He is an intense, energetic man of wiry build who dresses in a casual yet elegant manner. As he shifts the position of his arms and legs on the couch, there is something unmistakably spiderlike in the movements. For all his politeness, he cannot mask the impression that his mind is racing far ahead of his rapidly spoken words.
"My involvement with this company goes back to about 1939," says Lee. "I was always the editor, the art director, the head writer, and the creative director [from the age of 17]. In the early 1960s I was thinking of quitting. I thought I wasn't really getting anywhere. My wife said, 'Why not give it one last fling and do the kind of stories you want to do?' So I started bringing out the offbeat heroes. I never dreamt that they would catch on the way they did."
He emphasizes that he did not create the characters alone, but co-created them with the help of an artist. Nevertheless, it was Lee who revolutionized the comic book industry by introducing the concept of what has been termed the "hung-up hero" — the superhero whose powers do not preclude him from having the same emotional troubles as the average mortal. This is what makes Lee's characters so believable and so irresistibly entertaining on television. It explains why CBS'The Incredible Hulkis a hit, and why the same network has filmed eight episodes ofThe Amazing Spiderman. On January 19 from 8 to 10 p.m., CBS will broadcast the pilot for a new Marvel-based series,Captain America.
"Dr. Strange may come back again," says Lee. "It was made into a two hour television movie." His old Spiderman cartoons, too, are still in syndication.
He claims to work "about 28 hours a day," and a look at his dizzying list of activities supports this claim. Besides running the Marvel headquarters, Lee makes frequent trips to the West Coast to develop shows for ABC and CBS, writes some cartoons for NBC, acts as consultant to the Spiderman and Hulk programs, writes an introduction to each of the dozens of Marvel books published each year, writes occasional books and screenplays of his own, gives lectures all over the country, and — what to some would be a full-time job in itself — writes the plot and dialogue not only for the Spiderman newspaper strip, but also, since November, for a Hulk newspaper strip that already appears in more than 200 daily papers worldwide.
Few people know Manhattan as well as Stan Lee. Born the son of a dress cutter in Washington Heights, he has made the Upper East Side his home for the past 15 years. "I'm a big walker," he explains. "I'm a fast walker: I can easily average a block a minute. So if I want to walk to Greenwich Village, I give myself an hour — 60 blocks. I wouldn't know what time to leave if I took a cab."
Asked about new projects in the works, Lee mentions that Marvel is planning to produce some motion pictures that will be filmed in Japan. "And I have a contract to write my autobiography," he adds. "I was surprised and delighted that they gave me five years to do it. So I presume I'll wait four years; maybe in that period, something interesting will happen to me."
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EASTSIDER JOHN LEONARDBook critic for theNew York Times
3-22-80
"It's as if the job I have were designed for me," says bearded, bespectacled John Leonard, lighting his fifth cigarette of the early afternoon as he sits relaxed at his Eastside brownstone, talking about the pleasures and perils of being one of theNew York Times'three daily book critics. Like his colleagues Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Anatole Broyard, Leonard writes two book reviews for theTimeseach week, and is syndicated nationally. An avid reader since childhood, he now gets to read anything and everything he desires.
That's the advantage. The disadvantage, explains Leonard, is that "there are 50 thousand books published every year in this country. You can never even pretend to be comprehensive. You can't even pretend to be adequate in your coverage, whereas theTimeswill review almost any play that opens, on or Off Broadway, and almost every concert and movie. We'll review maybe 400 books a year in the daily paper."
A smallish, balding man of 41 who dresses purely for comfort and has a calm, refined speaking manner, Leonard looks precisely like the bookworm he is. "I'll get here, in this house, probably 5,000 or 6,000 books a year, mailed to me, or brought by messenger. The luxury of this job is that there's so much to choose from that any mood or interest or compulsion or desire to educate oneself or amuse oneself can be matched by some book that has come in."
New books by well-known authors, he says, are the first priority because "they've earned reviews, for service to the literary culture over the years." He and his two fellow critics "divide up the plums and divide up the dogs. Since I did Kissinger's memoirs, the next huge, endless book that has to be reviewed, whether anybody wants to review it or not, will not be reviewed by me."
Somewhere between 100 and 140 serious first novels are published in the U.S. each year, according to Leonard. "This is not pulp paperback westerns. It doesn't even count science fiction or gothic or all that. I think a special effort is made by all of us in the reviewing racket to review first novels."
He reads many authors' first books on the recommendation of trusted agents and publishers. "Over the years you decide who isn't lying to you. … Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was telling someone about that the other day. He said, 'Sure, you can call me as often as you want. But I'll say that you begin with a hundred dollars in you bank account, and if it turns out that you are begging me to review a book that has no other redeeming virtues but the fact that you have invested 50 or 80 thousand dollars' worth of advertising in it and you've got too many copies out in the bookstores that aren't moving, that bank account goes down. When you give me a real surprise and a pleasure which is what makes this job worthwhile, the bank account goes up. But if the bank account goes down to zero, it's closed.'
"And that's right. There are people in this town who I won't take a telephone call from. But that's the exception."
Apart from reading, writing and travel, Leonard has few interests. "By May, I can even look healthy, because I just sit out in the garden, getting paid to read," he says with a grin. He and his wife Sue, a schoolteacher, have three children from previous marriages. His son Andrew will be starting college in the fall.
A book reviewer since 1967, including a five-year stint as editor of theSunday Times Book Review, Leonard also write a warmly personal, frequently humorous column in the WednesdayTimestitled "Private Lives." A collection of 69 of the columns appeared in book form last year under the titlePrivate Lives in the Imperial City(Knopf, $8.95). In addition, he has published four novels and hundreds of free-lance articles for magazines ranging fromPlayboyto theNew Republic. For years he wrote TV reviews forLifemagazine under the pseudonym "Cyclops." Recalls Leonard: "It was a good way to turn your brain to Spam."
Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up reading theCongressional Recordinstead of comics, and initially planned a career in law. Booted out of Harvard for neglecting his studies in favor of the campus newspaper, he sharpened his journalistic skills under William F. Buckley Jr. at theNational Reviewbefore completing college at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Following graduation, he became the program director of a radio station, wrote his first two novels, and worked in an anti-poverty program in Boston. Then he was invited to join theTimes. "I did my Westside and Village stuff when I was first here and broke," comments Leonard. He has owned his four-story Eastside house since 1971.
Among the most memorable books that Leonard has helped to "discover" are Joseph Heller'sCatch-22and Gunter Grass'sThe Tin Drum. "To be able to sit down one night, as I did, and to realize you're in the presence of an extraordinary talent, with no advance publicity, to be able to have a hole to fill in the paper two days later, to sit down and pull out all your adjectives and get people to buy the book: this is what you live for," he sighs happily. "You only need two or three of those to last a lifetime."
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WESTSIDER JOHN LINDSAYInternational lawyer
7-1-78
It was said of John Kennedy that he was too young and too active a man to retire immediately after the presidency. Had he lived to serve two full terms, he would have been 51 upon leaving office. How he might have spent the remainder of his career is difficult to guess, but it's likely that he would have ended up doing work very similar to what John Lindsay does today.
