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

by Blair Tindall

  Under the covers, Randy whispered plans for tours together. Did I want to record a Mozart Divertimento with Orpheus? Could I start subbing in his ballet orchestra?

  We returned to Ruth’s house the next night and to our “just colleagues” routine. Ruth loaded her table with organic salads, tabbouleh, broiled trout, and chicken stir-fried with snow peas and sprouts. Everyone dug in, without questioning where Randy and I had been all those nights.

  Evan, the violinist, took a third helping of fish, praising Ruth’s cooking. He’d had intestinal problems all summer, growing skinnier even since we started rehearsing this week’s Boccherini Quintet. He said Ruth’s healthy menus made a tall guy like him lose weight. I knew something else was terribly wrong. When visiting Jayson on Bedford Street, I’d seen gay men around Greenwich Village who were skinny like Evan, with skin blotched by grotesque skin lesions. Middle America might be clueless, but everyone in the arts knew the look of AIDS by now.

  Soon after returning to New York, I sat in Carnegie Hall’s top balcony, a steeply raked expanse of inexpensive seats. Jimmy sat next to me, on one of the last nights he’d be in New York before taking the job he’d won with the Houston Symphony. Perhaps “won” was too strong a word; a few members of the audition committee had come to New York without advertising the position, inviting only a handful of oboists to play for them. It was a loophole in the audition system that allowed symphonies to hold “invited” auditions if they selected no one during the cattle calls.

  Jimmy and I had bought these tickets in the spring, before I went to the summer festival with Randy. Sitting beside Jimmy, I began feeling uneasy. I was in a pickle, involved with three of the city’s most powerful oboists, each of whom could make or break my career. My scenario with these men had felt like wildly romantic fantasy, as if I were starring in a film about the music business. Now it was turning into a bad dream that affected my livelihood.

  As the music started onstage, I thought about the New York City Ballet Orchestra subbing Randy had given me. Warming up next to him before our first performance at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater, I had wondered why an usherette stared at me so intently, without smiling, from the pit railing. Randy and I had made love the previous night on a sheepskin he’d spread over the bed in his 70th Street apartment: the start of something wonderful and new.

  Sitting beside Jimmy made me nervous because I did not know how to end our liaison gracefully. Maybe it would just fizzle out when he left town. As the oboe soloist Heinz Holliger finished the middle movement of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, my eyes drifted from Jimmy’s hand, nearly hidden beneath my skirt, across Carnegie Hall’s top balcony. There I saw Jayson, alone. I smiled at him, wondering why he wasn’t with the other oboist he liked or with his ballerina wife.

  As the Rondo drew to a close, I saw a rush of understanding in Jayson’s eyes. He turned away. He had finally realized why I toured with Orpheus and he did not, why St. Luke’s hired me without calling him. As the audience burst into applause for the oboist who had performed, I scurried across the balcony in pursuit of Jayson. He stumbled over the ladies in his row, tripped on his way up the deeply angled steps, and disappeared.

  CHAPTER

  9

  The Damnation of Faust

  THE NARROW STEPS led me down to Possible Twenty, the bar beside a popular sushi restaurant on West 55th between Broadway and Eighth. I’d come to pick up some sheet music from another musician who was stuck in Midtown between recording sessions. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust from the sunlight to the bar’s dim lighting, but I could make out a cello case and a trombone gig bag in the corner. A French hornist I knew sat at the end of the bar with a martini, marking something in his date book.

  I sat a few stools away and waited for the cello’s owner to appear. He and the trombonist must be in the bathroom doing blow. The horn player sniffled and scribbled. I’d tried working my way into the coke scene since drug use had become a way of networking with the top freelancers. Jimmy had once given me a little to rub on my gums in my bedroom at the Allendale. Not feeling any effect, I snorted half a line. Immediately I felt out of control. I hated cocaine, and as a nonuser I felt uncomfortable in a place like Possible Twenty, one of several 1980s Midtown pit stops for drugs.

  Musicians hit several haunts like this to kill time between gigs and score coke, tempering its effect with a drink or two. After tonight’s Broadway shows finished, Possible Twenty would open up its jazz club upstairs. China Song on 50th was another popular spot. So was Café Un Deux Trois, with its proximity to RCA Studios across 44th, west of Sixth.

