Between You and Me (20 page)

Shamelessly corny, perhaps, but it invariably got a big laugh, probably because that kind of nonsensical remark seemed so deli-ciously out of place at a serious classical concert.

During our interview, Perlman’s mischievous streak surfaced on several occasions, and there was one response in particular that I’ve always treasured. He had referred to the violin as a Jewish instrument, so I rattled off the names of some past and present masters—

Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, and Perlman himself—and

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then asked him why so many world-class fiddle players happened to be Jewish. With a broad grin and appropriate manual gestures, he replied, “You see, our fingers are circumcised and, you see, which gives it a very good dexterity, you know, particularly in the pinky.”

When we aired that 60 Minutes piece, Perlman was thirty-five and was already being hailed as the finest violinist of his generation; since then his stature has only increased. In recent years, he has devoted much of his time and energy to nurturing the talents of future virtuosos. He and his wife, Toby, run the Perlman Music Program, which provides intensive instruction in five instruments—violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano—for students between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Every summer, gifted youngsters from all over the world spend six weeks at the Perlman music camp on Shelter Island, a picturesque retreat off the eastern coast of Long Island, and Perlman himself often conducts and/or performs at their concerts.

Itzhak Perlman wasn’t the only world-class musician I interviewed on 60 Minutes. Three years earlier, in 1977, I had the thrill (and there’s no other word for it) of doing a story on a towering genius, a man esteemed by most of his peers as the greatest pianist of the twentieth century—Vladimir Horowitz.

Gaining access to Horowitz was a rare privilege. He was notorious for having an aloof, even reclusive personality, and he almost never consented to requests for interviews. But in the late fall of ’77, he was approaching a special occasion—the fiftieth anniversary of his American debut, a spectacular performance with the New York Philharmonic that had become the stuff of legend—and he agreed that such a milestone was worth the fuss of some media attention.

This assignment was one of the very few that made me nervous.

I have seldom been intimidated by the people I’ve interviewed, no matter how important or powerful or brilliant they were reputed to be. But the prospect of going one-on-one with Horowitz did get to me

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a little. The way I saw it, discussing music with Vladimir Horowitz was like having a chat about the theory of relativity with Albert Einstein. No matter how much homework I did, there was no way I could measure up.

My concerns proved groundless. When we began working on the Horowitz story, he was inChicago, where he was preparing to give a concert, a kind of tune-up for the golden-anniversary celebration two months later. Since we wanted to include footage from that concert in our profile, the 60 Minutes crew and I flew to Chicago and, on the day before the performance, paid a visit to Orchestra Hall to look things over, decide on camera positions, and otherwise get our bearings.

While we were doing that, Horowitz suddenly showed up. Without knowing that we were there, he had come to the hall to check out the piano, test the acoustics, and otherwise get his bearings. So I walked up to him, and just as I was about to introduce myself, he looked at me and said, “Mike Wallace. I watch you every Sunday night.”

I could hardly believe that this musical titan, a man I regarded with so much awe, was presenting himself to me as a regular viewer of 60 Minutes. Needless to say, that chance encounter was just what I needed to dispel the anxiety that had been gnawing at me, and when the time came for our interview at his town house in New York, I felt completely relaxed and comfortable in his presence. So much so that I even resorted to some playful needling, as I often did when I interviewed people I admired a great deal and whose company I enjoyed. For example, when Horowitz insisted that it didn’t bother him if some other pianist received more money for a concert, I was quick to point out how unlikely that was.

W A L L A C E : If somebody gets more money? You tell me one other solo performer in classical music who gets eighty percent of the gross, which is what Vladimir Horowitz gets.

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H O R O W I T Z : Well, I didn’t do it my whole life. After fifty years of playing, I got this.

W A L L A C E : You get three times as much as any other classical performer today, I am told. And you smile when I tell you this because you know it’s the truth, and you’re proud.

H O R O W I T Z : I’m not proud, but this—it is so.

It was obvious that the irreverent tone I had adopted was a rare experience for Horowitz, who was accustomed to being treated with a punctilious deference usually reserved for royalty. Instead of taking offense, he seemed to be stimulated and even amused by my rather flippant approach, and so did his wife, who sat in on the interview. As the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini, Wanda Horowitz had grown up in a musical aristocracy. She and Horowitz were married in 1933, and since then she had devoted her life to being his constant companion (he never traveled anywhere without her) and most trusted adviser. She was also his most demanding listener, as I discovered when I brought her into the conversation.

W A L L A C E : Do you talk frankly when he plays well, and when he plays not so well?

M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Oh, absolutely.

H O R O W I T Z : Unfortunately, yes.

W A L L A C E : She does?

H O R O W I T Z : She’s not always right, but she talks.

M R S . H O R O W I T Z : But most of the time I’m right. . . .

W A L L A C E : And you pay attention, maestro?

M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Don’t say no. (Laughs) H O R O W I T Z : I will say—I will say sometimes.

M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Well, sometimes.

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W A L L A C E : No, I’m quite serious about this.

H O R O W I T Z : You know, I take her ears because she knows my ups and downs. . . . She kn ows my playin g, you know, so she can judge.

We also talked about the difficult times he had been through, notably the period when he didn’t play at all in public. In 1953, when he was forty-nine and very much in his prime, Horowitz suddenly announced that he was tired of the pressures of touring and was going to stop doing concerts for a while. Twelve years passed before he played in public again, and during this long hiatus, he lived mainly as a recluse. In fact, there was a two-year stretch when he never once left his town house.

H O R O W I T Z : I was in this room, very happy.

W A L L A C E : You were in this room, very happy?

H O R O W I T Z : Very happy.

W A L L A C E : And you, madame?

