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

  Across the drive, our dorm mother, Sarah, joined other staff in decorating the gym for the dance that night in the outrageous Beaux Arts theme they’d dreamed up for their wacky little charges. It was dawning on me that our high school memory book was not something I’d reminisce over. Girls weren’t eligible for homecoming queen, or even a date, since a large percentage of the male student body was gay. A college actor in loincloth, draped in tire chains, ascended the throne, while clusters of teenage ballerinas danced, watching boys bump and grind on the other side of the gym.

  For the first time, I sold some dime bags of pot that night for ten bucks each, the weed bought from Guitarman Ray in Chapel Hill. Though a friend of my brother’s had recently been arrested for selling dope, I had figured out that my chances of being caught or punished were slim, as long as it happened inside NCSA’s gated community. My endeavor was part of a tradition noted in 1969 by the school’s president. “We have ... a little problem with drugs,” Robert Ward admitted to his trustees. In 1970, Ward noted that narcs busted twelve students and also mentioned “a small number of male faculty members” pursuing students sexually. The solution? Providing an on-campus coffee-house for entertainment, plus instructions to the students to police themselves.

  Applications had boomed.

  The administration was just as clueless in 1977, when I was peddling pot. “A few years ago, we were getting the students who figured they’d come here and spend a few years finding themselves. That led to suspicions of long-haired dope smokers,” our admissions director told the Associated Press. Although the director didn’t mention it, student-faculty sex hadn’t waned either.

  Our English teacher, Mr. Ballard, one of the few adults on campus who was widely trusted, warned my classmate Geoffrey against dance instructors Richard Kuch and Richard Gain. The two, who were a couple, had earned the nickname Crotch and Groin for their special interest in young male dancers. Male high school dance majors said that the pair, after adjusting their students’ form with physical contact in the studio, sometimes befriended homesick boys and invited them to their home for the weekend.

  As a music major, Geoffrey could easily avoid them, but at seventeen, he wasn’t safe from his academic adviser. At his “appointment” in the adviser’s home, Geoffrey sipped the wine he’d been offered and woke up to find himself pinned him to the floor. He wriggled free, running back to campus and keeping mum until graduation day to avoid expulsion for “artistic” reasons.

  Unlike Geoffrey, I volunteered for extra faculty attention. Signing out to visit my parents, I boarded the Southern Crescent to New York with my piano teacher instead. The trip started out romantically. As I sipped a cocktail on the tufted seats of the Southern Railway bar car, tasseled lampshades swung like a scene out of an Agatha Christie novel.

  From the moment we reached New York, I tasted the excitement José had described: musicians dashing around town, crowds beneath Carnegie Hall’s marquee, études spilling from apartment windows. We even attended the funeral of my teacher’s teacher, Irwin Freundlich, surrounded by famous musicians as the Juilliard Quartet performed a final tribute at Riverside Memorial Chapel.

  On the train ride home, we made love on our coach seats, hiding beneath our coats. The sexual relationship lasted for a couple of weeks more, which created a tense atmosphere in my hour-long private lessons, before he moved on to another student. I began fantasizing about life as a musician in the big city.

  I learned this was a popular dream for dancers too when I began hanging out with Noelle and her ballerina friends. They were nervously preparing to be examined by scouts from the New York City Ballet, who lined up the girls like cattle, measuring length between elbow and hip, evaluating turnout and proportion. Only the skinniest had a chance in George Balanchine’s company, filling out the master’s choreography with their emaciated bodies.

  “I got a pink slip,” one girl moaned at Friday lunch, holding her summons for private “fat conference” with the dance faculty. Girls were told to lose weight or go home for good. There was always a way to get just a little thinner.

  In the cafeteria, pods of ballerinas swarmed over desserts, cheese, and pastries, flitting to the restroom and wiping their mouths a few minutes later, and then repeating the feast. Raiding the bagel table, they created a favorite dish: two parts peanut butter, one part honey, and one part bran, rolled into balls that looked like baby porcupines. Some nibbled vegetables or scraped the skin off fried chicken, blotting it dry; one spooned up low-fat chocolate milk in slow motion, visualizing ice cream in its place.