  Cocaine use raged across New York City’s industries and class lines in the early 1980s. Most classical musicians had not been able to afford the drug until the commercial music market exploded, providing even the busiest classical musicians with additional income as studio players. Although the phrase “an hour with a possible twenty,” indicated an extra twenty minutes of overtime on a session, it also epitomized an era of power and excess. Classical, jazz, and pop musicians all shared the title of studio musician, recording music together for films and ad jingles. As studio musicians, racing between Midtown dates at the Hit Factory, Clinton Studios, and the RCA complex, they all felt empowered by the money pouring in from sessions and residual payments; drugs made them feel downright superhuman, as it did for drug-using stockbrokers, nightclub owners, and bankers.

  Certainly drug use among musicians was nothing new. From the 1930s, jazzers had provided a soundtrack for experimentation, with Cab Calloway’s “Funny Little Reefer Man” and Benny Goodman’s “Sweet Marijuana Brown.” There was no question that rock ’n’ roll carried its own torch with alcohol and drugs. Yet few outsiders suspected the musicians in the rarefied world of classical music, although we were playing the same twelve notes as everyone else.

  Substance abuse was almost a badge of honor. Players formed a drug-using community that was impossible for newcomers or outsiders to penetrate, a phenomenon that sometimes evolved into an orchestra-sized dysfunctional family. An Orpheus tour booklet meant for musicians’ eyes only included a cartoon reprint of catatonic male musicians wearing sloppy tuxes amid beer cans in a radio studio as the emcee announced, “You have just heard the Second Brandenburg Concerto performed by the Pro Harmonia Antiqua Society under conditions similar to those prevailing at music festivals in the time of Bach.”

  That cartoon’s message sprang to life one night at Bargemusic, a floating chamber music venue moored beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d stood next to Jayson at the railing to see the lights of lower Manhattan just across the water. Tonight, he would play second oboe on Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 and I would play third oboe.

  The audience was just filing in when Honey, the St. Luke’s harpsichordist married to the violist with the hee-hawing laugh, burst from the barge’s restroom and noisily sniffled his way outside. His energy level took up far more space than his slight body warranted. Hyperkinetic, Honey popped open a Heineken and almost simultaneously lit a joint. He chugged with one hand and toked with the other to counteract the cocaine he’d just snorted. “Gotta find the balance, man,” he said, twitching. The Fifth Concerto’s harpsichord cadenza, a classical version of a solo jazz riff, would zip by at breakneck speed tonight.

  Honey had almost certainly shopped at Donald’s Claremont cocaine den, the hub of 1980s classical drug activity. Or he might have visited Metropolitan Opera violinist Seymour Wakschal, another classical dealer arrested in 1982 for selling a half ounce of coke to a narc in his apartment right across from Lincoln Center. Cops found four more ounces of blow, three pounds of pot, and 540 Quaaludes in Seymour’s pad. Despite the charges, Wakschal slipped free within the year.1

  Studio players may have been casual about their drug use, but substance abuse among classical musicians sometimes had tragic consequences. Clarinetist Lou Gompertz was found shot dead in his Manhattan apartment after a drug deal gone wrong. In Cleveland, baritone Edward Russell White
hanged himself from a psychiatric hospital’s sewer pipe after overdosing on panic meds because of a bad rehearsal.2 California violinist Cynthia Taylor was murdered in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district after a lifelong struggle with booze and cocaine, while an Oregon Symphony violist overdosed on a speedball, a mixture of heroin and cocaine.

  Classical music celebrities weren’t immune, either. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas was arrested in 1978 at Kennedy Airport carrying coke, pot, and amphetamines. Violin soloist Eugene Fodor was found with heroin, a dagger, a hypodermic needle, and pills in an empty hotel room on Martha’s Vineyard, a unit he’d entered through an unlocked window. A student of Jascha Heifetz, a full-scholarship recipient at Juilliard, and winner of top honors in the 1974 Tchaikovsky Competition, Fodor had turned to cocaine after trying to meet the superhuman expectations of his audience. Until the charges were dropped, managers avoided hiring him because Massachusetts’ mandatory drug-sentencing laws would have put him behind bars for several seasons.3

  There were plenty of reasons for musicians to get high—to soothe the frustration of spotty employment or to dull the repetitious nature of practicing and performing the same works again and again. For others, it was the pursuit of perfection in an art whose quality cannot be measured.

