Playing catch-up
Jun 16th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Excavated from June 4th (with me still struggling to whup this damned blog technology to the mat), this excerpt from my long-suffering, much put-upon father substitute Perry (a.k.a. St. Perry) Nelson:
” . . . I enjoyed reading these reminiscences of the times you spent with Rostropovich. Such an intimate portrait as emerges here provides a richness of detail about such famous people that those of us who only know them from their professional reputation seldom get to experience.
“As I’ve looked over that list of people here on your blog that you report having known personally during your life, any number of them intrigue me. I’d be very interested in your telling me how you came to know people like Aaron Copland or Tennessee Williams or Bob Hope or Dorothy Parker, and of course, I’d enjoy as much detail about the times you spent with them as you’d be willing to share….”
Wow . . . what a rare direct invitation to name-drop!
And naturally I’ll do my best to oblige.
For openers, the merest lick & a promise:
1.) Aaron Copland: When I returned to NYC at 19, with a diploma in hand certifying me a freshly baked Bachelor Musicae of the University of Texas in Austin, I had along with that a priceless letter of introduction to him from his boyhood friend Aaron Schaffer, meanwhile Dean of Modern Languages at U.T. Aaron C. told me he’d first confided to Aaron S. his boyhood ambition to become a composer.
2.) 10 Wms. (as he sometimes whimsically signed himself in the return-address part of a letter envelope): At 18 I attracted the acquisitive attention of “the Texas Tornado” (as Tennessee referred to her) née Margo Jones, who joined the U.T. drama faculty the fall of 1942 after the World War II draft had taken all the men available for her Houston Community Players and she had no choice but to close the company down. Our June/January affair (11 years’ age difference) upset the U.T. campus the 1942-43 winter term, but Margo numbered among the authentic discoverers of Tennessee, and through that connection he actually did me a major favor some months before he and I even met, lining up for me the Manhattan apartment of a friend of his spending that summer away from the putrid city. We met only that fall when he returned from his comparative slave-labor Hollywood job, bringing with him the newly completed typescript of “The Glass Menagerie”, a private reading of which I attended in New York.
3.) Bob Hope: a truly brief encounter, during my first trip to Moscow in early 1958 (for what turned into The Van Cliburn Sensation). The Soviet attitude towards the USA had thawed a trifle, just enough for Hope’s entire production team to film a program in Moscow (during which he made some singularly tactless, outrageously undiplomatic cracks that must have had the U.S. Ambassador “Tommy” Thompson cringing - e.g., all the TV antennas on Moscow rooves: ”no receivers, only aerials”). I spent an evening out at the Embassy Club on the river, run by the Embassy’s Marine guards, where Bob Hope improvised hilariously for quite a while, but my only personal exchange with him occurred when we once stood side by side at urinals in the lobby men’s room of the National Hotel, when we had a brief exchange of an alimentary nature, during which he spoke of his “blasting problem”.
4.) Dorothy Parker (c. 1947) I met in the furnished apartment on lower Park Avenue the choreographer Jerome Robbins temporarily occupied, which he’d made available for a fund-raising party to benefit a left-wing organization called UNAVA, the United Negro American Veterans’ Association. Hally, the first wife of John Henry Faulk, wanted me to play the not very good upright piano there, and to my boundless delight I had pie-eyed Dorothy Parker - for me already virtually immortal - mooning at me from only a few feet directly in front of me, elbows propped on the piano, egging me on and on. That led to a truly cherished friendship - during the lull between her two profoundly neurotic marriages to Alan Campbell - which got put on hold when she moved back to him in Hollywood. I feel a moral obligation to write at some length about my Dorothy Parker - a totally different person from the saber-tongued, poison-penned figure of popular legend. I found her possibly the saddest of all the uncountable sad people I’ve known, at least to me touchingly kind and generous. On one occasion she spontaneously, impulsively did me a favor of major proportions - psychologically too intricate to go into at the moment.
