LB summoned everyone over to the piano that the Baldwin company had installed for him there, so he could play the latest special birthday song he’d prepared for me.
He’d written new words to a number from Mass called “God Said.” In the current production, I played guitar on stage during this song. Now, in front of the suite full of guests, my father made me accompany him on my guitar while he sang the new lyrics in his boozy croak:
Good . . . God . . . Jamie’s in Mass
Moving her ass(k)—not—
Why she’s in Mass . . .
Movin’ her ass, brother,
Movin’ her ass, sister,
Movin’ her ass, mister,
Movin’ her fine, flat ass!
My ass was flat? LB just liked the alliteration. The song had some amusing, raunchy lyrics, and I tried to be a good sport about it all.
Then later that evening, still seated at the piano, with the hangers-on still hanging, he gestured to a crease in his forehead and said to me, “You see this line here that runs right down the middle? That’s the Line of Genius. You don’t have one.”
He was sort of kidding and sort of not kidding.
“Well, ex-cuuuuuse me!” I replied, making light of his remark by quoting our old favorite, Steve Martin. But it did seem unusually mean; what had made my father feel compelled to make such a joke at his daughter’s expense in front of all those people? Was he simply jealous of my young birthday? Was he turning a wrinkle into a victory point? It didn’t seem right to take it literally, to take genuine offense. Of course I wasn’t a genius. Was I . . . ? I couldn’t believe he’d railroaded me into even asking myself such a question.
After the first performance of Mass, my father gave me a rib-compressing hug and told me I’d glowed on the stage. The truth was, I loved every minute of performing in Mass. I especially loved it during the Fraction, when the entire cast had to remain stock-still for eighteen minutes while the Celebrant had his ranting breakdown. I’d feel oddly safe: just a member of the ensemble, floating in the amniotic fluid of my father’s music within the great red womb of the Kennedy Center Opera House.
In the middle of the run, Harry Kraut cooked up a double birthday extravaganza for me and the conductor of Mass, John Mauceri. Two hundred people showed up at Pisces disco, including the entire Mass cast, as well as all Harry’s and LB’s local pals, mostly gay men. It was at this event that Harry mentioned there was a new “gay plague” going around, making young men mysteriously sick. He said the nickname for the disease was WOG—Wrath of God.
Hours into the party, when everyone was thoroughly inebriated, my worst nightmare came true: the whole Street Chorus, plus LB, got up and sang a surprise rendition of “Good . . . God . . . Jamie’s in Mass.” There they all were, my new friends with whom I’d been feeling so one-of-the-gang, singing my father’s icky lyrics at me:
She can sing head, yeah!
She can sing chest, yeah!
Oh, what a goddamn chest!
Later that night I wrote to Ann: “This is the price I pay for riding on the LB train.”
Holiday card, 1981: goofing around at the Watergate.
Library of Congress, Music Division
16
Quiet-ish
Stephen Wadsworth Zinsser, a Harvard friend of mine, asked me for an introduction to LB, to interview him for Opera News magazine. The interview was never published, but the two of them bonded over music, literature, wordplay, and the intense emotions they shared over having both recently lost a beloved family member: my father had lost his wife at about the same time Stephen had lost his college-age sister in a car crash. In the crucible of their combined grief, they conceived their opera, A Quiet Place—a sequel of sorts to LB’s one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, which he’d composed back in the early 1950s.
T in T, as we all called the earlier opera, was a portrait of an unhappy marriage in post–World War II suburbia. My father based the couple on his own parents; he even began by calling them Sam and Jennie, but eventually gave the wife his grandmother’s name, Dinah. Perhaps in a superstitious gesture to ward off bad luck, he wrote the opera while on his honeymoon. (I wish there were some record of how his bride felt about that.)