  As tall and beautiful as Sydney, Bonnie studied at Juilliard with master cellist Leonard Rose, playing Carnegie with the American Symphony and her chamber group, The Music Project. Practicing for hours daily, her meticulous discipline bled into the rest of her life. Bonnie wore designer blouses while catering elegant chamber music fêtes in her huge apartment overlooking the Museum of Natural History, parties where cocaine flowed as freely as the Premier Cru Chablis she served.

  She started dating my friend Rob, an oboist who sometimes played in American Philharmonic when Jayson quit after two years. Rob was devoted to her, and soon the couple was engaged. On one bus trip to Kennedy Center, he was distraught; she had seemed ill, and he couldn’t locate her before leaving for Washington. Her absence that day was a small and early sign of troubles to come.

  Rob and Bonnie married, producing an adorable blond baby. Over the next two years Bonnie’s financial struggles surfaced. Her debts were curious for someone earning nearly six figures freelancing and playing at Phantom of the Opera. Soon, money began to disappear from purses in the Phantom pit or downstairs at Town Hall during concerts with Philharmonia Virtuosi. Bonnie grew gaunt and started missing concerts. Phantom fired her, and Philharmonia soon followed. Rob filed for divorce and took custody of their son.

  She started freebasing, moved into a crack house, and sold her body to pay for the drugs. Arrested for prostitution and theft, Bonnie was ravaged by bronchitis. She descended into street life, sometimes visiting crack dens in Jersey City. At about this time, novelist Richard Price described a drug-abusing violinist from Broadway’s Phantom of the Opera in his crime novel Clockers:

  Her face seemed to belong to two separate women, as if a see-through hag mask had been superimposed on the features of a Nordic milkmaid.

  Bonnie’s retired father took her to Florida but could not stop her cycle of dependency. She moved in with a one-armed addict who foraged through their carpeting for crack. She stole meat from a supermarket while wearing a silk Oscar de la Renta party dress, then sold her designer clothes to prostitutes for more crack. An alcoholic chain-smoker, she lived in her car and then in the woods, taking breaks to hitchhike and turn tricks.

  Suffering from a paralyzing depression, Bonnie checked into a county detox, where doctors diagnosed her as HIV-positive. Through it all, she kept her eighteenth-century Testore cello worth around $350,000; in recent years, the von Trapp family (real-life subjects of The Sound of Music) has helped raise money to support Bonnie’s drug treatment. Bonnie reached her fiftieth birthday and lived in Idaho with a new husband and seventeen pets. She died in 2005.4

  Drugs were not the only plague sweeping the mid-1980s classical music scene. I hadn’t seen Evan since the summer festival, and by the time I ran into him on Broadway in November, he’d shrunk to the size of a scarecrow. “It’s just an intestinal bug,” Evan said weakly.

  We both knew better. Paul Jacobs, the Philharmonic’s pianist, had looked just like Evan before dying the previous year. A 1950s prodigy like Sam, Paul was finally seeing success as a soloist, with his Debussy solo recordings earning rave reviews. Paul started showing up at Avery Fisher Hall looking rail-thin and died a few months later. Before long his disease had a name: AIDS, which was killing gay men in the arts.

  When Paul died in 1983, some 2,100 AIDS deaths had been reported in the United States. At the time, the disease seemed distant to most Americans, but inside the arts community, as more young men succumbed to what was then an automatic death sentence, panic, anguish, and rage took hold.

  My ex-roommate Lionel died of AIDS in Venezuela, where he had taken an orchestra job. Vinson Hammond, a spectacular pianist I’d played with at Manhattan School, died at his parents’ house in Alabama. Freelance violist Karl Bargen went home to the Southwest and never returned. Bruce Ferden, one of my conductors from Manhattan School, passed away, as did New York City Opera music director Christopher Keene, one of seventy-five New York City Opera employees lost to AIDS. Pianists Jorge Bolet, Joseph Villa, and Thomas Lorango, a bisexual who’d married a girlfriend of mine, all died. Michael Dash, a countertenor known from his appearance as the boy soprano in the televised premiere of Bernstein’s Mass, performed for the 1971 opening of Washington’s Kennedy Center, died. So did Ross Allen, a Broadway keyboard player; Kent Jones, an oboist I’d known at NCSA; baritone William Parker; and organists by the dozen including Calvin Hampton, Eugene Hancock, and the Philharmonic’s own Leonard Raver.

