I was thirteen years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I remember the day very clearly. I had gone with my parents to the Polo Grounds to see the New York football Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers in the last regular-season game of the year. Tuffy Leemans, the star fullback for the Giants, was being honored that day.
Instead of sitting with my parents, I was watching the game from the press box with Dick Fishell, who was doing the radio play-by-play for WHN. Dick was a good friend of my parents and I really looked up to him because he was good-looking and had all the girls. It just seemed to me like he had it all. When the news came in to him just before halftime, Dick looked at me and said, “Shit, they bombed Pearl Harbor.” I said, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?”
At halftime, I went down to see my parents, who were sitting about ten or twelve rows back from the field, and I asked, “Where’s Pearl Harbor? Because they just bombed it.” My father said, “Who bombed it?” and I said, “The Japanese.” So that’s how my dad found out about our involvement in World War II. This was long before CNN and twenty-four-hour news, of course, so no one else at the Polo Grounds knew a thing about it until the game was over.
My father was forty-three years old when the war started. Even though he was too old to serve in the armed forces, he worked as a civilian consultant for the Air Force at Wright Field in Ohio. He also sold $5 million in war bonds at special events and helped bring entertainment to servicemen in hospitals. For me as a kid, World War II was something I read about in the newspapers and heard other people talk about. It really didn’t affect me directly at all and until the war was over I knew nothing about the millions of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
What I remember clearly from those years is coming home from watching the New York football Giants play the Chicago Bears at the Polo Grounds on November 14, 1943. When my dad and I walked into the house my mother was listening to the radio. Still really excited about the game, I started to tell her about it when she interrupted me. “I’m sorry you weren’t here because you missed something unbelievable. Bruno Walter was supposed to conduct the New York Philharmonic but he got sick, so this young, unknown conductor took over and did a great job. His name is Leonard Bernstein.” I went into my room and I thought, “Leonard Bernstein? Shit, I know this guy.” And I did.
At that time, I had already begun taking piano lessons from a woman named Rose Raymond, who had studied with Leopold Godowsky at the Vienna Conservatory. She lived on Riverside Drive and Eighty-Sixth Street, in Manhattan. Once a week, I would sit with her for an hourlong lesson, and it was always brutal because she would make me do all these finger exercises at the keyboard without ever letting me play a single note. At one of her recitals I was supposed to play “Clair de Lune” but I forgot the music and really screwed it up good.
Even though I thought I had no talent and still hated to practice, I would ride the subway once a week from Forest Hills into Manhattan, get off the train at Fifty-Third Street, and then take a double-decker bus to Rose Raymond’s apartment. No matter how cold it was, I would always ride on top because I really loved being up there. I was sitting on top of the bus one day with a couple of other brave people in the cold when this young guy who I thought was kind of weird came up the stairs and sat down next to me.
When I started whistling a tune, he said, “Is that ‘Two O’Clock Jump’?” I said, “Yeah, how do you know that? Are you a musician?” He said he was, so I asked him if he played in any of the local bars. He said, “No, actually I’m a conductor.” When I asked him what he conducted, he said, “The New York Philharmonic.” I said, “Come on. I know who conducts the Philharmonic. Bruno Walter.” And he said, “Well, I’m an assistant conductor.”
After we had introduced ourselves to one another, I was getting off the bus at Eighty-Sixth and Riverside and the last thing I said to him was, “Well, I’ll see ya on top someday, Lenny.” What I meant was that I would probably see him again someday on top of the bus. Now he had made this sensational debut by stepping in at the last minute for Bruno Walter on a nationwide radio broadcast. The next day, the New York Times ran a front-page story about it, so I wrote him a letter, but I never got a response.
When I told my mother how I’d met Leonard Bernstein, she thought it was marvelous. Although I think she secretly hoped I would be conducting or composing for the Philharmonic some day, she always made a point of telling me, “Music is not a career I want you to have. I just want you to be able to play for your own pleasure, the way I do.”
A couple of years later, I went to music camp at the Tanglewood Music Center in western Massachusetts. Before I left, Morton Gould, a well-known composer and conductor who was one of my parents’ friends, told me, “Don’t worry about the girls. Look out for the guys.” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but the first night I was there, this guy asked me to take off my shoes and socks so he could put his foot up against mine. I thought that was really weird so I refused. Even if I had taken off my shoe, I would have only gone as far as my sock.
I was at a Tanglewood faculty-student reception when I saw Lenny Bernstein, so I reintroduced myself. Lenny was with Felicia Montealegre, whom he later married, and when Lenny realized who I was, he said to her, “We have an amazing past.” Because she thought we must have done more than just run into one another on a crosstown bus, she said, “But he’s so young, Lenny.”
Lenny was brilliant, and I always had huge admiration for his work. He could be writing West Side Story in the morning and then go conduct Bach in the afternoon, but I didn’t see him again until I was working to help Ted Kennedy win the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary in 1980. I was attending a dinner party at his sister Jean Smith’s house, and Lauren Bacall was also among the other guests, when Lenny came up to me and said he wanted to talk.
“Listen,” he said, “have you been telling people that I once met you on a bus?” After I told him I had, he looked at me and said, “That never happened. You just dreamed it up. I wish you would stop telling this to people.” And I said, “Holy shit!” Because I thought this made the story even better.
While I was going to Forest Hills High School, my parents would sometimes drive down on the weekend to Philadelphia to visit my aunt and her husband in Elkins Park. They had three sons, and the Binswanger boys were always roughhousing and having fun. Even though their family wasn’t very Jewish, either, we would all play hide-the-matzoh at Passover.
I really liked being with the Binswangers, and I was always sorry when my mother and father and I would have to get back into my dad’s Oldsmobile. On the drive home, we’d listen to the New York Philharmonic playing Brahms and Beethoven on the radio. The music was very dark and it would already be getting dark outside, and I really hated that ride because I knew I was going back home to where I had very few friends and was going to be alone again.
You know that book Is There Life After High School? To me, it didn’t look like there was. For four terms in a row at Forest Hills High School, I was marked down for excessive lateness. The reason I never got to school on time was that I had trouble sleeping at night because I kept hearing music in my head. I had real insomnia as a kid and I think it all started when I heard my mother say, “I only had four hours of sleep last night. If I don’t get a nap today, I won’t be able to function.”
To me, that meant that if you didn’t get enough sleep you would get sick or die. It was just a statement she made in passing but it really got into my head. My insomnia became so bad that I started taking sleeping pills when I was sixteen or seventeen. My mother was taking them, too, and I got one from her whenever I needed something to help me get some sleep. As an adult, this became a really bad habit I had to work very hard to break.
By this time in my life, my parents were going out almost every night. Whenever a new play or a nightclub opened in Manhattan, they would get an invitation so my dad could write about it in his column. They had a really
active social life and whenever we would go to dinner at a place like Danny’s Hideaway, a great joint on East Forty-Fifth Street where all the celebrities went back then, they would always see all these people they knew, like Earl Blackwell, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Louis Sobol, who were also newspaper columnists like my dad.
I would be sitting at the table talking to my parents about something really important to me and right in the middle of whatever I was saying, my mother or father would interrupt me by saying, “Oh, look, there’s Louis Sobol. Hey, Louis!” Although I always wanted to say, “Hey, I’m talking here,” I never did.
Even though I was in the general program at Forest Hills High School, which meant I did not have to take any state Regents exams, my grades were always really bad because I just didn’t care about what they were teaching me. Mechanical drawing and Spanish had no relation whatsoever to what I cared about, so I never paid attention in class. Instead of listening to the teacher I’d read scores by Ravel underneath my desk.
One night when I was a sophomore or junior, my mother came into my bedroom and said, “You know, your dad and I have made a decision. We’ve bought you a Steinway grand and we push you all the time to practice, but it’s obvious you don’t want to play the piano. So we’re giving you the choice. You can stop, if that is really what you want to do. You don’t have to take lessons anymore, and you don’t have to practice.”
After my mother walked out of my room, I thought, “Man, this is great! Free at last.” But later that night, the Jewish guilt started creeping in and I thought, “Jeez, I can’t do this to my mother.” So I kept right on taking lessons from Rose Raymond, and maybe even practicing a little harder than before. But I still had no real relationship to the music I was playing.
Although I still didn’t have many friends, New Year’s Eve always seemed like something special to me. It was the night when you were supposed to go out and celebrate and have a really good time. Because I wanted to be part of that as a teenager, I developed a routine on New Year’s Eve that never varied.
Right after dinner I would go into my room to get dressed, always very warmly because I’d gotten that message pretty clearly from my mother. Then I would leave our apartment and walk about three blocks to the Seventy-First Street subway station and get on the train. I’m sure my parents must have been a little bit worried that some pervert might take advantage of me on the subway, but they never said a word about it. Since it was a safer time, nothing bad ever happened to me.
It would take me about half an hour to get to Times Square. When I came out onto the street, I would just go with the crowd. Even though all the lights on Broadway had been turned down because of the war, there would still be about four hundred thousand people there. Men in suits and coats and hats, and women in fancy dresses and fur coats, and lots of servicemen in uniform. Everybody would be drinking but me. I was just part of this great mass of people, none of whom knew me. It was like I was invisible—I could see them but they couldn’t see me.
At midnight, people would start blowing on little tin horns and throwing confetti in the air. Lots of people would be kissing each other but no girl ever kissed me. Why I chose to do this, not just once but year after year after year, I have no idea. I guess I just wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I thought, “This is what you do on New Year’s Eve. You go to Times Square and maybe something wonderful will happen.” But it never did and then I would get on the subway and ride back home by myself. For me as a kid, New Year’s Eve was all about expectations, but no matter how many times I went to Times Square, the night never lived up to any of mine.
