In the men’s room soon after, I ran into one of the old-time editors who worked on the news desk. “Oh, you’re the new arts guy,” he said. I said, “Yeah.”
“Well, there’s only one thing you have to know to survive on this paper.”
“What’s that?”
“It comes out every goddamned day.”
That turned out to be very good advice.
I never discovered who it was who recommended me to the Times. My first year at the paper, more than fifty individual people on the Times and in the art world took me aside at various social events to confide to me that he was the person or she was the person who had gotten me my job.
Shortly after I was hired, the New Yorker hired Harold Rosenberg as their art critic. Bob Coates, who had been there for many years, was a perfectly good writer, but his reviews were thin. Soon after that, Time magazine hired Robert Hughes for the same reason and because they had been against everything modern. You couldn’t really conduct that kind of journalism anymore. Art had become a part of mainstream cultural life, and journalism had fallen behind its readership. It was a very big change.
The Times tried to upgrade their coverage of the arts. They had never had an architecture critic, but now they hired Ada Louise Huxtable. Then they hired Clive Barnes, who had been the ballet critic of the London Times and the Spectator. I had read Clive in the London Spectator for years, so I was delighted. When the chief movie critic, Bosley Crowther, who had been at the Times for as long as anyone could remember, panned Bonnie and Clyde, it was a great embarrassment. That’s when Vincent Canby was hired as his backup, and then Crowther was eased out. They offered the theater critic’s job to Kenneth Tynan, who had made a great reputation on the London Observer. When he turned them down because he wanted to write for the New Yorker, they hired Stanley Kaufman—very briefly. Stanley didn’t make a very impressive showing; he was very condescending to his readers. As soon as the Trib folded and Walter Kerr was available, they dropped Stanley and hired Kerr.
In the spring of 1972, I was sort of dragooned into temporarily giving up writing about art to work as the cultural news editor on the daily paper. The guy who preceded me was an old-time reporter. He had no interest in the arts, regarded it as a demotion that he had been made cultural news editor, and took it out on us. We complained bitterly to the management. The last straw for me came when the Museum of Modern Art was putting on the first de Kooning retrospective in New York, and I told him I needed extra space.
“Who the hell is de Kooning?” asked the cultural editor of the New York Times.
When I became cultural editor, I discovered Clive Barnes was manipulating the schedule every day to accommodate his conflicts. Clive wrote wonderfully in those days. He had been writing for a very knowledgeable ballet public in London, and he brought that same attitude to New York. But as soon as he came to the Times, he understood that in New York, the theater critic is top banana. Clive had his eye on the job.
When Walter Kerr left, Clifton Daniel offered the job of theater critic to Clive. But Clive didn’t want to give up writing about dance; he wanted both jobs. At first they said no. Then Clive wrote a piece about the first Harold Pinter play done in New York in his Sunday dance column as if it were a dance subject. His pal at Time magazine called Clifton Daniel and said, “You only have to read what Clive wrote about Pinter to know that he’s your theater critic.”
So finally Daniel gave in and created this absurd situation where Clive was the first-string theater critic and first-string ballet critic. And it was a mess. Sometimes he would persuade producers to postpone the opening of a play to accommodate his crazy schedule. Sometimes he wouldn’t review things until they were just about to close. It was a totally unworkable arrangement.
MICKEY ALPERT: As I heard it, the story goes that when Clive had difficulty with the Times, the Shuberts, who felt he was sympathetic to them, went to Rupert Murdoch and guaranteed a page of advertising once a week if they hired Clive. No one knows whether the story is true, but the Shuberts did take out a lot more ad space in the Post right around the time Clive Barnes became its dance and theater critic.
I met Clive in 1967, when he wrote his first theatrical review as chief drama critic of the New York Times. It was for Scuba Duba, a play I was handling written by Bruce Jay Friedman. Clive was the image of Broadway criticism, the most accommodating and most influential of critics. He worked seven days a week—he was really indefatigable.
HILTON KRAMER: It was too bad; Clive pissed away real gifts. Once we happened to converge in Paris and happened to see one of the Soviet dance companies that was doing something of Prokofiev’s in Paris. His conversation about it was brilliant; he had such an encyclopedic knowledge about the whole history of ballet.
I began going to the New York City Ballet when it was still at City Center on 55th Street. Sometimes I would go three or four nights a week. That’s when George Balanchine was doing some of his greatest ballets and had some of his greatest dancers. It was very cheap, but there was never a full house. For years, I would run into people on the street who didn’t know my name and whose names I didn’t know, but we would nod to each other because of all those evenings we saw each other during intermissions.
STANLEY DRUCKER: You had a definite core audience that would come to Carnegie Hall week after week. Tickets were handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. A special event would draw the core plus others. And then, of course, as we were in New York, there were always a lot of visitors.
Carnegie Hall had a wonderful sound. But Lincoln Center was a new concept, a great opportunity to have the arts in one place. I remember the groundbreaking for Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, which opened in 1962. Eisenhower dug the first shovel. A temporary stage was set up on the site. Various dignitaries spoke. The Philharmonic played under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.
JOHN TAURANAC: I’ve frankly never been a fan of Lincoln Center. I never liked the idea of sequestering culture. One of the joys of passing by Carnegie Hall is hearing a hint of music from the crack in the window. To take culture with a “K,” as it were, and say this is where we are going to have it, in this sacred place, doesn’t work as far as I’m concerned.
CAROLE RIFKIND: Lincoln Center was a totality that they believed time wouldn’t touch. It didn’t want to recognize the messy vitality of the city. It was something that was controlled and symbolic, isolated, high culture.
HOWARD KISSEL: Lincoln Center transformed the West Side; it was a catalyst for an unbelievable transformation. That huge chunk of real estate that had been brownstones, tenements, West Side Story, was now devoted to culture. The tax rolls increased beyond one’s ability to imagine. The Met was the last of the buildings to open in ’66.
President Eisenhower unveiling plans for Lincoln Center in 1959, which “transformed the West Side.”
ROBERT MERRILL: Together with a few other artists, I went to the new opera house at Lincoln Center to try it out before it opened officially. Some said it was too large. I did not think so. If you sing correctly and project, you’ll sing well in every house. I did not miss the old Met. It had become difficult to create new productions there, to store scenery. Between productions, sets had to be moved to a warehouse. The old Met had had its day.
STANLEY DRUCKER: Once there was a Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, that was the end of the Lewisohn Stadium summer concerts. An air-conditioned venue was preferable to an outdoor theater, and City College did other things with the site. But what a marvelous thing it used to be to play out in the open air on a summer night. You couldn’t beat it.
Under the name of Stadium Symphony, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra would play a six- or eight-week season at Lewisohn Stadium, the athletic field of City College. It was a Greek-style colonnaded arena of concrete benches with some tables and chairs down below that held twenty-five thousand or more. Tickets cost from twenty-five cents to $1.20. We played six nights a week, had only one rehearsal per con
cert, and performed a different program every night. We covered so much music, all the Beethoven, all the Tchaikovsky.
KEN LIBO: There could be a symphony, a singer, a concert pianist, all top-notch acts. I may very well have seen Leonard Bernstein conduct, I may have seen the Pittsburgh Symphony, I may have heard Lily Pons sing. Graduations were held there.
Minnie Guggenheimer’s mother was friendly with Adolph Lewisohn, which is how Minnie got the job of organizing the concerts and introducing the performers. She always made intermission speeches, prefacing her remarks with “Hello, everybody,” and the audience would answer back, “Hello, Minnie.” Once a member of the royal family in England was in attendance, and he got lost somehow. Minnie grabbed the microphone and called out, “Here, Prince. Here, Prince.”
Now it’s quite dreadful, really horrible. If you want to see a prison, why go to Danamora up the river? Save yourself the trouble. Go to Amsterdam Avenue and 136th Street to see this prison-like structure that is used for science—what else?—where Lewisohn Stadium used to be.
STANLEY DRUCKER: When I joined the Philharmonic in 1948, Bruno Walter was the chief conductor. The other conductors were Leopold Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Charles Munch, Leonard Bernstein—a couple of good names. They were all top level. In New York you got the best the world had to offer. Some I loved less than others, but I respected and learned from each one. You collaborate with a conductor. It’s like playing a duet. It’s communication by a gesture, a look.
When Bruno Walter came out on stage, you thought you were in a cathedral. He walked slowly, his expression was serious. But his approach was quite emotional. I remember him conducting Song of the Earth by Mahler, and during the final movement, he had tears in his eyes. Terribly moving. He was a protégé of Mahler’s in Europe; there was that link.
Dimitri Mitropoulos had a great impact on me. He was Greek, a lean and lanky man who conducted without a baton. He was all over the place, more off the podium than on. Once there was a magazine photograph of Mitropoulos off the podium with the caption “Airborne Maestro.”
Mitropoulos was passionate, wild. He could conduct anything, but he championed twentieth-century music, the harder the better. He was able to absorb very complex and complicated scores; he memorized complete scores. Often he’d rehearse without the score in front of him. And I would also say if there’s such a thing as saintly, Mitropoulos would qualify. He performed many good deeds, helping musicians, buying instruments, paying for schooling, helping people’s children. But his own lifestyle was very simple. He lived in one room in the Great Northern Hotel on 56th Street not far from the stage door at Carnegie Hall. He was a modest man in a way, but on stage he was tremendous.
Stokowski also conducted without a baton, but he was very different from Mitropoulos. Stokowski was the man in the ivory tower; you could not easily approach him. But he had a wonderful sense of balance and tonal quality, an interesting way of working. His way of rehearsing was to play. If he had to stop, and everybody has to stop occasionally, he would start again in the very place he left off. If in the time allotted he could get through a piece three times, he would do it.
In those early years, Lenny was one of the guest conductors. Whenever he conducted, it was an event. Of course, I didn’t call him Lenny then; I called him Maestro, even though he was only in his thirties. Lenny was the kind of person who drew out what you had to offer. He approaches conducting with love; it was a sharing of something. He was passionate; he had something to say, and he was burning with talent.
At that time, we didn’t see all sides of his talent. But later on when he became musical director, all of the different facets of his brilliance came together. Conducting was only one of the things he could do. I don’t know when he practiced the piano, but he was a soloist conducting from the piano any number of times. And of course he was a composer. Over the years we played many of his works.
When Leonard Bernstein became musical director in 1958, it was a major forward leap. We went from a twenty-eight-week season and six- or eight-week summer season to year-round employment because of the force of his talent and image. That summer we had a seven-week tour of South America—every single country, even Paraguay. The next year, there was a ten-week tour of nearly every country in Europe, including Russia and Poland—new territory in those days. Pasternak and Shostakovich came to the concert in Russia; Charlie Chaplin came in Switzerland. There hasn’t been a tour of such length since.
RABBI JUDAH NADICH: Leonard Bernstein used to come to the Park Avenue Synagogue for Kol Nidre and during the day on Yom Kippur. I didn’t speak to him, as I was busy, as can be imagined. He wasn’t a member and I don’t know whose seat he occupied, but he was always sitting there, to the right of the pulpit.
STANLEY DRUCKER: It was a no-no in concert history to socialize with the maestro. But Lenny was very approachable, and I got to know him quite well. The first time I was the soloist with him conducting was in 1961 when I played the Debussey Clarinet Rhapsody in a bunch of performances at Carnegie Hall. The next time was in the Carl Neilson Clarinet Concerto. He was a champion of Neilson’s music. Lenny was instrumental in having the John Corleano Concerto written and conducting the work for me. Playing the world premier of that concerto was one of the high points of my life.
“Everything about him was bigger than life”: Leonard Bernstein annotating a musical score in 1955.
Lenny was very New York; he could speak jive talk, rock ’n’ roll talk, 52nd Street jazz talk to percussion players about using different sticks. He spoke multiple foreign languages and had an incredible command of English. He could communicate, and communication in the arts is the thing; collaboration and communication.
The orchestra loved him. He was flamboyant and powerful. Everything about him was bigger than life. Mitropoulos had a lot of that quality, too. When you’re dealing with an institution like the Philharmonic, which is the oldest orchestra in the United States and one of the oldest in the world, you have this whole panorama, this whole sense of movement from one conductor to the next.
7
Making Music
JOE DARION: The Tin Pan Alley that I was a part of was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just before rock came in. Once rock came in, that Tin Pan Alley disappeared completely. The lyricists and music men were replaced by performers who wrote their own songs because who needed any talent for that junk?
The heart of Tin Pan Alley was the Brill Building on the west side of Broadway between 49th and 50th Streets. On either side was a restaurant: Jack Dempsey’s on the uptown side, and the Turf on the downtown side. Jack Dempsey’s was the fancier restaurant where the publishers ate; the songwriters never ate there. It was a long narrow place with a dogleg in the back where the publisher and the secretary he was having an affair with sat—so nobody would know. The Turf restaurant had terrible food, just right for the songwriter who had just sold a song or had a royalty check. Most of the time, though, the songwriters made do with a frankfurter from the little stand on 50th and Broadway. That’s all they could afford.
Although the food was terrible, the Turf had the greatest cheesecake in the history of the world. The basement was filled with cheesecakes stacked from the floor to the ceiling, ready to be shipped everywhere. The owner of the Turf raced horses. One year he ran one of his horses, Count Turf, in the Kentucky Derby. Every songwriter bet his bejeezus on it, and Count Turf won. Boy was that a week for the songwriters!
In the time of Tin Pan Alley, the whole Brill Building was filled with music publishers. The front door to every publisher was open, and you could hear a piano pounding from the inside somewhere. Standing in the hallway, you could go crazy—the cacophony was overwhelming! Every publishing house had an outside office where the secretary sat. She was called the “dragon lady” because you couldn’t get past her. It also had an inside office that was a small room with a piano, and in that room sat the guys who were pounding out these immortal songs. It was very hard to get to the i
nside office.
On the sidewalk outside of the Brill Building, there would be a crowd of guys, all looking pretty down at the heels, each one holding a dirty manila envelope in his hands with his latest creations. These were the songwriters. They were all upward strivers; the really top songwriters didn’t have to stand in front of the Brill Building. But every once in a while, one of us would have a bestseller. I remember one called “My One and Only Love,” a lovely song that I still hear on the radio.
Out of maybe twenty songwriters milling around, maybe one or two of them would be women. There weren’t many blacks at the time. They had their own labels and their own companies. Still, I never saw a sign of antiblack feeling. If you had a good thing, you could get on. And if they took your song, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t take mine.
On any given day, it got to be so crowded on the sidewalk outside the Brill Building that the police would come along and shoo us into the building. Then the building superintendent would shoo us out again. The cacophony outside was as bad as the cacophony inside. But it was out on that sidewalk where you made your contacts and partnerships, where you gossiped, where you found out who was up for a date, who was coming up to record, what music publisher was in with what record company, and when they were going to record. You ran your life according to that information. There were always arguments, bickering on the street, shifting partnerships of lyricists and music men. We never called the guy who wrote the music a composer; he was the music man. If you wanted to insult him, you’d say, “Oh, the composer!”—ironically. A few pairs actually stayed together, but most people shifted around.
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