Larry Adler, who died on August 6th aged 87, wasn't just the world's best-known player of the mouth organ (he did not like the word "harmonica"), he was the man who gave it dignity. He was also the best-known raconteur about the great days of Broadway and Hollywood.
As he said when he wrote his autobiography: "I thought of calling it Name-Drops Keep Falling on My Head after someone said, 'Damn it Adler, can't you even tell me the time without dragging in Sammy Davis Jr?' " In the end he called the book It Ain't Necessarily So - because "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about and when I play It Ain't Necessarily So, I'll be plugging my book."
Larry Adler was an intimate of Fred Astaire and played with him on Broadway. The man who gave him that part was the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Eddie Cantor was one of his early patrons. He played for years with Jack Benny and in the 1930s made a film with Vivien Leigh. He was at parties with all the Hollywood moguls.
In 1994, he became the oldest artist ever to be awarded a gold disc for a million-selling album - appropriately of Gershwin melodies, accompanying entertainers from a different generation, including Elton John, Sting and Kate Bush. In the same year, he released an album in which he accompanied Gershwin.
Lawrence Cecil Adler was born in Baltimore. His Jewish parents were both born in Russia. In middle age he discovered that the family wasn't called Adler at all. His grandfather, who ran the family dairy, came to America with the name Zelakovitch. "He got tired of waiting in immigration queues, always last to be called because his name began with a 'z'. Thus he became Adler."
He studied piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. When it came to the end-of-term concert, he decided he was being patronised by one of the teachers who asked: "What are we going to play, little man?" That was the point at which he decided to play Yes! We Have No Bananas, instead of a Grieg waltz. He was expelled at just about the time he discovered he could make better music with a mouth organ.
At 14, he ran away to New York. He wanted to play with Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals, but failed the audition. "Kid, you stink," said the band leader. Looking for work, he landed a 40-week contract playing on a country-wide tour in the intervals for film performances. He earned $100 a week, huge money for those days and almost unknown for a 14-year-old.
His next break was working with Eddie Cantor, then, next to Al Jolson - Larry Adler's idol - one of America's most popular entertainers. Cantor didn't employ him as a mouth-organ player, but to dress up as a pageboy. When he was 17 he opened with Fred and Adele Astaire and Marilyn Miller in the Vincent Youmans show Smiles at the Ziegfeld Theatre. The show flopped but, full of enthusiasm and self-importance, Larry Adler was convinced he was a star and lived like one. He bought expensive suits on the advice of the gangster Legs Diamond, one of the many hoodlums - Al Capone was another - with whom he came into contact at the speakeasies which were now his regular watering holes.
From New York, he went to Hollywood and played at parties. He played in a picture called Many Happy Returns, starring Ray Milland and Burns and Allen, in which he was accompanied by the Duke Ellington orchestra. Later, he played the first ever mouth-organ solo of Rhapsody in Blue. When Gershwin heard it he said, "It sounds as if the goddamned thing was written for you." Years later, Ira Gershwin gave him Lullabye Time, a suite written by George that had never been published or performed before. It was dedicated to Larry Adler.
He went to London, and in 1938 was one of the star names in a British film, St Martin's Lane, starring Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton and Rex Harrison.
During the war, he went all over the world entertaining troops with Jack Benny. It all came unstuck when the House Un-American Activities Committee started investigating him - mainly because he had been a member of the Committee for the First Amendment, led by Humphrey Bogart, which went to Washington to protest at the blacklisting of Hollywood writers. He was blacklisted himself, although never brought to testify.
When it became obvious that he wouldn't get work in America, he took off for Britain. In 1953, he wrote the music for the film Genevieve. He also composed the music for The Hellions (1961), The Hook (1963), King and Country (1963) and High Wind in Jamaica (1964).
He went back to America in 1952 to play in a concert, but he remained blacklisted and could find no permanent work in the country. It was the 1970s before he went to the US regularly.
Larry Adler performed in Ireland during the 1960s. While his son Peter was studying at Trinity College Dublin he gave a one-man show at the Eblana Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1965. He also performed at the Wexford Opera Festival. While in Dublin, he stayed in Conor Cruise O'Brien's house in Howth. Larry Adler also played at the Gate in 1967 and appeared on RT╔ Television's Late Late Show.
He was not a religious man, but his Jewish origins were powerful in his life. For years he refused to play in Germany because of its Nazi past, although he had entertained survivors of the Holocaust there after the war.
He was married and divorced twice, to the former Eileen Walser, with whom he had two daughters and a son, and to the British journalist Sally Cline, with whom he had a daughter.
Larry (Lawrence Cecil) Adler: born 1914; died, August 2001