  They waddled off for the last class of the week, where Crotch and Groin let the girls hide their little bellies under sweaters while they concentrated on the boys. Afterward, weekend frenzy started in earnest. A bun-headed army of sylphs stormed Mickey’s convenience store, a few blocks off campus, for Twinkies, Snickers, Moon Pies, and quarts of Breyer’s, bribing me to buy them Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill Wine with my fake ID.

  On Saturday, they wolfed down French toast in time to catch NCSA’s blue school bus to Hanes Mall, buying new leotards at Capezio, buttery sugar-bread at the Moravian bakery, and cheese at Mr. Dunderbak’s deli. At Eckerd’s, they stocked up on peanut butter, Ritz crackers, cigarettes, Ex-Lax, and throat lozenges, finishing with a stop at Dunkin’ Donuts.

  As the other ballerinas prepared to pig out, Maria, a stunning Latina, whispered into the pay phone that she forbade anyone else to use. Tonight, like every Saturday, a stretch limo would pick her up at seven, gliding back just before curfew. Maria had more clothes and money than anyone else; she appeared to be keeping company with the wealthy tobacco executives of Winston-Salem.

  The rest of us stayed in the dorm playing cards, with jelly and cream-filled doughnuts spread out around us. Awash in candy wrappers, the little swans sat on the floor whacking point shoes to break them in, ripping their new leotards to personalize them, and babbling about food. Remember to mark your puke with orange Cheetos so you know when to stop. Peanut butter’s delicious but painful to throw up; nachos, pineapple, and fries are even worse. Ice cream goes down clean and comes up smooth, so eat all you want. Cafeteria white rolls, macaroni and cheese, cereal, and pudding work great too.

  Partying wound down on Sunday, hours before Monday’s leotard inspection. The dorm bathroom was a war zone, spattered with watery puke and feces. The timing and dosage of laxatives was imperative: no explosions, just gentle all-day diarrhea. Consuming only water, dancers sucked on lozenges for throats hoarse from vomiting. Bones ached and moods turned bitchy. Some fasted all week, repeating the binge again on Friday.

  I joined the wispy dancers in their feasts. Since I did not throw up, my weight went up thirty pounds. Even though Noelle gained a little, she was still stick-thin. When she was finally pink-slipped for being five pounds overweight, she drank tomato juice until she weighed ninety-five pounds, her tongue turned black, and she felt faint in dance class. “Faster,” scolded her instructor, as Noelle’s five-foot-eight-inch frame pirouetted sluggishly.

  Noelle’s roommate, Elisabeth, had already left NCSA to join the Atlanta Ballet. Only sixteen, she lived in an apartment all by herself. Elisabeth couldn’t find a high school to accommodate her touring schedule, until she found the one institution that would have her, which otherwise instructed juvenile delinquents and truants.

  I missed her as the rest of us lined up on the sofa for our monthly dorm meetings. A male painter from Hickory spat tobacco in a clear glass, absently flipping a ballerina’s blond ponytail back and forth as the smell of freshly baked cookies wafted down the hall. Our dorm mother bustled about, hanging decorations.

  “Now then,” she chirped, setting down her glitter glue stick, “how everyone?” She cocked her head, and her voice grew syrupy. “Whoooooo’s homesick?”

  “You kids will do well,” called our chaperone from the bus seat ahead of me, clapping her hands cheerily. “Musicians are so good at math.”

  “Where are we going?”
Noelle whispered.

  NCSA’s high school division provided no preparation for the SAT and required only two years of English, one in social studies, and a semester of biology and math. Physical education meant saying that you’d gone to the pool, or skated, or performed some other solitary sport. Physics and math beyond geometry weren’t offered at all.

  Most students were too young to be alarmed about their limited education. A 1969 high school violin alum, Lucy Stoltzman, wrote, in materials prepared for a 2003 Chicago conference for the Consortium for the Liberal Education of Artists, which addressed humanities education for performers:

  I was brought up as a violinist and had a traditional music education, forgoing academic subjects in favor of music beginning in tenth grade at NCSA. The most complicated thing I did in my chemistry class at NCSA was to boil water with and without salt in it... a friend told me I’d have a brain the size of a pea by the time I graduated.

