Getting Real

by Gretchen Carlson

  • • •

  Back in Minnesota during the school year, my life was pretty regimented. I got up at 6:00 a.m. every day to get in some practicing before school. Home at 2:30, and more practicing, plus homework and chores. Believe it or not, in spite of all my music work, I had a pretty normal childhood. I was interested in so many things—I didn’t want to miss out.

  I did have to make some sacrifices because of my practice schedule, which was only natural. I wasn’t able to join Girl Scouts or be a crossing guard at school (which I really wanted to do!). I could never hold a knife in the kitchen or chop vegetables or any other normal thing, because it was too easy to slice off the end of a finger.

  Molly had started playing the cello, and she and I began playing in a quartet with two other girls, under the direction of Mr. Davenport. We practiced every Monday night for years, and soon were playing at events in the community. Our favorite piece was “I Got Rhythm.” Sometimes Mr. Davenport would be our guest artist, playing on the bass a snappy, jazzy version he’d created.

  We also played softball for a team called the Lincoln Logs. My mom was the coach, and to this day it amazes me that she let me join the team, with relatively little fear that I would damage my precious hands. I played second base and Molly played first. She was the real athlete and an exceptional hitter. I was envious of how Molly looked in her jeans. Levi’s were the rage then, especially light blue cords. I remember taking a ballpoint pen and crossing out the size on my pants label so nobody would know how big my pants were.

  By junior high I was becoming conscious of my weight in an unpleasant way. To this day I remember my dread when we competed in the annual 440 race at school, which was part of the President’s Fitness Challenge. We had to run around the football field four times, and I agonized over the event for weeks in advance. I couldn’t even sleep because I was so worried about it. I hated to run, and my weight held me back. My greatest fear was that I would be dead last, or, worse still, that I wouldn’t be able to finish.

  I guess maybe I could have skipped going to Hans Bakery on the way to school. I could have chosen not to have doughnuts every day, but I didn’t. So I suffered with my fear. I don’t think I ever came in last, but the anxiety alone nearly did me in. I wanted to be slimmer and in better shape, but I just didn’t care enough to do it at that point in my life.

  I was quite sociable, even popular. Because I had so many interests, I was friends with different kinds of people. I didn’t fit the stereotype of kids in music or art or sports hanging out in their own cliques. Dad always taught us to be inclusive of everyone, and I took it to heart. I was also very interested in boys, and from the fourth grade on I always had a “boyfriend”—and at that age, my weight didn’t seem to be a factor. For me, boys represented fun and an escape from the discipline of practicing.

  Molly and I spent a lot of time plotting about boys, and usually we didn’t like the same ones, which was a good thing. We spent endless hours over at Molly’s house, sitting on her parents’ bed and strategizing how to call boys and tell them that we liked them. Finally, after mustering up the courage, Molly would call the boy I liked, and she’d blurt out, “Gretchen likes you. Do you like her?” I’d do the same for her.

  On Saturday afternoons we’d go to the roller-skating rink, called Cheapskate, which was also a great place to meet boys. They had a dance called the Snowball. The boys lined up on one side of the rink and the girls on the other. The boys came over and chose a girl they wanted to slow-skate with as a romantic song played. Then the whistle blew and everyone had to find new partners. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have liked being on the spot that way, worried about not being chosen. Luckily, Tom Schultz, my junior high boyfriend, was a great roller skater. He always picked me first.

  My friends and I engaged in the normal junior high experimentation. For a while I was hosting “makeout” parties in my parents’ basement. That’s where we practiced kissing. My house had a little room under the stairs that was a haven in the event of a tornado. There was a single light bulb. We’d cram four couples in, count to three, turn off the light, and everyone would start kissing. Then we’d stop and turn the light back on. It was silly and kind of sweet, and it was also very daring on my part, because if my mom caught wind of what was going on downstairs I would have been in big trouble.

  But I was only willing to go so far. Once at a make-out party a boy put his hand up the back of my shirt, and I was outraged. Always one to stand up for myself, I announced to the other girls, “We’re leaving!” We got on our bikes and rode single file down the street, with me yelling indignantly, “He put his hand up my shirt!” as if that was the most unthinkable infraction.

  During the school year I continued to work with Mary and perform in many recitals. I regularly won competitions, and I got used to seeing my name and picture in the local newspaper. I came to expect it. Then a boy named Gary Levinson came to town, and the competition heated up. Gary was my age and had just moved to Minnesota from Russia, where he’d been playing the violin since he was four. He became my main challenger, and it was like the battle of the violins when Gary and I played. Earlier I described playing as a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra. That opportunity was the prize for winning the Young People’s Symphony Concert Association competition. Gary and I went head-to-head, and when the judges couldn’t decide between us, we were both given first prize in a tie. We soloed with the Minnesota Orchestra on separate occasions the following year. Gary went on to have an important musical career and is currently the artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth. We never became friends as children, but I’ve followed his career with interest. Without knowing it, he had a big influence on my competitive spirit back in Minnesota.

  I also competed against Joshua Bell at the 1981 national competition for the American String Teachers Association, which was held in Minnesota. My mother said I played absolutely beautifully, and she figured I’d win the grand prize. Instead, I was first runner-up to Joshua, a kid from Indiana we’d never heard of before. Joshua chose a life in music and became one of the most famous concert violinists in the world. I chose another path, yet our lives have intersected often—an example of the way things come full circle. Joshua has been on my show many times, and in 2013 I enlisted him as a judge at the Miss America pageant.

  I was very serious about my music, but practicing was a grind, and if I had an excuse to skip practice I took it. When I was in the sixth grade I broke the pinky finger of my violin hand playing football. I caught a pass and it bent my finger the wrong way and broke the knuckle. Honestly, I was thrilled. An escape from violin practice! When I ran to tell my mother, she looked at it and said it was nothing. So I kept playing violin, and I was also playing the piano at that time. My piano teacher took one look at my swollen finger and said, “Gretchen, your finger is broken!” Sure enough, we went to a doctor and he put it in a cast. I was elated. I would have to stop practicing until it healed.

  In spite of my social nature, I’m struck looking back by how much time I spent by myself. Practicing the violin is mostly a solitary endeavor. At school I was deemed too professional to practice with the other kids, so they put me in a soundproof room so I could work on my own. Often I’d sit in that room and I wouldn’t play. It felt like a jail cell. And when I came home from school I was supposed to practice more, and if my mom wasn’t home—she was often with my brother at tennis practice—I’d sometimes take a break. My tiny rebellion.

  • • •

  In a study of child prodigies, David Henry Feldman of Tufts University wrote, “If you have a child who is in the world to play the violin, and you decide this child is not going to learn to play the violin—you have killed that child, if not physically, then certainly emotionally and spiritually.” In my parents’ eyes I was a prodigy, and they felt an obligation to see that my talent was nurtured. The violin was my identity—it was my soul—and my parents were very sensitive
to the importance of developing my gift. When Dorothy DeLay told them that I should move to New York and study at Juilliard, my parents felt they had to give the idea serious consideration. After two summers playing at the Aspen Music Festival, Miss DeLay believed that I could flourish at Juilliard, which would mean uprooting me from my life in Minnesota. My parents agreed to take me to New York for an audition. The idea that this might be the next step on my journey filled me with a mixture of excitement and dread.

  I passed the audition, but my feelings were mixed. I wondered if I really wanted to do this, and if my parents were actually thinking of sending me away to live on my own in New York. Was I psychologically ready for such a big step? Were they ready to let me go? I loved music, but I also wanted to fit in. I didn’t just want to be “the violin girl.” When my parents decided I would stay in Minnesota during the school year to maintain a sense of normalcy and then study with Dorothy DeLay at Aspen during the summers, I was relieved, and later when I understood things better, I was grateful that Mom and Dad didn’t ship me off to Juilliard, essentially robbing me of any chance for a childhood.

  The next summer my parents allowed me to go to Aspen for the whole summer by myself. I lived in an old run-down hotel called the Blue Spruce. It was designed like a traditional motel, with four rooms on the bottom and an outside stairway to the four rooms on the top. A Frenchwoman named Madame Knapp was the house mistress. Madame Knapp was quite a character—rail thin, with big blonde hair, bright red lipstick, and a low, gravelly smoker’s voice. She chain-smoked, and a cloud of smoke always lingered in the air above her head. The house was so old and rickety we worried that the whole place would go up in flames. We were on our own a lot and responsible for getting our meals at the cafeteria. Suddenly I was part of a group of kids more my own age, and that changed my experience for the better. I lived at the Blue Spruce every summer from then on.

  At the Blue Spruce I befriended Hope Easton, a cellist from Cleveland who was even younger than me. She was tiny, with a beautiful cherubic face and the strongest little hands I’d ever seen. She had the same passion for the cello that I had for the violin. Hope later became a cellist of great renown, performing at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and venues all over the world, as well as on TV.

  Hope and I became very close, even sharing a room. There wasn’t a lot of space for us to practice, but we’d take turns—one of us would use the bedroom and the other would practice in the bathroom. We inspired each other to practice instead of goofing off, but we also managed to have fun together. We both had two ear piercings in our right ears, and somehow Hope talked me into letting her pierce my ear with a third hole, after freezing it with ice cubes. It was a mess—probably the grossest thing I’ve ever done. I still have the third hole in my ear, although it has been three decades since I’ve put an earring in it.

  If there was any tension in our relationship it wasn’t around performing, it was around boys. Our mutual crush was Peter, a cellist who also became quite renowned. That summer he was just the hottest boy at the festival. Since he was a few years older than me, I thought he was way too old for Hope. But we both went after him.

  There were lots of teenagers at the festival that year. Some nights Hope and I snuck out of the Blue Spruce, which was a daring escapade. We had to climb out the window, teeter along a ledge as narrow as a balance beam, jump down, and crawl past Madame Knapp’s ground-floor window. Then we headed for the hot tub at Benny Kim’s place. Benny and his brother Eric were both at the music festival. Benny played the violin and Eric played the cello. They lived at a hotel with their mother. I remember skinny dipping in their hot tub late at night. We were definitely breaking curfew and might have been thrown out if we’d been caught. Luckily we never were. I became great lifelong friends with Benny, and he played my favorite violin pieces at my wedding.

  Sometimes we went over to the arcade and played Pac-Man for hours. I excelled at Pac-Man, thanks to my fast, nimble hands and fierce concentration. You might say being a violinist made me a video game master. I also loved the game Galaga. I still love video games, and I was thrilled when my husband gave me Galaga and Pac-Man for Christmas recently.

  The older students were a constant source of admiration. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the Italian-born classical violinist, was already a famous soloist by the time I met her, and I was in awe of her. She was five years older than me, and she played like a dream, and chain-smoked too. She was utterly cool, with tight jeans and boots, and she acted as if she didn’t give a crap what anybody thought. She had attitude, and I admired that. She was the first person I’d ever seen who was a serious classical musician but looked like a rock star. Nadja went on to have a great career, although it was almost cut short by a terrible accident when she cut off the tip of one finger in a kitchen accident (thus my mom’s dictate: no knives!). Her finger was reattached and her career was not damaged.

  Not long ago, I was on a plane to Arizona and I realized that Nadja was sitting behind me. Would she even remember me? I went up to her, bent down in the aisle, and said tentatively, “Nadja, I’m Gretchen Carlson. I used to go to Aspen . . .” I felt a little nervous, wondering if she would even know who I was. But she did. “Gretchen, I know who you are—how are you?” And we had a nice conversation. I glowed. Isn’t it funny how you can be transported back to a teenage mentality in your forties?

  Sometimes Hope, Peter Winograd, Ellen Payne, and I went into town at night to play in a quartet for money at the Souper restaurant. We were given a wonderful meal for free, and we kept a violin case open in front of us for tips. We usually made between a hundred and two hundred dollars and divided it up. Every once in a while, a celebrity would come by and drop a hundred-dollar bill into our case. My cut was a lot of money for a fifteen-year-old.

  Finally I was having fun at Aspen. I belonged in a way I relished. But the main work was very serious. By this time I was in the Festival Orchestra, which was the top-ranked orchestra, and I was being personally taught by Dorothy DeLay.

  Working with Dorothy DeLay was considered to be the fulfillment of any young violinist’s dreams. I was in awe of her, just like every other student, but I also found her intimidating. I never felt as if we had a relationship, the way Mary and I did. I always called her “Miss DeLay,” never “Dorothy.” Having said that, she was a remarkable and innovative teacher. In particular she taught me to be myself, to bring forth my own voice in music. She believed that the secret to greatness was to infuse your music with your unique personality. I had never heard anyone say that before, but it was something I had already felt internally. Miss DeLay taught me a visualization technique that helped me in my life even outside violin. She asked me to visualize myself on the stage performing and to imagine the entire performance at its best, including the moment of applause or, if it was a competition, winning. She urged me to imagine the feelings. And then she’d ask me to walk it backward and visualize what I was going to do to reach that point. It was a powerful exercise, because if you can see yourself achieving the best, you have the confidence to go ahead and do it.

  Miss DeLay also used visualization to help me interpret pieces. She taught me to see a piece of music as a story arc with different moods, but it would not be just any story. It would be my story. The personal feeling would help build the interpretation and make the piece something of my own creation.

  For Dorothy DeLay playing music was not just about technique, it was about communicating. What were you trying to convey to an audience? What story were you telling? What did you want them to feel? To accomplish that you had to reach down deep inside yourself and discover the meaning of what you were playing. It was a revelation to me to begin understanding music in that way.

  With Miss DeLay’s guidance, I began to think in musical notes. Because I had perfect pitch, I heard them everywhere. That never went away. My husband likes to tell the story of when we lived in Cleveland right after we were married. I’d wa
ke up in the morning and lie in the dark listening to the ships from Lake Erie blow their horns. I’d say, “E-flat . . . D-flat.”

  If there was a downside to working with Miss DeLay, it was that she was chronically late. She was notorious for it. Everyone joked about it, but I really hated it. I’d have a lesson scheduled for ten, and maybe if I were lucky she’d get to me by four. She was always rescheduling. I spent more time with her secretary, Leslie, than I did with her. I was a stickler for being on time, and it drove me crazy.

  I guess I’d have to say she was something of a diva, and in fairness that happens when you’re the best in the world and everyone wants to be with you. When I did get in to see her, the sessions sometimes felt rushed because she had twenty other students waiting. I was always conscious that I was in the presence of a great teacher who was solely focused on my craft and much less so on me as an individual. She was teaching the best players in the world, and I was only one among many. I never felt as if she paid attention to me as a person. There were no tuna sandwiches in Dorothy DeLay’s studio.

  • • •

  By the time I was fifteen, I had a window into what my future could be. All the young players lived for their music. Some of them were just embarking on their professional careers. They were single-minded—and often unhappy. The pain and struggle of their isolated lives really struck me. I was breaking away in my own mind. I had many things I wanted to live for, not just music. Sometimes I felt guilty that I wasn’t more single-minded, that I felt the strong pull of friends and school and dating and the full experience of being a young girl. During the school year, walking home from school carrying my violin, I sometimes felt embarrassed. It set me apart during a time when I only wanted to belong.