by Mike Wallace
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B E N T O N : One of the mouthiest, anyhow.
W A L L A C E : Well, you know what he calls you?
B E N T O N : No.
W A L L A C E : A patriarchal cornball.
B E N T O N : Well, very good.
W A L L A C E : What do you think of that assessment?
B E N T O N : I don’t care anything about that. (Laughs) He’s a simpleminded art critic. Well, it’s all right. If he likes to see it that way, all right. I call him an arty critic. Canaday’s only one example of a whole pack of them.
W A L L A C E : So —but this does not really sting you? You don’t take it—
B E N T O N : When I was young, it did. Yes, I used to get angry.
Today I just laugh.
W A L L A C E : Are you a cornball?
B E N T O N : Probably. What of it?
In 1935, when he was at the height of his success (his self-portrait had recently adorned the cover of Time magazine), Benton became so fed up with the art scene in New York that he left the city where he had lived for many years and returned to his roots in Missouri to get back to what he called “human contact with real people.”
He later described New York and other big cities as “coffins for living and thinking,” and when I asked him why he was so aggressively anti-urban, Benton replied, “I just feel that life within them is simply not good enough anymore. You don’t get enough out of it. The pressures are too great, the dirt’s too much, the stinks are too much, and the intellectual world stinks, too, when it’s shut in and doesn’t get out into the world. I think that the intellectual world of New York is even worse than the Congress of the United States.”
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I also reminded him about his controversial criticism of Picasso, whose works he had disdained as “artistic decadence.” He elaborated on that indictment: “What I meant to say there, that when art comes to be made out of art rather than out of the meanings that are in life, it is entering into a period of decadence. Now, from this I would say that Picasso represents, more than any artist, that peculiar state because he makes pictures out of pictures all the time.”
In the 60 Minutes profile, I noted that Benton and his wife, Rita, spent half the year on Martha’s Vineyard and the other half at their home in Kansas City. What I did not mention was that my wife and I were among their summer neighbors on the Vineyard. Before I did the story on him, Benton and I had, at best, a nodding acquaintance.
That was mainly because his family lived up-island, near Chilmark, the site of a lively art colony; our digs were in Vineyard Haven, where distinguished authors (like my friend Bill Styron) and stellar journalists (like my friend Art Buchwald) preferred to estivate.
One day in the summer of 1974, a little over a year after my piece onBentonwas broadcast, he called me to request a favor. He had beenasked to take part ina lecture series at the Methodist Church inEdgartown, the purpose of which was to raise money for the Martha’s Vineyard Arts Association. The problem was that Tom Benton had no stomach for making speeches of any kind in any forum, so he had agreed to participate only onthe conditionthat he could bring along Mike Wallace and the 60 Minutes profile to serve as props or helpmates. I readily gave my consent to that arrangement.
Evenunder those circumstances, whenthe fateful evening arrived, Tom showed up at the church with a case of the jitters. Fortunately, I had anticipated his outbreak of last-minute stage fright, and I had the perfect remedy. Fully aware of his lifelong fondness for the sauce, I had come equipped with a flask that contained his favorite
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libation—cold and very dry gin martinis—and for the next half hour or so, we stood outside the church and gulped them down with the fervor of parched Bedouins quaffing at an oasis. Thus fortified, we entered the church fully prepared to be as loquacious and provocative as the occasionrequired.
In his remarks to the audience, Tom alluded to our hearty imbib-ing. He said that “before performing, one should drink gin and not bourbon, because bourbon sneaks up on you, while gin arrives with a punch, letting you know exactly where you stand, or fall.” He did not fall, and after showing the 60 Minutes profile, I had the happy experience of interviewing him all over again. In its story on the event, our local paper, the Vineyard Gazette, said that Benton and I “held the audience in a spell,” and the reporter went on to praise Tom for his “deliberate and delightful orneryness.”
Thomas Hart Benton died at the age of eighty-five just five months after that special evening, and all I can say now about that is how grateful I am that he waited until after I got a chance to know him and become his friend.
I t z h a k P e r l m a n
V l a d i m i r H o ro w i t z
A S I ’ V E I N D I C A T E D , I H A V E never tried my own hand at painting or sculpture or any of the other fine arts. (My longtime colleague, Morley Safer, is the painter-in-residence at 60 Minutes.) But classical music is another story. As a boy growing up in Brookline, I began taking violin lessons when I was ten and kept at it until I was seventeen. My violin teacher would later claim in interviews that I
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was not an especially diligent pupil; he said I talked too much during the lessons and that I had a knack for coming up with all kinds of implausible excuses to explain why I hadn’t been able to practice.
I’m sorry, but that is not how I remember it. I mainly recall the times when I was so pleased with my playing that during practice sessions, I would open all the windows in my room so that neighbors and passersby could catch an earful and be impressed by my musical prowess.
