, paraldehyde, Thorazine, Dexedrine, sodium amytal, chloral hydrate and god knows what else (per his biography, he took Thorazine before going on air).  Much of his last 20 years was spent in the constant pursuit of meds—even, per his biography, once desperately swallowing a friend’s wife’s birth control pills.  Anything to null the pain of his existence.

Despite it all—the depression, pills, shock treatments, mood swings—what comes through, as seen on his TV episode, is brilliant.  Oscar may have been in a drug fug while on air, but his mind, his timing, his wit, still work like razors.  As Oscar himself said, “functioning is the important thing.”  When, on the show, Astaire says he’s forgotten the words to a song, Oscar ripostes, “Have you had shock treatments, too?”  Asked at what age he started show biz—forty-five, Oscar replies; “I was a boy wonder.”  Taking a break from the piano, he announces, “I’m going out to take a saliva test.”  (That one sounds straight from the autobiography.)  Then he lights another cigarette.  You won’t see that on TV today.

In, around, and between the piano playing, the jokes, the prowls, the cigarette drags, are strange, striking, spontaneous moments.  As Fred plays the piano, Oscar tries out a weird, shuffling dance step that leaves him clutching the instrument (at the 14:30 mark).  Then he drops his cigarette to the floor and grinds it out with his shoe (you won’t see that on TV today, either).  Later he strolls off the set, telling June Levant (pertly chic and wickedly funny), who’s perched next to him as if soldered to her stool (to keep guard?), to read from a Time magazine profile of him.  June obeys.  The autobiography again peeks through (“It’s all about me,” says Oscar).  “But for Oscar, [age] 51,” June reads—“DON’T SAY THAT!” Oscar bellows suddenly off camera.  June grins, and reads further:  In 1953 Oscar was “packed off to a Pasadena sanitarium”; offstage, Oscar is heard yelling, “you packed me off, I didn’t even know where I was!”  “Somebody had to do it,” June sweetly replies.

And there’s Astaire, of course.  Oscar introduces him as “the greatest song and dance man in history,” a paean Astaire wears modestly.  He’s relaxed, informal, as natural as Spring rain; you sense, as with Oscar, something authentic here.  He sings several Great American Songbook songs, mainly from his movies—”They Can’t Take That Away From Me”; “Our Love is Here to Stay” (once as himself, once as how movie mogul Sam Goldwyn would sing it); “I Won’t Dance” (and Astaire doesn’t, he only sings); “They Didn’t Believe Me”; “A Fine Romance”; “Night and Day” (briefly).  His style is intimate, casual, off the cuff; he seems to be winging it, but he has the experience, the ease, the showmanship, to make it seem so.  If he forgets words, he just hums the tune.  Launching into “S’Wonderful”—“I’ll get there,” he says.  Singing “A Foggy Day in London Town,” Fred repeats the verse, varying the rhythm, the phrasing, the verbal stress.  It’s effortless, simple, almost improvisatory.  You have to remind yourself who this is—Fred Astaire, American Legend.  Watching him, as Oscar’s biographers note, is like being at “a kind of private Hollywood party at which the public was invited to eavesdrop.”  S’wonderful to behold.

Astaire’s appearance, and its significance (“an undeniable coup for Levant,” say Kashner and Schoenberger), similarly affects Oscar; his admiration, even adoration for him—“I’m a little overcome that Fred is here”—is as heartfelt as a child’s.  “You evoke a fervor in me.  I’ll have to go to Lourdes,” he says, “and confess and become a saint, I’m so overcome, I’m so thrilled with you.”  He then asks Fred to “talk to June a minute while I cry.”  Fred responds with affection (and a little patience).  But the prickliness also comes through.  When Fred corrects Oscar on a movie title, Oscar glares:  “You’re the first man who ever dared to correct me in public.”  The audience laughs, uneasily.  Oscar says he’s feeling “awfully tired and I’m sick”; “Oscar,” Fred replies, “you’re the strongest man I know”; “Well,” Oscar snaps back, “the strongest man who’s dying.”  Always there’s the autobiographical—asked what’s her favorite Astaire-Rogers film, June says it’s Carefree—“Because it’s about a psychiatrist,” she says, adding (with a sly look at her husband), “and you know what we’ve been through.”  If Astaire is a relaxed Hollywood party, are Oscar and June a tense evening chez Levants?

Oscar did get into trouble on his show, however; not due to his health nor his hospital-bed revelations, but to his wit.  Oscar was just—too ready with the quip.  His comment, per his biographers, on the rabbi-blessed marriage between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller—“Now that Marilyn is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her”—brought on audience gasps.  The show was cancelled (Oscar protested he didn’t mean his remark literally, but “in connection with the kosher dietary laws”!), loyal fans picketing the studio.  A well-received TV guest stint led to the show’s renewal, on which Oscar continued his “adder-tongued comments about Hollywood’s celebrities” (“Lenny [Bernstein] has no humor about his egomania; I do”).  Celebrities continued to appear, including Christopher Isherwood, Linus Pauling, James Mason, Dean Martin, Dmitri Tiomkin, Eddie Cantor, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey, Walter Winchell, and Aldous Huxley, who discussed hallucinogens—which, says Levant’s bio, “was daring, exotic stuff in 1959.”  Per Oscar, Huxley “’not only made converts on that show, he made addicts.’”  Oscar continued irrepressible.

Also continuing were the controversies.  The show was cancelled yet again when its sponsor, Philco, withdrew support after Oscar needled a company representative on air.  An infuriated Oscar called for a Philco boycott, fans again protested, while no less a personage than Frank Lloyd Wright announced he was cancelling his Philco order.  Once more the show was renewed, but Oscar began to lose interest.  His increasing addictions lent a “wild tilt” to his behavior (like when he smashed a corporate-sponsored radio to “smithereens” on set), which caused wary producers to tape Oscar’s show for broadcast, to control him.  “[I]t was no longer,” write Kashner and Schoenberger, “the live and dangerous enterprise…[but] had become a chore.”  Soon Oscar walked away from his show for good.

But Oscar was still seen on TV.  Jack Paar invited him onto his own show, which, unlike Oscar’s, was nationally broadcast.  Levant’s appearance there, say his biographers, “came as a shock to the rest of the country,” as the rumply, scruffy Oscar “clearly lacked the groomed, unctuous, ‘cult of sincerity’ manner that even in 1958 marked the average television personality.”  Audiences still laughed, albeit nervously, at Oscar’s confessional jokes, such as his revelation he was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, “’my fifth in two years'”; yet they “enjoyed being shocked by his black humor.”  “For the first time in the country’s popular media,” says his biography, “mental illness and its various treatments were coming out of the closet.”  And Oscar bodaciously led the way.

There were additional television appearances, including on the stylish quiz show What’s My Line, during which panelists collectively gasped after removing their masks to view Oscar in the flesh.  Making what turned out to be his final televised appearance, on the Merv Griffin show in 1965, Oscar then chose to remain in seclusion at his home, writing two autobiographies, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (transcribing his tape-recorded reminiscences) and The Unimportance of Being Oscar.  His last public appearance was in 1972, a surprise attendee at a luncheon honoring Charlie Chaplin.  He died later that year, peacefully in bed; the young policeman who responded to the emergency call took down his name with “no sign of recognition…The forgetting had begun.”

I suppose most people today have forgotten Oscar Levant.  About the most anyone will know of him are the 17 Hollywood movies he made, sometimes shown on TCM, some of them classics—Humoresque; The Barkleys of Broadway; An American in Paris; The Band Wagon, which I think is the greatest of the MGM Freed musicals.  (There’s also his last film, the glossy, high-budget, definitely non-classic The Cobweb, in which Oscar plays a convincing version of his neurotic self and which I wrote about here.)  Yet a man of Levant’s fearsome wit should be remembered.  Oscar wasn’t merely funny; during the purse-lipped 1950s, he was an astute, and deadly, commentator on his era’s idiocies.  One noted jibe, made in 1956 on the CBS TV panel show Words About Music (on which Oscar appeared regularly), referred to then-Vice President Richard Nixon:  “’He swings a big mouth,’” went the crack, “’and carries a little stick.’”  Network honchos, per the bio, purse-lipped about Oscar’s “too risky” wit, pressured the show to tamp down its star.  In response, Oscar quit; bereft of his presence, the program went off the air three weeks later.

We could use another Oscar Levant.  Seven decades after his show, TV programs are still being pressured, and censorship is still real, and omnipresent.  One can only dream how Oscar would comment on America, its culture and its politicians, today (that Nixon gag could certainly apply to the current White House occupant).  The more proper citizenry will no doubt point out Oscar’s (very real, and sad) mental and pharmacological issues, and dismiss his commentary as diseased, distorted, and…well, improper.  As Oscar himself said, he “’made insanity America’s favorite hobby.’”  Is it any different today?

Yet Oscar’s illnesses paradoxically freed his wit; they “’giv[e] me insight,’” he claimed.  “There is a thin line between genius and insanity,” went his most famous quote, and “I erased that line.”  For an insane man, though, his madness was very sane.  I’m tempted to see in Oscar—pounding at his piano, incessantly smoking, incessantly wheezing, in all his rumpled, crumpled, declining glory—a representation of an America also in decline.  As Oscar said about himself, we’re in “’a state of ‘chaos in search in frenzy.’”

Yet Oscar had the wit, the self-awareness, and the courage to observe, and jab, such chaotic frenzy—a quality so needed today.  Maybe Levant was nuts, but it’s the nuttiness of Lear’s Fool, speaking edgy truths to the mad king; and I wish he was here now, to observe, report, and skewer with a poniard’s thrust.  As I look back on 2025 and wonder, with trepidation, what’s in store for 2026, I can only hope for another Oscarian wit to arise, floating in its own orbit.  Yes, Oscar displayed his brilliance under less-than-ideal circumstances (protesting letter writers called his program “a sick-sick show”)—but boy, what a swell party he threw.

Good night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are.  And Happy New Year.

You can watch the complete (decaying) print of The Oscar Levant Show with Fred Astaire here.  Courtesy of the Richard Glazier YouTube channel.

Bonus Clip:  Here’s Fred Astaire with Oscar and June Levant on The Oscar Levant Show, singing “Isn’t It a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain,” which he originally sang in Top Hat.  Moments like this one are meant to be preserved:

Bonus Clip 2:  Here’s Oscar Levant’s appearance on the TV show What’s My Line, October 17, 1965.  Oscar enters at the 22-minute mark—blinks, twitches, cigarettes, and all: