Betty nodded, swirling her wine. She felt the same way. She had almost no money saved, with only a small pension from her part-time job at the ballet. She’d do something else in a heartbeat but didn’t know what that something else could be. She didn’t know anything about computers and didn’t have a college degree.
“I saw your name in the Marlboro programs,” I said, trying to steer to a more positive subject by describing my night with Sam at the Whetstone Inn. In the soft light of Betty’s apartment I could almost see her, twenty years and forty pounds lighter, smiling with the same musical joy I’d felt at my debut, as she played Schubert’s Trout Quintet.
In the late 1950s, in the first wave of women to win orchestra jobs, Betty joined the Houston Symphony part-time. It was all exciting and new for her. She moved up to the New York City Ballet Orchestra, which performed in one of Lincoln Center’s shining new theaters. It was literally a jewel box—the prisms of faceted lamps lined the balcony.
As she talked, I pictured what the ballet orchestra was like today. I’d substituted in it during my romance with Randy, who played principal oboe there. I couldn’t see the stage from my chair in the pit but had strained to make out the dancers in a reflection, either in the jeweled lights or in an audience member’s glasses. Now veiled with dust, the lights and their design dated the theater. Outside, Lincoln Center’s marble had cracked with neglect, and rust stains dripped down the white stone. The scene no longer looked the idyll it had been when Betty began playing there two decades before.
“I can get my pension soon,” she said, but she couldn’t afford to leave the Allendale. “I’m going to be working until I die.” Betty looked glum.
“I got offered a Broadway tour,” I blurted out. The forty-week tour paid $1,200 a week. In addition, my $600 weekly per diem to pay for hotel and food was cash, therefore nontaxable. I could pay off my audition debts and schmooze a big contractor who might move me to a real Broadway show back here in New York if I did well.
Betty brightened. Why was I hesitating?
“It would be a fantastic job if it were permanent,” I said. There was no guarantee I’d ever be offered a show back in New York. “I could come home to nothing. If you’re out of town for weeks, no one will be offering you work when you return.”
There were other considerations. It would be hard to be viewed as a serious classical musician after taking this kind of work, and I could lose the gigs I had right now. The groups and musicians I had been playing with described musicians who turned to Broadway as selling out. I’d also be playing exactly the same music every night. If I took this tour, my life and career would change. Was this what I wanted for my future? I hadn’t even mentioned the job offer to Sam, because I was afraid he’d lose respect for me as a musician.
“It’s not, you know, real music,” I said, summing up my thoughts. Betty shrugged, drinking more wine. I might have to give up the two solo concerts I’d booked this season, which ended up costing more than I would make playing them. In addition, the rest of freelancing looked bad for me, since the oboists in a position to hire me were either my ex-boyfriends or oboe rivals who hated my ex-boyfriends.
Betty set down her glass, sloshing wine over the rim. “How much does it pay again?” she asked. In Betty’s day, union benefits weren’t much, but now I’d get insurance, pension, and $72,000 per year, a third of it nontaxable money for food and hotels. If I moved to a long-running Broadway show, I might have that for years.
As Betty ticked off the list of good reasons for me to go on tour, I looked around. Beneath the decorating, her kitchen had the same tin cabinets as mine. Water damage stained her ceiling and the windows were rotting at the same rate.
Sounds like a great thing, Betty concluded, refilling and then quickly draining her glass. There was a ping as the crystal glanced off her pretty stone coaster and shattered on the floor.
“Damn it!” Betty’s face twisted, her voice prickly. It was time to go. I had decided to join the Broadway tour.
CHAPTER
15
The Pits
THE WHOLE BAND was in the hot tub. As water frothed over my bare breasts in the moonlight, I considered how quickly my life had changed. Well into a forty-week tour with The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber in Concert, we were playing two weeks at Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center across the street from the hotel. My fellow New York musicians had all acquired a California glow and lost their inhibitions.
This tour was different from the business of classical music in nearly every way. Audiences flooded in to hear Andrew’s popular tunes, sung by his wife, soprano Sarah Brightman. Unlike symphonies, these for-profit productions were paid for by investors and audiences, not charity. With steady employment, I’d already paid off a sizable chunk of my credit card debt.
I was surprised to find that I enjoyed playing Andrew’s pop tunes, even throwing myself into making reeds each morning so I could produce a more beautiful sound. After I got over my initial snootiness about pop music, I came to prefer the more casual concert presentation and being around the fun cast of actors. However, I did miss being part of the primary attraction, as I would have been at an orchestra concert. My magic dress was now in mothballs.
The musicians on tour hardly resembled the classical prima donnas I knew. No one pretended they liked starving for art but squirreled away their steady paychecks for a rainy day. The road life of upscale hotels seemed a world away from the grit of New York, and although many of us were strangers, others had traveled together for years. The tour felt almost like a family vacation.
Mike perched on a chaise beside the Jacuzzi. A percussionist, he’d lived out of a suitcase for ten years straight, using his tour savings to buy a house in upstate New York. Saving his per diem by bunking with friends in nearly every city, Mike had nearly paid off his mortgage.
Touring offered more opportunities than just money. Vinny, a bass trombonist, wanted to move up the food chain to become a conductor in order to better support his family. This was exactly how most Broadway conductors got their start, although the majority were keyboard players who could make themselves even more versatile by accompanying the singers during piano rehearsals. Vinny had taken a leave of absence from A Chorus Line to be our assistant conductor, leaving his Tony-winning actress wife, young son, and infant daughter behind.
No one was more determined than Dale, who would do nearly anything to keep playing his trombone. Though classically trained at the Eastman School of Music, he had crossed over into jazz and pop, working first with the Buddy Rich and Woody Herman bands, then with Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Sometimes the gigs were months apart, so Dale ran a construction contracting business, getting up before six to remodel kitchens. To fill the gaps in his income, he drove trucks at 2 A.M., delivering The New York Times to distribution centers.
By 1987, Dale was still driving trucks, even though he’d landed his first New York show. His future looked promising; Broadway had seen a 12 percent box office increase the previous year, and he hoped that meant his show would enjoy a long run. He could use the extra cash to make Christmas special for his daughter. Changing out of his tux at the Minsk off Theater, Dale had skipped the opening-night party for a short nap and then taken off to deliver his papers. Alone in a dark newspaper warehouse a few hours later, he ripped open a stack of newspapers, quickly finding Frank Rich’s review of his show:
For those who worried that Broadway might be nothing more than a carnival fairway offering mindless fun, along comes Teddy and Alice, a show that fearlessly puts pedagogy back into the American musical. The result is an evening that combines the educational mission of My Weekly Reader with the entertainment agenda of a halftime show at a high-school football game... This exorcism, unfortunately, takes considerably longer to accomplish than the charge up San Juan Hill.
Dale took a long look at the truck, stuffed with thousands of copies of the review. He was delivering his own show’s death sentence.
There were more stories like Dale’s on this tour. Each of the thirty-five musicians, twelve actors, one conductor, several company managers, a handful of stagehands, and a sound designer had one. The orchestra’s large size, augmented by thirty-five more players in large towns, was unusual at a time when producers wanted more synthesizers and fewer acoustic musicians.
What our large orchestra represented in this show was a visual metaphor for luxury. Unfortunately, the artistry of our musicians was obliterated by excessive amplification. Critic Robert Commanday of the San Francisco Chronicle described the result:
A symphony of sixty players was made to sound, through the magic of electronics, like an orchestra of sixteen. But the image was preserved—a whole symphony with full wire choir (string section to you) was sitting there playing. With each instrument miked, you were spared having to listen to the real uptown thing, in natural aural perspective.
Reduced to being an oversized stage prop, we had plenty of free time for reading, socializing, and sightseeing. There was Alcatraz in San Francisco, botanical gardens in Milwaukee, and the St. Louis golden arch. Christmas Day in Los Angeles we shared candy canes with a heavy-metal band that was also staying on our floor at West Hollywood’s Le Parc Suites. Living in the alternate reality of hotels, all the usual tour misbehavior had started in earnest by the third week.