  Douglas Calloway, in 1977 an eighteen-year-old dance major from West Virginia, told the Associated Press he simply wanted to “drop the whole classroom thing.”

  Parents of NCSA students didn’t express much more concern over the future of their children. The mother of one 1981 drama graduate told the Raleigh News and Observer that she “never thought a son of mine would live that way. But he’s dedicated. He’ll make it.” The budding actor had just moved into a third-floor Brooklyn walk-up and worked part-time for a polling firm. Another mother told the same reporter that her daughter “may end up selling pencils on Forty-second Street, but she plans to make it a career!”

  I wasn’t feeling optimistic about my chances either. At eighteen, after three years of arts education, I didn’t know what started the Civil War; I’d never heard of the periodic table of elements; and I couldn’t calculate a percentage. I fiddled with the SAT answer sheet, filling in random bubbles like abstract art.

  Afterward, the chaperone herded us back on the bus. “I love the sound of the oboe,” the old lady said, after asking about my major. I wondered why the school had chosen this innocent event to supply a chaperone. “You’re too young to know, dear, but Danny Kaye—he’s a comedian, you see—he always said, “‘The oboe’s an ill wind that no one blows good.’” She looked at me hopefully. “Ill wind ... Shakespeare?” She settled in her seat, pursing her lips.

  Ill wind? We never read any Shakespeare.

  A ballerina behind me whispered, “Why was that test called SAT, because it’s Saturday?”

  A few months later, we streamed across the stage at commencement, and then went in separate directions. “It’s like they sent us off on a speeding train, and now it’s breaking down in the desert,” Geoffrey said quietly. I felt the same, but I had a plan—to keep studying with Joe Robinson in New York. He’d just won the New York Philharmonic’s principal oboe position.

  I wasn’t that thrilled about continuing my relationship with Robinson. He never stopped putting his hands on me. He’d given me a big red F on one of my juries (the final examination for performance majors), soon after my mouth had been injured in a car accident. And although he clearly ranked me as one of his better students, he regarded my misbehavior scornfully, instead of asking what was wrong or speaking with my parents. I’d been accepted at both Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. I chose Manhattan, since Joe was teaching there exclusively.

  As my parents hugged me at commencement, I felt like I’d gotten away with murder. I couldn’t admit to them how tenuous I felt, after insisting on coming here instead of attending Exeter.

  Anne Epperson, one of my other teachers who was a former Juilliard staff accompanist, overheard us talking about finding a New York apartment and scribbled something on a scrap of paper. Pushing it into my hand, Anne said, “It’s the address of a building on West Ninety-ninth Street, where the landlord likes renting to classical musicians.” She told me to give the building agent, Rudy Rudolph, three hundred dollars cash and mention her name.

  “It’s called the Allendale.”

  To celebrate graduation, I bought tickets with my dope profits to hear violinist Itzhak Perlman, who was playing with the pianist Samuel Sanders. I was terrified to approach Perlman backstage afterward, since he was so very famous. He was also mobbed by women members of the concert series’ volunteer committee. Sanders looked much friendlier. Except for his luxurious head of curly brown hair, he looked like a younger, cuter version of Woody Allen, right down to the prominent nose. Since Sanders had taught my piano teacher during his Juilliard days, I almost felt I knew him.

  The concert had taken place in Greenboro in an old university auditorium with a utilitarian backstage area. I waited until Sanders had gathered up his hairbrush, address book, wristwatch, and a vial of some kind of pills, which had been perfectly lined up on the dressing room’s plywood counter. He checked the spot three more times, as if some object could have magically appeared.

  “Mr. Sanders,” I said, and mentioned my piano teacher. He began looking at the shelf a fourth time. Wondering what Sanders would think of me, I was too intimidated to compliment his playing or mention the concert at all. He was the most famous musician I’d ever met, and I wanted him to approve of me. Sanders scanned my plastic glasses, polyester dress, and drugstore pantyhose bagging at the knees.

