“I need the therapy of doing a lot of different things, especially since discovering that I’m suffering from what Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist, calls ‘erosion of identity.’ No personal life—that sort of jazz. When I finish my show, I buy all the newspapers and magazines and read till six in the morning. Natural curiosity. I’m going to do a novel. There’s less quicksand in the written word. I’ve never had a big reverence for poetry, though. Kenneth Rexroth standing up before a jazz group in San Francisco and saying, ‘Do the dead know what time it is?’ Man! I’m working on an L.P. idea with the trombonist Bill Russo—a little satire on jazz. Things are building. Adlai Stevenson told me one night in Chicago, ‘You’re more successful with free association than I am with painstaking editing.’ Bill Blair, his old buddy and law partner; James Jones; Dr. Carl Binger, the Harvard psychiatrist; Leonard Bernstein—they’ve all been into the Vanguard. Audiences are in an oxcart until someone chooses to propel it.”
Robert Rice
JANUARY 11, 1958 (FROM “THE PERVASIVE MUSICIAN”)
S PUBLICLY AS circumstances have allowed over the last twenty-nine years—and for the last fourteen of them that has been very publicly indeed—Leonard Bernstein, a formidably gifted and communicative thirty-nine-year-old Bostonian, has been, in his phrase, “making love” to music. The affair has been incessant, ardent, triumphant, and, one might say, comprehensive. In the course of it, Bernstein has embraced the Muse (name of Euterpe) as a concert pianist, as a conductor, as a composer of both concert pieces and Broadway shows, and as a musical pedagogue on television. Last October, Bernstein was in Tel Aviv, leading the Israel Philharmonic. He had flown there the day after the opening of West Side Story, his latest musical show and one of Broadway’s biggest current hits. He had spent the day before the opening writing the introduction to a book of his, concerned mainly with Euterpe, that Simon & Schuster hopes to publish this year. (This is not the first year that Simon & Schuster has hoped to publish it; its title was originally to have been “Conversations at 30.”) Also in October, Columbia issued two records of Bernstein’s; one was West Side Story and the other consisted of two piano concertos, a Bach and a Beethoven, in which he had conducted a special recording orchestra, with Glenn Gould as the soloist. When Bernstein returned from Israel, early in November, he took on a few new chores: learning the score of the Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto, which he played with the Philharmonic as pianist-conductor just a few days ago; preparing himself to conduct seven weeks of Philharmonic concerts, four in January and three in April; and writing five or six television scripts—four of them for the Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, which he will lead Saturday afternoons this winter, and one or two of them for the television program Omnibus, which frequently features him as a freewheeling lecturer on various aspects of music. It was a little over a year ago that Bernstein was hired to share with Dimitri Mitropoulos the musical directorship of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, and it was late in November that Mitropoulos announced his resignation, to take effect after the present season, and Bernstein was appointed to take over next fall as sole musical director of the Philharmonic—probably the most important musical job in the country. This is the first time ever that that exalted post has been given to a man born in the United States. It is also the first time ever that it has been given to the composer of a song called “Wrong Note Rag.”
Outwardly, Bernstein has much of the actor about him. The bones of his face are arranged so theatrically that in shifting light he gives the impression, without moving a muscle, of being an entire cast of characters; it is hard to find two photographs of him that are clearly of the same man. His skin is dark, and his hair is thick and black, with a distinguished flecking of silver beginning to appear in it. His posture is erect and his figure is trim. (Few conductors ever get fat; leading an orchestra is stiff work.) His speech, too, could be an actor’s; his voice is baritone, with a suspicion of vibrato in it, and his diction is precise and of that curiously cosmopolitan sort that combines the broad “a” with the hard “r” and is therefore indigenous to no place or background except show business. Most people meeting him for the first time are surprised that he is quite short—he stands five feet eight and a half—since in a tailcoat on a podium, or as the subject of a television cameraman’s artistic angle shots, he looks statuesque. He is fond of clothes and is always carefully turned out; as a matter of fact, he can become as exuberant over adding to his wardrobe as over any other activity he engages in, and he has been known to invite friends to fittings he regards as especially momentous. (“Lenny’s dress rehearsals,” one guest has called them.) In the early days of his fame, his dress tended to be fiery, but in recent years it has become conspicuously cool. A few months ago, when he appeared on Omnibus to expound Bach, the jacket of his suit was so uncompromisingly three-button that it left almost no shirt front visible. Socially, Bernstein generally manages to be downstage center; he is cheerful, informal, gregarious, and a star player of parlor games and jazz piano. “Lenny is not a person it takes you six months to get to know,” an old friend has said; practically no one—not even the musicians who work for him, or, for that matter, his doctor’s office nurse—calls him anything but Lenny.