A comparison between the two men is hard to escape. Both were war heroes. Both rose to power aided by their personal magnetism — Kennedy to the nation's highest office at 43, Lindsay to the nation's second toughest job at 44. Both gave eloquent speeches, aimed for high ideals, and made controversial decisions that brought plenty of criticism from within their own ranks.
Lindsay, now an international lawyer, has changed little in appearance since he stepped down in 1974 after eight years in City Hall. The brown hair has turned mostly grey, and the lines in the face are slightly more pronounced, but when he's behind the desk of his Rockefeller Plaza office, his lean, immaculately dressed, 6-foot-3-inch frame resting comfortably in a huge leather swivel chair, he still looks like a man who is very much in charge.
He is a partner in the corporate law firm of Webster and Sheffield, which he first joined in 1948. "This is a firm of about 75 lawyers," he says in a soft, lyrical voice. "We're general practice. … I'm back into corporate law, and there's a fair amount of international work which takes me abroad quite a bit — largely representing American businesses overseas. A lot of my work is done in French. I'm handling a complicated matter involving imports to this country, and a complex arrangement involving offshore oil exploration and drilling. Real estate transactions. The purchase of oil. A matter in Australia. Municipal counseling for a city in Colorado … "
The international situation is beneficial to New York these days, says Lindsay, because "parts of the Western free world have a bad case of the jitters. Europeans particularly, and also many people in the Middle East, feel that this is a more stable place to invest their capital."
Leaning back, with his feet propped up on another chair, he elaborates on foreign affairs: "I think Carter's plane deal in the Middle East escalated tensions rather than reduced them. It's not a foreign policy to sell arms in the Middle East. I think Americans have an obligation to spell out what our foreign policy is."
Except for a few public speaking engagements, Lindsay has devoted nearly all his attention this year to the practice of law. "I used to spend a little time withGood Morning Americaon ABC, but I dropped it in January because of the pressures of this office," he says. "Recently I did a pilot for public television. It's a small documentary that shows cataclysmic events in world history — mostly from World War II — and at the same time, shows what was going on in America. … It might be turned into a series of documentaries."
Because he served four terms as congressman for Manhattan's Silk Stocking district, Lindsay is generally associated with the East Side, but actually he was born on the West Side's Riverside Drive in 1921. One month after graduating from Yale in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy and served for the next three years, taking part in the Sicily landing and the invasion of the Philippines on his way to earning five battle stars.
Two years after leaving the service, he received his law degree, and seven years after that, in 1955, his abilities impressed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell so much that he made Lindsay his executive assistant. In 1958, Lindsay ran for Congress and won, quickly establishing himself as a tireless worker for the rights of refugees. Lindsay was an early supporter of the Peace Corps and a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Soon after leaving Gracie Mansion, John and his wife Mary and their children settled down on the West Side near Central Park. "I feel very strongly that the park is for people, and not for special interest groups," he says. "We introduced bicycling on weekends, and when I retired from government we had a major plan to restore all of Central Park."
The reason he first got involved in politics, says Lindsay, was because "out in the Pacific on lonely nights, after hearing the news of the death of good friends, I made a determination that one day I was going to try to do something. I was determined that we weren't going to have war again."
In regard to his years as mayor, Lindsay makes the simple statement that "I did my best of a very tough job and I have no regrets about it. I look ahead to the future."
But what will the future bring? Would he consider running for office again?
"That's a tough question, Max," he replies. "I know there's a lot of talk with some of my friends about the Senate in 1980. I don't take that lightly. … Right now I'm not making any plans to run. … But you just don't know, because life does funny things, and I also think there's a big vacuum out there now — second-rate politics everywhere.
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WESTSIDER ALAN LOMAXSending songs into outer space
9-17-77
On August 20, when the Voyager 2 spacecraft blasted off for a trip beyond the solar system, it carried on its side a unique record player and a single phonograph record. Included on that record are 27 musical selections that theNew York Timeshas called "Earth's Greatest Hits." If, someday, extraterrestrial creatures play the record and enjoy it, they will be most indebted to the man who chose 13 of the songs — Westsider Alan Lomax.
That Alan's advice should be so highly respected by a committee that spent eight weeks choosing the other 14 songs is a testimonial to his musical reputation. Ever since he became head of the Folk Music Archives of the Library of Congress at age 20, Alan has devoted his life to the preservation and study of international folk music. Following the footsteps of his late father, musicologist John Lomax, Alan has taken his recording equipment to six continents in search of the rapidly disappearing musical treasures of the world.
I finally caught up with Alan and met him for an interview on a Friday evening at his office/apartment on West 98th Street. One room, I observed, was lined wall to wall with tapes and record albums. Another was filled with music books, a third with computer readouts, and a fourth with movie films.
Alan's foremost interest right now is cantometrics — the science of song as a measure of culture. Recently he published a book titledCantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology. Accompanying the volume are seven cassette tapes. The songs are arranged in an order that will teach the student to interpret their general meaning without knowing the language.
"When you learn the system, you can understand any music," said Alan. "We analyzed 4000 songs from 400 societies around the world. Out of that study has come a map of world music." He then showed me a musical chart of Europe, the Far East, and Indian North America. Thirty seven aspects of the music, including rhythm, volume and repetition, had been analyzed by a computer to make a graph.
"Each aspect of the music," said Alan, "stands for a different social style. It's like the guy who says, 'I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.' It means that kind of music stands for his background and what he believes in."
Alan played a tape for me containing a Spanish folk song, an Irish jig and a song from Nepal, explaining some of the elements as the music was playing. "By the time you've heard two or three tapes," he said, "you get used to the world standards of music. In primitive societies, he added, "everybody knows the same things about everything, so being specific is a bore, and repetition is what they like. You don't impose your boring accuracy on everyone. By the same token, primitive people find it much easier to sing together than, for example, New Yorkers of different backgrounds. In the latter case," said Alan, "everybody starts singing at a different tempo, like six cats in a bag. But if you take people who live together and work together, it's like clouds rolling out of the sea."
Alan was not impressed with the 1976 movieBound for Glory, about the life of American folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie during the Great Depression. The movie ends with Woody leaving Hollywood for New York to perform in a coast-to-coast radio show. The man who hosted that show was Alan Lomax.
"We collaborated on a number of things," recalled Alan. "It was an enormous pleasure. He was the funniest man that ever talked. And he was so quick. That's what was wrong with the movie. Talking with Woody was like playing a game of jai alai. He was a deeply passionate person, and tremendously gifted. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up."
Though Alan can sing and play the guitar, he does not regard himself as a performer but rather as a "funnel" for other musicians. During the 1940s he helped launch the careers of people like Burl Ives and Pete Seeger by providing them with songs and putting them on the radio. "We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by God we did it," said Alan. "By 1950 it was a national movement."