  “So what?” he spat, and whirled back to the society ladies who were clustered around Perlman.

  CHAPTER

  3

  The Prodigy

  MOLLIE SANDERS COULDN’T understand why her son Samuel wasn’t growing faster. Born a chubby baby in 1937, he weighed only eighteen pounds one year later and gasped for air whenever she or his father, Irving, gave him a bottle. When he was old enough to walk, he would stop to squat every thirty feet or so, panting through blue lips as his brother, Martin, bounded down the sidewalk.

  Doctors diagnosed a hole between the left and right ventricles in Samuel’s heart, a congenital defect called tetralogy of Fallot, that reduces the oxygen in the bloodstream. Surgeons were pioneering cardiac surgery at the time, but rarely for children. Like some two thousand other blue babies born annually in the United States, Samuel was expected to die before his teens.

  Without health insurance, medical care drained his family’s finances. Irving’s wholesale meat business thrived, though, and he had bought a two-family brick house by 1941, with a bedroom for each of the boys and one for their older half sister, Marjorie. As Samuel grew older, the Bronx schools tucked him away with other children who didn’t look right, the crippled, twitching, and wheezing students of all ages who didn’t fit in anywhere else.

  Even though he couldn’t play sports, Samuel wanted a baseball glove, just like the Yankees used. Instead, he got a used upright piano and lessons with Hedwig Rosenthal. The matron terrified him, her frizzy hair standing on end, eyes bulging and scarlet nails rapping as Samuel played Czerny beneath a portrait of a stern man. He unleashed his wrath on the keyboard, banging with fingers clubbed from bad circulation, drilling each phrase to perfection in a corner of his parents’ living room.

  Pianist Samuel Sanders at around age ten, with his teacher Hedwig Rosenthal. (Ashley Studios, Hotel Great Northern, New York. Courtesy of the Juilliard School archives.)

  Sam grew weaker. Then, when he was nine, his mother heard about a new surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. As the family drove across the George Washington Bridge, Samuel looked back toward Manhattan’s lights, twinkling across the Hudson, and yearned to be a part of all the exciting things that happened there. For Samuel, the bridge represented the pathway to a more normal life.

  Two doctors at Johns Hopkins examined him, Helen Taussig and Alfred Blalock. The team had first operated on a fifteen-month-old blue baby in 1944, building a duct to carry blood directly to the girl’s lungs. Samuel became the 298th child to receive the procedure, which increased the oxygen saturation level in his blood by about 50 percent. No one knew how long he might survive.

  A surgical complication caused a curvature of t
he spine. For a time, one leg felt numb and then grew slightly shorter. Samuel and his mother stayed in Baltimore for nine months for physical therapy, while Irving watched Martin in the Bronx. Once Samuel returned home he started practicing again, even though he didn’t much like lessons and recitals.

  Only two years later, Samuel went public with Chopin’s difficult F-minor Concerto at age eleven, his story printed in the New York Times. Transformed from misfit to star, he was finally allowed to enroll in a regular class at Taft High School.

  For Samuel, 1950 was a watershed year. His bar mitzvah brought a Steinway grand; he won a brand-new competition called Concert Artists Guild, which awarded ten dollars for a Town Hall debut recital and management with Arthur Judson’s prestigious Columbia Artists; and the Times called him “bright with promise.” Basking in the limelight, Samuel won a $500 wardrobe for his mother by competing on The Big Payoff, a CBS television quiz show, and then appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts and CBS television’s Prize Performance.

  Martin was talented as well, studying violin at New York’s High School of Music and Art. But he joined the army and then headed for college. After graduation he launched a successful real estate business, begun years earlier when he bought, with his own bar mitzvah gift, land in Brooklyn the city would later purchase for the new Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island.

  Their half sister, Marjorie, had married a physicist and moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only two years old, a facility for plutonium production associated with the Manhattan Project. Marjorie organized a music committee, just as many communities across America were doing, raising money to pay recital fees for visiting musicians and a local part-time orchestra. In 1954, Marjorie brought in her sixteen-year old brother Samuel, who entertained the local scientists by playing Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau.