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

  “Negative,” he said finally. He handed me a pamphlet and a fistful of colored, ribbed, and extra-large condoms. I promised myself I’d change my wild ways. Suddenly my romances with Jayson and Jimmy looked not free-spirited but shameful and dangerous.

  Randy, the third part of my oboe triptych, soon rejected me entirely, demeaning our summer relationship as an affair even though he was not married. Obsessed, I paced West End Avenue at 2 A.M. I went as far as his door, where I heard a woman making coffee for him, probably the usherette I’d seen hanging over the pit railing.

  What does she have that I don’t?

  Randy and I subsequently went to Puerto Rico on an Orpheus tour, which was arranged while we were in New Hampshire together months ago. He would not speak to me, turning his chair away during rehearsals of the Rossini overture we played. The curse of score order once again booked us in adjacent rooms; his voice on the phone to someone new was torture.

  Months passed before I saw Randy again. It was the final gig he’d hired me for, a European tour with Orpheus. Deutsche Grammophon followed us from the Mozarteum to Montreaux, photographing the orchestra for its new sixteen-disc recording contract. On the album cover for a Mozart Divertimento we’d recorded so fervently together last year, today’s photo in Salzburg would show Randy leaning away from me. As we boarded the bus in all-white outfits for the photo shoot, the orchestra joked that we looked much like the sperm in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. I knew a quarter of the sperm intimately, if the blond horn player from last night’s Lucerne hotel room counted. I’d had a crush on the hornist for some time and hoped he would provide a diversion from obsessing about Randy. Unfortunately, I had yet to learn that one-night stands aren’t the best path to a relationship.

  Photograph taken in Salzburg, 1987. I am in the front row, third right of center. (Schaffler, Salzburg)

  I wasn’t the only scorned lover on the bus, however. My hornist had, a few years ago, nailed a cellist, who promptly turned lesbian. Later, the horn player would divorce and land the bassist’s ex. The bassist, in turn, cuddled with a younger violinist on the bus in front of his ex-wife. A female violist who lived in the Allendale was in the process of leaving her pianist husband for an Orpheus cellist, and a revolving list of subs like me added even more variety. All this intra-orchestra familiarity may have provided a musical benefit on this tour, because Spanish newspaper ABC reported that “the ensemble from New York transcends any name that carries any sense, or meaning, of plurality. It is—again without hyperbole—one instrumentalist. With only one body and only one spirit.”

  During a free week, I cashed my per diem check and headed to Menton, on the French Riviera, with two girlfriends. Randy took the same train, en route to Nice with Guillermo, a Puerto Rican violinist who’d shared our house back in New Hampshire. Traveling together in an Italian rail car, the five of us lay down for the night, Guillermo, on one side of me, became friendlier with my harpsichordist friend; Randy, on the other, put his sock feet in my face.

  I had made the fatal mistake of becoming involved not just with one but with three of my most influential colleagues. Jayson would never again hire me for his studio dates. Other oboists would penalize me for the work Jimmy had provided me and denied them, and I wouldn’t play with Orpheus or in Randy’s pit again for some time.

  When we returned to the United States, Randy quickly married an oboist from California, someone cuter, younger—and a crackerjack instrument repair technician to boot—who was now carrying his baby. However, his insistence that our relationship remain secret made it appear to others that he’d rejected me for my musicianship. I’d destroyed my connection with almost every freelance group in the city. I was only twenty-six years old.

  Second Movement

  Rhapsody in Blue

  The cinder blocks and missing roof of the Allendale’s water tower.

  CHAPTER

  10

  West Side Story

  TWO NEW KOREAN cellists got off the Allendale’s asending elevator on Three, and a man stepped forward to punch the CLOSE button. He mussed his hair in a self-conscious way that gave him the appearance of a teenager.

  “I haven’t lived here long,” he said, extending a bony hand as the lift creaked along. He was so skinny, like Evan and Paul before they died, that I hadn’t recognized him until he told me his name.

  “My name’s Sam Sanders. What do you play?”