Alan spent the next 10 years of his life in Europe, where he produced a definitive 14-album collection of international folk music. Then he moved back to the U.S. and settled on the Upper West Side, where he has lived for the past 15 years. His residential apartment is located two blocks from his office.
Besides his research in cantometrics, done in cooperation with Columbia University, Alan is now preparing for publication a study on international dance movement and its relations to society. Energetic, jovial, and looking considerably younger than his years, Alan has no doubts about the lasting value of his work.
"I make my living as a very hard-working scientist," he said. "By using scientific methods, I can absolutely refute the ideas of those who say that Oklahoma doesn't matter, or that the Pygmies might as well be exterminated. Each of these people, we have found, has something for the human future, for the human destiny."
* * *
The Mighty Lomax
fromThe Westsider, late 1977
It's oldies night on the radio. The d.j. has promised to play nothing butthe greatest hits of the '50s and '60s, and sure enough, here they are —"Irene Goodnight" sung by the Weavers; "Tom Dooley" by the KingstonTrio; "Abilene" by George Hamilton IV; "Midnight Special" by JohnnyRivers; and "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals.
All of these songs reached number one on the charts. And they have something else in common: all are genuine American folk songs of unknown authorship that might have been lost forever if they had not been discovered and preserved by John and Alan Lomax, the famous father-son folklorist team.
The folk music explosion in America that peaked in the early 1960s and continues today owes more of a debt to the Lomaxes than to any performer or songwriter. John Lomax died in 1948 at the age of 80. His son Alan, 62, has been a resident of New York's Upper West Side for the past 15 years. Working seven days a week at his 98th Street office and his 100th Street apartment, Alan has carried on his father's work with a remarkable talent and energy. He has gone far beyond the simple collecting of folk songs, and maintains a dizzying schedule of activities — writing books, catching planes for Europe or Africa, making movies, producing record albums and tapes, and heading a musical research project for the Anthropology Department of Columbia University.
Fathers and Sons
The elder Lomax was primarily a songhunter. His first collection,Cowboy Songs, was published in 1910. It contained such gems as "John Henry," "Shenandoah" and "Home on the Range," which he heard for the first time in the back of a saloon in the Negro red light district of San Antonio.
Alan was born in Texas in 1915. When he was 13 years old his father gave him an old-fashioned cylinder recording machine, and the boy was hooked. He became a full-time song scholar at 18. In that same year his father was put in charge of the newly created Archives of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in Washington. When Alan was 20 he took over as archives director. The father-son team eventually provided more than half of the 20,000 songs in the collection.
The Lomaxes wrote many books together; they introduced American folk music into the nation's public schools, and through their radio programs in the U.S. and Europe, made celebrities out of such performers as Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.
Whereas John Lomax was interested in the music for its own sake, Alan began some time ago to look for the deeper meaning, or social significance, of folk songs. In his many trips around the world he built up a collection of recordings from every continent and virtually every major culture. Along with a co-worker he developed his findings into the new branch of anthropology known as cantometrics.
When the Voyager 2 spacecraft left Earth last August for a journey beyond the solar system, it carried on its side a unique record player with a specially made disk for alien beings to hear and enjoy. The disk contained 27 musical selections, which have been named "Earth's Greatest Hits"; 13 of them were chosen by Alan Lomax.
The following interview was conducted in various rooms of Alan's office on a Friday evening in August, 1977. One room was filled with recording equipment, tapes and records; another with music books; a third with computer readouts; and a fourth with movie films. Lomax spoke rapidly and found it difficult to sit still. He is not a neat housekeeper, a sharp dresser or a master of the social graces. He is, however, a tireless worker who gives the impression of being totally absorbed in his work. A large, robust man, he will no doubt continue to be a major figure in the field of international folk music for years to come.
Question: What exactly is cantometrics?
Answer: It means, literally, singing as a measure of culture. With it, a song performance may be analyzed and related to a culture pattern. Each aspect of music stands for a different social style. By using cantometrics you get the story of mankind in musical terms. … It's like the guy who says, "I don't know anything about music but I know what I like." It means that kind of music stands for his background and what he believes in.
Q: How did you develop this new science?
A: I started this project in 1961. … We analyzed 4,000 songs on a computer. Out of that has come a map of world culture. There are 10 big groups or styles of music. Stone age people have style 1. … We found there's a similarity of Patagonian music and Siberian, even though these people live near the opposite poles. … Along with studying song, we have also studied dance and conversation in the same way, from film. I probably have the biggest collection of dance film in the world — 200,000 feet. Maybe the New York Public Library has more, but that's specialized in fine art.
Q: What's the purpose of cantometrics? How can someone learn it?
A: I recently published a set of seven cassette tapes of folk songs from all 10 cultural levels around the world. In the booklet that comes with it, the songs are broken down and analyzed so that the student can learn the cantometrics system on his own. When you learn the system, you can understand any music, even if you don't know the language it's being sung in. By the time you've heard two or three tapes, you get used to the world standard of music. Cantometrics measures things like repetition, ornamentation, rhythm, melody, orchestral arrangement. … It analyzes music in relation to social structure — political organization, community solidarity, severity of sexual sanctions. Cantometrics makes the world's music into a geography.
Q: How does American music differ from that of the world in general?
A: In our culture, for example, we didn't have much repetition until rock and roll came around. And that represents another influence. … As you know, we of European background don't sing very well together. Everybody starts singing at a different tempo, like seven cats in a bag. But if you take people who live and work together, it's like clouds rolling out of the sea. … It turns out that the people with the most repetition in their songs have the most primitive cultures — at least, in relation to their economic development. Everybody knows the same thing about everything. So being specific is boring, and repetition is what they like. You don't impose your boring accuracy on everyone.
Q: What do you consider the real beginning of the folk music movement in America?
A: It all began in Texas in 1885 when my father heard "Whoopee Ti Yi Yo" on the Chisholm Trail. He was a country boy. He grew up in Texas, and the cowboys drifted past. He wrote the songs down just for the hell of it. Then he got a grant from Harvard and found out how important it was. He was the first person in the country to use a recording device, in 1902.
Q: Did you know Woody Guthrie very well?
A: Know him? I made him famous. I had a coast-to-coast radio program when Woody first came to New York. I introduced him when he first sang on radio. He stayed at my house. … They offered him a huge contract, but he just walked off and went to Oklahoma. He was a deeply passionate person, and tremendously gifted. First of all he was the funniest man that ever talked. And Woody was so quick: talking to him was like playing jai alai. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up. And there was always a slightly strange thing about woody — an itchy feeling that he had. It might have been beginning of the disease which later killed him.
Q: What's your connection with Pete Seeger?
A: Peter Seeger is my protege. I gave him his banjo. The banjo was a dead issue, and he came to me and asked what he should do with his life. He was a Harvard hippie. … We got to be colleagues. We worked on the whole revival of the American folk music. I taught him most of his early songs.
Q: Were you ever a performer yourself?
