Marvelous Marv

Marvin Hamlisch was the youngest student ever admitted to Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music. For his piano audition he transposed Goodnight, Irene into different keys on demand. He was seven at the time. This year, at 29, he became the first individual ever to win three Academy Awards in one night: the first for his adaptation of Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin's music for The Sting, the second and third for the score and title song of The Way We Were. After his final sprint to center stage, Hamlisch said to the audience: "I think we can talk to each other as friends."

The awards were the fulfillment of Hamlisch's plan to reach the peak of his profession before his 30th birthday. In the past five years, he has scored more than a dozen films (including Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Fat City, The World's Greatest Athlete), working up to an annual income of $80,000. The total is now soaring like the strings in a climactic moment from one of Hamlisch's scores, as royalties pour in from his own album of Sting music and Barbra Streisand's recording of The Way We Were.

That song was almost scrapped. Hamlisch had written it before the film was shot. When Streisand was ready to make the record four months later, says Hamlisch, "she asked me to compose something more complex." It took lyrical persuasion by the composer to convince the star that simplicity counts.

The Sting, however, was a snap. Director George Roy Hill had already decided to use Joplin's classic rags and, admits Hamlisch, "I was like an East Side tailor. I'd stitch in a minute of music here, 35 seconds there--it took only eight hours to do the whole job."

The Manhattan-born son of a Viennese accordionist, Hamlisch as a boy was nicknamed "Fingers" because he avoided sports to guard his hands. He went to work at 19 as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway shows, beginning with Funny Girl in 1964. He squeezed in night school too, graduating cum laude from Queens College. In 1968, at a Broadway party, the pianist met Producer Sam Spiegel, who chatted about a film he was planning to make from John Cheever's short story The Swimmer. Three days later Hamlisch handed him the completed theme for the movie.

Hamlisch has lived in Hollywood for the past two years, but he remains an unreconstructed New Yorker. Working at home on a rented moviola (a hand-operated viewer on which a film can be studied frame by frame), he even keeps the curtains drawn to thwart the distracting California sunshine. "Look at me," he says proudly, "I'm as pale as a Long Islander in February." He likes to tell about his own case of inflated Hollywooditis after the awards. "I thought," he says, snapping his fingers in fandango-like recall, " 'Baby, you are the real goods--Cole Porter, move over.' Then a friend phoned from New York. 'Hey,' he says, 'I heard you won some contest out there.'" Comments Hamlisch: "That was all I needed to get me back to reality."

Reality, for Bachelor Hamlisch, is hardly a flamboyant lifestyle. He attends a Conservative synagogue every Friday night, neither smokes nor drinks, and watches his diet carefully--the result of a bleeding ulcer a few years ago. His biggest indulgence is a video tape recorder attached to his television set, on which he replays cassettes of his appearances on talk shows. He even had some dental work done after deciding that one of his front teeth was not photogenic.

About his music, Hamlisch is not cautious: "I'm a terrific arranger and a terrific pianist," he says. "I'm a believer in strong melodies. In this sense I'm innovative, because so much music today is unmelodious." Dismissing the old dictum that film music should be unobtrusive, he believes in getting his melodies into the forefront. "If I'm scoring a sad scene, I want my music to take the audience over the emotional brink," he explains. "I want to bring a tear to their eyes."

With three Oscars staring down from atop $7,000 worth of stereo equipment, Hamlisch is working ten hours a day on the music for the film version of Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue. He has spent two weeks struggling with the title theme alone, because, he says, "I want to prove that I'm not a fluke." And he is pursuing his next goal--to write a hit Broadway musical. "I want to see my name in lights above one of the great Broadway theaters," he says, "before I'm 35."

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