Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  In this environment, the nonprofit Ford Foundation budgeted $57 million in 1951 for programs promoting peace, democracy, world economy, education, and interpersonal behavior. The foundation’s first five-year arts and humanities program spent $2 million annually, starting a tab that would total $320 million by 1974. A private foundation, Ford was not accountable to taxpayers in its choice of artists, often giving large grants to develop a nascent organization over many years.

  America declared superiority in technology, education, and industry, but the U.S. government saw the Soviets’ cultural wealth as a threat. Echoing nineteenth-century “arts religion,” government leaders promised spiritual and social benefit for any community that launched an active cultural life. Bach and Beethoven would provide sublime revelation, or, in the words of one Life magazine story, “impose form and meaning on the increasing complexities of the human experience.” Europe and Russia had something America did not: a complex creative class that had evolved over centuries. Not to be outdone, Americans wanted one too—right away.

  “The sooner we can implement a program of selling our culture to the uncommitted people of the world as a weapon, the better off we are,” said New Jersey congressman Frank Thompson in 1954.14 Four years later, that “weapon” arrived, in the form of a Texan pianist so unpopular that Columbia Artists Management was considering dropping him from their rural touring program.

  When pianist Van Cliburn won Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, he beat the Russians at their own game. New Yorkers threw him a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue, and politicians declared the arts essential to a free society. Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill to build a National Cultural Center (later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), JFK appointed an honorary arts council, and Jacqueline Kennedy brought Pablo Casals, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky to the White House.

  In the early sixties, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund examined the future development of the performing arts. Their published study, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, suggested that a more active cultural life would benefit all classes of Americans, that

  the arts are not for a privileged few but for the many, that their place is not on the periphery of society but at its center, that they are not just a form of recreation but are of central importance to our well-being and happiness. In the panel’s view, this status will not be widely achieved unless artistic excellence is the constant goal of every artist and every arts organization, and mediocrity is recognized as the ever-present enemy of true progress.15

  The Rockefeller report did not analyze how to pay for the vast arts programs it promoted. However, New York’s most powerful men did find a way to capitalize on the idea, with plans for arts centers that would profit them as businessmen while painting them as beneficent cultural patrons. By 1962, construction of at least sixty performing arts complexes was under way nationwide, increasing real estate values and development and protecting a city’s value and appeal as postwar residents were fleeing to suburbia. Although the centers looked like a boon to arts groups, they were a mixed blessing. The performing organizations would soon find that their elegant new surroundings increased operating costs dramatically.

  “The raison d’être for Lincoln Center was dubious from the beginning,” observed New Yorker journalist Paul Goldberger. “It originated with Robert Moses, not Leonard Bernstein, and Moses didn’t care much for opera, or theatre, or symphony orchestras. He just figured that they could serve as a magnet for development.”16

  America still exhibited an inferiority complex about its cultural life, so even the very structure of New York’s Lincoln Center echoed the Eurocentric activity inside its buildings. Tennessee pink marble had been good enough for Washington’s National Gallery in 1941, but Cold War concert halls had to be built from European bricks and mortar. For Lincoln Center, travertine marble was brought from the quarries that built St. Peter’s basilica in the Vatican, with the Metropolitan Opera’s enormous murals by Russian-French painter Marc Chagall taking center stage on the plaza.17

  A multimillion-dollar industry revolving around performing arts complexes like Lincoln Center blossomed, providing new business for contractors, service industries, transportation, investment companies, law offices, and accounting firms. Moving companies provided exhibition tour packages, with insurance firms securing the precious artworks. Consultants peddled management surveys to orchestras, troupes, and civic organizations planning the arts centers, while manufacturers sold the centers’ ingredients: carpeting, seats, lighting, concrete, steel, easels, and industrial tiles.

  Paying for it all became a staggering prospect. Orchestra trustees accustomed to plugging a five- or six-figure deficit each year shrank in terror when confronted with skyrocketing costs, as groups mounted longer seasons and more elaborate productions within their costly new buildings. A New York City Opera performance at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater ended up costing nearly five times what it had at its old home, the populist City Center on 55th Street. Even though the opera nearly sold out its new house at sharply higher ticket prices, the company’s annual deficit leaped from $325,000 to $1.8 million soon after the move.18

  Paid for largely by contributors, the complexes themselves cost a fortune. Some $144 million of Lincoln Center’s $185 million construction cost came from private sources. The Metropolitan Opera’s $32 million construction estimate rocketed to $50 million, and putting on its operas consumed 10 percent of all music production expenditures in the entire country.