M R S . H O R O W I T Z : Not so happy.

In spite of what he told me, Horowitz himself was not so happy during this period of withdrawal. The truth of the matter was that he spent much of that time coping with depression, and I didn’t fully appreciate what an ordeal that must have been for him until I had my own bout with the disease a few years after our interview. He eventually came out of it, and in 1965 he finally resumed playing in public.

His much-heralded return to the stage took place at the same site where, as a young man, he had made his triumphant American debut. Wanda Horowitz had her own special memory of that comeback event. “He came out, and there was a big line of people on both sides

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of Carnegie Hall,” she recalled. “And somebody said, ‘Oh, Mr.

Horowitz, we stood in line all night.’ And I said, ‘You know what? I stood in line for twelve years.’ ”

Horowitz was born in Kiev, but he left the Soviet Union in 1926

and did not return until sixty years later. He eventually settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1942. He gave many benefit performances during World War II, the most famous of them in 1945, when he played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at an event in Central Park celebrating the Allied victory that brought an end to the war. At one point in our interview, Horowitz told me how proud he was to be an American and how much he loved the United States. That made me think of the patriotic occasion in the summer of ’45, so I began trying to goad him into playing the Sousa march again for our 60 Minutes audience.

W A L L A C E : Do you love this country enough, maestro, to respond to a request for you to play something that you haven’t played in many, many years in public?

H O R O W I T Z : Yeah, but I don’t know it.

W A L L A C E : You know what I’m going to ask you?

H O R O W I T Z : Yes, I know because they ask me all the time. . . .

W A L L A C E : Are you enough of a patriot?

H O R O W I T Z : No, I forgot that. I didn’t play—

W A L L A C E : Come on. You haven’t forgotten it.

H O R O W I T Z : I didn’t play— I tell you, I don’t know it. But I have to remember. It’s too difficult.

W A L L A C E : I’m sure that it’s difficult.

His wife now joined in the prodding. “Go ahead, go on,” she urged, and her encouragement must have made the difference, be-

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cause he launched into a rousing rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” thus giving me (and later, our viewers) the sublime pleasure of hearing the Sousa warhorse played as it had never been played in public—or at least not since that memorable day in Central Park thirty-two years earlier. That impromptu recital at his town house inevitably became the highlight of our story on Vladimir Horowitz.

During these years, the 1970s and early ’80s, I did pieces on other eminent “longhairs,” as classical musicians were often called back in the days before Americans of the hippie generation adopted the shaggy look as their badge of identity. The seventieth birthday of composer-conductor Aaron Copland was celebrated on 60 Minutes, and I later did a story on Leonard Bernstein, whom I had known since childhood. We were both born in 1918, and we grew up in the same community. In fact, when I was working on the Bernstein profile, one of the wags in our office suggested that we call it “Two Boys from Brookline.” I also did a piece on Mikhail Baryshnikov not long after he defected from the Soviet Union; I introduced that one with the rather bold assertion that “never before has one extraordinary dancer so captured our imagination.”

Because I grew up in a musical family (my sister, Helen, was a gifted pianist), and because of my own teenage adventures with the violin, I felt comfortable in and conversant with the world of concerts and ballet. But I regret to say that my enthusiasm for classical music did not extend to opera, the dubious charms of which have always eluded me. Still, exceptional talent must be recognized wherever it is found, so I made occasional visits to that hybrid arena of robust arias and florid librettos. In the mid-1970s, I did stories on two of the world’s finest sopranos, who could not have been less alike in background or temperament. One was Maria Callas, the fiery Greek diva who had a stormy romance with Aristotle Onassis and lost him to

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Jacqueline Kennedy. (That love triangle had all the passion and histrionics of a grand opera.) The other was the gracious Beverly Sills, who was born in Brooklyn and who, in her younger days, was known as

“Bubbles” Silverman. Finally, I did a story on the most celebrated tenor of his generation, Luciano Pavarotti, in 1993, the year he sang in front of a half million fans at a special concert in Central Park, a gala event that was transmitted on television to forty-seven countries.

Nor was I the only member of our team who dabbled in high culture. Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Harry Reasoner, and all the other correspondents who have worked on 60 Minutes over the years have done their own periodic pieces on artists of one stripe or another.

Call it a diversion, if you wish, for there is no denying that our magazine show is perceived primarily as a broadcast that focuses on scandals and corruption and other stories that provoke controversy, and scandal, corruption, and controversy is what’s just ahead.

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M i c k e y c o h e n

IN THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, JOHN Huston’s classic film noir about a gang that plans and carries out an elaborate jewel heist, one of the characters with a flair for expression describes criminal pursuits as “a left-handed form of human endeavor.” In the spirit of that felicitous phrase, let me say that over the years, I’ve had dealings with more than a few moral southpaws. The first one to make an appearance in my particular rogues’ gallery was a mobster named Mickey Cohen, who was one of our first guests on The Mike Wallace Interview after we made the jump to ABC in the spring of 1957. Of all the interviews I’ve done during the past half century, that’s the one I’ve regretted the most because what happened with Cohen in our studio B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

that night seriously undermined our position at ABC and, for a while at least, damaged my credibility as a reporter.

Reaching out to a shady character like Cohen was part of our overall effort to light a fire under the new network program. Both Ted Yates and I realized that the vast majority of our interviewees would come from the ranks of conventional celebrities: Hollywood stars, ambitious politicians, literary lions, and others of that ilk. But we figured that if we spiced up the roster from time to time with offbeat, cutting-edge guests who were not from the glittering mainstream, we would have a better chance of igniting the kind of buzz that had made Night Beat such a success during its six-month run on Channel 5 in New York.