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

by Blair Tindall

“Good afternoon,” Blanche warbled, in her thick French accent. The blonde had turned to the orchestra, surveying every face to establish rapport with our ranks. “I would like to introduce our wonderful soprano—”

  Just as Blanche announced her name, I recognized Arleen Auger’s smile from Thanksgiving dinner in Vienna two decades ago. She’d had a wonderful life since then, spending years at the Vienna State Opera, singing at the televised wedding of Price Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, and touring Japan with the Bach conductor Helmut Rilling.

  I was already older than Arleen had been when she rose overnight to international fame. I still struggled with my own career, which shone in some places but sputtered and failed in others. I got to borrow Arleen’s figurative magic dress on occasion, but I was starting to think I would never have one of my own. The reality of my little-girl fantasy was often far less glamorous, but I had invested too much to turn back now.

  As a soprano soloist, Arleen would always stand in front of the orchestra in a starring role. She spent much of her preparation time studying scores and shaping their musical interpretation with her creative mind. In contrast, oboists like me had few opportunities to perform as star players. Much of my career would be spent accompanying soloists as part of an orchestra, where decisions about tempo, phrasing, and balance between instruments would belong to the conductor.

  Starting our aria, Steve and I fit our English horn lines under a flute solo. Arleen’s thoughtful interpretation soared above, angelic. Where did she find such inspiration? Perhaps she already knew she was sick, with the brain tumor that would kill her at fifty-three.

  Blanche was still sharp, though she was quite old. She was undeniably a deeply spiritual and committed musician. However, I questioned why the St. Luke’s musicians described her as a world-class interpreter of Bach. I could barely make out her tiny gestures and concentrated on blending with Steve, trying to provide a solid bass line for his wailing incantations, since I had the lower-pitched part.

  He couldn’t complain, I thought, but he could keep me in my place by saying I wasn’t playing musically. The “musicianship” criticism was subjective and hard to describe. Steve enjoyed a reverence from other freelance musicians that bordered on idol worship, and a comment from him about my musicality could tarnish my professional reputation and keep me out of his way as competition. How little had changed from the old NCSA “artistic policy,” where musical critique sometimes masked the faculty’s ulterior motives.

  After rehearsal, I saw Sydney conferring with Steve, who hadn’t yet discovered that she and I were friendly. “He says you’re in tune but not musical,” whispered Sydney, one of the few people here I trusted. She went on to complain about the seating. “It’s the boys’ club.” Sydney nodded in the direction of her chair at the far end of the flute section. “The boys’ club won’t ever let me play. I quit!” As she rushed off to check her answering machine on the pay phone, I wondered what she was talking about. Boys’ club? All the flutists here were women. Stepping into the crisp October air, I looked for Steve’s car but found Eliot, the principal flutist’s husband, instead. A recent MBA graduate, he now played cello part-time.

  “You are so lucky to play with Steve,” he said. I was feeling a little nauseated. Eliot was just one of the many New York musicians who showered Steve with adulation and assumed younger musicians like me could never compare. Like much of this orchestra, his attitude toward a select group of players approached religious fervor. “And Blanche. Blanche, Blanche, Blanche!” He sighed, casting his gaze up to the sky. Still awaiting a sign from above, he didn’t notice when I moved away.

  Steve picked me up in the Bach Festival’s old Toyota, turned right at the Whetstone Inn, heading down Ames Hill Road, and parked in a wooden garage that must have been a stable at one time. All the St. Luke’s wind players had been assigned to housing here; they formed impenetrable tribe during the early eighties drug days. We convened around a rickety dinner table. Dennis, who was a gourmet cook and oenophile, opened a very good bottle of Bordeaux.

  “My wife’s coming up Saturday, Stevie,” Dennis said.

  “Great, Dennie, mine’s coming too,” Mark said.

  “My squeeze is up Friday, Markie,” Dave cried.

  “Steve,” I said, trying to sound casual, “Sam Sanders is coming too.” I had a saggy double bed up in my room, which doubled as storage for broken furniture and the owner’s boxed possessions.

  Dennis drummed his fingers slowly, exchanging a long look with Steve.