  When President Eisenhower broke ground for Lincoln Center in 1959, he proclaimed that “a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world” would grow out of what was then a $75 million complex. The cost had grown to $100 million one year later and $170 million by 1963. Private contributors, most notably the Ford, Rockefeller, James, and Avalon foundations and the Carnegie Corporation, continued pouring new grants into Lincoln Center’s snowballing budget, but in its seventh year, the project teetered on bankruptcy.19 A summer music festival and film series were canceled, staff was cut, and plans for an administration building were scrapped. At last two donors, John D. Rockefeller III and Lawrence Wien, gave $1.25 million apiece, which, with more foundation, city, and individual funds, finally paid off Lincoln Center’s building fund. Nearly ten thousand donors had contributed to the Lincoln Center project.20

  As Lincoln Center’s crisis was averted, its administrators now faced the problem of paying for sharply increased operating costs, which totaled $40 million annually for all the center’s constituents. Amyas Ames, chairman of Lincoln Center’s executive committee, predicted in 1970 that the complex’s total deficit would increase from $11 million to $20 million in a mere three years, only a fraction of which could be recouped by higher ticket prices. If the arts were a public good, as their businessmen architects claimed, the government had to step in.21

  Interest in federal arts support was nothing new—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had proposed a government role—but the country saw little real application until the 1960s, except for a brief post-Depression period. From 1935 to 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt established employment programs for artists under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA’s Federal Music Program (FMP) concentrated on providing employment for musicians, spurring the formation of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh, Springfield (Massachusetts), Oklahoma City, and Utah symphonies, and encouraging new works by Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, and others.22 Musicians of the FMP worked steadily by 1938, earning $23.86 for a 45-hour week.23

  Government money and creativity were bad bedfellows from the beginning, proving to be more controversial than expected. When the Federal Theatre Project produced prolabor anticapitalist plays critical of the government that funded the program, the House Un-American Activities Committee muzzled WPA arts programs, which Roosevelt later reviewed and canceled in the midst of economic recovery.

  WPA arts
projects had whetted an appetite for government-sponsored culture in America, and support for the arts began showing up throughout government agencies. Cultural programs were included in the Office of Education, the Social and Rehabilitation Service of the National Institute of Mental Health, the Labor and Interior departments, the Small Business Administration, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which gave $41 million to cultural programs during the 1960s.24

  Congress also provided ongoing funds for the operations and activities of the National Gallery of Art. The industrialist Andrew Mellon, seeking a tax break after the Depression, had founded the museum in 1941 by donating $14 million and his private collection, which centered around twenty-one masterpieces once owned by Catherine the Great of Russia.25

  Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey unsuccessfully introduced bills for federal arts funding; Eisenhower and Harry Truman also failed with their recommendations supporting culture. Centralized support for public arts policy came with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a “place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods ... beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor,” said Johnson in a 1964 speech. Johnson’s Congress finally approved the National Council on the Arts in 1964, satisfying a growing constituency of arts board members who were also business, community, and corporate leaders. Though the 1950s McCarthyism (which blacklisted many actors) cast suspicion on the arts, the new organization was included under the umbrella of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities in 1965, spawning the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

  The artists themselves remained cautious. Many disagreed with Johnson’s Vietnam policies and considered government money tainted, anathema to the autonomous voice of protest in a time of drastic social change. The musicians’ union, lobbying for jobs, supported the legislation, but 91 percent of American Symphony Orchestra League members had previously opposed federal funding in 1951, seeing the money as artistically oppressive. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson, Harper’s editor Russell Lynes, playwright Thornton Wilder, painter Larry Rivers, and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti all argued that federal funding would tether creativity and lead to mediocre art.26

  Ironically, Richard Nixon—active in Joseph McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt—became the NEA’s messiah. In 1971, he increased the agency’s budget eightfold, to $40 million. “It struck me as politically wise to build up the Endowment,” said Leonard Garment, the clarinet-playing lawyer who had become Nixon’s special counsel. Garment advised the president that such a dramatic increase could win the political allegiance of arts groups’ board members, who were usually influential corporate and community leaders as well.27

  Nixon imbued the arts with the power “to help heal divisions among our people and to vault some of the barriers that divide the world.” The agency’s new chair, Nancy Hanks, added that “the lives of the people should be advanced in freedom and in comprehension of the tough and soaring qualities of the spirit,” declaring the arts to be “not a luxury; they are a necessity.” In rhetoric intended to lure arts board members, one Nixon-era official promised that symphonies, ballets, and stage plays would “rid our society of its most basic ills—voicelessness, isolation, depersonalization—the complete absence of any purpose or reason for living.”28

  With such a broad agenda, it was not surprising the NEA started out by assigning funds indiscriminately. In its infancy, the NEA gave $350,000 to the American Ballet Theater but also proposed $400,000 for a new chamber orchestra to compete with already struggling groups, as well as subsidizing a musicians’ booking agency that would steal business from existing managers. Some $100,000 was allocated for artists’ housing, $80,000 for helping art school graduates, $50,000 to preserve Hawaii’s natural beauty (through a conference on development), and $10,000 to help a poet move to a warmer city.29

  Seed money from the Ford Foundation provided what appeared to be limitless growth for performing arts groups, spawning new foundations to fund an ever-increasing number of projects. Ford’s unique invention, the challenge grant, saw great success in raising money by asking donors to match foundation giving. The rate of growth was breathtaking as performing arts centers were erected, radio broadcasts brought concerts into every home, and legions of students earned fine arts degrees. Cultural growth sped ahead with little examination of the arts’ genuine or practical value to society. Why classical music? Why orchestras? Is the expense worthwhile? Few asked for fear of being labeled barbaric.

