Getting Real

by Gretchen Carlson

  Every Friday morning, instead of going to school, my mom drove me to Mary’s house in an old neighborhood in South Minneapolis, along back roads. The trip took an hour and a half. When we entered the house, Mary always greeted me with a kiss—“How’re you doing, baby doll?”—and I would tussle with her dog, Maggie, for a few minutes. Maggie was a friendly black-and-white mutt who looked as if she hadn’t been brushed in years. Her messy appearance fit right in with the messiness of the house.

  We practiced in a small study. The room was filled with piles of books and stacks of music. There was a piano squeezed against the wall and a music stand, with just enough room for Mary and me to stand during practice. It was a tight fit. Mom would sit a few inches away and take notes in her beautiful penmanship:

  “Watch your bow arm.”

  “Don’t tug the bow too hard with your index finger.”

  “Intonation problems on the fast part of page three.”

  “Lift your chin.”

  “Practice this passage twenty times.”

  Our lessons normally started with exercises. As I accomplished each one to Mary’s satisfaction, she checked the page and assigned a new one.

  She marked my music with a thick pencil, which had a dark texture that smudged on the page. I loved those pencils. They had removable square erasers on the end, and because I was such a perfectionist I would use those erasers a lot when I wrote notes myself.

  Even as a seven-year-old I could tell that Mary was kind of eccentric. There were photos in the house of her and her sister performing in the most glamorous gowns imaginable. But Mary had left glamour behind. Now she and her husband, Bob, and their three children lived a different kind of life, which I thought of as artsy. Mary and Bob were crazy about each other, totally devoted, and it felt good to be in their presence. Bob wrote his wife love poems and bought her bouquets of flowers. Their house was like no other place I’d ever been. My mother was meticulous, with everything in its place. Mary’s house was like a storm—books and junk everywhere. The rooms were narrow and dark, with a steep staircase up to the attic, where I never dared to go, and another one down to the basement where a boarder lived. I never met the boarder.

  Bob was a freelance journalist and he was home a lot. He had an electric dump truck track set up on the dining room table. The truck would go around the track, up and down hills, dumping its load into barrels. He’d show me all the switches and features, and I loved watching that dump truck go around the track.

  Bob could also play the nose flute, which delighted me no end. It was a semi-plastic device that he put on his nose. He’d blow into it and play a song. I always laughed and clapped. Bob was fun.

  The lessons lasted two hours, and halfway through we’d take a break and have a snack. Bob would appear in the doorway. “Can I make you my tuna special?” he’d ask with a flourish. Of course! Bob was the cook in the family, and he made the best tuna sandwich I’d ever had—oil-packed tuna with lots of mayonnaise on toast—and I really looked forward to it.

  “Half,” Mom said.

  “Whole!” I argued.

  Sometimes I got half a sandwich like Mom wanted, and sometimes I got a whole. I loved to eat, but Mom was always watching my waistline.

  In spite of dietary restrictions, Mom and I had another ritual after the lesson. We stopped at Dairy Queen on the way home. I always got a vanilla cone with sprinkles on top, and this was before lunch!

  Over the months and years to come, Mary took me through a classical training repertoire, beginning with the easiest—Bach, Vivaldi—then on to Handel and Mozart and Mendelssohn. And eventually to Tchaikovsky, Paganini, Brahms, and Beethoven. Beethoven wasn’t hard because of the notes but because of the interpretation. You had to be a mature player to interpret Beethoven.

  Standing in Mary’s cramped music room, with my violin pressed against my chin and my fingers dancing through the notes, I was transported into another world—one where I wasn’t a little kid but a performer who could bring the most wondrous melodies to life. It was pure joy. The ability to play music gave me a depth well beyond my years. At seven years old, I lacked the vocabulary to express my feelings, but music placed a rich vocabulary at my disposal every single day. I remember thinking, “This is mine . . . this beauty belongs to me, and nothing can change it.” Big emotions for a little girl.

  My first recital for Mary was held at the MacPhail Center for Music in June 1974, just as I finished second grade. I played Bach’s Concerto in A minor, first movement. I was accompanied on the piano by a woman named Thelma Johnson, who would become my piano accompanist for many years. Thelma was a warmhearted redhead, and she was a lot of fun to be around. Her husband played bass for the Minnesota Orchestra. Their kids were grown, and I think Thelma just loved having me around. It sounds funny to say that she became my friend, since she was an adult and I was a little girl, but I didn’t have any real music friends then, so that’s what happened.

  Sometimes I’d stay over at Thelma’s house. She had three pianos, and we played together and laughed our heads off. In spite of the warning that my hands were too small for piano, I studied it on the side with a local teacher for years just for fun, and I thought of it as my escape. Unlike the violin, which always came with a certain amount of performance stress, the piano was just pure entertainment, and it’s still fun for me today.

  Thelma played for me at every recital and every competition and audition. Later, she played at my wedding. She’s still alive and quite elderly, and I’ve seen her from time to time over the years. I once took my daughter, Kaia, to play the piano for her, and it was a very happy visit, one Kaia remembers fondly.

