A Flute-Player and His Appalling Sickness

By Warren Boroson

Violinists don’t suffer from this illness. Nor do piano players. Or percussionists. Or conductors.

But at least one legendary flute player, Jean-Marie Rampal (1922-2000), has succumbed. In fact, Rampal may be the only musician in history who has  confessed that he has been a not-infrequent victim. 

            The horrible malady:  the Giggles.

            Rampal, who is credited with getting flute players accepted as free-lance soloists, was a fun-loving Frenchman, a bon vivant.

           In his autobiography,  “Music, My Life” (Random House, 1989), Rampal writes of getting the Giggles in the middle of a few different concerts. And for a flute-player, a case of the Giggles is no joke. When it strikes, Rampel goes on, “there is nothing a flutist can do to produce a sound. A violinist…convulsed with laughter can still bow; a hilarious harpist can still pluck; but a giggling flutist? He has no breath, and his instrument is useless.”

    One instance of several he gives: He and another flute-player, Maxence Larrieu, were recording Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

     “We were the only French musicians amid a throng of Germans…. For some reason, we started to giggle during the first take. Everyone joined in. I suppose they thought these two French flutists were quite hysterical. An hour later, no one was smiling. With each fresh take, our laughing intensified until we were sobbing. The Germans regarded us with steely glares….”
      Another attack occurred during a live performance in Germany. He and another flute-player, Aurele Nicolet, were playing a Telemann Trio Sonata for Two Flutes and Continuo. They were performing a richly ornamented duet, played like a duel. At their first performance, everything went OK, “but at the next performance of the piece we collapsed as the ‘duel’ began. The laughter took over, and I began shaking so hard I couldn’t go on; I took out my handkerchief and pretended to succumb to an attack of coughing. Nicolet just managed to end his turn, but the tears were streaming down his face. No one guessed we were actually laughing.”

I don’t know why people get the Giggles. It may have something to do with contrasting the solemnity of an occasion with the its inherent silliness. Solemnly playing Mozart with a superb chamber group…looking at a few other players…and thinking: “We’re such rascals! Such cutups! Such clowns! What are we doing, being so damned serious?” And then the Giggles  proceed to cascade. How silly of us all to be laughing like crazy now! 

     “I once got  bad case of the Giggles,” a friend tells me. “I was in a medical examiner’s office, and there, on his table, was a glass jar with ... a decapitated head floating inside. It was so absurd! I started laughing and could hardly stop—even though other people in the office began staring at me. God knows why I was laughing!”

     I’m not sure how to cure the Giggles. Removing the patients from that particular environment may be the best solution.

            Rampal was, despite his malady, a phenomenally successful flute-player. (A flute-player for the New York Philharmonic, Paige Brook, told me that a “flautist” made the most money, a “flutist” came next, and a “flute-player” hardly enough to live on.)

     The book is easy to read, and I enjoyed encountering people I knew—like Jan Meyerowitz, a music professor at Brooklyn College--and people I just remembered fondly, like Bill Watson, who ran an all-night classical-music program on WNCN.

     Rampal was in awe of everything Hollywood. At a party there, he met actress Anne Baxter and told her the name of the one person he most wanted to meet. Can you guess? Groucho.

    She arranged it. Groucho proved  to be perfectly charming. And he told Rampal that Harpo had taken his harp playing seriously: “Did you know he even went to Paris to study with Henriette Renie?”

    Rampal never played with another great flute player, James Galway, in public, and pooh-poohs rumors that they didn’t get along.  (Galway is now 74.) In fact, he gave Galway a few lessons and encouraged him in his career; Galway always expressed his gratitude. Incidentally, Rampal was the original Man with the Golden Flute. He owned a few of them. (It occurs to me that while famous tenors have sung with other famous tenors, and famous sopranos with other famous sopranos, Horowitz never played with Rubinstein [in public], Heifetz never played with Menuhin, and Harry James never played with Louis Armstrong.)

