Archives for 2013

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, notebook entry, 1945

If you awoke tomorrow morning to find yourself rich, what would you do with the money? I’m not talking about transparently obvious lifestyle changes (a Park Avenue duplex) or high-minded exercises in altruism (the Teachout Foundation for the Care and Feeding of Poor, Talented, and Likable Artists). What I have in mind are purer-than-pure luxury items, the things about which most of us necessarily dream in vain.

It happens that I’m not much given to fantasy, no doubt because my job provides me with just about everything that I want. I get to see shows of all sorts for free, publicists send me books and records, and I travel as often as I like (though not always to the places where I’d most like to go). Once in a while, though, I imagine how it would feel to be able to have absolutely anything I wanted, and these are the seven items at the very top of the list. I’d originally planned to restrict myself to five, but this being a dream of limitless wealth, it seemed churlish to slam on the brakes, so here goes:

• A chauffeured limo. I’ve only known one person, William F. Buckley, Jr., who maintained a limousine and driver. I rode in it four times, though never in the company of the owner, whose occasional custom it was to have his guests picked up at their front door if they were visiting him at his country home in Stamford. That was what really impressed me–the notion that a rich and considerate man might spare his less monied guests the agonies of public transportation by sending his very own car for them. Bill was like that.

• A full-time personal assistant. I tried hiring a once-a-week assistant a few years ago, but I eventually realized that it didn’t work, at least not for me, partly because I’ve never been good at delegating authority and partly because the whole point of having an assistant, at least in what Mrs. T calls “my fantasy world,” is that he or she is (A) omnicompetent and (B) at your beck and call 24/7. What I wanted, of course, was Jeeves, and he wasn’t at liberty!

• A Morandi etching. I know, I know, why not an oil? But the truth is that an etching by my favorite modern Italian artist is the objet d’art that I’d most like to add to the Teachout Museum, so much so that I actually bid on one at a New York auction house ten years ago. As longtime readers of this blog will recall, I got cold feet and backed down in the face of competitive bidding by a dealer, an act of self-evident prudence that I nonetheless continue to regret to this day.

• A Bösendorfer grand piano. This would be a true luxury item, since I scarcely ever play piano nowadays. On the other hand, I know a doctor who has a first-rate piano and a very large living room in which she presents high-class house concerts, and I can imagine doing such a thing myself. In any case, a grand piano is an exceedingly handsome piece of furnishing, and I’m sure it’d be great fun to be able to sit down at will and riffle off a few bars of “Easy Listening Blues” on the kind of instrument that can make even the clumsiest of duffers sound plausible, if only for a few fleeting seconds of reflected glory.

• A screening room. I’m not talking about a dinky little cubbyhole, either, but one with theater seats and a CinemaScope-sized screen.

• A Frank Lloyd Wright vacation home. This one, needless to say, would do me quite nicely. It can be rented for short-term visits, and I’ve had the good fortune to stay in it twice, the second time with Mrs. T. The experience was blissful. I’d happily settle for an exact copy built on a site of my choosing somewhat closer to Manhattan, but if the original were to become available, I wouldn’t hesitate to snap it up.

And last but not least:

• A hot tub. You guessed it, right?

From 2004:

Would I go to the library if there were a good one in my neighborhood? Probably–but I’m not so sure. When I was young I read in great shelf-emptying gulps, thereby accumulating the intellectual capital off which I’ve been living for the past quarter-century. Now I read far more selectively, concentrating on new titles, though I also re-read books habitually. I operate on the principle that any book worth reading more than twice is a book worth owning, and my shelves reflect that belief. I’m sure that the Web has cut down considerably on my library-related needs, but it may also be that libraries simply don’t have as much to offer me as they used to….

Read the whole thing here.

“The victor belongs to the spoils.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

You never know what you’ll find when you go trolling through the Web in search of your own name. (Yes, I do that.) Just the other day, for instance, I stumbled upon this link from Claremont College’s Drucker Archives, a reproduction of a letter that Peter Drucker, of all people, sent to me in 1994 in which he expressed tentative but nonetheless genuine interest in the possibility of having me write his biography:

I need to know a little more about you–perhaps you could tell me what kind of work you have done and what kind of work you propose to do for the “intellectual biography” you propose….I have in the past been very reluctant to have anyone do any kind of biography on me. It is not only that I am an intensely private person. I believe strongly that a writer speaks through his writings and not through his life.