T in T is one of my favorite LB pieces; it’s a miniature masterpiece. The opera opens with a jazzy trio huddled around an old-fashioned radio microphone, extolling the virtues of suburbia in their smoothly persuasive harmonies:
Our little spot, out of the hubbub,
Less than an hour by train;
Parks for the kids, neighborly butchers,
Saves us the trouble of summers in Maine!
In old-time radio style, the trio advertises their product: the supposed perfection of postwar middle-class suburban life (white life, that is—and, interestingly, with no specified religion). Sam and Dinah struggle with the widening chasm between the image of themselves that society is selling them and the way they actually feel. Their marriage is a mess, and they can’t communicate with each other, except to bicker at the breakfast table:
Sam: Pass me the toast.
Dinah: You might have said please . . .
Sam: This coffee is burned.
Dinah: Make it yourself.
I so admired how my father made the two vocal lines intertwine and overlap in that breakfast scene—a perfect musical evocation of a heated argument, and a perfect example of how music can amplify a libretto. And that libretto: my father managed to make it sound truly, conversationally American. (Stephen would take that approach to the next level in his own libretto for the sequel.)
In the ensuing scenes, Sam goes off to submerge his emotions in the manly, minor victories of office life and the gym, while Dinah seeks solace at her psychiatrist’s, and later at the movies. In time-honored fashion, the husband suppresses his feelings, while the wife marinates in hers.
Blending the jazzy trio with Sam’s spiky swagger and Dinah’s wistful lyricism, my father created a completely personal, wholly American musical vocabulary for portraying his couple in their shiny apple of a perfect world, with its worm of despair hiding within. He also wrote one all-out hilarious, showstopping aria for Dinah—“What a Movie!”—in which she begins by scoffing at the film she just saw, then gets carried away, reliving the exotic, escapist romanticism she secretly couldn’t resist:
It’s a dazzling sight—
With the sleek brown native women
Dancing with the US navy boys
And a hundred-piece symphony orchestra:
“ISLAND MAGIC!”
I didn’t really get to know T in T until my father started working on its sequel with Swoozie (the nickname Daddy coined from Stephen’s initials, SWZ). Their plan was to pick up the story many years later, just after Dinah has been killed in a car wreck that appears to have been an alcohol-fueled suicide. The two grown children, Junior (who is mentioned but not seen in T in T) and his younger sister, Dede (a new character), drive down from Canada for the funeral with their shared lover, François (also a new character). After the funeral, they all spend the night with grieving Sam in “the little white house” from the first opera, and thrash out their various issues. That was the spine of the story, fleshed out with elements of psychosis, incest, homosexuality, and alcoholism. Yup: just a story about an average American suburban family.
And no political agenda to be seen anywhere. It appeared that after his ambitious attempts to change the world—through Mass, through 1600—my father was now turning inward, to a ravaged psychological landscape, for his subject matter.
The trick was to get him to actually sit down at the piano and compose. There were constant concertizing interruptions; his oath to set aside conducting somehow hadn’t come true at all. Also, he was having a harder time than ever getting up in the morning—that is, the afternoon. Four p.m. was a typical LB wake-up time. Occasionally, Alexander and I shared a meal with him at the Dakota around nine p.m.; our father would be having breakfast.
Yes, he wa
s depressed. He hated getting older, hated his diminishing physicality. But the other part of the problem—and the two were inextricably entwined—was that he was continuing to put prodigious quantities of uppers, downers, and alcohol into a body that was growing ever less efficient at metabolizing all those substances. It fell to the team at the Dakota—Julia; Charlie, the personal assistant; and Ann, the gifted new chef—to kick-start the Maestro every day. And this task also fell to Stephen when the whole household (minus Julia) moved to Indiana University in the dead of winter for a concentrated period of composing and work-shopping. Stephen and Charlie told me later how they would drag LB bodily out of bed and push him to the piano to compose.
While my father was going through his composing torture in Indiana, I was going through a minor musical torture of my own, in a recording studio in New York City. Brian was producing the sessions, and had written one of the songs. I was singing—and paying. Was it his project or my project? The hours and the dollars flew away; I fought a chronic sore throat, hated my singing, gnawed my lips to shreds.
