Some of My Lives

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Authors: Rosamond Bernier

BOOK: Some of My Lives
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Every word is for John
Table of Contents
Title Page
Disgrace
Some Musicians I Have Known
Stokowski
Aaron Copland
Leonard Bernstein
Early Mexican Moments
Some Animals I Have Known
Up, Up, and Away
Under the Volcano
(
pace
Malcolm Lowry)
Malcolm Lowry
Paul and Jane Bowles
The Good Neighbors
More Mexican Moments
Vogue
—First Job
Chick Austin
Virgil, Aaron, and Nadia Boulanger
Paris Again
Now It's London
In Search of Proust
Visits to Matisse
René Clair and Vittorio De Sica
On My Own for
Vogue
: First Visit to Picasso
Picasso and Antibes
L'ŒIL
Begins with a Gift from Picasso
Berthe Morisot's Daughter
Goncharova, Larionov, and Pevsner
Wifredo Lam
Venetian Adventures—
Venice Observed
Georges Braque—Lord of the Birds
Remembering Fernand Léger
Alberto Giacometti
My Friend Miró
Henry Moore
Max Ernst
Chanel Comeback
Visiting Karl Lagerfeld
Once Upon a Time: Life at Mouton Rothschild
Louise Bourgeois, a Loving Memory
Sitting for David Hockney
Jerome Robbins
The Editor as Talker
Lecturing Notes
Still Talking
Philip Johnson and Our Wedding
Some of John's Musical Friends
About John
To the Met with Alex Katz
Afterwords
Foreword to John Russell's
Paris
Janet Flanner (Genet)
Richard Avedon
Irving Penn
Acknowledgments
Also by
Copyright Page
M
y English mother, Rosamond Rawlins, left her native shores to marry my father, Samuel R. Rosenbaum, the eldest son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, at the beginning of World War I. He was brilliant, the president of his class at the University of Pennsylvania, president of his year at law school, editor of the law review, Phi Beta Kappa. And what did he do but marry my mother, an Episcopalian. His family said the Kaddish over him and never met my mother. I hardly ever saw them.
I was born in 1916, two years into World War I, in Philadelphia. My mother was quintessentially English and patriotic. Her brother Hugh had been killed fighting in the trenches. His photograph in uniform, a handsome sensitive face, hung over our staircase.
I was brought up like a little English girl: riding lessons began at age four. I went for my lessons to Foley's Riding Academy, where Miss Eleanor Foley in admirably fitted jodhpurs guided my efforts from a leading rein. I won my first medal at six. A photograph records me on my pony Teddy happily holding my silver cup. It was only second place—but there was a cup to go with it! Two years later there was a blue medal for jumping, first place!
Naturally, I had to have a governess; a French governess would be best. Both parents were excellent linguists. Because my mother missed her family and her country, we went to England several times a year, sailing on one of the ships of the Royal Mail Lines. We stayed at Aunt Queenie's in London. I was very impressed because the toilet in her flat was at the end of a corridor, not part of the bathroom. I had never seen this before. Her daughter was called Aunt Olive. She was always described as the picture of rectitude.
Many years later, in 1949, I opened a copy of
Time
, and there
was an article about Aunt Olive: she had been murdered by someone who came to be called Haigh the Vampire—dissolved in a vat of acid. I gained considerable credit with my ten-year-old stepson when I took him to Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London and could point out my family connection to one of the exhibits.
On one of our visits to London, my mother was interviewing candidates for a French governess. I was six at the time and extremely shy. I was called in to meet the favored candidate, and, wordlessly, I stood on my head. This is a skill I had acquired on my own, and I thought it best to show myself to my advantage.
A disgraceful episode dates from two years earlier. At that time English children, boys and girls, were dressed in what were called sailor suits, navy blue of course, and part of the outfit was a metal whistle on a white cord. It was Empire Day, when there was a great procession of various elements of the British army and navy with their bands. I marched along with my mother, following the parade, carried away by the marching music and the sight of a drummer with a big tiger skin bravely making resounding whacks on a huge drum.
The parade ended in a church, where there was a Thanksgiving service for the troops. As I have said, I was a shy child, so it was completely out of character when, intoxicated by the music, I lifted my whistle to my lips and let out a shrill blast. I was hurried out of church in disgrace and never allowed to wear my whistle again.
A few years later, I am ten years old and enrolled, to my dismay, in an English boarding school, Sherborne School for Girls. My mother had died two years before, and this had been her wish. I would come back to Philadelphia for the Christmas and summer holidays. Before these departures, the entire school, at chapel, sang the encouraging words “Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea.” I was the only transatlantic student; foreign students were still a great novelty.
It was time to return for the autumn term. I was booked with my governess, Mademoiselle, to sail on the family's favorite line, the Royal Mail, on the
Orduna
.
At the last moment Mademoiselle fell gravely ill, no question of traveling. But my father saw no reason to postpone my return to school. He took me to New York for a farewell dinner, at the old
Waldorf. I had black-currant ice and was totally miserable. I kept my misery to myself.
My father knew the purser of the
Orduna
because of my mother's frequent transatlantic trips. I was taken to the boat, introduced to him, and, I felt, abandoned.
I discovered that my cabin had three bunks, which encouraged me. I slept in a different bunk each night. I had my place in the dining room at the purser's table. Each night I would put on my one party dress (silk), my white silk socks, and my patent-leather slippers and go down to the dining room. The others at the table were quite jolly, and soon I was enjoying my favorite dish at the time: cold smoked tongue. Since there was no one to curb me, I had tongue at every meal and felt this indeed was high living. After dinner, I would go up to the smoking room and gamble. The gambling consisted of choosing a wooden horse; a throw of the dice would indicate whether the horse could advance along a stretch of canvas marked with divisions or stay in place. I had spectacular luck. People came to see which horse I had chosen. I won my term's pocket money many times over.
It was something of a letdown when my grandmother met me at Plymouth and hurried me away to Sherborne.
A welcome illness ended my English boarding school days and brought me back to Philadelphia and my bed.
This was before the days of streptomycin and antibiotics. For TB patients it was bed rest and practically force-feeding.
When finally I was fully vertical again, it was Sarah Lawrence for three happy years. I had the great good fortune of having Professor Jacques Barzun for my don. Many years later we were both speakers on a program for Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown, New York. As I said to Jacques (by then, he was Jacques to me): I had never expected to share any platform with him, not even a subway platform.
Even later, I was lecturing at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, on Diaghilev. And who was sitting in the front row but Jacques Barzun? His first wife had died, he had remarried, and his second wife came from that part of the country.
After the lecture he and his wife took me out for some memorable margaritas.
I
was brought up in a bath of music. My father was a lawyer by profession, but music was what counted for him. His enormous collection of records, lovingly cataloged and constantly expanded, filled my young ears with everything from late Beethoven quartets and German lieder to Stravinsky and de Falla. He used to play the themes from Wagner's operas on the piano before taking me to a performance.
As my father was head of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Orchestra, I got to go to concerts, even rehearsals, at an early age.
There were archaic blue laws in Philadelphia, which meant that on Sunday everything was closed tight, no cinemas, no restaurants, nothing to do. So, visiting conductors and soloists were delighted to be asked to our house for a Sunday lunch. We had a pretty eighteenth-century house just outside of Philadelphia, with fireplaces in almost every room and a big garden, so it was a welcome change from hotels.
Note: it may be just as well they only came for one meal. The English cook, impractically imported by my father, had shot her bolt with the Sunday roast and Yorkshire pudding. Weekdays, my father away at his office, we alternated for dessert between anemic stewed pears and discouraging stewed prunes.
There was no feminine hand at the helm, so I presided as hostess long before my teens, to a fascinating array of guests.
I was most impressed by Otto Klemperer, not only because he was enormously tall, way over six feet, but also because of the jocular way he threw butterballs at his wife at table.
It seems he became more and more eccentric. I learned from his
biographer that while being honored in Australia at an endless dinner followed by dancing, he was excruciatingly bored. Dutifully, he danced with his hostess, but desperate, he suddenly grabbed her and gave her an enormous kiss. “Dr. Klemperer, you really cannot do that
here
,” gasped his astonished partner. “Then VERE?” he bellowed.
But his
Fidelio
, his Mahler, were unforgettable.
As a young Debussy fan, I was thrilled to meet Walter Gieseking, the incomparable interpreter of that composer. I remember going with him into our rose garden and choosing a particularly pretty bud for his buttonhole.
Nathan Milstein made his American debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing an old favorite of his, the Glazunov Concerto. I went with my father wearing my best party dress. The seductive, full-blooded Russian tone really moved me. Milstein was one of the last pupils of the great Hungarian violin teacher Leopold Auer, I learned later.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was the soloist with the orchestra, playing his Fourth Piano Concerto. Not even rapturous applause melted his icy demeanor.
When he came to our house, he could not be persuaded to take off his fur-lined coat.
Another guest conductor was Issay Dobrowen. He was the regular conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic at the time.