  Sam’s thick hair curled over his gray turtleneck, and his brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. I could tell he didn’t remember meeting me nine years ago in Greensboro, and there wasn’t a hint of the short temper I’d seen then. Perhaps moving into the Allendale after living in a grander place had humbled him.

  I found him irresistible, even though his mannerisms reminded me of Woody Allen. His weight loss emphasized the resemblance even more—his bony nose had become even more prominent—but his energy level was magnetic. Juilliard students I knew gossiped about Sam’s friendship with Bobby White, but he was certainly flirting like a straight man today. As the elevator stopped on Six, Sam held the door open and invited me to lunch the next day at the neighborhood café where he always ate.

  Arriving at Marvin Gardens, I found Sam sipping a Diet Coke in one of the rear booths. He looked handsome in his turtleneck, though it was an odd wardrobe choice for 70-degree weather. I slid onto the seat opposite him and ordered a salad.

  “Bassoon’s my favorite instrument, oboe next,” he was saying, when our food arrived. He pulled at the American cheese melted between slices of white toast and ate his sandwich piecemeal. He asked about my career and training. Did I know Margo Garrett from NCSA? She’d come to Juilliard in 1969, having grown up in North Carolina like me. She was such a star, so sweet. How did I like Orpheus? The Philharmonic?

  He was animated, bouncing between topics: composers, restaurants, the Juilliard accompanying department he’d started, and his efforts to get equal billing and better pay for collaborative pianists. “Some soloists won’t even hire women pianists,” he said, explaining that old-school artists think women will upstage them. He fell silent for a moment to sip his soda.

  “Sam, how did you end up in the Allendale?” I said. Surely a Juilliard professor who toured the world with Itzhak Perlman could afford something nicer. Sam set down his Coke, swallowed, took a deep breath, and chuckled nervously.

  “My wife—well, she was my wife—and daughter live a block away on West End,” Sam said. “Split up for now. I needed someplace to stay.”

  From Sam’s behavior in Greensboro, I guessed that his wife may have found him difficult to live with. I’d seen his temper firsthand. I’d also heard Sam was a ladies’ man; most recently there were rumors about Sam and a dark-haired flutist. The two had recorded George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale. The flutist was married as well, with a daughter who was turning into a star pianist. It was all messy and incestuous in the minuscule world of classical music.

  “I got the Allendale place through Bobby White,” said Sam, clearly eager to change the subject. From what he said, it sounded like Sam had moved into conductor Neal Stulberg’s old place on Nine. “You know Bobby? Second floor, tenor.”

  I’d heard him singing Irish songs. Bobby charmed landlord Brunhilde to rent flats to all his friends. In fact, he’d found apartments for half the Allendale’s tenants, surrounding himself with the supportive community he’d started building years back.

  Sam asked if I knew guitarist Fred Hand, who lived across the hall from him. Or the Korean cellists who studied with him at Juilliard and turned pages sometimes? Could I turn pages this Friday for a benefit with Itzhak on the Upper East Side?

  “Sure, I’m free Friday,” I said. I wanted to hear Perlman up close and check out a Fifth Avenue apartment. Sam was a class act and wouldn’t live in a dump like the Allendale for long. I thought he made a fortune playing with such stars.

  “What a beautiful tomato!” Sam exclaimed, as he poked at the cotton
y-pink slices beside his unfinished sandwich. I checked to see if he was joking, but Sam was enthusiastic about everything he encountered, regardless of quality. Observant, he missed nothing. There’s a lesson there for me, I thought.

  When I hauled out my wallet, Sam snatched the restaurant bill. On the street, he pressed money in my hand for a taxi. What a contrast to our first meeting nearly a decade ago, when he had snarled at me. I must have been wrong about him. He was generous, disciplined, passionate, and kind.

  I hung the Yves St. Laurent cocktail suit far away from my reed desk to avoid staining it. There’d been an entire wall of them for fifty bucks apiece in the basement at Fowad, a 96th Street firetrap stuffed with designer evening wear whose origins were always a mystery. Spreading a ragged hand towel on my lap to protect my skirt from oil smears, reed shavings, and steel filings from sharpening my knife, I turned on my high-intensity lamp. Pulling my thread tight against the desk leg, I had begun tying on another reed when the phone rang.

  Damn! I dropped the thread spool, shooting cane across the room while trying to reach the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hold on, I’m getting another call,” Sydney’s voice cried over the phone. The line fell silent. I scanned the floor for my cane, eyeing the time. After a couple of minutes I hung up, and the phone rang again immediately.

  “Yeah,” I snarled, expecting Sydney again.

  “Claire Kendall?”

  “Blair Tindall,” I corrected her.

  “Whatever,” said the high-pitched voice. “This is Fern? At the Orpheus office? I’m hiring for the next tour?”

  As we spoke, I pictured the latest intern in the orchestra’s airy loft at 80th and Broadway. Not bothering to learn an instrument herself, she was a new recruit in the arts management army, gazing out the window overlooking Zabar’s at violinists scurrying to the subway with cases slung over their shoulders.

  If she climbed the ranks, Fern would earn up to seven times more than any of them as CEO of a major orchestra, a theoretically nonprofit organization whose administrators’ annual salaries would rise to $700,000 by the millennium. If she were really smart, she’d study conducting and make up to $2 million for just fourteen weeks of work, leaving plenty of time for one or two other $2 million gigs in other cities.

  I spied the cane just under my bed.

  “Well, Claire? We’ve tried everyone else in town? We’ll be stuck if you can’t do it?”

  “Okay. And it’s Blair. Blair.” I sighed and hung up. At least there was no confusion about my place on the Orpheus list these days. No new work came in either. Groups that had sprouted like toadstools in the 1970s seemed an anomaly in the late 1980s, their musicians permanently epoxied to their chairs. Only a narrow age category had been in the right place at the right time.

  I gathered the grimy towel on my lap into a wad that rattled with the tools I’d been using. They included four reed knives, since I could never seem to get any one of them sharp enough to shave off the last hundredth millimeter of cane required without tearing off the reed’s tip. I dropped it on the desk, turned off the light, and set to the task of transforming myself with the discount Yves St. Laurent suit.

  It was time to go. I met Sam in the lobby and hopped into a waiting limo. Its crystal decanter rattled as we pulled onto 90th and Riverside to pick up Itzhak. I sat quietly as the famous violinist, crippled by polio during his childhood in Israel, pulled himself inside, laying his aluminum crutches against the leather seat.

  Cruising through Central Park, the two men rattled off baseball scores and news of their children, only then moving on to music. “A lady in the audience last night told me my Strad sounded beautiful,” joked Itzhak. He’d held the violin to his ear, shaking it. “Really? I don’t hear a thing!”

  I had a feeling we were about to meet a few more ladies like that. The car turned down Fifth Avenue, stopping just past the Met. As we made our way upstairs to the host’s apartment, Sam carried Itzhak’s precious fiddle across the lobby, since the violinist needed both hands for his crutches. Itzhak followed, his leg braces creaking gently.

  An elevator opened directly into the apartment instead of the usual hallway or vestibule. The place looked like a museum, full of furniture pieces that looked as if they should have braided cords surrounding them for protection. I peered through an archway that framed a series of door-ways beyond it. I’d hate to lose my keys in this apartment, I thought, as we passed through rooms whose tabletops and étageres were arranged with objets d’art. Oil paintings hung on nearly every wall.

  In a spare bedroom, I gazed through sheer curtains at the street, trying to give Sam and Itzhak privacy for their preparations. Something in the room ticked irregularly, like one of those old pyramid-shaped pendulum metronomes. I looked around for a clock but didn’t see one.

  Sam stood at a mirror, fussing over his bow tie with trembling fingers. He rustled tissue paper in his bag, extracted a hairbrush, and used it to fluff up his curly hair. He then carefully lined up his brush, glasses case, and date book on a mahogany side table, just as he had backstage in Greensboro. It was a study in right angles. Turning away, he rooted through a Dopp kit, tapped out eight pills, and threw them back dry.

  More drugs, I thought.

  Itzhak seemed as confident as Sam was neurotic. He wrapped his enormous hand around the violin’s neck, plucking each string, then clamped the Strad between chin and shoulder, tuned with broad bow strokes, and sent rivulets of scales down the fingerboard.

  I turned back to the window, focusing on the luxury building across 82nd Street. As I pulled the sheer drapes aside for a close look, Sam was right behind me. He snatched off his glasses to peer at five naked couples kissing, guzzling champagne, and massaging one another in a Jacuzzi. Itzhak glanced but went back to his fiddle.

  Sam reddened, whipping his tux jacket shut.

  Most definitely not gay, I thought.

  “It’s time, Mr. Perlman,” called a chipper blonde. Her huge diamond-stud earrings glinted, and her hair was perfectly combed behind a tortoiseshell headband. Itzhak handed Sam his Stradivarius and hoisted himself onto his crutches. I grabbed the pile of sheet music and followed him; Sam lingered by the window until the last second.

  Applause rippled through the audience, seated on the faux-gold bamboo chairs that fancy caterers bring with them. These were the richest and most generous New Yorkers, who supported the Carnegie Hall Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other cultural treasures.

  Itzhak sat down and arranged his legs, laying his crutches on the floor and taking his instrument. Sam’s rigid posture softened at the piano. His hands, that were shaking backstage, were still. I placed Pablo Sarasate’s “Zapateado,” op. 23, on the piano and sat to his left. Sam poised his weird, clubby fingers over the keyboard.

  That ticking again! And in a faster tempo than this piece.

  Sam launched into the Spanish dance, drawing out strong octaves in his left hand, a saucy folk tune in his right to set up Itzhak’s dramatic high Es perfectly. Sam, who had appeared almost frail backstage, became a powerhouse as he accompanied one of the world’s great virtuosos. It was as if he banked every shred of energy for his music.

  He didn’t just play the piano, he wove playfully around Itzhak’s dark-sounding tone as if his life depended on it. His passion took flight. He wasn’t merely an accompanist; he was a collaborator in a breathtaking performance.

  I stood up and reached to turn the page where Sam had marked. I was one eighth-note late, but that was surely close enough. Sam grunted, slapping my hand and flipping the music himself. I took more care with the next page.

  Next came Fritz Kreisler’s showy “Caprice Viennois.” The piece was included on an album Itzhak and Sam had recorded that was nominated for this year’s Grammys. The audience responded to this performance with polite applause. An evening like this was more about networking than music. In 1986, philanthropy was hotter than the stock market. Wealthy New Yorkers needed th
e tax breaks that came by donating to nonprofit charities like music groups.

  Itzhak Perlman and Samuel Sanders. (Julian H. Kreeger. Courtesy of the Juilliard School archives.)

  Afterward, Itzhak’s stretch limo glided back to the Allendale. As we pulled up beside the hydrant, our doorman Jules was mute, gawking at the limo. I stepped out in my designer suit, feeling the car might turn into a pumpkin at any moment. We turned to go inside.

  “Wait,” said Sam, gesturing with his head as we stood in the foyer. Just ahead of us, Betty waited for the elevator. Sam wanted to avoid her as much as I did. She was usually alone or wheeling her double bass. Tonight an older man clutched her elbow.

  “Isn’t that—?”

  “Yeah. They’ve been having an affair for years,” said Sam, studying the contents of his battered mailbox. I recognized the man from old photographs of him as a New York City Opera star of the 1950s, although his health had declined since his glory days.

  As I got off on Six, Sam held the elevator door, which bucked against his hand with a greasy smudge. “Want to come up for a drink?” he asked. Hearing him play had turned me on, and I accepted.

  Sam’s apartment looked like a smaller version of mine, with an equally pink bathroom, bare-bones kitchenette, and cheap marble-patterned green linoleum. His possessions, however, were far more elegant. A nineteenth-century display case was filled with antique glassware, and another cabinet held toy soldiers, Yankee memorabilia, and a baseball autographed by lefty Whitey Ford.

  Sam had made the large corner bedroom into his piano room, carpeting the floor and adding plaid curtains to soak up the sound for his neighbors’ sake. In the other bedroom, an enameled Japanese screen hid his bed, leaving only a kitchen table for socializing. Above the table hung a photo of Sam at the White House, shaking Jimmy Carter’s hand as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich looked on.