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By Root 616 0

from the rest of us. They come into the world with an inflated idea of their relation to it, and everything they find in it. I got a little flash into that side of him once, in Paris, when I strolled into an art store to look at some pictures that caught my eye. A guy came in, an American, and began a palaver about prices. And the way that guy talked gave me a whole new slant at his kind. He didn't care about art, the way you do or I do, as something to look at and feel. He wanted to own it. Winston was that way about music. He made a whore out of it. You went to his concerts, but you didn't sit out there at his rehearsals, and see him hold men for an hour overtime, at full pay, just because there was some French horn passage that he liked, and wanted it played over and over again--not to rehearse it, but because of what it did to him. And you didn't walk out with him afterwards, and see him all atremble, and hear him tell how he felt after playing it. He was like some woman that goes to concerts because they give her the right vibrations, or make her feel better, or have some other effect on her nitwit insides. All right, you may think it's cock-eyed to compare him with somebody like that, but I'm telling you that in spite of all his technical skill, he was a hell of a sight nearer to that fat poop than he ever was to Muck. That woman was in him, poodle dog, diamonds, limousine, conceit, cruelty and all, and don't let his public reputation fool you. She has a public reputation too, if she hands out enough money. The day the story broke, they compared him with Stanford White, but I'm telling you that to put Winston Hawes in the same class with Stanford White was a desecration.

You can't own music, the way you can own a picture, but you can own a big hunk of it. You can own a composer, that you put on a subsidy while he's writing a piece for you. You can own an audience that has to come to you to hear that piece if it's going to hear it at all. You can own the orchestra that plays it, and you can own the singer that sings it. I first met him in Paris. I hadn't known him in Chicago. He came from a packing family so rich I never even got within a mile of where they lived. And I didn't look him up, even in Paris. He showed up at my apartment one day, sat down at the piano, played off a couple of songs that were there, and said they were lousy, which they were. Then he got up and asked me how I'd like to sing with his band. I was pretty excited. He had started his Petite Orchestra about a year before, and I had gone to plenty of the concerts, and don't you think they weren't good. He started with thirty men, but by now he was up to forty. He raided everywhere, from the opera orchestras, from the chamber music outfits, and he took anybody he wanted, because he paid about twice what any other band paid. He footed the deficit himself, and he didn't have a man that couldn't have played quartets with Heifetz. What they could do to music, especially modern music, was just make it sound about twice as good as even the composer thought it was. He had some stuff with him he wanted me to do, all of it in manuscript. Part of it was old Italian songs he had dug up, where I would have to do baritone coloratura that had been out of date for a hundred years, and how he knew I could do it I don't know. Part of it was a suite by his first viola, that had never been performed yet. It was tough stuff, music that wouldn't come to life at all without the most exact tone shading. But he gave me six rehearsals--count them, six, something you couldn't believe. Cost didn't mean anything to him. When we went on with it I was with those woodwinds like I was one of the bassoons, and the response was terrific. I took out Picquot, the viola, before I took a call myself, and the whole thing was like something you read about.

That part of it, I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't admit it was an adventure in music I'll never forget. I sang for him four times, and each time it was something new, something fresh, and a performance better than you even