      While Rampal was by and large a convivial, good-natured person, he could lose his temper. In Florida once, he began performing just as the audience began noisily slurping down dinner—it was a dinner-theater, “better suited to Hello, Dolly!” He and his colleague began laughing uncontrollably. “Maybe it was the array of loud sports coats and white patent-leather shoes…. Had we really flown and driven a thousand miles to play Mozart for people picking strawberry seeds out of their false teeth?”

    His unfavorite restaurant? The Russian Tea Room. He stopped by one night to tell people waiting for him that he couldn’t dine with them. The maitre d’ insisted that he first check his coat – despite his explanation!

    He also doesn’t pull many punches. When he visited Las Vegas, he decided to stay at the “grotesquely overdone Caesar’s Palace. Why not? If you’re going to the cathedral of bad taste, you might as well worship at the highest altar.”

    “I love cities…,” he writes. “The suburbs are for the birds.”

    “…for every good [conductor], you will find two bad.”

     He led a full life, and quoting what he called another French artist, said, “Je ne regette rien.”  (Edith Piaf.)

     Incidentally, he confessed that he didn’t want to play the flute longer than he should have. The French, naturally, have a phrase for that: sucrent les fraises. Putting sugar on the strawberries.

Good Quotes

+ “I can, and do, play Mozart and Scott Joplin on the same program…but I recognize the genius of one and the geniality of the other.”

+“If I were stranded on the proverbial desert island and could take only one piece of music with me, I think it would be Don Giovanni.”

+ On Mozart’s dislike of the flute: “Because Mozart is a god to me and because I am a flutist, I find it impossible to believe in a god who didn’t like the flute.”

Jean-Marie in Concert

Four seasons (Spring) by Vivaldi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlukpsDQ-BE

From Magic Flute with Alain Marion (two golden flutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efKGbLcxsno

Bach’s Brandenburg No. 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTmgYDDfOU4

Lo, the Gentle Lark (with Miss Piggy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhaO2crrH0k

Beethoven, Romance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsBc1lE3D1g

Is Carolyn Elefant the Worst Lawyer in the U.S.?

Is Carolyn Elefant the Worst Lawyer in the U.S.?

Maybe not. But I wouldn’t hire her to defend me against a jaywalking ticket. She might get me assessed $250,000, then hanged.

     You see, I had written this article saying (1) everyone needs a lawyer, and (2) other things being equal, hire a lawyer in a group. Because you want someone looking over any one lawyer’s shoulder.

    So this Elefant writes that I have accused her, a solo lawyer, of being unethical! Well, no I didn’t. I don’t even know her. (Thank God.) All I wrote was that solo lawyers, in general, may not be as ethical as lawyers who practice in a group. There’s evidence to that effect—though it may apply only to physicans.

   She’s in Washington, D.C.

   Don’t jaywalk in Washington, D.C. You might wind up with her defending  you.

Musical Anecdote

The father of Carl Czerny, a famous composer, was walking in the streets of Vienna sometime in 1793 when he encountered Abbe Joseph Gelinek, a famous pianist of the day. Gelinek was preparing to have a public musical duel with another pianist. His opponent: a young foreigner. “I’ll fix him,” said Gelinek confidently.

    The next day, they met again. How did the duel go? asked Czerny.

    Gelinek was “awestruck.”

   “Yesterday was a day I’ll remember! The young fellow must be in league with the devil. I’ve never heard anybody play like that! I gave him a theme to improvise on, and I assure you I’ve never heard even Mozart improvise so admirably. Then he played some of his own compositions which are marvelous—really wonderful—and he manages difficulties and effects at the keyboard that we never even dreamed of.”

    “I say,” said Czerny the elder. “What’s his name?”

   “He’s a small, ugly, swarthy young fellow and seems to have a willful disposition…. His name is Beethoven.”

In  Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, by Jan Swafford, Houghton-Mifflin, 2014.

Stop This Whining! Now!

So many good people are so depressed by the results of the election!

 The Bad Guys--the cynical, depraved Republicans, the Kochs of the world--defeated the decent compassionate people, like Obama. 

But sometimes the Bad Guys do triumph. 

