The name Max Steiner may not be familiar to the general public, but the music he created is recognizable to millions of fans worldwide. Steiner was a pioneering film composer who invented techniques that are still used today to score a motion picture. He was responsible for the music behind some of the most popular movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age: King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), Now, Voyager (1942), The Searchers (1956), and countless others. Even the most casual moviegoer has heard the melodies of “Tara’s Theme” or the “Theme to A Summer Place.” And anyone who has ever watched a Warner Bros. film from the 1940s will have heard Max Steiner’s opening fanfare over the studio logo.
The story of Max Steiner is also the story of Hollywood itself. Through the course of his career, one can see the evolution of the motion picture industry, from the silent era to the widescreen spectacles of the 1950s. Steiner put his musical imprint on some of the most beautiful films ever crafted, and yet his own story was far from picture-perfect.
In addition to the trials he faced professionally as an artist, Max Steiner’s personal life was often chaotic and sometimes tragic. Financial mismanagement, four marriages, and a troubled son were the realities he faced when he wasn’t conducting on the studio recording stage. Now, for the first time, that story is brilliantly told in a new biography, Music By Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (2020), by Steven C. Smith.
Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated journalist and producer of more than 200 documentaries about music and cinema. A supervising producer of the series A&E Biography, he has worked with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. He is also the author of A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (1991). I recently interviewed Steven about his Max Steiner biography.
MH: Thank you, Steven, for taking the time to discuss your new book with us. When did you first discover film composer Max Steiner?
SS: I was about eight years old, so that would be 1971. One day, my family’s modest television set seemed to grow in size, to encompass all of Skull Island, as I watched King Kong for the first time. The characters, the settings, the action, and the music all made me feel that I was inside the movie. I’ve never forgotten the thrill of that experience.
After that, I began to notice when Steiner was the composer of films I was watching. And my love of classic movies and their soundtracks was encouraged by my older brother, Wayne Bryan, who was a Broadway actor by that time. One of Wayne’s friends was a Hollywood Reporter columnist named Robert Osborne. Bob was also very encouraging. He would invite me to some of his elegant parties at his residence in Hollywood, and around the age of nine and ten I met some of the stars he’d later interview on TCM. That was a wonderful time.
Bob played a part in another memorable Steiner screening for me: in 1976, Gone with the Wind was shown for the first time on television. And since I had an early video recorder, Bob asked me to record GWTW for him, which I did!
MH: What motivated you to write a biography on him?
SS: I began work on my first book, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, while I was in college and it was published in 1991. After that, I had to figure out how to make a living—and writing books about composers, while very fulfilling, wasn’t going to pay my rent. From 1992 to 2015, I worked mostly as a television producer, making documentaries about Hollywood history. I was a producer on A&E Biography, on AMC’s series Backstory, and ultimately, I made over 200 programs for cable networks.
Then my happy world was hit by the cultural equivalent of a meteor: reality television! By 2007, reality shows had replaced the kind of documentaries I loved to make. Luckily, I found a perfect home at a production company in Hollywood, called Trailer Park. There, I produced “behind-the-scenes” pieces about films current and classic. These appeared on DVDs and Blu-rays for studios like Warner Bros., Universal, and Fox.
One day, Leonard Maltin, who’s been a friend since the Herrmann book, recommended that I interview Gary Giddins. Gary is a brilliant writer on jazz, and also the definitive biographer of Bing Crosby. He’s equally insightful about Hollywood filmmakers, and over the course of many on-camera interviews for my projects, Gary and I became friends. Then, in 2015, he changed my life.
“How would you like to write a book for a series I’m editing for Oxford?” he asked. Gary explained that the series would include biographies of artists who had been overlooked when it came to book-length studies. He named some of the subjects they were considering, and when he said “Max Steiner,” I said something like, “Stop! I’m in!”
That was the beginning of a five-year adventure that took me to Vienna, London, New York, and to the libraries of my native Southern California. Luckily, most of the surviving paperwork for RKO and Warner Bros. productions were in Los Angeles and accessible to scholars.
MH: Having previously written a well-received biography on composer Bernard Herrmann, I would imagine that many of those research contacts gave you a solid foundation for writing this latest book?
SS: You’re absolutely right, Matthew. Sadly, almost all of the people I interviewed for Herrmann who also knew Max had passed away by 2015. But I still had the transcripts of those conversations, and I remembered many of their Steiner comments. Also, many of those individuals, like violinist Louis Kaufman and his wife Annette, had published books or articles detailing their friendships with Max.
Most significantly during my work on Herrmann, I became close friends with John W. Morgan, a film composer who was mentored by Max in the 1960s. John and Max spent long hours together discussing Steiner’s scores in detail, using his pencil sketches for reference. Max also talked about the people he worked with, how the studios worked…so thanks to John, I had insights I couldn’t have found elsewhere.
The other incredibly important person I met in the 1980s was James V. D’Arc, a superb (now-retired) archivist at Brigham Young University. Jim saved Max’s papers and scores and session recordings. Jim also preserved the papers of Max’s third wife Louise, who was Steiner’s principal harpist for years and the mother of his only child. So without Jim D’Arc, mine would be a very different, much shorter book!
MH: Your library research was extensive. One of the primary resources for any Steiner research in this country is BYU, which I’ve visited twice. It must have been quite a challenge for you to organize and narrow down this wealth of information. Were there any details or stories you discovered during this journey which you had to leave out of the 400+ pages?
SS: Indeed, there were. Thanks to Jim D’Arc, I had the “good problem” of going through thousands of primary documents—everything from Max’s private correspondence to his utility bills. In addition to the material at BYU, I found hundreds of pages in Vienna related to the enterprises of Max’s father Gabor, who could be the subject of his own book, and Max’s grandfather Maximilian, who convinced Johann Strauss Jr. to write for the stage, thus launching the golden age of Viennese operetta in the 19th century. Then there were the materials related to Max’s Broadway years that I found in New York and elsewhere.
Holding these documents, which were often literally colorful—color printing in programs, handwritten letters—it was easy to feel that I was back in time, witnessing the creation of these stage works and films. And since Max lived 83 eventful years, and worked on approximately 300 movies, I did have to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. However, if I included everything I found, the resulting book would be literally exhausting. And since Max was a great dramatist who knew the importance of tempo, I wanted the book to move at a brisk pace. Hopefully I was able to find the right balance between giving time to key events and keeping a sense of forward momentum for the reader.
But some of the material I had to leave out or shorten has found a life elsewhere. For example, on January 29th I’ll be giving a webinar on Steiner for an organization in London—so for that, I’ll be sharing “new” information and imagery about Max’s years in Britain (before he came to America).
MH: Music By Max Steiner is a fascinating read for film buffs. I knew I would be interested because of the Hollywood history, but I was equally engaged by Steiner’s background growing up in Vienna and all the musical influences that were a part of his life. What was your biggest discovery in researching Max’s life?
SS: I knew that Max’s father Gabor was a famous showman in Vienna. But I didn’t know that Gabor had created a massive amusement park that anticipated Disneyland by sixty years. It was called “Venice in Vienna,” and it was a multi-acre recreation of that Italian city, with canals, gondolas, palazzos. But the park also had this incredible mix of what some would call “high” and “low” culture: concert halls, rollercoaster rides, beautiful restaurants, wrestling arenas—you name it!
You know the famous Ferris wheel we see in movies like The Third Man? Gabor had that installed. It was in his park, and it’s the last surviving piece of it. “Venice in Vienna” also had what appears to be the first movie theater in Vienna: it opened in 1896, just months after the Lumiere Brothers had their first film screenings in France. At age eight, Max was probably among the first people in Europe to see movies there. Gabor was decorated by the head of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Joseph…so the Steiners were a very important family in Austria. At least until Gabor’s fortunes collapsed. And that’s when Max had to venture out and find his own way in the world.
MH: In addition to his symphonic film scores, Max Steiner wrote a song that became a number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100—the “Theme From A Summer Place.” The Grammy Award-winning song literally turned Steiner’s fortunes around. But beyond its commercial success, the song seemed to have struck a nostalgic chord with that generation of the early 1960s. Listening to it now, it certainly evokes a special time and place, and that comes through in your description of it. Is it fair to say that this song is a prime example of how Steiner was able to adapt (his classical style) to the changing times?
SS: Yes, “Theme from A Summer Place” is a good example of how Max kept listening to the music of his time, even if it wasn’t music he particularly enjoyed. “Theme from A Summer Place” holds a very important place in Steiner’s life, because for decades, Max had been trying to write a hit popular song. And although he had a phenomenal gift for melody, as we know from his film scores, his various songs, with the exception of his theme from Now, Voyager, didn’t register as pop hits.
Then, in 1959, he scored A Summer Place; and for the young lovers Johnny and Molly, he wrote basically a pastiche of a simple rock’n’roll ballad, complete with repeating triplets a la “Blueberry Hill.” Well, for once Max did not expect that theme to have a commercial life. But it was recorded by easy listening conductor Percy Faith, and it became what Billboard Magazine named the best-selling instrumental in the history of early rock’n’roll. Written by a 71-year-old symphonic composer from Austria!
MH: The general public is probably most familiar with Steiner’s score for Gone with the Wind, notably his “Tara’s Theme.” Many of his film scores are available on cd or on YouTube now. Is there a particular score you would recommend to listeners?
SS: One of the joys of writing this book was discovering, or re-discovering, so many Steiner scores that are tuneful, moving, and often invigorating. Listening to the main title of Adventures of Don Juan starring Errol Flynn is like drinking three cups of strong coffee! And as I researched his life, I came to appreciate that Max was successful as a dramatic composer partly because he loved people, he loved life, he loved being in love. There was tremendous passion in the man.
As for scores I’d recommend, I suggest watching the following movies, then listening to the CDs of them: Johnny Belinda (one of Max’s favorites), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, Of Human Bondage (1934 version), The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, Dark Victory, Jezebel, and The Letter. And that’s just for starters!
MH: Having just finished your book recently, I was struck by your keen sense of analysis. You really understand musical history and are able to write about the technical aspects of Steiner’s scores in terms most readers will understand. You write with the insight of a composer! Do you have a musical background?
SS: Thanks for the kind words, Matthew. I began studying piano and music theory when I was ten, and kept taking music classes through college. I had vague hopes of being a professional pianist, until I arrived at USC and realized that I was nowhere in the league of the musicians I met! Instead, I decided to try to write something about Bernard Herrmann, after learning that there was no book about his life. And that put me on what proved to be a very happy professional path.
MH: What are you working on now?
SS: Currently I’m enjoying the promotional phase of the Steiner book—and it’s very different from what I had imagined, due to Covid. Instead of showing up at book stores and libraries, I’ve been giving webinars about Max. And that’s actually been a bright spot in this miserable, tragic year of 2020: the webinars are being viewed by people around the world, and that’s enabled me to connect with individuals I never would have known otherwise. Max Steiner was such a gregarious person, I think he would appreciate the fact that we’re not only talking about his amazing body of work, but that he’s still bringing people together.
Park Ridge Classic Film would like to express its gratitude to Steven Smith for this virtual interview. For more about Steven’s work, be sure to visit his website:
www.mediasteven.com