Polygram Records heard the demo tape and passed: “Too smart,” they said. I went back to LA, and the drawing board.
By the following summer, the delays on the opera were becoming an emergency; Houston Grand Opera, which had co-commissioned the work, was presenting the premiere the following season. So my father resolved to spend two uncluttered weeks working with Swoozie in Santa Fe. But first, he had a little something to do—in Los Angeles.
LB was having a disagreement with the Tanglewood administration. So he’d decided, instead of going up to Tanglewood that summer, that he would inaugurate the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, a Tanglewood-esque initiative with orchestral and conducting students, concluding with some concerts at the Hollywood Bowl.
With a sinking heart, I felt my experience at Harvard repeating itself: Daddy was “following me onto campus.” Maybe it was just a coincidence. But now that I was finally building some songwriting momentum, and making those demos at last with David Pack, it filled me with the ancient ambivalence to contemplate my father’s arrival in the distant refuge I’d gone to such pains to create for myself.
Jamie’s first LA demo.
He arrived in shaky form: exhausted and irascible. I read the label on his Dexedrine bottle: “One daily.” By dinnertime, he was adding scotch to the mix. The combined substances seemed to alter his personality. This father of mine—who reliably helped his struggling friends with “loans” he knew would never be repaid; who was so kind and attentive that even those he met for five minutes reported a deep connection; this father who readily gave his name, money, and time to every worthy organization that requested it—was now prone to throwing lit cigarettes at us across the dinner table or calling people “fuckface.”
I’m pretty sure he thought he was being an adorable rapscallion.
My father had once told me a story about a lady—in a book? on a radio show?—called Madame Reformatsky who was always attempting to change and improve the people around her. He’d shared that story to warn me against thinking I could make my boyfriends better—but really, LB was the biggest Madame Reformatsky of them all. One of his rescue cases came along to LA: Ted, a blond, whey-faced young man whom Harry had arranged to be a paid assistant. His duties seemed mainly to consist of annoying the daylights out of chef Ann and assistant Charlie.
In July, Alexander came out to LA for his birthday. At the lavish house in the Brentwood hills where my father had been lodged, the party was an all-day, all-night epic that put tennis court, pool, and hot tub to good use. My housemates, Marjorie and Elliott, brought along their new baby, Sam—my godson! When Daddy finally appeared poolside at four p.m., he was enchanted with Sam; “I feel like a grandfather,” he said. “Well, you’re a god-grandfather,” I told him, a little sadly. Having a kid of my own was not in my immediate plans—after all, I was on my rock star track—but it was hard to suppress the notion while living in a house with a new baby. In any case, I was certain there was something wrong with me, that it would never happen. Maybe I’d done too many drugs. Or maybe I just lacked the instinct; women my age made a fuss over babies to an extent that left me feeling deficient. It seemed somehow unimaginable to me that I would ever have a kid.
Alexander’s party concluded in grand form with the EMS coming to pick up Ted after his major vomiting event in the living room.
My father remained miserable throughout his time in LA. I sensed that it pained him deeply not to be at his beloved Tanglewood, that he felt genuinely bad about it. Plus, he wasn’t composing his opera, either. He slept around the clock whenever he could. The rest of the time he fueled himself forward with his array of substances. I worried about him; I felt his anxiety as if it were a rash on my own skin.
The hardest feat in the world to pull off was to have a little one-on-one time with Daddy. He was always surrounded by the hordes: the entourage, the fans, the fellows. So it was a minor miracle when he came out one afternoon to visit me in Venice. We sat together on the beach, just the two of us, chatting in the sun for a few hours. We sang pop songs from the ’60s together; he remembered all the lyrics to “Paint It, Black,” the tune to “Pretty Ballerina,” the bridge to “Here, There and Everywhere.” What a prodigious mind was still in there; I had to marvel.
At the end of my father’s stay came the concert at the Hollywood Bowl. I loved that huge amphitheater, dramatically wedged into the surrounding Hollywood Hills: the picnics and wine on the little folding tables, the glow of the stage intensifying as twilight descended, the desert air cooling our arms under the night sky. And all the music.
The first half went beautifully. I was drenched in tears during the final chorale in Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Nobody could conduct Aaron’s music like Daddy did; he was so close to his friend and mentor, he could practically channel him. Then, during intermission, Marjorie and I got stoned. This proved to be a mistake.
The concert was to conclude with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which LB would play, conducting from the piano—as he’d done for decades to perennial acclaim. He’d sounded terrific all week whenever I overheard him practicing in the Brentwood house. But recently he’d developed a new problem: in performance, his fingers turned icy and wouldn’t move properly. Harry had arranged for me and my friends to sit in the very front row, directly in front of the piano. Now I writhed in pot-amplified proxy agony as LB garbled passage after passage. The huge crowd at the Bowl seemed to love it anyway; there was a roaring ovation at the end.
For an encore, LB returned to the piano and played a solo Gershwin prelude. He’d played it beautifully for me earlier in the week, but now, in addition to some wrong notes, he also appeared to forget how it went in the middle. “He’s fudging it!” Marjorie whispered. It was true: for a while there, he was making up the Gershwin as he went along.
What my father needed to do, more than anything, was to wrap it up in LA and go to Santa Fe to work on his opera with Swoozie. But when he finally got there, he came down with such terrible bronchitis that he had to go home. Anyway, that was the excuse; maybe he was crashing from his amphetamine-fueled LA schedule. He even canceled some upcoming concerts in Europe—but not all of them. Nina and I flew over to meet him in Vienna.
Going on the road with our father had been such superb fun when we were kids that Alexander, Nina, and I spent the later years trying over and over to recapture the experience. Yet the truth was, his endless hangers-on and louche habits—what we couldn’t help perceiving as the Harryness of it all—were making the touring experience ever less enjoyable for us.
But there could still be magic. On this trip, Nina and I discovered the glories of the Vienna Philharmonic. We were amazed to see them play a Saturday afternoon concert at the Musikverein with LB, then run over to play Otello in the pit of the Staatsoper that evening. The next morning at eleven they were back at the Musikverein for another concert with LB, then back to the opera that same night for a performance of C
apriccio—and then all the next day, rehearsal and video retakes with LB. Their energy and sheer devotion to their work was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
Here at last, Nina and I realized, was a professional orchestra of the highest order that was as passionate about music-making as our father was. They were a uniquely organized cooperative, unburdened by American-style union rules. Back home at the Philharmonic, we’d seen rehearsals where, at the stroke of noon, the Local 802 shop steward in the violin section would stand up and point at the clock, whereupon the musicians would rise out of their chairs midbar, leaving my father fuming on the podium. Such a thing would never happen with the Vienna orchestra; they were willing to rehearse until they got it right, even if they ran over by half an hour. Daddy loved them for that—and the music they created with him was sublime. Harry organized live audio and video recordings of those concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic: all the Brahms symphonies, all the Beethoven symphonies, Mahler, and more. Harry may have been a burden to us, but he gave the world some treasures.
Then the whole gang, orchestra included, went to Munich. After a gorgeous Brahms concert, my thirtieth birthday festivities culminated in an after-party at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, where my father’s penthouse suite had its own private entrance to the hotel’s swimming pool. Birthday pool party at two a.m.! But so many hangers-on. They were a mixed assortment: a combination of the LB working team—his audio engineer, his video director, their spouses, his publicist, musical and personal assistants, maybe a doctor or a masseur—combined with the various young men and women who were local, or were friends of Harry’s, or had followed along from elsewhere. Daddy never seemed to get tired of the hubbub. In fact, he seemed to need it—desperately.
Famous Father Girl Page 21