  I had been keeping a list of people—all gay or bisexual men—I knew personally who had died of AIDS. When it reached one hundred names, I threw the list away.

  During my first years in New York, gay men visited clubs for anonymous sex, fucking faceless partners through “glory holes” punched between stalls in “cruisy” bathrooms, while straight couples experimented with bisexuality and mate-swapping in local bathhouses. Birth control pills had eliminated the risk of pregnancy, and most sexually transmitted diseases could be cured with antibiotics. Whether gay or straight, hardly anyone used condoms anymore.

  My ex-roommate Lionel and many other gay male musicians had picked up men at Village bathhouses and, late at night, in Riverside Park. Heterosexual musicians kept most of their casual sex within the classical music community, although a few tried out Plato’s Retreat. Gays and straights both felt comfortable when they hit the road together, however. On one 1980s Solisti New York tour, that chamber orchestra enjoyed a hotel-room orgy featuring almost every sexual position and combination, a night that would be gossiped about even as its participants went gray two decades later.

  AIDS was something entirely new. New York City closed virtually all the city’s bathhouses, most of them specializing in homosexual sex. Gays cried discrimination but women suffered too, many not realizing they were also susceptible. The health department didn’t add vaginal intercourse to its list of risky practices until 1987. No AIDS drug therapy had yet been approved by the FDA, and taking an AIDS test could red-flag insurance companies, which then denied coverage or raised rates.

  Many of my women friends were beginning to realize that they were at high risk because of bisexual former partners. I knew that Sydney’s ex-boyfriend, the bassoonist who’d moved to San Francisco, had surprised everyone when he came out of the closet there. I didn’t know Sydney well enough yet to ask her if he might have been bisexually active when they were dating, or if she was worried about having contracted AIDS. I wasn’t sure about several of my former partners either, so I signed up for one of the anonymous AIDS tests offered at city health centers.

  As a freelancer I bought my own hospitalization insurance, but never the expensive plan that paid for outpatient doctor visits. The only medical professional I kne
w was the physician’s assistant at a city health clinic, a woman who gave me free birth control pills and antibiotic prescriptions for me to self-treat recurrent respiratory and urinary infections.

  Live chickens squawked from a corner shop as I crossed 126th Street, feeling conspicuously white and female in Harlem. I found the facility on a tiny lane in a late-1950s cinder-block public works building much like the Lenox Avenue clinic where I’d taken a free pregnancy test years ago. It was the only Manhattan site then offering completely anonymous AIDS tests. Inside, a nurse seemed startled by my presence as she handed me a plastic jar and anonymous identification number. In the epidemic’s early days, I guess she saw few women.

  Over the next two weeks I felt the same butterflies as stage fright, which then intensified into stomach pain. Finally the day arrived when I could claim my results. My chest tightened as the city bus passed the Columbia campus, which was where I last saw Evan. I pictured him warming up on Ruth’s balcony in New Hampshire. He was tossing off a Paganini “Caprice,” the sunset behind Mount Monadnock beaming a halo around his body like a Renaissance painting.

  Evan had died last month. Would I be next?

  As the adviser opened my file, I read posters on the wall, their messages aimed at gay men. I thought about the irony of sitting onstage at Carnegie Hall in a ball gown and, in the same month, in a plastic chair at a free Harlem public health clinic. What if I were sick? I didn’t have money for medications or doctor visits. What was taking so long? It must be bad news. I imagined myself an ashen skeleton. With credit-card debt from traveling to orchestra auditions, I had no savings. Would anyone help me? At what point do dying people commit suicide?

  “Let’s double-check your ID number,” the adviser said grimly. I handed him my slip. My heart pounded in the silence as he read a file for what seemed like an eternity.