  “Sam Sanders? He can’t stay here,” Steve said grimly.

  “But you ... all of you....” I trailed off. Sam, a more important musician, would outclass them and shrink the status of their carefully constructed clique. At the same time, they considered me an outsider who had to play by their rules.

  “He can’t come.”

  Foliage season? Where would I find a room? Ka-ching! I’d offer to pay, since I invited Sam. A fourth of my week’s $600 salary. And how will we even get to an inn?

  “I’ll rent a room then,” I said, controlling my anger. “Steve, may I use the festival’s Toyota you’ve been driving to get there?”

  “Absolutely not,” Steve said firmly. “I’m driving it to save mileage on my car.”

  “Okay then,” I said, my anger nearly boiling over. “Could you drive me into Brattleboro to rent a car?” Since Brattleboro was twenty miles of winding road, Steve relented and tossed me the keys. I grabbed them and turned away to search for local inns in the Yellow Pages. I got lucky on the first try, landing a room at the only place in Marlboro just as they’d received a cancellation.

  On Saturday, Sam and I explored the Whetstone Inn. “I’d always wondered about this place when I was playing Marlboro,” said Sam, looking over book titles on the dark wood shelves before choosing one. His bony fingers turned the pages, stopping when he found his own name printed in a Marlboro program from 1968.

  There were other familiar names in the programs, including Betty, the Allendale spinster. Like Sam, she would have been around thirty then. I imagined her with long blond hair and slim hips, walking bare-foot in the Vermont sunshine. What happened? Sam’s career had taken off meteorically, while Betty played the tedious bass oompah off beats of ballet music, drinking alone in her little Allendale apartment and devoting herself to someone else’s husband.

  Sam looked younger than ever, due to a combination of his slim figure and passionate outlook. The Whetstone’s fire was reflected in his lively eyes. Together again with Sam, I relaxed for the first time all week. Sam believed in me and encouraged my musicianship. In addition, he was attracted to subjects like politics, art, religion, and literature. What a contrast to the musicians back at the house, who only veered from talking about themselves to discuss expensive gourmet cuisine, an interest that gave the illusion of elitism they wanted to cultivate.

  I was relieved to be away from those depressing musicians as Sam and I cuddled on the inn’s comfortable sofa, opening a bottle of Merlot and talking about Sam’s favorite movies: Prizzi’s Honor, Belle de Jour, The French Connection. He imitated Katharine Hepburn in the film Stage Door, trilling giddily, “The Caaaaaalla lilies are in bloom—”

  “Let’s come back here next year,” Sam said, interrupting himself before lowering his voice. “If—if I’m still around, that is.”

  Yanking down our Murphy bed, we tumbled around on the mattress in our incomplete version of sex, and finally Sam fell into a rare deep sleep, relieved of any possibility of midnight practicing. Each deep breath gurgled. His body sloshed and clacked. I rose and walked to the window facing Ames Hill Road.

  A half-moon had risen. Its soft light filtered through the red pines surrounding the inn, illuminating autumn leaves along the road. Four vials of Sam’s pills cast a shadow across the windowsill. When Betty came here, she had been about my age. But my future looked brighter than hers ended up. The Philharmonic would have an opening soon, and I’d have a good chance after playing as a subs
titute for years.

  Sam, sleeping, gurgled like a baby. We had been having an exclusive relationship for five months now, and I’d never felt more loved and respected. Unlike Randy, Sam had expressed a real desire to make a commitment. If we married, would I have to pay his doctor bills? How would we have children?

  I was frightened. Other twenty-seven-year-old women out there were dating healthy men their own age. Probably the kids from my grade-school classes had careers that offered health benefits and retirement funds. They probably strove to excel in nine-to-five jobs where they were rewarded with promotions. My life felt very wrong. I didn’t know how I was going to survive.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Mozart in the Jungle

  THE ELEVATOR OPENED directly onto Alice Tully’s apartment, which looked north over Central Park. I was here to turn pages for Sam’s run-through with the teenage violinist Joshua Bell, whose half sister had been my acquaintance at NCSA. Josh grew up in Indiana, with as normal a childhood as any prodigy ever had.

  His hostess had lived an extraordinary musical life spanning the century. Sam picked up a photo of Miss Tully curtsying before Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1925. In another picture, she posed with Spanish princess Maria de Bourbon at her family’s Minnesota estate. A Courbet landscape was hung on walls tinted green to match her Magritte painting of an apple. In the hallway, Steuben glass paperweights were enshrined in black velvet alcoves, symbolizing the origin of her family’s wealth.

  Her $3.3 million round Monet and $4.8 million Toulouse-Lautrec were rarities. One of her desks had even been created by Marie Antoinette’s cabinetmaker. Heiress to the Corning glass fortune, Tully had plenty to lavish on art and music.

  Holding her Maltese dog Tatie, Tully entered the room regally. She was famous enough to be a museum piece herself. So many people knew the Lincoln Center auditorium named after her that she was often introduced as Alice Tully Hall. Although she may have been the wealthiest person I’d ever met, Tully had a casual and friendly manner. She wasn’t a dilettante but a trained musician. Born to a state senator and his wife in 1902, she used family money to study voice with Jean Périer and Thérèse Leschetizky in Paris, giving a debut recital at the city’s Salle Gaveau in 1927.

  It wasn’t surprising that Tully had been attracted to Europe, which offered a centuries-old tradition of literature and the arts that the United States could not. European nations had a long history of patronage, in which churches and royalty commissioned music, statuary, paintings, and palaces. In pre-Depression America, the arts enjoyed none of that support.

  European arts finally began to flourish in America only in the thirties, when the government established arts funding under the WPA. Tully returned to the United States. At her debut in 1936 at Town Hall, critics noted technical defects while applauding her intellect. By her third New York concert, it became clear that Tully would never be a top diva, so she stopped performing in public.

  During World War II, Tully became a Civil Air Patrol pilot. She remained single, keeping company with a tenor for thirty years. After inheriting her estate in 1958, she decided to help other artists and became a modern-day Medici, giving away vast sums of money to help musicians.

  Tully indulged many interests. She contributed to wildlife preservation funds, once visiting Ethiopia just to pet the emperor’s lion. She donated anonymously through her Maya Corporation, a foundation set up in 1953 to underwrite struggling arts, education, and health organizations. Scrupulous about the use of her name, she insisted on testing the acoustics of Alice Tully Hall herself, choosing the decor and the organ builder and then creating enough room between the rows of seats to make even her six-foot-six tenor companion comfortable.

  Moving into a small apartment in Central Park South’s Hampshire House in 1959, Tully began buying the twenty-seventh floor’s four other flats. Her fourteen-room home was completed in 1968 when she purchased Greta Garbo’s apartment, last rented to a quarrelsome Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, who had bought it while Sinatra was filming On the Town. Since Hampshire House was a residence hotel, the 6,500-square-foot apartment came with maids and room service, which compensated for a minuscule Pullman kitchen. The five apartments comprising her home came with individual monthly fees totaling $22,800 in monthly maintenance. (When Tully died eight years later, the apartment listed for $7 million.)

  Tully’s apartment provided an extravagant backdrop for Josh, who looked more like an ordinary teenager than a violin virtuoso. His mother and father had come along too. While the Bell parents sat down, I sat next to Sam and helped arrange his music on the piano’s music rack. Josh took out his Guarnerius violin, lent by New Jersey collector Herbert Axelrod, and began tuning. He and Sam were to play this program throughout New England and then record an album of showpieces. This run-through would give Tully a chance to meet the rising star. She’d long helped out individual artists like Bobby White, and gave soprano Jessye Norman the cash she needed to travel to Europe and “be discovered.” Young stars counted on philanthropists like Tully to help them buy instruments; Josh was planning to purchase a $4 million 1727 Stradivarius violin.

  Although I had confidence in my musical abilities, I knew I’d never travel in this sphere, a stardom reserved for singers, cellists, pianists, and violinists. They played the greatest repertoire everyone knew: Brahms, Beethoven, Sibelius, and Mendelssohn concertos. Even though I’d just won fourth prize in the Lucarelli International Competition for Solo Oboists, I knew there were few opportunities to strut my stuff. Oboists, with the exception of the Mozart Concerto, were limited to orchestra jobs or an occasional solo or chamber concert.