“Did you hear?” A violinist in the band room was spreading the gossip before a matinee.
“Percy and Connie were naked in the outdoor swimming pool last night. No mistaking them,” another violinist said, describing our conductor’s midnight grope with a stunning actress.
It must have been very, very dark outside, because I didn’t look a thing like Connie. Percy and I had returned from an evening stroll at Corona del Mar, the temperate California air exotic to his British senses. Soothed by low tide lapping over the tide pools, we’d sprawled on the rocks, enjoying the stars. Percy had a girlfriend in England, but tours being tours, I knew we’d sleep together that night.
I followed Percy into the hotel’s pool. The air felt good against our skin, and we kissed and embraced in the warm water. Being around him was easy, and with his British accent and repertoire of jokes, everything he said sounded new. He was also a fine musician. I loved playing for him, and he was more appreciative of my efforts than most conductors. We dried off and then made our way upstairs to his suite. Percy made love as exuberantly as he conducted.
A few hours later, the early morning light hit the Barolo remaining in my glass. I didn’t feel so good, but the lack of sleep and overindulgence during the entire tour had yet to affect Percy. We lay in bed, listening to Madonna’s new CD on Percy’s Walkman. He lit a cigarette.
“You’re quite extraordinary,” he said. “Do you want to do Aspects in New York?” He stubbed his cigarette in the bedside ashtray and looked expectant. Aspects of Love was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest, going into the Broadhurst Theater in a few months.
Why, I thought, did I bother with an answering machine? Between Sam and my former oboist boyfriends, I got hired for most of my gigs in bed.
As I dressed, I totaled up the jobs I’d acquired this way. Jayson got me onto the hiring lists at Philharmonia Virtuosi and for several studio contractors. Although I’d originally been hired for St. Luke’s and Orpheus through recommendations, Jimmy had kept requesting me as long as he and I were intimate. The New York City Ballet came through Randy, though that was short-lived and my absence there had been permanent so far. When the relationships ended, my spot on each group’s hiring list dropped. Some would never call me, others would do so only occasionally, and only for second oboe. I would love to play a show. I had just about run out of classical gigs in New York.
* * *
The Hudson Valley Philharmonic had a concert almost as soon as I returned from the Andrew Lloyd Webber tour. I was surprised that Sydney had taken off from her show to sub Hudson Valley, which paid substantially less—about $100 a concert and $70 per rehearsal. The show would have brought in about $150 a night, which was paid to Sydney’s own substitute whenever she was absent. “I need to play something else to break up the boredom,” she explained. When the van returned to New York around eleven-thirty after the final performance of the week, Sydney and I joined two Hudson Valley violinists for nachos at the Border Café on Broadway.
“No, no, no,” Sydney mumbled, pushing my hand away when the check came, then squinting to read it. “Imagine, me needing glasses,” she said.
Sydney reached for her wallet, lurching to the right. She spun around, scrambling under the table. “My bag! My flute!” Her voice rose. Didn’t she hang it on her chair? After two killer margaritas, I wasn’t sure myself.
“Maybe you left it in the ladies’ room,” I suggested, although I knew she had not. She returned, frantic. The violinists clutched their own instruments as the bartender, Angel, called 911. Angel said he’d seen a woman leave with a bag that looked like the one Sydney described.
A few minutes later, two cops took out their notebooks under the punched-tin bar lamps. “You say there was some kind of flute in it?” The officer sighed. He didn’t appear very interested in the theft, suggesting that the department gave grand-larceny cases, which meant thefts exceeding $10,000, precedence over petty crime.
“No, no! It is grand larceny. The flute’s silver. And gold. Solid silver and gold!” Sydney said, her voice shaking. The instrument was quite rare. She’d last had it appraised for $10,000, and it was insured for that amount.
