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Arts & Entertainment

Else Blangsted: The Queen of Film Music

The legendary 91-year-old movie music editor and North Hollywood resident talks about her remarkable life.

“Of all the great music editorsshe is the queen,” said famed film composer Perry Botkin.

It’s an estimation shared by pretty much all the composers, directors and actors she worked with during her years as Hollywood’s preeminent music editor. The exception is Quincy Jones, who called her his “Bavarian Princess.” Robert Redford, in a written tribute delivered when she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, declared that she has “the mind of an artist and the soul of a saint.”

When she received her award at the age of 88, she literally danced through the crowd, and accepted  the honor with the relaxed grace, candor and humility for which she’s long been revered. “Like everyone else, I did my job, and I did my best,” she said, “I just did it longer, not better.”

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She’s Else Blangsted, now 91, who lives in a lovely home in North Hollywood with both front yard and back yard exploding in a vibrant profusion of blooming flowers. While most people never make any time in their lives to stop and smell the roses, Else makes that time every day. It’s one of many qualities that has endeared her to so many Hollywood legends. Her best friend ever was the late great Dudley Moore, who she always calls “My Dudley.”  

These days she’s closest to the actor James Cromwell, who shares her humor and passion for politics, but also remains close to a legion of actors, composers, musicians and friends, including Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, Quincy Jones and many more.            

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Born in Wertsburg, Germany to Jewish parents in 1920, her life has been punctuated by passages of both triumph and tragedy, and though she modestly insists that living through it all hasn’t resulted in any surplus of wisdom, she does admit that, if anything, she maintained a healthy sense of humor through it all.

After the New Yorker magazine published a 40-page profile in 1988 detailing the remarkable series of events that is her life, from growing up in a Jewish family during the early days of Nazi German, getting pregnant out of wedlock as a teen, attempting suicide, giving birth to a daughter she was told was dead, leaving Germany as a girl to come to Hollywood to work as a nanny for the producer Mervyn LeRoy before getting work in the studios, appearing in Cecil B. DeMille’s silent Samson & Delilah, and eventually becoming one of Hollywood’s best and most beloved music editors, through love affairs and marriages, through the death of her husband, to meeting again the daughter she thought had died decades earlier, and much more  -- her main response to it was regret:

“It all seems pretty grim,” she said with a smile. “They left out all the humor.”

But as any of her friends know well, time spent with Else is never without humor for very long. She loves to laugh, and she loves telling funny and often bawdy stories about people she’s known well, from DeMille to Chaplin to Dudley Moore and beyond.

She eats lunch many times a week at her local haunt, the coffee shop of the  in Studio City, where she holds court at the same table she’s been at for years. It’s there Patch met up to talk to her about her remarkable life.

“I had a small part in Samson and Delilah,” she said over a toasted muffin and avocado. “DeMille was a very strange man. You can see me in the movie – I am standing behind Hedy Lamarr and they put this wig on me with blonde curls that made me look like a cocker spaniel ... There were 300 extras in this scene who had to start running when Samson pulled down the walls of the temple. I asked DeMille if we could have a rehearsal because I was scared of being trampled. He refused and did the scene – and you know anytime you fear something, that is when it will happen – I did get trampled. I got hurt. That was the end of my acting career.”

That wasn't the only reason her encounters with one of Hollywood legendary directors was not pleasant.

“DeMille was Hollywood,” she said. “He was a concept. He was an ugly bald man in riding britches with a whip. He wanted terror, he wanted confusion. I did not like him.”

So she apprenticed in the studios and eventually worked her way up the ranks to becoming a music editor, the person responsible for all the music in the film, and for working as a conduit for the composer and director of the film. 

Her first work was mostly in TV (“God-awful shows like Hazel and Dennis the Menace,” she said), but soon moved into movies, and went on to work on countless classic films, including On Golden Pond, The Great Santini, Ordinary People, In Cold Blood, Cactus Flower, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Front,  Nuts, Tootsie, All Of Me, and Six Weeks (with a score by Dudley Moore).

She explains that the role of a music editor has changed immeasurably since her day.

“It’s an entirely different system today,” she says. “We did everything by hand. No one cuts film anymore. It’s all digital. In my day, the music editor was the communicator, ideologically speaking, between the composer and the director.”

She then details the diligence she brought to the role of music editor, which began by ‘spotting’ the cues of a film with the composer and director. She’d then log a detailed description of each cue with its timing, which she rendered with exacting precision: “You describe a close-up, or a city, or two people before a kiss, whatever it is.”

