Between You and Me (19 page)

“Is one very simple question of jealousy,” Dalí replied with a sly smile. “Myself attracts one tremendous quantity of money for my genius. The thermometer of my success is the jealousy of the people around me.”

Finally, in an effort to elicit his views on the competition, I asked him, “Which contemporary painters, if any, do you admire?”

“First Dalí. After Dalí, Picasso.”

And that was it: The list stopped at two. Still, it was considerate of him to include Pablo Picasso, who, after all, was almost universally regarded as the greatest artist of the twentieth century. It’s difficult to

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imagine any conversation about modern art without some reference to Picasso, so it’s hardly surprising that his name came up—though in a disparaging way—when I interviewed another famous painter, Thomas Hart Benton, on 60 Minutes in 1973.

In so many ways, Benton was the polar opposite of Dalí and all the other modernists who broke away from traditional painting. Both his life and his art were deeply rooted in America’s heartland. His forebears were hardy pioneers who had helped to shape the political landscape in Missouri when it was a frontier outpost on the western edge of the United States. He was named after his great-uncle, the Thomas Hart Benton who was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1821—the year Missouri became a state—and served there for three decades. His own father later served as a congressman from the Show-Me State.

The spirit and values that Benton inherited from that frontier culture were reflected in his work. Best known for his large and vivid murals, his art was firmly grounded in history and the lives of real people. He was an ardent regionalist who drew his strength and inspiration from the traditions of the rural South and Midwest and the down-to-earth folks who lived there. That approach to painting brought Benton considerable success, but it also put him sharply at odds with surrealism and all the other major innovations that transformed art in the twentieth century. In the early 1930s, when he was living in New York, he taught at the Art Students League, and one of his prize pupils was a young man from Cody, Wyoming, named Jackson Pollock. The two artists became close friends, but a few years later, Pollock made his move in a radical new direction and became a leading exponent of abstract expressionism, a style that has to be viewed as the antithesis of Benton’s realistic oeuvre.

Over the years, Benton acquired a reputation for being a hard-drinking, intellectual brawler who seized every opportunity to rail

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against abstract painting and most other avant-garde styles. In his view, modern art had been contaminated by forces that were effete, sterile, and elitist, and his cantankerous assaults included gay-bashing comments about the pernicious influence of homosexuals on the art world. In return, he was roundly scorned as a reactionary, a relic from a rustic past.

By the time I caught up with him in 1973, Benton was nearing the end of his long and combative life. When I interviewed him at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard shortly before his eighty-fourth birthday, I asked him about his advancing age.

W A L L A C E : Do you hate getting old?

B E N T O N : No. I feel good. I feel fine. I don’t hate getting old.

W A L L A C E : You still work.

B E N T O N : I don’t even hate to die. I don’t give a damn.

W A L L A C E : What do you mean?

B E N T O N : I don’t care.

W A L L A C E : You mean when your toes turn up?

B E N T O N : That’s it. That don’t ever bother me. People say when you get old, you get to thinking about death—as the lawyers put it, in contemplation of death—that you make a move. I make no moves in contemplation of death.

We then talked about his work and his many quarrels with the modern art establishment, which led to an exchange about one of the more influential members of that clique.

W A L L A C E : John Canaday of The New York Times, I think you’ll agree, is one of the most prominent critics of the art scene.

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B E N T O N : One of the mouthiest, anyhow.

W A L L A C E : Well, you know what he calls you?

B E N T O N : No.

W A L L A C E : A patriarchal cornball.

B E N T O N : Well, very good.

W A L L A C E : What do you think of that assessment?

B E N T O N : I don’t care anything about that. (Laughs) He’s a simpleminded art critic. Well, it’s all right. If he likes to see it that way, all right. I call him an arty critic. Canaday’s only one example of a whole pack of them.

W A L L A C E : So —but this does not really sting you? You don’t take it—

B E N T O N : When I was young, it did. Yes, I used to get angry.

Today I just laugh.

W A L L A C E : Are you a cornball?

B E N T O N : Probably. What of it?

In 1935, when he was at the height of his success (his self-portrait had recently adorned the cover of Time magazine), Benton became so fed up with the art scene in New York that he left the city where he had lived for many years and returned to his roots in Missouri to get back to what he called “human contact with real people.”

He later described New York and other big cities as “coffins for living and thinking,” and when I asked him why he was so aggressively anti-urban, Benton replied, “I just feel that life within them is simply not good enough anymore. You don’t get enough out of it. The pressures are too great, the dirt’s too much, the stinks are too much, and the intellectual world stinks, too, when it’s shut in and doesn’t get out into the world. I think that the intellectual world of New York is even worse than the Congress of the United States.”

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I also reminded him about his controversial criticism of Picasso, whose works he had disdained as “artistic decadence.” He elaborated on that indictment: “What I meant to say there, that when art comes to be made out of art rather than out of the meanings that are in life, it is entering into a period of decadence. Now, from this I would say that Picasso represents, more than any artist, that peculiar state because he makes pictures out of pictures all the time.”

In the 60 Minutes profile, I noted that Benton and his wife, Rita, spent half the year on Martha’s Vineyard and the other half at their home in Kansas City. What I did not mention was that my wife and I were among their summer neighbors on the Vineyard. Before I did the story on him, Benton and I had, at best, a nodding acquaintance.

That was mainly because his family lived up-island, near Chilmark, the site of a lively art colony; our digs were in Vineyard Haven, where distinguished authors (like my friend Bill Styron) and stellar journalists (like my friend Art Buchwald) preferred to estivate.

One day in the summer of 1974, a little over a year after my piece onBentonwas broadcast, he called me to request a favor. He had beenasked to take part ina lecture series at the Methodist Church inEdgartown, the purpose of which was to raise money for the Martha’s Vineyard Arts Association. The problem was that Tom Benton had no stomach for making speeches of any kind in any forum, so he had agreed to participate only onthe conditionthat he could bring along Mike Wallace and the 60 Minutes profile to serve as props or helpmates. I readily gave my consent to that arrangement.

Evenunder those circumstances, whenthe fateful evening arrived, Tom showed up at the church with a case of the jitters. Fortunately, I had anticipated his outbreak of last-minute stage fright, and I had the perfect remedy. Fully aware of his lifelong fondness for the sauce, I had come equipped with a flask that contained his favorite

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libation—cold and very dry gin martinis—and for the next half hour or so, we stood outside the church and gulped them down with the fervor of parched Bedouins quaffing at an oasis. Thus fortified, we entered the church fully prepared to be as loquacious and provocative as the occasionrequired.

In his remarks to the audience, Tom alluded to our hearty imbib-ing. He said that “before performing, one should drink gin and not bourbon, because bourbon sneaks up on you, while gin arrives with a punch, letting you know exactly where you stand, or fall.” He did not fall, and after showing the 60 Minutes profile, I had the happy experience of interviewing him all over again. In its story on the event, our local paper, the Vineyard Gazette, said that Benton and I “held the audience in a spell,” and the reporter went on to praise Tom for his “deliberate and delightful orneryness.”

Thomas Hart Benton died at the age of eighty-five just five months after that special evening, and all I can say now about that is how grateful I am that he waited until after I got a chance to know him and become his friend.

I t z h a k P e r l m a n

V l a d i m i r H o ro w i t z

A S I ’ V E I N D I C A T E D , I H A V E never tried my own hand at painting or sculpture or any of the other fine arts. (My longtime colleague, Morley Safer, is the painter-in-residence at 60 Minutes.) But classical music is another story. As a boy growing up in Brookline, I began taking violin lessons when I was ten and kept at it until I was seventeen. My violin teacher would later claim in interviews that I

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was not an especially diligent pupil; he said I talked too much during the lessons and that I had a knack for coming up with all kinds of implausible excuses to explain why I hadn’t been able to practice.

I’m sorry, but that is not how I remember it. I mainly recall the times when I was so pleased with my playing that during practice sessions, I would open all the windows in my room so that neighbors and passersby could catch an earful and be impressed by my musical prowess.

My teacher, Harry Ellis Dickson, was such a gifted violinist that he played in the first section of the Boston Symphony, and at a time when my sister’s husband, Alfred Krips, was the concertmaster of that orchestra. Harry went on to become a conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, filling in for Arthur Fiedler and, later, John Williams.

His daughter, incidentally, was also a close friend of our family. Her name was Kitty Dickson, but she is known to most Americans by the name she acquired when she married a Brookline neighbor, Michael Dukakis, who has the distinction of being the only governor of Massachusetts ever to run for president.

As for my own progress as a violinist, I was good enough to be given the honored role of concertmaster of our orchestra at Brookline High School. That turned out to be the high-water mark of my musical career. When the time came for me to go off to the University of Michigan in 1935, I didn’t take my violin to Ann Arbor. In the end, I suppose Harry Dickson was right about me. Although I had been blessed with some talent, I did not have the drive or the discipline to become a first-rate fiddle player. As the famous virtuoso Jascha Heifetz once put it, to become an accomplished concert violinist, one

“must have the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk.”

I quoted that comment by Heifetz when I introduced a 60 Min-

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utes profile I did in 1980 on another brilliant violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Born in Israel, Perlman had his first big success on an American stage at the age of thirteen, when he played his fiddle on The Ed Sullivan Show. He was given his first violin when he was a child of three, and the following year he was stricken with polio. As much as audiences over the years have been dazzled by Perlman’s musical skill, they have been even more impressed by the courage and strong will it took to overcome his severe disability. I asked him about that.

W A L L A C E : I would think there might be a tendency, forgive me, to feel sorry for this crippled fiddle player.

P E R L M A N : (Laughs) Well, I think that in the beginning there may have been, and I think that—

W A L L A C E : Were you aware of it?

P E R L M A N : Oh boy, was I aware of it! I could show you reviews when I first came to the United States: “Handicapped violinist pretty good, despite disability.” Or “Crippled blah, blah, blah, dah, dah, dah . . .” And “As he went on the stage hobbling on his shining aluminum crutches and very heavily sat down, but afterwards we forgot all about it and it was just music.” And so on. And every, every single review had to mention that.

W A L L A C E : Got to you?

P E R L M A N : And that the— Oh yes, it got to me, because it was just taking away from the matters at hand.

Recalling the intense focus and hard work that had gone into my teenage exercises with the violin, I was struck by something I had heard about Perlman’s casual approach to practice sessions.

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W A L L A C E : Who was it—André Previn who said that he came in one day to watch you practice, and you were practicing and watching I Love Lucy on television simultaneously?

P E R L M A N : (Laughs) Well, it depends on what you practice.

Actually, the best show to practice on is baseball.

W A L L A C E : You can turn off the sound.

P E R L M A N : You turn off the sound, you see what’s going on, and you practice your technique. I’m not talking about practicing thinking or anything like this. That’s a totally different thing. I did some of my greatest practicing when I was in London watching cricket. I mean, cricket, you know, cricket . . . is a very, very slow game.

Perlman had an impish sense of humor, and once he became an established virtuoso, he would often regale audiences with his banter from the concert stage. There was, for example, the silly joke he sometimes told about how Beethoven’s death left some of his admirers so bereaved that, on a group visit to his grave, they decided they had to have one last look at their beloved Ludwig. So they dug up his grave, and when they pried open his coffin, they were severely scolded by Beethoven. “Please, please, leave me alone,” he demanded. “Can’t you see that I’m de-composing?”