Serenade (17 page)

Winston Hawes, the papers said, was one of the outstanding musicians of his time, the conductor that could really read a score, the man that had done more for modern music than anybody since Muck. He was all of that, but don't get the idea he was ever one of the boys. There was something wrong about the way he thought about music, something unhealthy, like the crowds you always saw at his concerts, and what it was I can only half tell you. In the first place I don't know enough about the kind of people he came from, and in the second place I don't know enough about music. He was rich, and there's something about rich people that's different from the rest of us. They come into the world with an inflated idea of their relation to it, and everything they find in it. I got a little flash into that side of him once, in Paris, when I strolled into an art store to look at some pictures that caught my eye. A guy came in, an American, and began a palaver about prices. And the way that guy talked gave me a whole new slant at his kind. He didn't care about art, the way you do or I do, as something to look at and feel. He wanted to
own
it. Winston was that way about music. He made a whore out of it. You went to his concerts, but you didn't sit out there at his rehearsals, and see him hold men for an hour overtime, at full pay, just because there was some French horn passage that he liked, and wanted it played over and over again--not to rehearse it, but because of what it did to
him.
And you didn't walk out with him afterwards, and see him all atremble, and hear him tell how he felt after playing it. He was like some woman that goes to concerts because they give her the right vibrations, or make her feel better, or have some other effect on her nitwit insides. All right, you may think it's cock-eyed to compare him with somebody like that, but I'm telling you that in spite of all his technical skill, he was a hell of a sight nearer to that fat poop than he ever was to Muck. That woman was in him, poodle dog, diamonds, limousine, conceit, cruelty and all, and don't let his public reputation fool you. She has a public reputation too, if she hands out enough money. The day the story broke, they compared him with Stanford White, but I'm telling you that to put Winston Hawes in the same class with Stanford White was a desecration.

You can't own music, the way you can own a picture, but you can own a big hunk of it. You can own a composer, that you put on a subsidy while he's writing a piece for you. You can own an audience that has to come to you to hear that piece if it's going to hear it at all. You can own the orchestra that plays it, and you can own the singer that sings it. I first met him in Paris. I hadn't known him in Chicago. He came from a packing family so rich I never even got within a mile of where they lived. And I didn't look him up, even in Paris. He showed up at my apartment one day, sat down at the piano, played off a couple of songs that were there, and said they were lousy, which they were. Then he got up and asked me how I'd like to sing with his band. I was pretty excited. He had started his Petite Orchestra about a year before, and I had gone to plenty of the concerts, and don't you think they weren't good. He started with thirty men, but by now he was up to forty. He raided everywhere, from the opera orchestras, from the chamber music outfits, and he took anybody he wanted, because he paid about twice what any other band paid. He footed the deficit himself, and he didn't have a man that couldn't have played quartets with Heifetz. What they could do to music, especially modern music, was just make it sound about twice as good as even the composer thought it was. He had some stuff with him he wanted me to do, all of it in manuscript. Part of it was old Italian songs he had dug up, where I would have to do baritone coloratura that had been out of date for a hundred years, and how he knew I could do it I don't know. Part of it was a suite by his first viola, that had never been performed yet. It was tough stuff, music that wouldn't come to life at all without the most exact tone shading. But he gave me six rehearsals--count them, six, something you couldn't believe. Cost didn't mean anything to him. When we went on with it I was with those woodwinds like I was one of the bassoons, and the response was terrific. I took out Picquot, the viola, before I took a call myself, and the whole thing was like something you read about.

That part of it, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't admit it was an adventure in music I'll never forget. I sang for him four times, and each time it was something new, something fresh, and a performance better than you even knew you could give. He had a live stick all right. From some of them you get a beat as dead as an undertaker's handshake, but not from him. He threw it on you like a hypnotist, and you began to roll it out, and yet it was all under perfect control. That's the word to remember, perfect. Perfection is something no singer ever got yet, but under him you came as near to it as you're ever going to get.

That was the beginning of it, and it was quite a while before it dawned on me what he really wanted. As to what he wanted, and what he got, you'll find out soon enough, and I'm not going to tell any more than I have to. But I'd like to make this much clear now: that wasn't what I wanted. What I meant to him and what he meant to me were two different things, but once again, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't admit that what he meant to me was plenty. He took to dropping into my dressing room at the Comique while I was washing up, and he'd tell me some little thing I had done, something he had liked, or sometimes, something he hadn't liked. If he had been giving a concert, maybe he had heard only part of the last act, but there would always be something. You think that didn't mean anything to me? Singing is a funny job. You go out there and take those calls, and it's so exciting that when you get back to your dressing room you want to sing, to cut it loose till the windows rattle, just to let off the steam that excitement makes. You go back there and you'll hear them, especially the tenors, so you'd think they had gone crazy. But that excitement is all from out front, from a mob you only half see and never know, and you get so you'd give anything for somebody, for just one guy, that knew what you were trying to do, that spotted your idea without your telling him, that could appreciate you with his head and not with the palms of his hands. And mind you, it couldn't be just anybody. It has to be somebody you respect, somebody that knows.

I began to wait for that visit. Then pretty soon I was singing to him and to nobody else. We'd walk out, go to a café while I ate, then drop over to his apartment off the Place Vendóme, and have a post-mortem on my performance. Then, little by little, he began making suggestions. Then I began dropping in on him in the morning, and he'd take me through some things I had been doing wrong. He was the best coach in the world, bar none. Then he began to take my acting apart, and put it together again. It was he that cured me of all those operatic gestures I got in Italy. He showed me that good operatic acting consists in as few motions as possible, every one of them calculated for an effect, and every one made to count. He told me about Scotti and how he used to sing the Pagliacci Prologue before he got so bad they couldn't use him in Pagliacci. He made one gesture. At the end of the andante, he held out his hand, and then turned it over, palm up. That was all. It said it. He made me learn a whole new set of gestures, done naturally, and he made me practice for hours singing
sotto voce
without using any gestures at all. That's a tough order, just to stand up there, on a cold stage, and shoot it. But I got so I could do it. And I got so I could take my time, give it to them when I was ready, not before. I began to do better in comedy roles, like Sharpless and Marcello. Taking out all that gingerbread, I could watch timing, and get laughs I never got before. I got so I was with him morning, noon and night, and depended on him like a hophead depends on dope.

Then came my crack-up, and when my money was all gone I had to leave Paris. He stormed about that, wanted to support me, showed me his books to prove that an allowance for me wouldn't even make a dent in his income. But it was that storming that showed me where things had got between him and me, and that I had to break away from him. I went to New York. I tried to find something to do, but there was nothing I could do except sing, and I couldn't sing. That was when this agent kidded me that no matter what shape I was in I was good enough for Mexico, and I went down there.

I had read in some paper that he had disbanded his orchestra in Paris, but I didn't know he was starting his Little Orchestra in New York until I got there. It made me nervous. I dropped in, alone, at his first concert, just so I could say I had, in case I ran into him somewhere. It was the same mob he had had in Paris, clothes more expensive than you would see even at a Hollywood opening, gray-haired women with straight haircuts and men's dinner jackets, young girls looking each other straight in the eye and not caring what you thought, boys following men around, loud, feverish talk out in the foyer, everybody coming out in the open with something they wouldn't dare show anywhere else. His first number was something for strings by Lalo I had heard him play before, and I left right after it. Next day, when I saw the review in the paper I turned the page quick. I didn't want to read it. I had a note from him after Don Giovanni, and shot it right back, and one word written on it, "Thanks," with my initials. I didn't want to write on my own stationery, or he'd know where I was living. I felt funny about asking for opera house stationery. I was afraid not to answer, for fear he'd be around to know why.