In terms of music, my big breakthrough came when I was fifteen years old and started using a fake ID to sneak into little jazz clubs like the Three Deuces and the Spotlight on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. Sometimes there would be more people onstage than in the audience. Dizzy Gillespie was the guy I loved the most and he became my hero. I worshipped him because everything he did was so cool and I loved the way he looked onstage playing that funny-looking trumpet of his. One night I saw him standing out on the street with a monkey on his shoulder, so I went right home and asked my mother and father if I could get a monkey, too, but of course they said no.
It wasn’t just Dizzy, either. I’d go to Birdland to watch the Count Basie Band, with Sonny Payne on drums, and they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around—it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way.
Using the name Happy Baxter, which was as close as I could get to Bacharach without sounding Jewish, I formed a band with four other guys my age and we played a couple of high school dances in Forest Hills. What I liked best about playing in public was that I got to meet girls who would never have talked to me for any other reason. I remember playing a Saturday-night dance at a Catholic church in Forest Hills where there must have been twenty pretty girls hanging around the piano. As a teenager, I thought a lot about girls, so when it came to deciding to become a musician, that night definitely made an impression on me.
There wasn’t much talent in the band but we did have a good drummer, Norman Feld, and a saxophone player named Jack Conn, whose father had cofounded the big music publishing company Bregman, Vocco, & Conn. Jack would get us arrangements for free. We would rehearse at his house and also go to the Nola rehearsal studio, right off Broadway on Fifty-Fourth Street, where the woman at the front desk would let us rehearse for free. Sometimes there would be jam sessions going on with the top names in jazz. One night when the piano player didn’t show up, a great clarinet player named Eddie Barefield, who had worked with Bennie Moten and Fletcher Henderson, let me sit in with him and some top guys.
Even though I was now a lot more serious about music, I still got minimal action in high school. I thought I had gotten laid in Rego Park one night with a girl who went to school with me but it wasn’t even close to going all the way. There was another girl I knew who had colossal tits and the two of us would go up on the roof of her building and I would dry-hump her and come just like that! I actually got laid for the first time during the summer after my junior year in high school when my father got me on this USO tour with a collection of vaudeville musicians who couldn’t get work anywhere else.
It was a variety show, and the tap dancer Hal Le Roy was the big star. Roy Smeck played banjo and I was the boogie-woogie piano player, as well as by far the youngest guy on the tour. We all traveled together by bus and train to do shows in military wards and hospitals in places like Martinsville, Virginia, where the audience consisted of guys who’d had half their faces shot off in the war.
Before I went on the road, I persuaded my mother to let me take the braces off my teeth. She agreed on the condition that I put them back on when I got home again, which of course I never did. The one time I really needed my mother to tell me what to do, she didn’t, and as a result, I’ve had problems with my teeth throughout my entire life.
The highlight of the tour for me took place one night when this older woman who was a singer took me to bed. Even though I pretended to know what I was doing, she knew the truth. But she was very kind to me and that was the first time I ever got laid. I couldn’t wait to tell my few friends what had happened, but when I got back to Forest Hills, none of them seemed all that interested. When I showed my younger cousin the condom I was now carrying around in my wallet, at least he was impressed.
In addition to the jazz I’d heard on Fifty-Second Street, I had also started listening to the French Impressionists. I really liked Debussy, and Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Suite no. 2 was a big favorite of mine. Even though I still wasn’t a very good musician and wasn’t doing anything to advance my career, I did like listening to Freddy Robbins, a really good deejay my par
ents knew who played jazz on WOV.
One day, I heard him announce a piano competition. The first prize was fifteen lessons with Teddy Wilson, who had played with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. The second prize was fifteen lessons with either the great boogie-woogie piano player Albert Ammons or with Joe Bushkin, who played jazz piano in the hottest clubs in the city. So I decided to enter the contest.
Because there were a hundred and fifty contestants, I wasn’t sure I would even get past the first round, so I didn’t tell my parents about it. I just went in to the radio station by myself and played “Laura” and “How High the Moon.” I was told they were going to pick fifteen of us to continue on into the next round.
When a telegram came to our house notifying me I had made the cut, I had to tell my parents what I’d done. When I went in to the radio station to play again, I made it to the finals along with two other kids. The three of us had to play onstage in Town Hall in front of an audience that included my parents, all of Freddy Robbins’s radio listeners, and a panel of eight judges.
I was competing against a white kid from New Jersey and a really nice black kid named Warren Vaughan. When the judges came back to announce their decision, they said it was a tie between Vaughan and me and we would each have to play one more song to decide the winner.
By this time I was so nervous that I just kept licking my lips so I could get some saliva going in my mouth. While I was waiting to play, Joe Bushkin came over to me with his girlfriend Nellie, a hot-looking blonde who seemed kind of drunk. When she said, “Show Joe what you were doing to your lips,” this made me even more nervous. But when I started talking to Joe, he turned out to be an enormously cool guy and a very free and wild spirit who was unlike anybody I had ever met before.
Just before I had to go out onstage again to play, Mary Lou Williams, the great jazz piano player who wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, walked in. I don’t know if Warren Vaughan played better than me, which he probably did, or whether the panel felt they had to vote for him because Mary Lou Williams was there, but he won and I came in second.
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 2