  Through it all, my mother was my ballast, my shelter from any storm. She always told me, even when I was a very small child, “Gretchen, you can be anything you want to be.” But she also said, “God gave you talents and He expects you to make the most of them.”

  I’ve thought of my mother’s words many times during my life. I had friends whose mothers didn’t encourage them or challenge them in this way, and I think it’s so important for children to know that their parents trust them to succeed and that the world is open to them.

  I think if it had been up to my dad, he wouldn’t have pushed me so hard to pursue music seriously. But even though he was the musician in the family, Mom was much more mindful that my talent was not something to fool around with. She certainly wasn’t a “stage mom” in the typical way. But she made a tremendous commitment on my behalf. I always felt very lucky, and we had a special closeness formed over years of mutual effort. I also think that my mother was an incredibly bright and passionate person, but she never capitalized on it for herself. She channeled her talent into helping her kids, and I was the beneficiary of that. My fondest memories are of driving to performances with my mom—just the two of us in the car. I was always anxious and I didn’t want to talk, but she’d chatter anyway, giving me a pep talk, putting me at ease.

  My father, a great lover of music, with an impeccable ear, gave me a different kind of support. He performed a ritual with me before every concert or audition. In our living room I would do a mock performance with only one audience member—Dad. I’d play the entire piece, and he would lean back in his chair, eyes closed and a faint smile on his lips, really listening. I knew he heard every note, every little nuance. He always gave me an honest appraisal. I needed that ritual, but it wasn’t easy. For me it was much easier to play before five thousand people than it was to stand in the living room and play for my father. When my dad said I was ready to go, I was ready to go.

  I loved playing for recitals and at church, and I had some pretty remarkable experiences along the way. My first great opportunity was being chosen to play for Isaac Stern. I was ten years old. Stern was doing what he called “A Conversation About the Fiddle” at Macalester College. Three students were selected to play for him, and I was one of them. The other two
were older than me, as usual, and one of them was a violin major at Juilliard.

  I was the first to play. Thelma sat at the piano, with Mary standing a few feet away looking on with pride. I stood next to Thelma, waiting to begin. Isaac Stern came bounding out, a big round man who seemed to fill the whole stage with his energy. He gave me a warm smile and seemed delighted by me, a little ten-year-old. So I played for him, the first movement and cadenza of the Mozart Concerto in G. When I finished, he clapped enthusiastically. Then he came over and bent down and took my face in his hands. I was waiting for his critique, because that’s why we were there. He looked into my eyes and told me, “You need to do only one thing. Grow up and get an adult-size violin.” Then he turned to the audience and said, “This child is a credit to her parents. Are they here?” My parents stood, beaming with pleasure at the praise.

  Mary was proud of me that day, and we all understood what Isaac Stern meant by growing into an adult violin. I was playing a half-size at that point, and the small violins just didn’t have the power or resonance. Nobody spent too much money on them, because you’d just grow out of them. It was a little frustrating, because the reviews at competitions were often along the lines of, “We can tell you have an incredible sound, we just can’t hear it.” There was only so much you could pull out of a quarter-size or half-size violin. So I had to be patient and wait for my arms to grow.

  I won’t say the instrument was everything, but it was a big thing. If two people at the same level were playing, you’d always choose the one with the better instrument. When I reached the point of choosing an adult violin around age thirteen, I tested about twenty-five models before I made my decision. It was a very personal choice. Someone once said it was as important as choosing a husband. I still have that instrument, and it’s one of my most cherished possessions.

  The summer I was eleven, Mary, Bob, and their children took off for three months to stay at a camping resort in Maine. It was impossible for me to be without a teacher for three months, so that’s when the idea came for me to audition for a place at the Aspen Music Festival. I didn’t realize at the time that it was rare for a child my age to go to Aspen. It would start a whole new chapter in my life.

  • • •

  Dorothy DeLay was considered by many people to be the greatest violin teacher in the country. She taught at Juilliard, as well as directing the Aspen Music Festival. When I went to audition for her I felt intimidated. She was a very large and imposing woman, with a red wig and a shapeless blue dress with a colored scarf. She didn’t treat me with the warmth and deference I was used to receiving from Mary. She was strictly business, with an impatient attitude that said, “Don’t waste my time. Show me what you’ve got.” And I did. I was many years younger than most of the other artists who would be at the festival—most were in their twenties—but I passed muster with Miss DeLay and was accepted into the program.

  That first year I only went for four of the nine weeks. It began as a vacation. While Dad stayed behind to run the car dealership, Mom and I and my siblings piled into a van with Mom’s friend Andrea and her daughter Kristin, who was my sister’s age. We wound our way west, stopping at Mount Rushmore and Bear Country in South Dakota. It was an adventure, although the long ride was tough on me because I had always suffered from carsickness. I survived by chewing roll after roll of Tums, to the point that my brothers nicknamed me “Mother Tums.” In retrospect, my roiling stomach might have been caused by nerves, because while everyone else was having fun, I was going to Aspen to work, and I had no idea what I would encounter. With each mile, my body was telling me I was facing the unknown.

  We rented a condo called Aspen Square in the middle of the village of Aspen. It featured a Baskin-Robbins on the ground floor and a beautiful pool that I was allowed to use when I wasn’t practicing.

  In 1978, Aspen was not the glamorous, celebrity-driven place it is today. There was no Chanel store, no Ritz-Carlton, and no McDonald’s. The people were very down-to-earth, and the clothes and food reflected that. Many people were vegetarians, which wasn’t that common then, and they were very health conscious. No cars were allowed in the center of town, which featured cobblestone streets with shops and restaurants lining the way. There was an aluminum hut at the end of the cobblestone mall that sold giant chocolate chip cookies hot out of the oven. To this day I’ve never tasted a better chocolate chip cookie.

  The first hurdle was an audition to determine where I would be placed in a summer orchestra. The audition was very intimidating. I entered the room and stood before a panel of judges seated behind a table. The leader was Jorge Mester, the conductor of the Aspen Music Festival. He asked me to play something from Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor and then he gave me a piece of music to sight-read. This was important because during the festival we had to learn music very quickly to be ready for our performances. He gave us the tempo, then called, “Go!” Since I was a good sight reader, I nailed it. I’m sure this was the reason I was assigned to the Concert Orchestra.

  In all there were five orchestras, and the Concert Orchestra was considered the third best—quite an achievement for a first-timer. I sat in the first violin section and my stand partner was David Kim, a fifteen-year-old Asian kid. David and I became good friends that summer and we met up each year. David had been playing the violin since he was three; he went on to become the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he plays all over the world. That summer we bonded over our youth. We were even boyfriend and girlfriend for a while, in an innocent way. I remember that my family invited David along when we went to eat at the Chart House, my favorite restaurant in Aspen, which had an endless salad bar, great seafood like crab legs in drawn butter, and a rich mud pie dessert. When the waiter asked David if he knew what he wanted, he replied, “Yes, sir, I have my heart set on scallops.” My brothers howled with laugher, but I got it. In that setting, fifteen-year-old David wasn’t a kid. He was an earnest little adult.

  The orchestra met for rehearsal every day and performed each week in “the Tent,” a huge outdoor concert hall at the foot of the mountain, with a white canopy over the seats. I can still remember the way the wind would whip up during concerts, slapping the canopy in tune with the music. Summer storms rose up frequently in Aspen, and sometimes there would be a sudden downpour as we were playing—which I found exhilarating. It was a new experience for me to play classical music in a setting of such natural wonder.

  Our audience included people from around the world who came to the festival to see some of the best musicians perform. They would bring picnic lunches and dinners and sit on the grass enjoying the music. It was the antithesis of the formal concert hall environment.

  At Aspen I learned what it meant to be part of an orchestra, to play as a team effort. I was used to standing out, but now the goal was to blend with the other violinists. So I took my place in the section, a small splash of blonde hair and color amid the more adult artists. My mother used to say I was a little girl in a big orchestra.

  After my first summer of just four weeks I returned the next year for the full nine-week program. My mother and brothers accompanied me, but my sister decided to stay home with Dad. My brothers were excited to learn that the actor Steve Martin lived next door. I swear we saw him take out the garbage one morning. That was a highlight.

  Mostly what I remember about that summer was the loneliness. My mother drove me to the rehearsals, and nobody really wanted to talk to me—what twenty-year-old wants to hang out with a twelve-year-old? When the orchestra took breaks, I’d sometimes go out front and sit on a huge rock and cry. On one hand I was glad to be there, and when I was playing I was fine, but I was so lonely and out of place. I felt sorry for myself.

  The gloom lifted in the middle of the summer when my sister and Molly visited for a week, along with my grandparents, while Mom and my brothers went home for a week. It was wonderful having Molly and Kris there. For once I wasn’t lonely
. I could see Aspen through their eyes as a wonderful adventure, a time to push the limits. Molly and I went shopping and Molly bought a bright yellow dress that laced up the back. She was slender and lovely, and I was a little bit jealous because I was too chunky to wear the sleek fashions. We were trying to look more mature, and Kris, Molly, and I hatched a scheme to go to a bar one night—as if two twelve-year-olds and a fourteen-year-old could pass for adults. We did go to a bar, but we were too chicken to order a drink.

  Playing with a big orchestra was a challenge, but my parents had taught me about mental preparation, which is something I’m not sure a lot of parents do. That simple ritual of performing for my father in the living room readied me mentally for the big stage. My mother’s daily pep talks allowed me to curb my performance fears. This support gave me strength in pressure-filled situations for the rest of my life. It was invaluable as I entered my teen years and began being anxious before performances. It’s a funny thing. In the early years I was never nervous. I just bounced onto the stage and started playing. But after people kept asking, “Aren’t you nervous playing in front of all those people?” I began to think I should be nervous, and then I was. So the mental preparation was absolutely essential. The funny thing is, no matter how nervous I was before a performance, the minute I started playing I felt completely at ease. It’s the same way I feel decades later when the red light on the camera signals that I’m on the air. I relax into the role.