I remember how miserable we were when Eisenhower defeated the clever, charming, ever-so-decent Adlai Stevenson. 

But look, we elected Obama, didn't we? 

And we're going to elect Hillary, aren't we?

Like

An Epidemic of Sammyglickism

An Epidemic of Sammyglickism

By Warren Boroson

There’s a word for a good employee, a desirable employee, a desirable colleague.

Namely, a “team player.”

    Not necessarily someone on a sports team. A cooperative member of any group.

    Someone at the Vanguard group once told me what Vanguard looks for in an employee. (Vanguard is the class act among final firms.) People who think in terms of “we,” not in terms of “I.”

   In short, someone who thinks first of helping other employees or the employer, rather than helping himself or herself.

   Example. In baseball, a home run hitter is up. There’s a man on first, none out, ninth inning. The home run hitter could try for an extra-base hit—or a bunt, and sacrifice the runner to second base, where a hit might score him. A team player bunts. A Sammyglick, putting himself first, swings for the fences.

    There’s an astute saying: “A people hire A people, B people hire C people.”

    B people are reluctant to hire A people—because they may show up the B people. In fact, they may eventually be promoted OVER the B people—because of their excellence. Whereas A people are self-confident. Jon Stewart hired John Oliver. A hiring A.

   Well, what’s the opposite of a team player?

   A word for someone always looking out, first and foremost, for his or her own interest Not for the interest of the team or the employer or fellow workers. A non-team player. Someone who doesn’t cooperate; someone who competes.

    There is such a word. It comes from the loathsome protagonist of the novel  “What Makes Sammy Run?” by Budd Schulberg. (I bought the novel, but couldn’t finish it.)

      I’ve met a goodly number of Sammyglicks in my long and undistinguished career in journalism.

   In fact, at my last job, the editor—an authentic Sammyglick--killed my financial column. It was a nationally syndicated at Gannett News Service.

   When I first met this editor, he said that readers identified me with the newspaper. I knew then that I was in trouble. Soon after, he killed my nationally syndicated column, saying it wasn’t “local.” I offered to write just a local column. He smiled a smile of satisfaction, and said no.

   At Medical World News, there was one editor who made suggestions about the magazine. And would relentlessly remind people when his suggestions proved successful.

   I could give other examples.

   Of course, Sammyglicks are sometimes useful. They may come up with good ideas. And they may not be Sammyglicks all the time. Sometimes they change. Perhaps just temporarily.

  Is Sammyglickism increasing? I don’t know, but I’ve run into a lot of it. What causes it? I guess you get it from your self-seeking parents and self-seeking brothers and sisters.

  And someone I know argues that Sammyglickism is far more common among Republicans than among Democrats, among people like the Koch brothers and Richard Nixon. Rich people who want to lower their taxes, not increase the minimum wage, and keep immigrants from entering the country or getting citizenship. 

Bad Memory...

Twenty or 30 years ago, I was living in Passaic, NJ--
I heard a boy who lived next door plead with his father, "Don't hit me, don't hit me!"
Said the father, angrily, "Don't tell me what to do!"

That poor kid--today he probably is timid and fearful--

Remembering the Great Sylvia Porter

Remembering the Great Sylvia Porter

BY WARREN BOROSON

A new book about Sylvia Porter has come out, and no one can accuse the author of trying to whitewash Sylvia. (The book, subtitled “America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist,” was written by Tracy Lucht, a journalism teacher.)

     Sylvia, Lucht writes, was stingy, contradictory, untruthful, and almost always fighting with the people she worked with. An especially recurrent criticism in the book: Other people wrote many of her columns and her books.  Writes Lucht, “Porter took credit for a lot of work she did not do, and she was less than generous toward those who worked for her.”

    I was among them. I wrote a half-dozen of Sylvia’s columns, along with some of her tax books. (On their inside cover it says, “Prepared with the editorial assistance of Warren Boroson.”)

     Someone at the book’s publsher phoned me.

   “Has Miss Porter read and approved the book?” 

    Me, my voice filled with contempt: “Sylvia doesn’t…read…her books.”