As Sydney and I headed around the corner to the Allendale, we met Sam, coming home with his conductor friend Joel, who stayed in Sam’s apartment whenever he visited from Minnesota. They offered to help us look through the neighborhood trash, our last chance before the garbage trucks came. Joel, whom I didn’t know too well, glued himself against me, his arm locked around my waist. He could probably tell that I was a little tipsy. I felt violated but was too distracted by the flute to do much about it.
“I think we’ve looked hard enough,” Joel said half a block later. We returned to the Allendale’s lobby. The thief had probably hopped on the subway to points unknown.
Joan and her two smelly dogs were resting on the lobby sofa. She smiled pleasantly, unaware of what had happened. The elevator door opened. Betty emerged, gripping her lover’s elbow as he shuffled out of the lift. I squirmed away from Joel, although he kept edging closer as the four of us stood aside to let Betty and her boyfriend pass.
Joel offered to come and hang out with us, but I said no. Once Sydney and I were alone, I began replacing her lock, since her keys and address had also been in the bag. Fortunately, I had an old lock in my apartment.
In the morning, Sydney called 1-800-VIVALDI to file her claim with Clarion Insurance. A friend plastered bus stops from Lincoln Center to Columbia with homemade signs that eventually turned up as fodder for New Yorker illustration. Sydney and I checked pawnshops for days, but the flute didn’t surface.
Sydney fell into a funk, as if she’d lost a lover or family member. She thought she’d found her musical mate for life in that old Powell flute. It was hard for me to imagine, since wooden oboes tended to wear out after a few years. But instruments like flutes or violins can be an extension of the player’s soul. Sydney’s had been stolen.
Aspects premiered with an eight-hundred-guest party at the Rainbow Room on opening night. In my strapless dress, I vamped it up on the revolving dance floor near Liza Minnelli, bumped into Dan Rather near the tarot cards, and heard a reporter grilling Prince Edward about a rumor some tabloid had started that romantically linked him to our leading man, Michael Ball. I loved these dress-up events.
Compared to performing onstage, though, pit life was mundane. Here, the audience came for the actors, not the musicians. My view of the audience took a different angle as well, as I watched the front row fill up each night at my eye level. The sights were fairly predictable. A man’s hand inched up his date’s skirt. Shoes came off, and bare toes invaded o
ur space. An old lady crinkled through her shopping bag for minutes at a time.
Tonight, though, two middle-aged men in kilts plopped down in the front row. One demurely crossed his legs, tucking the skirt underneath them. His companion sat splay-legged, as if he were watching television at home. Doughy flesh flowed over his theater seat. What do they wear underneath? I wondered.
As I stole glances at the men in kilts, concertmaster Sanford Allen called for silence by rapping a pencil against his stand, signaling me to play the tuning note, A, as the oboist always does. Also the house contractor, Sanford earned 50 percent over scale to keep track of orchestra issues, payroll, and decorum. He looked disapproving as I craned my neck at the men in kilts.
As Paul Bogaev, our conductor, started the overture, I spread The New Yorker across my stand. At first I read only during rests, like everyone else, but soon I discovered an unusual skill possessed by about 10 percent of Broadway musicians. I could read a magazine while playing my part simultaneously.
Those without the gift passed time in other ways, plugging in transistors, knitting, making lists, or doing crosswords. One trumpeter studied maps. The lucky ones with several minutes off left the pit, bringing back falafel sandwiches from Natureworks across the street. Sometimes the conductor even left the pit for a few moments.
At intermission came audience contact. Most of the visitors at the pit railing were simply interested in the instruments, asking questions about the size of the orchestra or offering an appreciated compliment. Others were annoying. “I used to play the flute,” a young woman hanging over the railing said vacantly. At least one ex-flutist visited each week. This one stared at us like zoo animals, which made me self-conscious.
I considered escaping the pit altogether, maybe checking out that heavy door in the north side of the basement. It led to a tunnel that connected all the Shubert-owned theaters on 44th and 45th: the Broadhurst, Shubert, Majestic, Golden, several others.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 22