A: Yes, I've made a few records. But I was always more of a funnel. I regarded myself as a dredge, dredging up the rich subsoil of American folk and putting it back on the developing music scene. We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by God we did it. By 1950 it was a national movement.
Q: What are some other things you've done?
A: I did the first oral history — the Leadbelly book and the book on Jelly Roll Morton. The Leadbelly movie (1976) was taken from that oral history. For Jelly Roll Morton, I transcribed the tape and made it into a piece of literature. The story has been bought for a movie by the same people who made the Woody Guthrie movie,Bound for Glory.
Q: Have you done a lot of research outside the United States?
A: Yes, I spent 1950 to 1960 in Europe assembling all the best material that had been collected into 14 albums, geographically arranged. Then I started thinking about what I heard on albums — not what musicians or literary people heard, but what I heard. Then I met some people at the National Institute of Mental Health who were interested in the norms of healthy behavior. I indicated to them that I was that getting at the behavior styles of the people of the world. They gave me some dough and I got a staff together.
Q: How was the American folk music scene then?
A: I was very shocked when I came back to the United States in 1960. The musical scene at Washington Square made me sick. They said, "Alan, those people you talked to are all dead." I kind of withdrew from the whole business. … Later I set up a concert in Carnegie Hall and brought in the first bluegrass group and the first gospel group to perform in New York. People stormed the stage. There were fistfights and everything. Well, that was the whole end of people saying New York was the center of the folk scene.
Q: What do you think of Bob Dylan?
A: Dylan came along in the footsteps of Ramblin' Jack Elliott. He lived with Woody for a while, and picked him as his model. He absorbed the whole southwestern style from Woody. And the country for the first time fell for a national American vocal style. Then Dylan left the scene and went middle class after three years. He turned his back on folk music, turned his back on people. I think he did a big disservice to the country when he did that. … The whole thing has been to make urban mobile people have a folk music of their own. It's not a bad idea. Terribly boring though.
Q: Do all your projects lead to one goal?
A: I make my living as a very hardworking scientist. I do that because it was important finally to take this huge world that was coming out of loudspeakers, and get down to the meat of it so that it can be used for the betterment of our future … so that we can keep all the treasures of the past and use them. That's what I'm doing. I'm doing it in a scientific way so that I can absolutely refute the idea of those who say that Oklahoma doesn't matter, or that the Pygmies might as well be exterminated. Each of these people, we have found, has something for the human future, and for the human destiny.
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EASTSIDER PETER MAASAuthor ofSerpicoandMade in America
1-12-80
On the surface, his life could hardly be calmer. Peter Maas gets up every morning to have breakfast with his 12-year-old son, then heads for his midtown office, where he spends about five hours at the typewriter. He rarely goes out in the evening, and his idea of fun is a weekend of fishing, a set of tennis or a game of backgammon. "I don't have to live in New York," he says. "When I'm working on a book, I might as well be living in the wilds of Maine."
But in his mind, Peter Maas leads the life of James Bond and Al Capone rolled into one. "I know an awful lot of people on both sides of the law," says the author of two nonfiction block-busters about crime,The Valachi PapersandSerpico.The Valachi Papers, the real-life saga of three generations of a Mafia chieftain's family, was published in 1969 following two years of court battles and rejections from 26 publishers who felt that books on the Mafia had no commercial potential. It sold three million copies in 14 languages and paved the way for an entire industry of Mafia books and movies.
Serpico(1973) revealed the rampant corruption in the New York City Police Department through the eyes of officer Frank Serpico. Then cameKing of the Gypsies(1975), Maas' third expose of the underbelly of American society which, like the others, was made into a successful movie.
Now the 50-year-old author has written his first novel,Made in America. Published in September by Viking, it is a raw, violent, grimly humorous story of an ex-football star for the New York Giants who gets mixed up with organized crime while borrowing money for a shady investment scheme. King Kong Karpstein, the terrifying loan shark who dominates the book, is based on several people whom Maas had known personally, and the novel's head Mafia character has much in common with Frank Costello, the "prime minister of the underworld," who granted Maas 11 interviews shortly before his death in 1975. The scenes ofMade In America— porn parlors, criminal hideaways, the FBI offices — are all described with the same intense realism as the characters. The movie rights have been sold for $450,000.
"The reason I wrote it," explains Maas, sitting restlessly at his 11-room Eastside apartment on a recent afternoon, "was that I didn't want to wake up 10 years from now wondering what would have happened if I had written a novel. … I also think a writer has to challenge himself constantly. I don't think he should play a pat hand."
As he talks on in his breezy New York accent, fidgeting with a gold matchbox on the antique table beside him, Maas seems barely able to restrain himself from getting up and pacing the room. Quite striking in appearance, he is a tall, stocky man with a Brillo-pad thatch of silvery hair and eyebrows like cotton batting. A native Manhattanite, he was one of the country's top investigative reporters for many years before writing his first book,The Rescuer, in 1967.
The reason for the titleMade In America, says Maas is that "the events in the novel could only happen in America. … One of the themes is that nobody in the book, including the football player and the federal prosecutor, thinks that he's doing anything wrong. So that's a very profound kind of corruption."
Like his previous books,Made in Americatook two years to write. "The biggest difference that I found," he points out, "was that in nonfiction, all the discoveries and surprises are in the research, and in fiction, they're all in the writing. When I write nonfiction, about two thirds of the time is spent in research. I didn't do any research for this. It was much harder. And it was the only time I had to rewrite the whole book."
Although Maas claims that his own life has never been in imminent danger, he was touched by deep personal tragedy in 1975 when his wife, a highly talented writer/producer named Audrey Gellen, was killed in an automobile accident. Their only child, John Michael, is a skilled pianist.
Puffing on an imported little cigar, Maas speaks with pride of some of his most important stories in the past. An article he wrote in 1960 led to the release of Edgar Labat, a black convict in Louisiana who had been on death row for 11 years. An article about columnist Igor Cassini in 1963 resulted in Cassini's arrest and conviction as a secret agent for Dominican strongman Trujillo. The biggest story Maas never wrote was a book about the shah of Iran; several years ago he turned down an offer of $1 million for the project in order to concentrate on his novel.
"I've always had trouble writing about women," he confesses when asked about future books. "So the main character of my next work will be a woman. It was going to be another novel, but now I've run across what I think is a fantastic nonfiction project, which I'm mostly interested in because the subject matter is a woman. So I think I'll do that first and the novel afterward. At least I know what my next two will be, and that's comforting."
died 8-23-01. born 6-27-29. Auth or ofSerpicoandThe Terrible Hours.
WESTSIDER LEONARD MALTINFilm historian and critic
9-2-78
Most people who opt for a writing career do not expect to accomplish much before the age of 30. But Leonard Maltin, a 27-year-old Westsider, breaks all the rules. His bookThe Great Movie Comedians: From Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, published in June by Crown Press, is the 30th volume to bear his name on the jacket. One of America's foremost film historians, he has written nine books and edited 21 others, while contributing articles to such publications asTV Guide,Esquireand theNew York Times.
The Great Movie Comediansis one of his most ambitious projects to date. In 240 pages of text and more than 200 photographs, the author analyzes the careers of 22 comic stars from the days of silent film to the 1970s. Sales have been brisk so far. The book is already in its second printing and has been picked up by the Nostalgia Book Club.
Leonard was born on the West Side, moved to New Jersey at the age of 4, and became hooked on old movies by the time he was 8. At 13, he began to write for a magazine calledFilm Fan Monthly. Two years later, he took over as editor and publisher — a job he continued for nine years. His work with the magazine led to his first book contract in 1968 — a thick paperback titledTV Movieswith summaries of thousands of films. The third edition is coming out this fall.
In 1975, when Leonard got married, he and his wife Alice moved to the West Side. She, too, is a film buff; their favorite Westside movie theatre is the Regency (Broadway at 67th).
Leonard's literary career has never been in better shape than now. Two of his other books will appear in new editions this fall. And the 10th book that he has authored, a comprehensive history of American animated cartoons treatedOf Mice and Magic, will be published next year by Signet.
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EASTSIDER JEAN MARSHCreator and star ofUpstairs, Downstairs
2-10-79
Upstairs, Downstairs, the saga of a wealthy London family and its staff of servants in the early years of the 20th century, is one of the most popular television series ever filmed. The first episode of the British-made series was released in England in 1971, and since that time more than one billion people in 40 countries have watched the exploits of the Bellamy family. Introduced to American public television in 1974,Upstairs, Downstairswon seven Emmy Awards, including one for Best Series each year it was shown.
If any single performer could be said to stand out over all the others, that would be Jean marsh, who received an Emmy for Best Actress for her portrayal of Rose, the head parlormaid. But what most of Marsh's American fans fail to realize is that, with her, without would be noUpstairs, Downstairs: she co-created the show with another British actress. A New Yorker on and off for the past two decades, Jean Marsh now lives in an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It is here that I meet her to talk aboutUpstairs, Downstairs, which returned to American television in January with 39 hour-long segments, eight of which have never been seen before on this side of the Atlantic.
"Sometimes it drives me crazy that nobody ever speaks to me about anything else," says Jean, a slender, pretty, soft-spoken woman who has the knack of putting visitors immediately at their ease with her charm and lack of pretension. "I start to drivel after a while, because I tell how I devisedUpstairs, Downstairsand how the cast was chosen." There is no irritation in her voice, only humor. With her lively eyes and childlike appearance, she is reminiscent of Peter Pan.
Upstairs, Downstairs, says Jean, "didn't spring new-minted. My friend Eileen Atkins and I had been talking about trying to devise a television series. We thought we should write something we knew about — about our pasts. And it became servants more than anything else, because her father had been a butler. She was showing me pictures of her family one day; she had photographs of servants going to a pub in a horse-drawn bus. So the first thing we wrote about was servants going on an outing. And later we decided it wouldn't be nearly as interesting unless we included the people upstairs."
Jean herself was born in a poor section of London, the daughter of a laborer and a barmaid. From her earliest years she aimed for a show business career as the surest route out of her social class. She began as a dancer — "I could teach classical ballet or tap if I wanted now" — and danced in stage productions and films from the age of 7 until she gave it up at 20. As an actress, she became an instant success at 15 when she played the role of a cat opposite one of England's leading comic actors. "The play opened, and I stole the review," recalls Jean with a grin. "It was a regional theatre, and they asked me to stay in their company. It was a peak of happiness in my life. There was no time to think of money or boys or clothes or anything — just work."
Her Broadway debut took place more than two decades ago, and over the years she has dazzled British and American audiences in an endless number of plays and movies. Classical theatre is her specialty; Jean recently completed a tour of American regional theatres with plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Oscar Wilde.
"Regional theatres are usually more professional than Broadway. I couldn't doTwelfth Nighton Broadway, but I can do it on the road and make money," she says of her favorite Shakespearean play. "At one performance, I was playing in britches and split them, and I managed to make up a rhymed couplet. Somebody came backstage and said, 'How can you split your britches at exactly the same time every night?'"
Her current project is a film titledThe Changelingwith George C. Scott. "I leave for Canada next week to do the exteriors. I'm going to get crushed to death in the snow. I play George's wife. My role is over very quickly, but then I appear in flashback soon afterward. It's a ghost/murder mystery. My death makes him susceptible to phenomena." Asked about Scott, she says, "I've known him for about 20 years. I think he's a dear. His image seems to be spiky and alarming. People say, 'How can you get along with him?' But I think he's like a teddy bear. He's adorable. Rather shy, too."
Married and divorced at an early age, Jean now lives alone and likes it. She acquired her Eastside apartment a year ago but has been unable to spend more than six weeks in it so far, due to her extensive travel. "I go out and get the bread and newspaper in my pajamas," she says.
Jean explains her amazingly youthful appearance by saying, "I'm very young in my head. I'm quite daft; I'm sillier than most people I know. I believe in God, and I believe you should lead a good life. … One thing I'm one hundred percent for is ecology. I'm so anxious that we don't bequeath the next generation with an ugly world. I'd like them to go on the walks I have had, and breathe the air I have breathed."
Elliott.
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EASTSIDER JACKIE MASONCo-starring with Steve Martin inThe Jerk
12-8-79
Jackie Mason admits that the most famous thing he ever did was to be caught with one of his fingers pointing upwards on theEd Sullivan Show. "The most famous and the least helpful," he says of the 1964 incident. "At that time there was a great wave of excitement about my type of character, because I was new and fresh and different. In those days, every comedian talked like an American; nobody talked like a Jew or a Puerto Rican or an Italian. … There was a lot of heat to give me my own series, but all the offers were canceled after that incident."
Asked whether he actually did make an obscene gesture, the short, stocky comedian with the broad New York Jewish accent shakes his curly head. "The truth is that I didn't — because I wouldn't be ashamed to tell you if I did. There's nothing wrong with it today. But the truth is that I was making with my fingers — I have a very visual act, you know — and Sullivan got panicky because President Johnson had just cut into the program, and when the camera came back on me, it looked like I was giving him some kind of message. The next day, I became headlines all over the world. … I maintained enough success and enough imagery to be able to do all the other shows as a guest, but the sponsors were afraid to be associated with me as the star."
Jackie is telling me this in his dressing room at Dangerfield's (1118 First Avenue), where he's performing six nights a week until December 17. The affable Mason is quick to defend his caustic brand of ethnic humor. "I don't see how it can be harmful. If people do feel any prejudice, it provides an outlet for them to be able to laugh at it. The people who decry ethnic humor are afraid of their own prejudice. You remind them of the ridiculous nature of prejudice. … Most of the things I say are universal: they're about marriage, about minorities, about social problems — the issues of the day."
He also pokes fun at doctors, weathermen and every profession in between. Then there are his highly exaggerated impressions of Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter and Ed Sullivan ("He always asked me to do an impression of him on his show. He found out from me how to dohim."). Another of his ploys is to razz the audience members. "In 21 years," he said, "I only had one incident where a guy got mad and wanted to punch me in the mouth. Thank God I move very fast. He wanted to kill me. Obviously he didn't catch me. That's why I'm still here for the interview."
Born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, he was raised in New York's Lower East Side from the age of 5. Following in the footsteps of three older brothers, he studied to become a rabbi to please his father. "I knew it wasn't for me. I have all license to be a rabbi, but I'm not a rabbi." A bachelor and Eastside resident, he loves New York because "this is a melting pot that doesn't really melt. There's a pot, but it's full of unmelted people."
Dangerfield's, he says, is the only club in New York where major comedians still perform. "Seven, eight, nine years ago, there was about 12 clubs that played comedians. There was the Copacabana, the Waldorf Astoria, the Latin Quarter, the Plaza: all those rooms were wiped out." Consequently, Jackie does a lot of performing in such clubs as the Riviera in Las Vegas and the Fontainebleau in Miami. Nowadays, however, he's more interested in making movies. His first one, directed by John Avelson ofRockyfame, was "a big success without anybody seeing it." His second film,The Jerk, is now being heavily promoted for its December 14 opening. Also starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Catlin Adams, it is about a poor black sharecropper's adopted son (Martin) who leaves home and begins wandering on the road until he ends up at the gas station of Harry Hartounian, played by Mason.
"He's an uneducated kid who doesn't know anything," explains Jackie. "He doesn't know how to handle himself, how to talk, how to act. I give him a part-time job at my place, and I give him a room. He doesn't know what a job is, and he doesn't understand that you get paid. He never saw money. He thinks you're supposed to eat it. He's a crazy lost kid and I play the father figure."
On December 20, Jackie will appear on theMerv Griffin ShowwithSteve Martin and Carl Reiner, the movie's director.
Jackie loves being a comedian because "I'm my own boss and I do what I like … When young comics say it's a hard business to enter, it's because they have no talent. If a young comic has talent, he's more likely to make a big living than in any business you can think of, with comparatively less effort, and more opportunity, and greater longevity. I never saw a good comedian in this business who hasn't made a comfortable living at it."
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WESTSIDER MALACHY McCOURTActor and social critic
9-22-79
"I never take anything seriously — least of all myself," says Malachy McCourt, one of the wittiest, most outrageous Irish personalities in New York. "I find my life is cyclical, and so I move every five or six years from one interest to another. Now that I'm doing acting sort of full-time, I thoroughly enjoy the uncertainty of it. But I do appear almost also every Wednesday at the unemployment office at 90th Street. I do a matinee from 2:15 to 2:45."
He concludes the remarks with his customary gust of laughter. As opinionated as he is entertaining, Malachy McCourt is one of those larger than-life characters who has mastered the art of conversation to such a degree that no matter what people think of him, they cannot help being magnetically attracted by his words.
In 1968 he had his own talk show in WOR-TV that was canceled because of the controversy it raised. From 1970 to 1976 he had a weekend show on WMCA radio, and lost that as well — for publicly condemning the station's treatment of an employee whose job was abolished. "They called him in on a Friday at five minutes to five, and told him to clear his desk. He had been there for 28 years."
The airwaves' loss has been the theatre's gain, because in the past three years, Malachy has developed an ever-increasing reputation as a character actor. Well-known for his roles in Irish plays — especially those by John Millington Synge — he has also been seen recently in movies and television. His films includeTwo for the SeesawandThe Brink's Job, while on television, he appeared in last season'sThe Dain Cursewith James Coburn and in Thomas Wolfe'sYou Can't Go Home Again.
His current vehicle isThe Shadow of a Gunmanby Sean O'Casey, the great Irish playwright. In the role of Seamus Shields, whom Malachy describes as "a snivelling, sycophantic swine of a braggart," he is co starring with Stephen Lang at the Off-Off Broadway Symphony Space for the Performing Arts, 95th Street and Broadway.
The action takes place in Dublin in 1920. "It was during the time of what they euphemistically call 'the Troubles,'" explains Malachy in his broad, breezy irish accent. We're sitting in his Westside living room. The walls are so loaded down with books that they seem ready to collapse. "The English brought in a bunch of gangsters from their prisons, called the Black and Tans. They were paid an extraordinary amount of money to go over and pacify the country. They could do anything they pleased. You could be tortured, raped and robbed."
Born in Limerick in 1931, Malachy quit school at the age of 12. "It was an equal struggle. They couldn't teach me and I couldn't learn." He joined the Irish Army at 14, was kicked out at 15, then went to England, where he worked as a laborer prior to emigrating to the U.S. at the age of 20. His conversational brilliance soon made him famous as a saloon keeper. At one time he ran a Malachy's and a Malachy's II on the Upper East Side. "I gave it up," he quips, "for the sake of the wife and the kidneys." Now the only bartending he does is on the ABC soap operaRyan's Hope, where he is a regular. "I much prefer that. It's a fake bar, and everybody else cleans it up."
He has few happy memories of his native country. "There should not be a united Ireland," he asserts. "In the South, the government is subject to enormous pressures by the church all the time, in the areas of birth control, contraception, abortion. People should have the rights to their own bodies and their own lives. … Consequently, those of us who escape get very savage about it. Very savage.
"Someone I was talking to the other day said, 'I can't understand how you can be an atheist and have of fear of death.' I said, 'I have no fear of death because I grew up with it.' It was all around. I woke up one morning when I was 5 and a half to find my brother dead beside me. Another brother had died six months before. My sister died in her crib. So therefore, what can you fear, when you know it so well? I'm alive today. I'll probably get up tomorrow. There's great comfort in the fact that we're all going to die eventually."
Asked about Daniel P. Moynihan, whom he somewhat resembles physically, Malachy describes the senator as "the Nureyev of politics. He can leap from conservative crag to liberal crag with gay abandon. A man who could serve Kennedy and compare Nixon to Disraeli must be either insane or insanely clever. I look at him and I cannot believe that this twinkly-eyed, overweight leprechaun can be so cunning."
Malachy's wife Diana — "she's the only Smith graduate I know that became a carpenter" — does custom carpentry work out of a shop called Space Constructs on 85th Street. Westsiders for two decades, the McCourts have two children, Conor and Cormic. One of their favorite local restaurants is Los Panchos at 71st and Columbus; it is owned by Malachy's brother Alfie.
Although Malachy has no desire to return to Ireland to live, he recommends it for tourists because "it's the last outpost of civilized conversation. The Irish have an attitude that when God made time, he made plenty of it. So for God's sake, don't be rushing around. Stand there and talk to me."
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WESTSIDER MEAT LOAFHottest rock act in town
10-21-78
For several years, up until last fall, Meat loaf lived in peaceful obscurity in an apartment at 25 West 74th Street. Few people outside of his own circle knew that the name applied to a gargantuan 29-year-old singer from Texas and the rock band he headed.
A couple of months ago, Meat returned to his old neighborhood after a long absence. This time he caused a mob scene in the local supermarket, and, on escaping to his apartment, found people climbing on the window ledges trying to catch a glimpse of him. The reason? His group's first album,Bat Out Of Hell, which has sold three million copies since its release a year ago.
"I don't like to be rude to fans," says the calm, gentlemanly Meat Loaf (his legal name) during an interview at his new apartment in another part of the West Side. "I'd lie down on the floor for hours so they couldn't see me. …Peoplemagazine printed my real name and told more or less where I lived: that's why I had to move."
Bare feet perched on the coffee table, he spreads his 275-pound, 6-foot frame evenly on the living room sofa. Although Meat's onstage image makes him out to be one of rock's meanest and toughest characters, in person he is totally devoid of arrogance, and in fact seems almost shy. Sam Ellis, Meat Loaf's glib road manager who arranged the group's recent trips to England, Germany, Canada and Australia, helps the interview along by adding his comments whenever Meat begins to reach for words.
All the songs onBat Out Of Hell— raucous, earthy, and intense — were written by fellow Westsider Jim Steinman, who plays keyboard with the group. After he and Meat Loaf met in 1973, they performed together frequently, but their music met with limited success.
"People were afraid of it," says Meat. "The songs were long. The voices were loud. People in rock said it was too theatre. People in theatre said it was too rock and roll." When Meat and Jim were finally offered a contract to do an album, Steinman went to work on some new material, and wrote nearly the entire contents ofBat Out Of Hellin four months, including the gold singlesTwo Out of Three Ain't BadandParadise by the Dashboard Light— a duet celebrating teen sexuality that has been choreographed into an 8-minute show stopper by Meat and lead female vocalist Karla DeVito. "Jim doesn't just write the songs and hand them to me. I do most of the vocal arrangements. It's really a team. It's like Sonny and Cher," says the gargantuan singer.
Brought up in Dallas under the name Marvin Lee Aday, he tipped the scales at 185 while in the fifth grade. "I was an only child and my parents always wanted two kids," he jokes. "So they set two places at the dinner table, and I ate both meals. … I was always on the baseball team, because if they needed a base runner, they'd say, 'Go in there and get hit by the ball.' I'd back up just enough so that I wouldn't get hurt."
He joined the high school choir in order to avoid study hall, and from then on, singing became his main passion. After completing high school at 15, he travelled around with a number of bands. By the time he settled down in New York, live rock music was no longer in so much demand as before. "That's one reason I went into theatre," he remarks. "Another reason was because someone hired me and I didn't have a job." As an singer and actor, Meat performed in some 10 Broadway and Off Broadway productions, includingHairandThe Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which he also appeared in the 1975 film.
WhenBat Out Of Hellwas first released, it did not catch on immediately. But soon a couple of influential radio stations in New York City fell in love with it. Then Cleveland and Boston began to give it a lot of air time. From there, its reputation gathered momentum across the country. As a result of the slow start,Bat Out Of Hellwas still climbing on the national charts nearly a year after it came out. In Australia, it was the number one album for 10 straight weeks.
This past summer the Meat Loaf band did four sellout concerts in the New York area in the space of a month. Now the band is taking it easy for a little while before returning to the studio for their second album. They plan to launch another world tour after the album is completed in March.
Meat shares his apartment with 23-year-old Candy Darling, a slender, pretty dancer/singer who will be performing in an upcoming Broadway musical,Whoopee!What does Meat Loaf like about the West Side? "I have absolutely no idea," he replies matter-of-factly. "I can't stand it anywhere else." Among his preferred Westside hangouts: O'Neal's, Gleason's, La Cantina, and Anita's Chili Parlor, all on Columbus Avenue between 71st and 73rd streets.
In spite of his meteoric rise to fame, Meat Loaf sees his overall career in a different light then his fans. "For me," he says thoughtfully, "rock and roll is not an end. I'd like to make movies someday. I want to direct. I want to produce. It's great to sell records, but this is not what I always want to do. It's just another step on the mountain."
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WESTSIDER ANN MILLERCo-star ofSugar Babies
1-12-80
Sugar Babies, the rollicking burlesque musical that rolled into Broadway last fall, was one of the most-awaited shows of the year because it signalled Mickey Rooney's return to Broadway after umpteen years. Less attention was initially given to Mickey's co-star, dazzling Ann Miller, who last appeared on Broadway in 1970 as a star ofMame. Ann, it turns out, is not only a wonderful singer and comedienne, but, in her mid-50s, is still one of the best tap dancers in America. Her fancy footwork has become a prime attraction of this box-office smash.
"I was also inGeorge White's Scandalsfor a year when I was 15," recalls Ann in her dressing room after a performance. "This is my third show only." For most of her career, she has lived in Beverly Hills, California. The veteran of dozens of movies, includingOn The Townwith Frank Sinatra, Miss Miller is a larger-than-life entertainer who believes that her career comes first and foremost, ahead of personal happiness and family. Married and divorced three times, she has no children, but is an ardent animal lover.
"I have two beautiful dogs, Cinderella and Jasmine," she says in a light Southern accent. "They look exactly alike, only one is Hungarian and the other is French. My secretary walks them. … I'm very much interested in the protection of animals. I think people treat animals very cruelly, and to me, when you adopt a dog, it's like adopting a child. My little Cinderella: she was thrown out of a car by somebody wanting to get rid of her. I found her in Cincinnati in a blizzard. She almost died and I saved her life."
By looking beyond the heavy rouge, bright red lipstick, large rhinestone earrings and fluttering false eyelashes that are part of her act, one can see that Ann appears considerably younger then her years.Sugar Babies, she points out, is not burlesque in the normal sense. "Burlesque got sleazy in the 1940s with bumps and grinds and tassel-twirlers, but that's not what we're selling. We sell, in a sense, glorified, old-fashioned, 1920s-style vaudeville, with good production numbers. And that's what burlesque was originally. … A college professor got this together. The jokes are authentic. … Our show is for everybody. It's not dirty at all — not by today's standards."
There is a crowd of people waiting to see Ann after nearly every show. Rooney escapes the fans by dashing out the stage door within minutes of the final curtain. "He lives way out in New Jersey," explains Ann, who rents a hotel suite on the Upper West Side. "Mickey is married and he has 10 children. He loves them all very much. … Mickey and I went to school together. He's a very nice person and he's a great pro. He may be a small man, but he's a giant in his own way."
Miss Miller, who likes to dine at the 21 Club, Sardi's and theConservatory, believes thatSugar Babiesis a hit "because it's timely.People are desperate to laugh. They're tired of hearing about war and thefood crunch and the oil crunch. They want to be entertained."
She has written her autobiography,Miller's High Life, which is available "only in rate bookstores and in every library in the country. It isn't out in paperback yet, but there's some talk of it." Asked about a projected second volume,Miller on Tap, she says: "It will be my life; it will carry on from where the other one left off."
She has no secret for looking so young, except that she is a nonsmoker, drinks nothing stronger than wine, watches her diet, and avoids anything strenuous in the daytime, to save her energy for the show.
