Alfred Newman was an Academy Award-winning composer and musician. He was nominated an amazing 45 times for his film work and won an Oscar(tm) for 9 of them (only the prolific soundtrack composer John Williams has more). If you count his family, including two brothers who also won Oscars as well as his well-known nephew, Randy Newman, the Newman family has been nominated an amazing 92 times for their composing prowess. But you’ve probably never heard of Alfred. And yet you know something both by and about him, both of which have nothing to do at all with the film scores and the Oscar wins. He’s another one of history’s known unknowns.
The Newmans were from Connecticut, a family that changed its name when they immigrated from Russia as Jewish refugees from one of the Czar’s pogroms. His mother, who had a total of ten children, insisted that her oldest, Alfred, who wa born in 1900, should have piano lessons. Her father, after all, was a cantor back in Russia, and she loved music. So, from an early age, Alfred was put in front of a musical instrument and expected to love it. Luckily, he did. He also shared that love with his little bothers Emil and Lionel. At the tender age of 12, Alfred helped support his large family by playing upwards of five shows a day at a local silent movie theater as the accompanist. By the time he was 20, Alfred was making a good living conducting the orchestras for Broadway musicals that were written by the likes of Kern, Gershwin, and Rodgers. And that’s when Hollywood called.
Irving Berlin was among the early musical geniuses who embraced the relatively new medium of “talkies,” the motion picture with soundtracks. Berlin had come across Alfred in New York and thought that the young conductor and musician would be the perfect fit for the film industry. Samuel Goldwyn of MGM offered him a contract and the rest, as they say, was history. Over the course of the next three decades, Alfred would compose and conduct the music for such screen classics as How Green was My Valley, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wuthering Heights, How the West was Won, The King and I, and scores of others. Even Charlie Chaplin, making the transition to sound pictures, used Alfred to score and arrange the music for his classic film City Lights, the great impresario’s first foray in to talkies.
So, you get the idea. Alfred was a big deal in the musical side of the film industry during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. Besides the award-winning films listed above, the reason you know Alfred’s work is for two other, only slightly related things. The first is that the music Alfred is best remembered for is only about 12 seconds long. He composed it for the 20th Century Fox Studios. It’s the fanfare that plays while the spotlights crisscross the 20th Century logo. In fact, that short tune is probably playing in your head right now.
The other thing Alfred is best know for has nothing to do with either music or film. In fact, it’s something that Alfred himself didn’t like. He died at a way, way too young 69 years of age, and he was afraid that his legacy would be possibly tarnished by this other thing he became associated with. It was a magazine that decided to name a character after him, and the characterization wasn’t flattering at all. In fact, it has since become synonymous with simple, moronic mindsets.
The magazine in question was the comedy rag, Mad Magazine, and the character that represents the silliness of the publication is known as Alfred E. Newman.
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