  I still enjoyed meeting famous musicians and glimpsing their glamorous lives. Last month, in a fund-raiser for Sam’s Cape Cod chamber festival in a Park Avenue apartment similar to Tully’s, I’d played in Jacques Ibert’s woodwind Quintet. When we finished, an elegant woman angled her French twist over my music stand. I smiled politely and looked up, expecting the Danny Kaye joke I heard so often. This woman’s eyes were startling. Whomever she was, she connected deeply with the music.

  “You are a very fine musician. That was the most beautiful sound and phrasing,” she said quietly, decisively. “I’m Anna Moffo.”

  I snapped to attention. It really was the legendary soprano, here with her husband, RCA chair Robert Sarnoff. I started telling her how I loved her Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5 recording with Stokowski, and that I’d worn out her Rachmaninoff Vocalise record. Before I could go on, she was gone, lost in a blur of designer dresses. Like Tully, Anna Moffo was a link to the distant past.

  Miss Tully was clearly engaged by Josh’s virtuoso performance, which demonstrated musical sophistication far more mature than his seventeen-year-old age. I felt privileged to be in the room. As he and Sam finished their recital, Tully began talking in detail about the pieces they’d just played. I had a feeling that when she was present at New York Philharmonic board meetings, she was not only a source of funds but also a strong artistic influence.

  We all walked to Tully’s dining room, where the downstairs restaurant had delivered a simple dinner. We ate at a polished fifteen-foot table that was surrounded by Picasso sketches. Josh’s father, a research psychologist at the Kinsey Institute, talked about his 1981 study linking biology and homosexuality. It was fascinating conversation, but even this could not keep Miss Tully, who was eighty-five, fully engaged. Seated at the head of the table, she nodded off for much of the dinner hour.

  Tully wouldn’t be able to bail out musicians for much longer. Her philanthropic style waned as modern American entrepreneurs earned millions but kept the cash. Those who did contribute gave to health, education, and technology, overlooking the arts they’d learned nothing about in school. The old school was dying off. “This extraordinary generation of New Yorkers, this generation of suffering, of memory, of the Holocaust and World War II, this heavily Jewish generation of goers and givers who have supported the arts so intensely, so gene
rously, is not likely to be replaced,” explained New York Public Library head Vartan Gregorian in a New York Times article.1

  While philanthropists like Tully were fading away, arts groups still behaved as if they had an eternal supply of blank checks. Donations had steadily increased since the late fifties, with arts spending strengthened by the strong stock market of the eighties. Nowhere was this spending more evident than on an international tour with one of America’s biggest orchestras that included me—sponsored, at least for the time being, by a corporate version of Alice Tully.

  Rough waves crashed against Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach. The New York Philharmonic’s tour bus drove us past women in tiny Brazilian “dental floss” bikinis, while men dozed in the traces of late-afternoon light. Up on Corcovado, the Christ statue blazed in the sunset against a graying sky. Rio was just one stop on the 1987 New York Philharmonic tour being sponsored by Citicorp. Three weeks in six South American cities would feature the full orchestra, with an additional week in three cities with the chamber group of fifteen.

  I was still a substitute in the Philharmonic, but the orchestra’s second oboist would be retiring soon. The orchestra had been hiring me for four years, so they clearly liked my playing. When the orchestra’s job advertisement appeared in International Musician, the union paper, I would send in my résumé and reserve an audition time. Typically, hundreds of instrumentalists would apply for such a job; the orchestra personnel manager had to decide who would be invited to audition, who had to send a tape before being given an audition appointment, and who would be rejected outright. This tour would give me a chance to make an impression on conductor Zubin Mehta, who had the last word on who got in.

  Sam had been unwavering in his support of my career, and he’d encouraged me to take more auditions. It wasn’t as if I made a conscious decision, but our relationship had begun drifting closer to friendship than love in the weeks following his trip to Marlboro. His physical condition was problematic, and he spent all night practicing downtown anyway. I hoped the tour would put some distance between us before we had the inevitable talk about breaking up as a couple.