  A 1975 Harris poll about public participation in the arts revealed Americans thought highly of the arts, much as they did of religion, with almost all respondents saying that cultural facilities were important to local quality of life and to the economy. Half expressed respect for professional musicians, but few actually attended concerts. The culture boom was fizzling, yet the business of the arts was gaining momentum.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Apollo’s Flophouse

  A NEATLY DRESSED BLACK man had just left the rental office. Inside, the agent looked up from his handwritten ledger, files spilling from book-shelves sagging overhead. “I always turn people like that away,” he said, winking slyly. My father, a southern history professor, set his jaw and looked at the floor. Someone in the apartment next to the office pounded out piano arpeggios.

  The Allendale was our best hope. Juilliard, the Mannes School of Music, and my own Manhattan School had no dormitories in 1978, and Upper West Side apartments meant astronomical rents and brokers’ fees exceeding $1,000. “Three hundred dollars under the table,” my NCSA teacher had said. Should I literally do that? I looked for a passage beneath his desk.

  The Allendale—together with the separate fifteen-story annex its landlords owned next door—had become the Ellis Island of classical musicians. A few musicians came in the sixties lured by cheap rents. Friends dropped in to rehearse, catch rides to a gig, or sublet. Lucky ones signed their own leases, and the building became a community, with its own social strata, immigration laws, public assistance, civil wars, and even two dictators. Spontaneous musicales ignited nightly; someone always brought an extra music stand, the Reicha quintet’s missing horn part, leftover sesame noodles, or a joint for inspiration. No one complained about loud practicing or the building’s decrepitude.

  There was an official Allendale just west of Times Square, which had opened just a few months before. Construction on Manhattan Plaza, a 1,700-unit forty-six-story apartment complex, had stalled during the energy crisis and the fiscal woes of New York City, which had financed construction with a $90 million mortgage.

  In The New York Times, Molly Ivins wrote that a federal subsidy to fill the place with performers and stagehands was being considered. By opening day, demand was so great that only one in four applicants got in, paying between 10 and 30 percent of their income on a sliding scale. The makeup was 70 percent artists and 30 percent elderly. Single folks got a studio, married couples a one-bedroom, and unmarried duos shared a two-bedroom—all with parquet floors, modern appliances, and access to the facility’s full-service health club.

  The building’s priorities in seedy Hell’s Kitchen angered the neighborhood. Even the General Accounting Office noted that Manhattan Plaza’s high-quality housing, built under a measure meant to mix economic classes, invited “resentment on the part of the taxpaying public who see their subsidized neighbors living in better accommodations than they themselves can afford.”1

  The Allendale, however, wasn’t city-funded official housing. It boasted no swimming pool or fancy appliances. Its self-selecting population endured poor maintenance, and its noisy-musician renters were hesitant to complain about one another for fear of retribution in their closed society.

  My parents and I followed Mr. Rudolph to the lobby, where he punched the elevator button. Inside, graffiti was scratched into the elevator’s Formica paneling. As we passed the second floor,
I heard a violinist practicing Paganini; on Four, Ravel’s piano Sonatine. Dark viola tones drifted from the stairwell as we walked down a gray sixth-floor hallway, lit by a few fluorescent lights.

  The hallway was dark, but when Rudolph unlocked apartment 601, brilliant sunshine washed the corner living room’s expanse of oak parquet, highlighting its mahogany inlay. Down West 99th Street’s canyon, tugboats passed in the Hudson River like toys, stark red against New Jersey’s palisades. Except for an ugly pink bathroom, the two-bedroom apartment was airy and spacious, its central kitchen and foyer perfect for sharing. The building filled with classical music felt as familiar as my high school dorm. There was plenty of room for me and two roommates, one of them the gay male friend my parents trusted to keep their eighteen-year-old daughter safe. My mother looked somewhat relieved.

  “It’s official, then! Our little girl’s going to take New York City by storm,” said my father, as he watched me scribble a check on my new Citibank account for $450 as a security deposit equal to one month’s rent.

  When the Allendale opened in 1910, its Carnegie Hall-style tower, stucco detail, and fierce stone lions stood above a valley whose nadir marked West 96th Street. The area was quickly being transformed from a sparse group of small houses and open land to an upscale neighborhood offering new luxury apartment buildings of twelve stories or more. At the Allendale, wealthy families snapped up opulent ten-room apartments, paying $250 for a place with fourteen closets and three baths on a residential street promoted as “the West Side’s Fifth Avenue.”

  Although the Allendale was extravagant, income tax laws had down-sized lifestyles by the 1920s, when the building next door, which the Allendale landlords would one day purchase, went up. More police blotter than society page, the annex rented five-room flats to the workingman. During Prohibition, the Mob snuffed out one of its less law-abiding tenants at the 45th Street speakeasy he owned.