My teacher, Harry Ellis Dickson, was such a gifted violinist that he played in the first section of the Boston Symphony, and at a time when my sister’s husband, Alfred Krips, was the concertmaster of that orchestra. Harry went on to become a conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, filling in for Arthur Fiedler and, later, John Williams.
His daughter, incidentally, was also a close friend of our family. Her name was Kitty Dickson, but she is known to most Americans by the name she acquired when she married a Brookline neighbor, Michael Dukakis, who has the distinction of being the only governor of Massachusetts ever to run for president.
As for my own progress as a violinist, I was good enough to be given the honored role of concertmaster of our orchestra at Brookline High School. That turned out to be the high-water mark of my musical career. When the time came for me to go off to the University of Michigan in 1935, I didn’t take my violin to Ann Arbor. In the end, I suppose Harry Dickson was right about me. Although I had been blessed with some talent, I did not have the drive or the discipline to become a first-rate fiddle player. As the famous virtuoso Jascha Heifetz once put it, to become an accomplished concert violinist, one
“must have the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk.”
I quoted that comment by Heifetz when I introduced a 60 Min-
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utes profile I did in 1980 on another brilliant violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Born in Israel, Perlman had his first big success on an American stage at the age of thirteen, when he played his fiddle on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was given his first violin when he was a child of three, and the following year he was stricken with polio. As much as audiences over the years have been dazzled by Perlman’s musical skill, they have been even more impressed by the courage and strong will it took to overcome his severe disability. I asked him about that.
W A L L A C E : I would think there might be a tendency, forgive me, to feel sorry for this crippled fiddle player.
P E R L M A N : (Laughs) Well, I think that in the beginning there may have been, and I think that—
W A L L A C E : Were you aw
are of it?
P E R L M A N : Oh boy, was I aware of it! I could show you reviews when I first came to the United States: “Handicapped violinist pretty good, despite disability.” Or “Crippled blah, blah, blah, dah, dah, dah . . .” And “As he went on the stage hobbling on his shining aluminum crutches and very heavily sat down, but afterwards we forgot all about it and it was just music.” And so on. And every, every single review had to mention that.
W A L L A C E : Got to you?
P E R L M A N : And that the— Oh yes, it got to me, because it was just taking away from the matters at hand.
Recalling the intense focus and hard work that had gone into my teenage exercises with the violin, I was struck by something I had heard about Perlman’s casual approach to practice sessions.
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W A L L A C E : Who was it—André Previn who said that he came in one day to watch you practice, and you were practicing and watching I Love Lucy on television simultaneously?
P E R L M A N : (Laughs) Well, it depends on what you practice.
Actually, the best show to practice on is baseball.
W A L L A C E : You can turn off the sound.
P E R L M A N : You turn off the sound, you see what’s going on, and you practice your technique. I’m not talking about practicing thinking or anything like this. That’s a totally different thing. I did some of my greatest practicing when I was in London watching cricket. I mean, cricket, you know, cricket . . . is a very, very slow game.
Perlman had an impish sense of humor, and once he became an established virtuoso, he would often regale audiences with his banter from the concert stage. There was, for example, the silly joke he sometimes told about how Beethoven’s death left some of his admirers so bereaved that, on a group visit to his grave, they decided they had to have one last look at their beloved Ludwig. So they dug up his grave, and when they pried open his coffin, they were severely scolded by Beethoven. “Please, please, leave me alone,” he demanded. “Can’t you see that I’m de-composing?”
Shamelessly corny, perhaps, but it invariably got a big laugh, probably because that kind of nonsensical remark seemed so deli-ciously out of place at a serious classical concert.
During our interview, Perlman’s mischievous streak surfaced on several occasions, and there was one response in particular that I’ve always treasured. He had referred to the violin as a Jewish instrument, so I rattled off the names of some past and present masters—
Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, and Perlman himself—and
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then asked him why so many world-class fiddle players happened to be Jewish. With a broad grin and appropriate manual gestures, he replied, “You see, our fingers are circumcised and, you see, which gives it a very good dexterity, you know, particularly in the pinky.”
When we aired that 60 Minutes piece, Perlman was thirty-five and was already being hailed as the finest violinist of his generation; since then his stature has only increased. In recent years, he has devoted much of his time and energy to nurturing the talents of future virtuosos. He and his wife, Toby, run the Perlman Music Program, which provides intensive instruction in five instruments—violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano—for students between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Every summer, gifted youngsters from all over the world spend six weeks at the Perlman music camp on Shelter Island, a picturesque retreat off the eastern coast of Long Island, and Perlman himself often conducts and/or performs at their concerts.
Itzhak Perlman wasn’t the only world-class musician I interviewed on 60 Minutes. Three years earlier, in 1977, I had the thrill (and there’s no other word for it) of doing a story on a towering genius, a man esteemed by most of his peers as the greatest pianist of the twentieth century—Vladimir Horowitz.