Unlike other music editors, she would time her cues within one-hundredth of a second, which had a real effect, as she illustrates with two examples, both composed by the legendary composer, Dave Grusin: “In Tootsie, when he/she first goes to an interview, her heel gets caught on something, and I timed that split-second it happens. And it made a musical joke of it. You can hear it.

“In Golden Pond, when Henry [Fonda] finally catches the fish, I timed the fish. You’re not aware of it. But you like it better. For some reason you feel that he really caught that fish.”

Her meticulous tome of cues and timings was delivered to the composer, who went away to write the score. Upon its completion, she would take the score, and physically scribe the cues directly onto the film stock in preparation for recording.

Next came the scoring session, during which the composer conducted the orchestra, while she led the session. “Musicians are like naughty children,” she says. “You get 48 of them, or more, and they’d all be chatting and gossiping, and I would say, into a mike, `We are in readiness.’  Then they shut up and go to their chairs, and play.”

After the recording was finished, she supervised the process of matching the music to the movie.

But all of this entails only the surface aspects of her role. What made Else the queen was her consummate capacity to communicate candidly with everyone involved, regardless of rank, and to ceaselessly champion the composer.

“When working on movies,” she explained, “the communication is more domestic than one might think. We connect with strangers the same way we connect with people at home. And that’s important: Don’t change your language when you talk to people who have more power than you do. Language is just physical. I’m talking about what is interior.

“If we like ourselves enough, it passes not only for charm, but it makes you less of a liar about your own life. And that truth communicates itself. And I really think I’ve got that by the short-hairs. Because I will talk to Mr. Redford the same way I talk to you. It’s a liberating thing.” 

It’s true. Anyone who knows Else knows she values talent far above celebrity. She’s been singularly unimpressed by some of the biggest stars Hollywood has known, such as Chaplin, the first international movie star. She first met him in Hollywood, and then lived next to him and his wife Oona in Lake Geneva, Switzerland for years. 

“There was no awe meeting Chaplin,” she said. “He was human. And the most egomaniacal guy I ever met.

“I went to a dinner where I first met him and Oona, who was very pregnant. And Charlie was telling story after story and wonderfully acting them out. And Oona kept saying, 'Charlie, I really have to go home.'  She looked like she was going to faint. He’d say, 'Yes, Honey,' and then go right back into another story. I felt sorry for Oona, much more so than I felt entertained by Chaplin.”

Other stars who are not well-known for their kindness, such as Frank Sinatra, are remembered with surprising fondness.

“My dear friend Lee J. Cobb was dying,” she said. “Sinatra saved his life. Lee had a series of heart attacks and couldn’t recuperate. It was a bad time for him, after the House Un-American thing, people always hounding him ... Sinatra took care of him. He gave him a key. A key to a gorgeous apartment on Fountain Avenue with a houseboy when he got out of the hospital. Lee asked me to write a letter to Sinatra to thank him for saving his life.”

Of all the composers she worked with, she became closest with Dave Grusin, who scored hundreds of films. Grusin, who is retired now, happily related Else stories, lovingly discussing her propensity for doing yoga in the studio, which she did for decades before it was in vogue, and her eternally unflagging advocacy for the composer’s work to be heard.

Let us hear the music!,” he related, was her relentless refrain.

“Tony Bill made a movie called Six Weeks, and he calls me and he says, ‘I got Dudley Moore to do the score, and he’s got a music editor but I think you two should meet, you’d like each other.’ We made a date down in Venice to run the film. My Dudley was already there wearing a silver silk cravat. I said to myself, ‘He’s more frightened than I am!’

“We sat down, looked at the film, we both liked it, nobody else did. I said to him, ‘You have two and a half minutes to make up your mind that I will be your music editor.' I went away. Came back and he nodded his head very definitely. We made that movie and then another and then another.”  

Like many people, Dudley needed someone to trust, and when Else came into his life, he found a life-long confidante. Through his triumphs and his sorrow, she was there for him. During the last years of his life, while he was in New Jersey suffering from a rare brain condition called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy from which he died in 2002, Else would call and read to him over the phone.

“Always Dickens,” she remembered. “He loved Dickens.”

Asked to describe why she loved him so, she’s succinct.

“My Dudley was a wonderful person,” she said. “A truly good person.”  

At 92, she’s not coy about discussing the inevitable, but promises she will make it to 100: “And that’s enough. One gets tired.”

Her humor and love of music has been one constant that’s carried her through her life, and as a longtime music editor she can’t help but score the music she wants played at her memorial.

“God Bless The Child by Billie Holiday is number one,” she said. “Because it’s ‘God bless the childwho’s got his own.’ And I’d also like Randy [Newman] to be there to perform You Can Leave Your Hat On."

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