23 
PIANO ROLLS
Eight years ago, Brooke and I bought a small property in Litchfield County, in northwestern Connecticut. It used to be a very rural area, but now is thought of as sort of chic. Our life there is just the opposite. We rarely go out.
I find it painful to wrench myself away from the country and go back to the city. The minute I drive up the dirt road to our house my cares evaporate—exactly the way they do when I’m alone fishing. Fishing and gardening: two great old passions of mine that go back to my childhood at Arden. Brooke has built a huge birdcage on the deck for our two parrots. Pedro, a macaw, and Igor, a caique, are our only pets now. I don’t like the idea of having a dog in the city, although we miss having more animals around.
When Brooke and I first saw the property, we took along a friend who thought the house was so undistinguished that he advised gutting it and making it into one big room. Brooke was all for that idea, but I balked. I like walls and definition. I won that one, but it was only the beginning. The grounds were a disaster. The driveway had to be moved. Ten acres of trees had to be thinned out. The poison ivy growing up to the front door had to be killed. The pond was a mud hole that had to be dredged.
Gradually, what started out as a cleanup became a serious horticultural adventure as we fecklessly created one garden after another. We planted the banks of the pond with irises, rushes, arrowheads, and cattails. At last count, we have planted more than two hundred trees, from apples, evergreens, and birches to weird things like dawn redwoods and aralias—not to mention four hundred ornamental shrubs. Brooke grandly calls it her “arboretum.” She points and I plant. For a pianist I’m surprisingly indifferent to the state of my hands, which usually look like a Russian peasant’s, my fingers covered with dirt and cuts. Before I perform at night, I have to scrub away the day’s work from under my nails.
So much of my life is spent either on the road or in hypersocial situations that when I get to the country I rarely go out except to the market. In the city I run my midtown office like a visiting pasha. I’m on the boards of various cultural institutions, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and American Ballet Theatre. For the past decade I’ve basked in the reflected glory of Kitty Carlisle Hart as vice-chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts. Although I’ve been an activist for all sorts of political causes—I still think of myself as a liberal—I’ve come to believe that the most critical thing to fight for is support for the arts. So I’m involved up to my eyeballs.
I tried to instill in my kids a similar appreciation for the arts and a sense of civic involvement. I also encouraged them to be as independent as possible. One of the biggest differences between me and them is that they’re not following in anyone’s footsteps, which is just fine with me. As of this writing, Colin, the youngest, was deep-sea diving in Indonesia, gathering coral for cancer research. Jason, the oldest, is an actor who teaches theater to underprivileged kids. Courtnay is a graphic designer in Seattle, and just bought a little spread of her own in Montana next to a great trout stream.
Recently I received in the mail a batch of old news clips about my parents that I’d ordered from the Hearst organization. Leafing through them one morning, I was staggered to find a small, barely legible picture accompanying a New York Daily News article about my birth in July 1937. It showed my mother, still alive at the Harbor Sanitarium, holding me in her arms: the first time I had ever seen a picture of the two of us together.
Betty Walsh, my secretary, called the News archives and ordered a print. A few days later, a stiff brown envelope arrived. Inside wasn’t the photograph we’d asked for but another one dated from the same time. This picture was even more staggering. In it were not only my mother and me but my father, kneeling at our bedside and gazing raptly at us. Standing in the background were my godmother Ginny Chambers and my grandmother “Mammy” Oelrichs. There was nothing to read from that picture but hope.
A few nights later, I drove out to Long Island for one of my favorite annual gigs, an outdoor concert in the Old Westbury Gardens. It’s an event I’ve been doing for more than twenty years in a setting I’ve known for even longer—the old Phipps estate, on whose grounds I’d often played as a child. Like so many of the great relics of more privileged times, the gardens and house are now a tourist attraction, open to anybody who can afford the modest price of admission.
It was a beautiful July evening—the perfect temperature—and I knew exactly how it would go. The lawn would be packed with picnickers of all ages, from infants who had never heard of Peter Duchin to octogenarians who would totter up to the bandstand and tell me about the time they’d danced to my father’s music. We’d begin with a little Dixieland, then go into a bit of Fats Waller, then our Astaire medley, then a couple of Beach Boys hits…and four generations would be on their feet, dancing every which way as the lights came on in the huge ivy-covered mansion at the top of the lawn.
Then, as a climax, would come the fireworks, exploding in the sky above us. We’d swing into “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “America, the Beautiful,” and everybody would be crowded around the bandstand, clapping and singing along.
The village of Glen Cove is just down the road from Old Westbury, and before the concert I decided to stop off at a store to look for a secondhand piano for a friend. It’s a place called The Piano Exchange.
I’d met the proprietor before, an intense, wiry fellow named Rick Smith. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, and he had the look of a serious antiquarian—not your typical piano salesman—as he took me around the showroom, where I tried out a couple of unremarkable Steinways and Mason & Hamlins. Then he said, “Let me show you some real pianos.”
It was astonishing: Beyond the showroom was a warehouse the size of an airplane hangar—a vast, Dickensian curiosity shop of used pianos in every shape, size, color, and style from a Rococo instrument that Haydn could have played to a sleek Art Deco number that looked like something you could drive away in. A musty storeroom in back was filled with piano rolls: bin after bin of them, stacked floor to ceiling.
The only picture ever taken of my mother and me together.
“I think I’ve just about got ’em all,” Rick said.
He probably did. Scanning the labels, I saw every name from Rachmaninoff and Busoni to Jelly Roll Morton and George Gershwin himself.
“Let me play you something,” he said, pulling down one of the rolls. “Let’s see if you can guess who it is.”
I followed him through a catacomb of pianos. There in a dark, dust-filled corner was a Victorian, walnut-cased instrument—“the best reconditioned player piano in the world,” said Rick. He inserted the roll into the holder, pulled down the first sheet like a window shade, and flipped the switch.
I recognized the melody as “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,” an old Harry Warren standard from Gold Diggers of Broadway. It was a rather square, upbeat tune, played in a jaunty, no-nonsense style. I was wondering why on earth he’d put this on when I felt myself breaking out in goose bumps.
It was my father. I watched the black and white keys bouncing up and down. I followed the melody as it switched registers, the bass line as it tripped along. Obviously Dad had loved playing with crossed hands.
A strange calm came over me. I could see him sitting at the keyboard in his white tie and tails, smiling his broad smile. The rest of the guys were out on their cigarette break and Dad was taking requests. The ladies had rushed to the piano, where they gathered like butterflies to call out tunes. I could even see my mother standing behind him, lightly touching his shoulder. Pretty soon, the dance floor would fill up.