Gaining access to Horowitz was a rare privilege. He was notorious for having an aloof, even reclusive personality, and he almost never consented to requests for interviews. But in the late fall of ’77, he was approaching a special occasion—the fiftieth anniversary of his American debut, a spectacular performance with the New York Philharmonic that had become the stuff of legend—and he agreed that such a milestone was worth the fuss of some media attention.
This assignment was one of the very few that made me nervous.
I have seldom been intimidated by the people I’ve interviewed, no matter how important or powerful or brilliant they were reputed to be. But the prospect of going one-on-one with Horowitz did get to me
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a little. The way I saw it, discussing music with Vladimir Horowitz was like having a chat about the theory of relativity with Albert Einstein. No matter how much homework I did, there was no way I could measure up.
My concerns proved groundless. When we began working on the Horowitz story, he was inChicago, where he was preparing to give a concert, a kind of tune-up for the golden-anniversary celebration two months later. Since we wanted to include footage from that concert in our profile, the 60 Minutes crew and I flew to Chicago and, on the day before the performance, paid a visit to Orchestra Hall to look things over, decide on camera positions, and otherwise get our bearings.
While we were doing that, Horowitz suddenly showed up. Without knowing that we were there, he had come to the hall to check out the piano, test the acoustics, and otherwise get his bearings. So I walked up to him, and just as I was about to introduce myself, he looked at me and said, “Mike Wallace. I watch you every Sunday night.”
I could hardly believe that this musical titan, a man I regarded with so much awe, was presenting himself to me as a regular viewer of 60 Minutes. Needless to say, that chance encounter was just what I needed to dispel the anxiety that had been gnawing at me, and when the time came for our interview at his town house in New York, I felt completely relaxed and comfortable in his presence. So much so that I even resorted to some playful needling, as I often did when I interviewed people I admired a great deal and whose company I enjoyed. For example, when Horowitz insisted that it didn’t bother him if some other pianist received more money for a concert, I was quick to point out how unlikely that was.
W A L L A C E : If somebody gets more money? You tell me one other solo performer in classical music who gets eighty percent of the gross, which is what Vladimir Horowitz gets.
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H O R O W I T Z : Well, I didn’t do it my whole life. After fifty years of playing, I got this.
W A L L A C E : You get three times as much as any other classical performer today, I am told. And you smile when I tell you this because you know it’s the truth, and you’re proud.
H O R O W I T Z : I’m not proud, but this—it is so.
It was obvious that the irreverent tone I had adopted was a rare experience for Horowitz, who was accustomed to being treated with a punctilious deference usually reserved for royalty. Instead of taking offense, he seemed to be stimulated and even amused by my rather flippant approach, and so did his wife, who sat in on the interview. As the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini, Wanda Horowitz had grown up in a musical aristocracy. She and Horowitz were married in 1933, and since then she had devoted her life to being his constant companion (he never traveled anywhere without her) and most trusted adviser. She was also his most demanding listener, as I discovered when I brought her into the conversation.
W A L L A C E : Do you talk frankly when he plays well, and when he plays not so well?
M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Oh, absolutely.
H O R O W I T Z : Unfortunately, yes.
W A L L A C E : She does?
H O R O W I T Z : She’s not always right, but she talks.
M R S . H O R O W I T Z : But most of the time I’m right. . . .
W A L L A C E : And you pay attention, maestro?
M R S . H O R O W I T Z :
Don’t say no. (Laughs) H O R O W I T Z : I will say—I will say sometimes.
M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Well, sometimes.
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W A L L A C E : No, I’m quite serious about this.
H O R O W I T Z : You know, I take her ears because she knows my ups and downs. . . . She kn ows my playin g, you know, so she can judge.
We also talked about the difficult times he had been through, notably the period when he didn’t play at all in public. In 1953, when he was forty-nine and very much in his prime, Horowitz suddenly announced that he was tired of the pressures of touring and was going to stop doing concerts for a while. Twelve years passed before he played in public again, and during this long hiatus, he lived mainly as a recluse. In fact, there was a two-year stretch when he never once left his town house.
H O R O W I T Z : I was in this room, very happy.
W A L L A C E : You were in this room, very happy?
H O R O W I T Z : Very happy.
W A L L A C E : And you, madame?
M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Not so happy.
In spite of what he told me, Horowitz himself was not so happy during this period of withdrawal. The truth of the matter was that he spent much of that time coping with depression, and I didn’t fully appreciate what an ordeal that must have been for him until I had my own bout with the disease a few years after our interview. He eventually came out of it, and in 1965 he finally resumed playing in public.
His much-heralded return to the stage took place at the same site where, as a young man, he had made his triumphant American debut. Wanda Horowitz had her own special memory of that comeback event. “He came out, and there was a big line of people on both sides
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of Carnegie Hall,” she recalled. “And somebody said, ‘Oh, Mr.