Onstage, Bernstein is even less sombre than he is off. His directions to an orchestra during rehearsals tend to be facetious, and are often phrased in pure Tin Pan Alleyese: “I want the next four bars sehr square,” or “No! No! Not rallentando, just relaxo.” One day recently, after listening to a soprano run through a larynx-breaking aria from the Mozart Requiem, he inquired, “First timesies?” And when the singer confessed that it was, he exclaimed joyously, “Marvellusio! Couragiosa!” One of his Omnibus lectures last winter—which attracted an audience estimated at eleven million people—was on the subject of contemporary music. In the course of it, he said tonality was like a baseball field, with the tonic note as home plate, and he illustrated dissonance with such parlor tricks as playing the melody of the “Habanera” from Carmen in one key and the accompaniment in another, and then playing the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with his right hand and the melody of “America” with his left—at which the vice-presidents in the sponsor’s booth became rigid with consternation over the deluge of protests that were bound to come from patriotic societies. (None ever came.) Finally, Bernstein remarked, “And so we have the two warring camps of tonalists and atonalists, with Stravinsky and Schoenberg as the heap big chiefs.” On a previous Omnibus show, “The World of Jazz,” he pointed out that a blues song was a succession of twelve-bar stanzas, each stanza being a musical setting for a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter with the first line repeated. Then, to illustrate what he meant, he rendered the following stanza from what he called the “Macbeth Blues”:
“I will not be afraid of death and bane;
I said I will not be afraid of death and bane.
’Til Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.”
It is while leading a symphony orchestra in full cry, however, that Bernstein reaches his peak as an actor—and, of course, in the estimation of most critics, as a musician as well. To say the least, he conducts con moto. Attending a Bernstein concert is an optical as well as an aural experience. His technique of communicating with an orchestra involves the hands, the arms, the shoulders, the pelvis, and the knees, to say nothing of the forehead, the eyes, and the teeth, and until last week’s Philharmonic concerts he had rarely, if ever, been known to use a baton on the podium—apparently considering a stick supererogatory. He is rather aggrieved by the fact that a discussion of his bodily movements is a feature of almost any review of a concert of his. “ ‘Acrobatic’ and ‘choreographic’ are two of the most tiresome adjectives in the language,” he remarked plaintively not long ago. He claims that he is quite unaware of what he does when he conducts—that he simply reacts to the music. Lately, though, he seems to have been keeping guard over his reactions, to some extent anyway, for his performances are almost deco
rous compared with those of his younger days, when Thomson, describing a series of hairbreadth escapes that Bernstein had enacted on the podium, called him “our musical Dick Tracy.” One important reform, in the opinion of some spectators, is the result of his marriage, six years ago, to the actress Felicia Montealegre; she cuts his hair, and she cuts it often. Though reviewers continue to carp, and one small and queasy section of the public still insists that the way to listen to a Bernstein concert is with the eyes tightly closed, there is no denying that Bernstein has always been good box-office as a conductor. Indeed, his external graces are powerful enough to be a continuing source of allure to certain bobby-soxers—a minority group, to be sure, but one that is equipped, like the majority, with dog-eared autograph books, shrill voices, and unrequited passion.
Lillian Ross
MAY 9, 1959 (“PLAYWRIGHT”)
E HAD A talk recently with Lorraine Hansberry, the twenty-eight-year-old author of the hit play A Raisin in the Sun. Miss Hansberry is a relaxed, soft-voiced young lady with an intelligent and pretty face, a particularly vertical hairdo, and large brown eyes, so dark and so deep that you get lost in them. At her request, we met her in a midtown restaurant, so that she could get away from her telephone. “The telephone has become a little strange thing with a life of its own,” she told us, calmly enough. “It’s just incredible! I had the number changed, and gave it to, roughly, twelve people. Then I get a call from a stranger saying ‘This is So-and-So, of the B.B.C.’! It’s the flush of success. Thomas Wolfe wrote a detailed description of it in You Can’t Go Home Again. I must say he told the truth. I enjoy it, actually, so much. I’m thrilled, and all of us associated with the play are thrilled. Meanwhile, it does keep you awfully busy. What sort of happens is you just hear from everybody!”
Miss Hansberry gave a soft, pleased laugh. “I’m going to have some scrambled eggs, medium, because, as far as I know, I haven’t had my breakfast yet,” she went on. “I live in the Village, and the way it’s been, people sort of drop in on me and my husband. My husband is Robert Nemiroff, and he, too, is a writer. Yesterday, I got back to writing, and I wrote all day long. For the first time in weeks. It was wonderful. We have a ramshackle Village walkup apartment, quite ramshackle, with living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath, and a little back workroom, and I just stayed in that little old room all day and wrote. I may even get time now to do some of my housework. I don’t want to have anyone else to do my housework. I’ve always done it myself. I believe you should do it yourself. I feel very strongly about that.”
The medium scrambled eggs arrived, and Miss Hansberry sampled them vaguely and went on to tell us something of what life has been like since her play opened, a few weeks ago. “I now get twenty to thirty pieces of mail a day,” she said. “Invitations to teas, invitations to lunches, invitations to dinners, invitations to write books, to adapt mystery stories for the movies, to adapt novels for Broadway musicals. I feel I have to answer them, because I owe the people who wrote them the courtesy of explaining that this is not my type of thing. Then, there are so many organizations that want you to come to their meetings. You don’t feel silly or bothered, because, my God, they’re all doing such important work, and you’re just delighted to go. But you’re awfully busy, because there are an awful lot of organizations. The other morning, I came downstairs to walk my dog—he’s sort of a collie, and he’ll be six in September—and there, downstairs, were the two most charming people, a middle-aged couple who wanted me to have dinner with the New Rochelle Urban League before it went to see the play. I just couldn’t say no. Meanwhile, I’d been getting telegrams from Roosevelt University, in Chicago, which is a very wonderful institution back home, asking me to come and speak. I kept sending telegrams back saying I couldn’t come, and then they got me on the phone, and they had me. Once I’m on the phone, I just can’t say no. I sometimes find myself doing things for three or four organizations in one day. The other morning, I started the day by taping a television program. Then I went to the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs Founders’ Day Tea, at the Waldorf, where they were giving out Sojourner Truth Awards—awards named for Sojourner Truth, who was a very colorful orator who went up and down New England and the South speaking against slavery. Then I went home and went to the Square with my dog. When I got back home, I fed the dog and put on a cocktail dress, and my husband and I had dinner in a new Village steak house. Then we went to a reception for a young Negro actor named Harold Scott, who had just made a record album of readings from the works of James Weldon Johnson. A very beautiful album. Then we went home and had banana cream pie and milk and watched television—a program with me on it, as a matter of fact. It was terrifying to see. I had no idea I used my face so much when I talked, and I decided that that was the end of my going on television. The next day was quiet. I had only one visitor—a young Negro writer who wanted to drop off a manuscript for me to read. We had a drink and a quick conversation, and he was off. I actually got to cook dinner—a pretty good one, with fried pork chops, broccoli au gratin, salad, and banana cream pie. I’m mad for banana cream pie. Fortunately, there’s a place in the neighborhood that makes marvellous ones.”
Miss Hansberry told us that she had written her play between her twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh birthdays, and that it had taken her eight months. “I’d been writing an awful lot of plays—about three, I guess—and this happened to be one of them,” she told us. “We all know now that people like the play, including the critics. Most of what was written about the play was reasonable and fine, but I don’t agree that this play, as some people have assumed, has turned out the way it has because just about everybody associated with it was a Negro. I’m pleased to say that we went to great pains to get the best director and the best actors for this particular play. And I like to think I wrote the play out of a specific intellectual point of view. I’m aware of the existence of Anouilh, Beckett, Dürrenmatt, and Brecht, but I believe, with O’Casey, that real drama has to do with audience involvement and achieving the emotional transformation of people on the stage. I believe that ideas can be transmitted emotionally.”
“Agreed,” we said, and asked Miss Hansberry for some autobiography.
“I was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago,” she told us. “I have two brothers and one sister. I’m the baby of the family. My sister Mamie is thirty-five and has a three-year-old daughter, Nantille, who is divine and a character. She was named for my mother, whose name is Nannie, and her other grandmother, Tillie. My older brother, Carl, Jr., is forty, and my other brother, Perry, Sr., is thirty-eight and has an eighteen-year-old daughter, who is starting college and is very beautiful. Carl, Perry, and Mamie run my father’s real-estate business, Hansberry Enterprises, in Chicago. My father, who is dead now, was born in Gloster, Mississippi, which you can’t find on the map, it’s so small. My mother comes from Columbia, Tennessee, which is on the map, but just about. My father left the South as a young man, and then he went back there and got himself an education. He was a wonderful and very special kind of man. He died in 1945, at the age of fifty-one—of a cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, but American racism helped kill him. He died in Mexico, where he was making preparations to move all of us out of the United States. My brother Carl had just come back from Europe, where he fought with Patton’s army. My father wanted to leave this country because, although he had tried to do everything in his power to make it otherwise, he felt he still didn’t have his freedom. He was a very successful and very wealthy businessman. He had been a U.S. marshal. He had founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago. He had fought a very famous civil-rights case on restricted covenants, which he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, and which he won after the expenditure of a great deal of money and emotional strength. The case is studied today in the law schools. Anyway, Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we we
re planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time. I’m afraid I have to agree with Daddy’s assessment of this country. But I don’t agree with the leaving part. I don’t feel defensive. Daddy really belonged to a different age, a different period. He didn’t feel free. One of the reasons I feel so free is that I feel I belong to a world majority, and a very assertive one. I’m not really writing about my own family in the play. We were more typical of the bourgeois Negro exemplified by the Murchison family that is referred to in the play. I’m too close to my own family to be able to write about them.
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