Until the moment that his letter popped up on my screen, I’d completely forgotten that I once wrote to Drucker proposing that I write a book about him. I wasn’t kidding–I’d long found his work fascinating, and still do–but in the end I chose instead to write The Skeptic, and that was that.

I mention this because I settled last week on the subject of what is more than likely to become my next biography. No deal has been struck as of yet, so I won’t say whom I have in mind, but I think you’ll be surprised.

It occurred to me that it might be amusing to invite my followers on Twitter and Facebook to take a guess, so I did so on Friday night, and was promptly flooded with responses. Ten variously plausible candidates, Steve Allen, Count Basie, William F. Buckley, Jr., Aaron Copland, Joseph Cotten, James Dean, Marian McPartland, Jack Paar, Oscar Peterson, and Charlie Parker, received multiple votes. The rest were singletons:

• Serious (I think) guesses: Herb Alpert, Fred Astaire, Isaac Asimov, Tallulah Bankhead, Jack Benny, Marlon Brando, Anthony Braxton, Johnny Carson, “Churchill” (Caryl or Winston? I don’t know), John Coltrane, Merce Cunningham, Miles Davis, Clint Eastwood, Ella Fitzgerald, Slim Gaillard, Leonard Garment, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Yip Harburg, Skitch Henderson, Bernard Herrmann, Al Hirschfeld, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Vladimir Horowitz, Mick Jagger, Herb Jeffries, George Jones, Louis Jordan, Elia Kazan, Diana Krall, Steve Lacy, David Letterman, James Levine, Tom Lehrer, Oscar Levant, Norman Lloyd, Peter Lorre, Marjorie Main, Paul McCartney, H.L. Mencken (sorry, pal, BTDT!), Johnny Mercer, Ethel Merman, Charles Mingus, Robert Mitchum, Thelonious Monk, H.H. “Saki” Munro, George Jean Nathan, Barack Obama, Lorenzo da Ponte, Fairfield Porter, Dick Powell, Harold Prince, Buddy Rich, Thelma Ritter, Max Roach, Maria Schneider (presumably the musician), Budd Schulberg, Neil Simon, Carl Stalling (and/or Milt Franklyn), Roger L. Stevens, Billy Strayhorn, Cecil Taylor, Little Walter, Kurt Weill, Orson Welles, Donald Westlake, Paul Whiteman, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson

• Tongue-in-cheek (I assume) guesses: Simón Bolívar, “Cleo Birdwell” (cute), Pierre Boulez (“I know you love that guy and his tuneful music”), John Cale, Miley Cyrus, Wally Cox (that’s a book I’d buy!), Dale Earnhardt, the Empress of Blandings (ha!), Totie Fields, Kenny G (he got several votes), Bob Keeshan, Sacheen Littlefeather, Ed McMahon, me (I got two votes), Philipp Melanchthon, Slim Pickens, Zasu Pitts, Wilhelm Reich, Tupac Shakur, Curly Shemp (of the Three Stooges), Arnold Stang, Lu Watters

• Sweet guesses: Nancy LaMott, my mother (who also got two votes), Mrs. T

• The shrewdest guesses, though not even remotely close: Sid Caesar, Harold Clurman, Ida Lupino, Fats Waller (Copland and Cotten were smart, too)

• The closest guess, by Warren Leight: Richard Nixon

One follower responded to all this by declaring himself to be “really fascinated by what you’re getting out of this guessing game. Disparate choices, but with some common themes. Interesting list, taken as a whole. Shows what readers think are your areas of expertise? ” To which I replied, “If it does, then the general sentiment must be that I suffer from multiple personality disorder.”

I close with four observations born of much experience:

(1) Never write a book that’s already been written–well.

(2) Never try to rewrite a bad book that’s been out for fewer than five years. No one will even think of publishing it.

(3) Never try to write a serious biography of a living person. You’re begging for trouble.

(4) No man but a blockhead–or a subsidized academic–ever wrote a full-length biography except for an advance big enough to make the job reasonably cost-effective. That rules out at least half of the aforementioned people, including some about whom I’d dearly love to write a book. (It also rules out Paul Taylor, whose biography I once gave more than casual thought to writing.)

Still curious? Watch this space for details….

Samson François plays Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Among all our musical masters, l should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy’s operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructed–and in that order.”
Virgil Thomson, foreword to E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy