Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

When asked by a publisher to put together a list of people whom Paul had known in his life, he composed this response. As time goes on, he’ll share vignettes about some of his experiences with these people. (If any of them particularly interests you, say the word and I’ll gladly indulge myself in a little stroll down my own personal Memory Lane. - P.M.)

“As a sixteen-year-old piano student at Morningside Height’s Juilliard School in New York I lived diagonally across Claremont Avenue in the International House, where a young troubadour who lived just around the corner on Riverside Drive and had just begun attracting attention on his weekly fifteen-minute radio program used to come around on Sunday afternoons with what he carefully called his git-tar and entertain anybody in the lobby with the cornerstones of the repertoire that made him famous first as The Wayfaring Stranger and then as Burl Ives.

In the same casual coincidental manner, I have come into personal contact over the decades with a lengthy list of people who either became personal friends before fame had befallen them or after it already had. To cite only one further coincidental example, when I returned to New York three years later as a brand-new nineteen-year-old Bachelor of Music as defined by the University of Texas, a little-known playwright then in California, who went by the antic name Tennessee Williams, did me a generous and important favor, even though he and I would not meet personally until a number of months later.

Over the decades since then, in more or less similar manner, my catalogue of friends, acquaintances, and fleeting but memorable personal contacts has come to include - among others - these:

John Adams, Ernst Joseph Aufricht, Georges Auric;

Joan Baez, Luciano Berio, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Herbert Blomstedt, Arna Bontemps, Pierre Boulez, Margaret Bourke-White, Paul Bowles, Brassaï, Alfred Brendel, Benjamin Britten, Louise Brooks, Raymond Burr;

John Cage, Robert Capa, Truman Capote, Elliott Carter, Pablo Casals, John Cheever, Van Cliburn, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell;

Edison Denisov, David Diamond, Hedley Donovan;

John Henry Faulk, Kathleen Ferrier, Jacques Février, Horton Foote, Pierre Fournier, Paula Fox, Götz Friedrich, Christopher Fry;

Muriel Gardiner, Ann and Gordon Getty, Günter Grass, Robert Graves;

Peter Hall, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Bob Hope;

Eugene Istomin, Charles Ives;

Margo Jones;

William Kapell, Herbert von Karajan, Kiril Kondrashin, Nikita Khrushchov;

John Latouche, Evelyn Lear, Lotte Lenya, Ivy and Tanya Litvinov, Witold Lutoslawski;

Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Yehudi Menuhin, W. S. Merwin, Darius Milhaud, Gjon Mili, Agnes de Mille, Jessica Mitford, Dimitri Mitropoulos;

John Jacob Niles, Luigi Nono;

Flannery O’Connor, Carl Orff;

Dorothy Parker, Peter Pears, Krzysztof Penderecki, George Perle;

Thomas Quasthoff;

Regina Resnik, Sviatoslav Richter, Lynn Riggs, Jerome Robbins, Ned Rorem, Mstislav Rostropovich;

Aksel Schiötz, Ronald Searle, Pete Seeger, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Thomas Stewart, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Igor Stravinsky;

Maggie Teyte, Alice B. Toklas;

Carl Van Vechten;

Evelyn Waugh, and Frank Lloyd Wright.”