So that's how things stood when I was sitting beside Juana and the phone rang. She motioned to let it ring, and I did for a while, but I still hadn't called Panamier, and I knew I had them to talk to, even if I had nothing to say. I answered. But it wasn't Panamier. It was Winston. "Jack! You old scalawag! Where have you been hiding?"

"Why--I've been busy."

"So have I, so busy I'm ashamed of it. I hate to be busy. I like time for my friends. But at the moment I'm free as a bird, I've got a fine fire burning, and you can hop in a cab, wherever you are--all I've got is your phone number, and I had a frightful time even getting that--and come up here. I just can't wait to see you."

"Well--that sounds swell, but I've got to go back to Hollywood, right away, probably tomorrow, and that means I'll be tied up every minute, trying to get out of town. I don't see how I could fit it in."

"What did you say?
Hollywood!"

"Yeah, Hollywood."

"Jack, you're kidding."

"No, I'm a picture star now."

"I know you are. I saw your pictures, both of them. But you can't go back to Hollywood now. Why you're singing for
me,
one month from today. I've arranged your whole program. It's out of the question."

"No, I'll have to go."

"Jack, you don't sound like yourself. Don't tell me you've got so big you can't spare one night for a poor dilettante and his band--"

"For Christ sake, don't be silly. "

"That sounds more like you. Now what is it?"

"Nothing but what I've told you. I've got to go back there. I don't want to. I hate to. I've tried to get out of it every way I knew, but I'm sewed and I've got no choice."

"That sounds still more like you. In other words, you're in trouble."

"That's it."

"Into the cab and up here. Tell it to Papa."

"No, I'm sorry. I can't...Wait a minute."

She was grabbing for the receiver. I put my hand over it. "Yes, you go."

"I don't want to go."

"You go."

"He's just a guy--I don't want to see."

"You go, you feel better, Juana's nose, very snoddy."

"I'll wipe it, then it won't be snoddy."

"Hoaney, you go. Many people call today, all day long. You no here, you no have to talk, no feel bad. Now, you go. I say you gone out. I don't know where. You go, then tonight we talk, you and I. We figure out."

"...All right, where are you? I'll be up."

He was at a hotel off Central Park, on the twenty-second floor of the tower. The desk told me to go up. I did, found his suite, rang the bell and got no answer. The door was open and I walked in. There was a big living room, with windows on two sides, so you could see all the way downtown and out over the East River, a grand piano at one end, a big phonograph across from that, scores stacked everywhere, and a big fire burning under a mantelpiece. I opened the door that led into the rest of the suite and called, but there wasn't any answer. And then in a second there he was, bouncing in from the hall, in the rough coat, flannel shirt, and battered trousers that he always wore. If you had met him in Central Park you would have given him a dime. "Jack! How are you! I went down to meet you, and they told me you had just gone up! Give me that coat! Give me a smile, for God's sake! That Mexican sunburn makes you look like Othello!"

"Oh, you knew I was in Mexico?"

"Know it! I went down there to bring you back, but you had gone. What's the idea, hiding out on me?"

"Oh, I've been working."

One minute later I was in a big chair in front of the fire, with a bottle of the white port I had always liked beside me, a little pile of buttered English biscuits beside that, he was across from me with those long legs of his hooked over the chandelier or some place, and we were off. Or anyhow, he was. He always began in the middle, and he raced along about Don Giovanni, about an appoggiatura I was leaving out in Lucia, about the reason the old scores aren't sung the way they're written, about a new flutist he had pulled in from Detroit, about my cape routine in Carmen, all jumbled up together. But not for long. He got to the point pretty quick. "What's this about Hollywood?"

"Just what I told you. I'm sewed on a goddam contract and I've got to go."

I told him about it. I had told so many people about it by then I knew it by heart, and could get it over quick. "Then this man--Gold, did you say his name was?--is the key to the whole thing?"

"He's the one."