The day he came to us, there had been a heavy snowfall, and we were able to hire a sled drawn by two horses, with tinkling bells, to drive us, cozy under fur rugs, through a car-less Fairmount Park. I remember the ecstatic look on his face.
During the ride Dobrowen revealed an unexpected fact: he had played Beethoven's
Appassionata
Sonata for Lenin, whose favorite piece of music it was.
The pianist José Iturbi, who always crossed himself backstage before going on, was another guest soloist. He was a handsome, stocky Spaniard with an eye for the ladies. He appeared in several pictures in Hollywood, playing himself.
After a Sunday lunch at our house in Philadelphia (I was a college student by then), he offered to drive me back to New York.
During the journey, it became clear that he counted on the drive being prolonged by dinner and something more.
I hopped out nimbly at my destination.
Eugene Ormandy was a Hungarian whose real name was Jenö Blau. He took his stage name from the ship on which he had traveled to America: the
Normandy
.
He was a violinist and first earned his keep playing in the orchestra of the Capitol Theatre in New York, which accompanied silent movies.
Ormandy followed Leopold Stokowski as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and remained there for forty-two years.
Those were the days before air-conditioning, and we had a screened-in sleeping porch. One summer when we were away, my father lent it to Ormandy, who was conducting the summer season, to escape the stifling Philadelphia heat. But he soon gave it up and moved indoors. He had absolute pitch, and he complained that “those damn birds all sing out of tune.”
He was not given to understatement. When he returned from conducting the orchestra on tour, my father would ask him, “How did it go, Gene?”
And Gene invariably answered, “I was a zenzation!”
The Philadelphia Orchestra was my extended family. Its members saw me grow up. Every Christmas, the old timpanist, Papa Schwar, as we called him, gave me liquor-filled chocolates from his native Germany.
The greatest oboe player of them all, still a legend, was Marcel Tabuteau. His phrasing was so perfect, so musical, that it influenced all the other chairs. He was a jolly French bon vivant and a superb cook. He asked us back to his apartment for supper after a concert one night and made us kidneys flambé in a chafing dish that have never been equaled, even in Paris. Every summer he would go to Monte Carlo and lose all his money, and my father would wire him the funds for his fare home.
He called his wife Chocolat, and she called him Penguin.
I had been studying the harp for several years and graduated to study with the number-one harp teacher in America, a Frenchman from the Basque Country, Carlos Salzedo—a compatriot of Ravel's.
He divided his time between the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and Juilliard in New York, where he had a few private pupils. I used to come to New York from Sarah Lawrence once a week for my lesson and joined his summer colony at Camden, Maine. He was a short, Napoleonic figure—the old-fashioned music teacher who ruled over us tyrannically. We addressed him as “Maître” and stood up when he came into the room.
My theory was that he married the best pupil and the next best became his mistress. Every now and then there were improvements, so everyone moved up a notch. I was at the bottom rung of the ladder. Many of the other pupils already had jobs in symphony orchestras.
An exception to this pecking order was his most eminent pupil, Edna Phillips. When she was still in her twenties, Stokowski invited her to join the Philadelphia Orchestra as First Harpist. She was the first woman to join an American symphony orchestra. Later she became my stepmother.
We Salzedo pupils were mostly lodged in boardinghouses along Mountain Street, in Camden, and if you walked up Mountain Street, you would probably eventually hear a whole composition—Ravel's Introduction and Allegro, for instance, because Salzedo had us all practicing parts of the same piece.
Salzedo was fascinated by new technology. Radios in cars were the hot new thing. The best radio reception in Camden was at the cemetery, at night. Salzedo would drive up to our boardinghouse windows in his big old-fashioned car and honk to bring us down. We would scurry down, coats over our nightgowns, and pile in to be driven to the cemetery to listen to some uninspiring work he would not have dreamed of listening to under normal circumstances—the Grieg concerto, for instance.
He was a close friend of the composer Edgard Varèse and named his little rowboat
Arcane
after a Varèse composition. I got an allée in his garden named after me. Of more consequence, Salzedo was an early and very active member of the League of Composers, championing new music. In a recent concert of Elliott Carter's music, one composition, for harp and quartet, was dedicated to Salzedo, and there was a warm note about Salzedo in the program.
Salzedo, a quintessential European, did his best to fit in as a Maine summer householder. He joined the local organization of the Lions Club, which met weekly. Proceedings were started by all the members giving their best efforts at a roar, and Salzedo roared away with the best of them.
In my mind's eye, I can still see Salzedo on his hands and knees on his driveway, a woman's comb holding back a lock of very black (dyed?) hair, wielding a pair of manicure scissors as he minutely adjusted the curve of the drive.

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