With her jet-black hair, pearl-white teeth, and exaggerated makeup, Ann looks more than a little exotic. This may help to explain her belief in reincarnation. "I really do have memories of Egypt. They're not in a form that I can describe. You sometimes just know things. You're born with knowing. I have been to Egypt three times, and I'm planning to go back again and again, I want to go mainly to Luxor. I'm very entranced with it. I like all the antiquities of Egypt. The present-day Egypt I have no interest in to speak of."
Ann says she doesn't like the name of her current show. "People think it's candy, because there is Sugar Babies candy," she explains, "but in the old days, babies meant beautiful show girls. The girls had sugar daddies, so they were called sugar babies."
A Texas native who began dancing professionally in New York at the age of 11, Ann says yes, she feels good about her career, but that "it's been a long struggle. The sad part is, I have wanted so much to be happy, but I have never found happiness."
Her father, who was a lawyer, left her mother when Ann was 10. Since Mrs. Miller was almost totally deaf, Ann supported them by tap dancing at Rotary Club luncheons. She retains a fear of poverty to this day. "I save all my clothes because some day I might be poor again," she says. "I have a room with nothing in it but racks of clothes. I cover them nicely, and once a year I air them out, in case they come back in style."
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WESTSIDER SHERRILL MILNESOpera superstar
2-24-79
"In a career of my size," says baritone Sherrill Milnes, "there is no off season. I try to hold myself to 60 performances a year — not including recordings or dress rehearsals or private studies. … In fact, I think I'm the most-recorded American opera singer ever, in any voice category."
We're talking in his spacious Westside apartment facing the Hudson River. I cannot help observing that Milnes, a handsome man who stands 6 foot 2 and weighs 220 pounds, with his dark hair combed straight back and wearing a blue flowered shirt, looks very much like a country and western singer. It is his chest that gives him away — a massive, powerful chest that hints at the huge voice it supports. To deliver notes that are clearly audible throughout the largest opera houses in the world, over the sound of a full orchestra, and without amplification, is one of the most physically demanding tasks in all the performing arts. And one of the best paying. Only a handful of singers take home, like Milnes, approximately $7,000 for each night's work.
At 44, he is in the peak of his career, and has been since he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in December, 1965. He has sung in virtually all of the world's leading opera houses, including the Paris Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, and La Scala in Milan. Asked what more he can accomplish, Milnes replies that "one hopes to become a better artist all the time. But you can only go so fast. If you make family a priority position — which is certainly true in this case — there are only so many hours in the day. I could be more famous, were I on television more. But it takes time. … I don't want to sound like: he's satisfied with his career, where he is, and he doesn't want to do any more. But I have to realize that my career can no longer continue at the same rate of ascendancy."
His current show with the Met, Verdi'sDon Carlo, will continue until mid-March. "This is the first time New York has heard the five-act original version," notes Milnes. "We'll be doing it in Italian. People said, 'Why don't you doDon Carlolike the real original, in French?' The problem is, five years later, where do you find people who know it in French? There's a practical set of problems when, worldwide, everybody know it in Italian. I don't know if it would have been worth it for one season." Long-range planning is an important aspect of any opera singer's life. Milnes already has his schedule set up until 1984.
The main reason why Italy has declined in importance as a center for opera, says Milnes, is that the country's economic problems make it impossible for the companies to book singers years in advance. "I think America is now producing more singers than Italy, and Spain is very high on the list of producing singers."
It is to Italy that Milnes owes much of his success. "We have that phrase 'Verdi baritone' — sometimes more generically, 'Italian baritone.' There's no question that Verdi treated the baritone as a special voice category, differently really than composers before him. He did a lot of title roles for the baritone voice, and really split the bass and baritone roles very much."
Widely known as an unselfish performer who gives his time freely to others, Milnes is chairman of the board of Affiliated Artists, a non-profit organization that arranges concerts across America for young, up-and coming singers.
Born on an Illinois farm, he studied piano and violin from early childhood. In high school, he won the state music contest in five separate categories, including vocal soloist. Deciding that his voice was the instrument that showed most promise, he began his professional career as a member of a chorus attached to the Chicago Symphony. In 1960 he turned to opera. Boris Goldovsky, the opera maestro, signed him immediately, taught his willing pupil the fine points of acting in opera, and took him on five cross-country tours. Since 1962, Milnes has had practically no time for anything but singing.
A dedicated family man, he is married to soprano Nancy Stokes. The couple has a 6-year-old son, Shawn, and Milnes has two other children from a previous marriage. He has been a Westsider for almost 10 years.
Not at all snobbish about his own musical gifts, Milnes believes that singing is excellent recreation for anyone, regardless of voice quality. "I encourage people to sing in the shower. It's a great emotional outlet. Even if you're lousy, it makes you sound fantastic. When I'm on the stage, I always have that feeling that I'm never going to sound as good as I do in the shower. You can't get the sameringwhen you're singing to 5,000 people."
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WESTSIDER CARLOS MONTOYAMaster of the flamenco guitar
10-28-78
Carlos Montoya speaks two languages. The first is music; the other is Spanish. At 74, he is the world's most famous master of flamenco — the ancient folk music of the Spanish gypsies, which Montoya performs with dazzling speed and dexterity. On October 29 he will give a major concert at Avery Fisher Hall.
With more than 30 albums to his credit, Montoya is the most recorded flamenco guitarist in history. He is thoroughly committed to his instrument. It is not merely his living, but his life. He is a pure gypsy — "on all four sides," as the Spanish say. Maybe that explains why he likes to tour from January to May and from October to December every year, almost nonstop, across the U.S. and Canada, to South America, Europe and the Far East. He has been a Westsider since the 1940s and has rented the same Westside apartment since 1957. Yet when people ask Montoya where he lives, he is likely to reply, "On airplanes."
An American citizen for more than 30 years, he is perhaps the first persons ever to acquire citizenship after answering "no" to the question, "Do you like the American form of government?" Because of his poor English, he had misunderstood the query. He corrected himself, and that night played for President Harry Truman.
Montoya's wife, Sally, is his steady helpmate. Since their marriage in 1940, she has been his manager, interpreter and best friend. He still speaks little English, so interviews with him are often ponderous three way affairs. When I arrived at the Montoyas' residence late one morning, he was very polite, but eager to get the interview over with. "Vamos," he said. His demeanor changed when he discovered that I was able to understand his crisp, precise Spanish when spoken slowly. We quickly dispensed with the interpreter.
Does he consider flamenco to be the highest art attainable on the guitar? Sitting upright in an overstuffed chair, he smiled benignly and said, "Not all the flamenco guitarists are artists. There are many guitarists, but in the world there are only two or three artists on the flamenco guitar. … Most musicians are technicians. I think that to play flamenco as it should be played, you have to be an artist. The music is either very bad or very good. People who hear the performance may applaud both the technician and the artist. But afterward, if the performer was not an artist, they forget what they have heard."