     I also worked at her magazine. And it was I who first said that half of America read Sylvia’s columns, and the other half wrote them. (But I don’t hold it against her that I received little credit. I wrote financial stuff for Louis Rukeyser, too, and got little or no credit.)

    

 Working at Sylvia Porter’s Magazine was fun. Sylvia herself almost never visited, and by coincidence on my very first day there was an annual picnic. The entire staff picked up an all-paid-for lunch at a fancy restaurant and dined on the grass in Central Park. We called it “Picnic in the Park Without Sylvia.”     

   Still, Sylvia deserves credit for almost single-handedly inventing writing about personal financial—and led the way for women to enter the higher ranks of financial journalism. (In fact, her original columns didn’t even reveal that she was a woman: She used just her initials.) Writes Lucht,  “A large number of personal financial journalists today are women—so many, in fact, that one has to wonder whether personal finance has become a pink ghetto.”    
    Not only that, but Sylvia was incorruptible. As Lucht notes, at one time writers at The Wall Street Journal and the Daily News were actually paid to tout stocks. Not Sylvia….

   I once wangled an an interview with Peter Lynch, who ran Fidelity Magellan, one of history’s great mutual funds. At the time, Fidelity bought most of the ads in Sylvia Porter’s Financial Magazine. Lynch, after the interview, told me he would love to have Sylvia praise his new book, so more women might read it. So I asked Sylvia. No, she said flatly. She doesn’t endorse books. Did I  mention that Fidelity bought most of the ads in Sylvia’s magazine?

    It’s important to acknowedhge that there were two Sylvias. Sylvia One was the young, assertive, Phi Beta Kappa college graduate, sharp as a tack. Sylvia Two, the older woman I worked for, was as sharp as a wet noodle. Sometimes she embarrassed herself when she appeared on TV programs. She had become, not to put too fine a point about it, somewhat batty.

    She could also be difficult.

    “Warren, your columns are lovely. Just lovely,” she purred to me on the phone.

    Pause. Then she decided that she had gone too far.

    “But you’ll just have to do better!”

    She customarily read through the galleys of Sylvia Porter’s Magazine. One time, she had come upon an article claiming that a certain new safe was so easy to open that Larry, Curley, and Moe could do it.

   She phoned me. “Who the hell are  Larry, Curley, and Moe?”

  But she let the Three Stooges go through.

  She  hired me after I had visited her at her estate in Pound Ridge, New York. I was working at a superboring doctors’ financial magazine in New Jersey at the time, desperate to escape. Visiting Sylvia, I brought along a recording of Jussi Bjoerlng singing “Sylvia” and a bouquet of flowers. And when she told me, sharply, “I want someone who knows the difference between semicolons from colons,” I replied confidently, “I’m an authority on colons and semicolons. “

    I once said to her, You should write a book about mutual funds.

   Said she, “I HATE mutual funds.”

  I almost fainted. Later, I learned that she must have meant closed-end funds, which fell into the pits in 1929.

  She would phone me at the office. “This is…SYLVIA PORTER!!!” she would begin.

 When you work for Sylvia Porter’s Personal Finance Magazine, and you heard that, naturally, you jump out of your seat.

    But, as I said, she had integrity. At a dinner at her place, her husband said, “I don’t care what I do for a living, so long as I get paid well.” Sylvia, almost to herself, said quietly, “I don’t  feel that way.”

     Sylvia Porter’s Magazine—despite such splendid people as Pat Estess and Greg Daugherty—gave up the ghost after the stock market crash of 1987, when Fidelity pulled all of its advertising. And today hardly anyone but the elderly recognize Sylvia’s name. But at one time she was a powerhouse. Her columns appeared in 500 newspapers. Presidents Ford and Kennedy and Johnson communicated with her. Johnson even offered her a job as president of the Export-Import Bank. 

    As for the new book about Sylvia, it does a good job. The author’s last lines are memorable: “It is not difficult to grasp her importance. One only has to visit the personal finance section of a bookstore and imagine that, in the beginning, there was only Sylvia.”