The Class

  “Specifically, Leon, I object to the clichéd use of ‘one-six-four-five-one.’ ”

  “A cliché is what you make of it, Mr. Rossi,” Leon replied. “Richard Rodgers used it beautifully in ‘Blue Moon.’ ”

  “You’re not Richard Rodgers—and that mindless sequence of notes isn’t music.”

  Tashkenian was young, but he was aware of his own worth, especially at this moment. After this latest barrage of insults, he owed the maestro no more deference.

  “Look, Rossi, I’ve got better things to do than sit here and be abused by a pretentious, overrated asshole like you. I know damn well my chord progressions are familiar. But that’s the name of the game. The clichés make ’em think it’s something they’ve heard before. They’re half-remembering it even before they hear it. And that means they can hum it at intermission. And that, in the musical theater, spells success. You don’t have anything against success, do you?”

  At this point, however, Edgar Waldorf felt impelled to defend the star who was providing his show with light if not heat.

  “Mr. Rossi is one of the great composers of our time,” he said.

  But Tashkenian had gone too far to back down.

  “Of what?” he sneered And then turned to Danny. “You’re not even that good at classical. I mean, at Juilliard we studied the last movement of your pseudo-Stravinsky Savanarola ballet—as an example of heavy-handed orchestration. You’re nothing but an Ivy League con man.”

  As suddenly as he started, Leon stopped, gripped with fear at what he’d allowed himself to say.

  Danny could say nothing. Because some pellets of truth in Leon’s wild shotgun rage had hit home.

  They simply stood there, glaring at each other, both frightened at who might explode next.

  Curiously, it was Leon Tashkenian. He began to cry. He reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, wiped his cheeks, and then said quietly, “I’m sorry, Mr. Rossi. I spoke out of turn.”

  Danny did not know how to respond.

  “Come on,” Edgar pleaded, “he said he was sorry.”

  “I really didn’t mean what I said,” Tashkenian added meekly. Danny concluded that magnanimity would be his only way of saving face. “Forget it, Leon, we’ve got a show to think about.”

  Edgar Waldorf rose like a phoenix from his sofa of despair.

  “Oh God, I love you both. You are two beautiful human beings.”

  By some miracle, both men avoided his passionate lunges. He then took Leon’s lead sheets and handed them to Danny. “Here, schmaltz ’em up with your classical virtuosity.”

  “What?”

  “You gotta play these tunes to the cast tomorrow morning.”

  What new humiliation was this? Was he to “schmaltz” up Leon’s musical guano as this cheap hack looked on gloating?

  “Why do I have to play it?”

  “Because it’s supposed to be your stuff, Dan.”

  “They don’t know about Leon?”

  Edgar shook his head emphatically. “And they never will.”

  Danny was speechless. He turned to the young man, whose eyes were still red with tears, and asked, “You really don’t want any credit?”

  Leon smiled shyly. “It’s part of the business, Mr. Rossi. I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

  “They’re humming! Do you hear me, Danny? They’re humming!”

  Edgar Waldorf was phoning from the manager’s office of the Shubert Theatre. It was the first intermission after Leon’s numbers had gone into the show. They had even added a reprise of “The Stars Are Not Enough,” which Theora Hamilton would now sing just before the curtain fell (Sir John Chalcott, who had threatened to resign if this change were effected, was at that moment on a flight back to London).

  Danny had not been able to bring himself to go to the theater for fear of—he knew not what. Hearing the new songs fail? Or, worse perhaps, hearing them succeed?

  “And, Danny,” Edgar continued to enthuse, “I smell success. We’ve got a winner! Trust Edgar Waldorf, we’ve got a smasheroo!”

  Toward the midnight hour, there was a sensuous tap-tap-tapping at his hotel door.

  It was the distinguished—and heretofore coolly distant—leading lady. Miss Theora Hamilton was carrying a bottle of showbiz soda water, otherwise known as champagne.

  “Mr. Rossi,” she cooed, “I’ve come to toast a genius. That new ballad you wrote for me is a classic. I could see tears in their eyes as the curtain fell.”

  Danny had never taken much heed of her opinions, but he had always entertained some interest in her breasts. He was pleased to see that she had not neglected to bring them along.

  “Well, may I enter, or do we have to drink this in the hallway?”

  “Madame,” said Danny with a gallant bow, “je vous en prie.”

  And so the legendary Theora wafted in. First bottle, then breasts, then the heart that lay passionately within. They all were his that night.

  Yes, music hath charms. Even if it is by Leon Tashkenian.

  On the night of the New York opening, Danny had his driver bring Maria from Philadelphia directly to the theater. While she went in to watch the performance, Danny and Edgar paced nervously in the empty lobby. Every time they perceived laughter or applause they exchanged glances and mumbled something like, “Do you think they liked it?”

  During the ride to the party, Danny anxiously asked Maria what she thought.

  “Well, frankly, the original version was a little more to my taste. But the audience seemed to like it and I guess that’s what’s important.”

  “No, it’s only what the critics think that counts.”

  “I looked everywhere,” she said, “but I didn’t see Stuart and Nina.”

  “They were both too nervous,” Danny improvised. “In fact, I don’t think they’ll even come to the reception. They’ll probably just sit at home and watch the television critics.”

  By eleven-thirty, almost all the important reviews were in. The networks had been unanimously favorable. All complimented Stuart Kingsley’s literate book (Edgar’s wife, who had stepped in when Neil Simon declined the rewriting task, went graciously unbilled). And all remarked on Danny Rossi’s “sinewy, melodic score” (CBS-TV). It now seemed a foregone conclusion that the Times would come through with a rave.

  And it did. In fact, Edgar was on the bandstand at that very moment, tearfully reading the words that would make them all rich and famous forever.

  “It’s a Valentine!” he shrieked, waving a yellow sheet of paper above his head, “an unadulterated Valentine! Listen to his goddamn headline—‘Melody Makes a Mighty Return to Broadway.’ ”

  The crowd of actors, investors, and Beautiful People broke into cheers. Edgar raised his hand to plead for silence. At last, they quieted down to hear more. Only the tinkle of glasses was audible, occasionally punctuated by melodramatic female sighs and appreciative whispers.

  Meanwhile, Edgar read on from the sacred document.

  “Tonight, at the Shubert Theatre, Daniel Rossi confirmed beyond doubt that he is master of every musical form. What better demonstration of the enormous range of a composer than the comparison of his complex, powerful, nearly atonal Savanarola ballet with the dulcet and unabashedly simple melodies from Manhattan Odyssey. Certain to become standards are gems like, “This Evening, Like All the Other Evenings,” and, especially, The Stars Are Not Enough.”

  “Poet Stuart Kingsley has also shown that he has a magical gift for the theater.…”

  Immediately after the definitive critic’s closing salvo (“I hope it runs forever”), the band broke into “The Stars Are Not Enough.” And everyone, young and old, drunk and sober, began to vocalize. Except Danny Rossi.

  As the guests sang chorus after chorus, Maria leaned over and whispered in her husband’s ear.

  “It’s really lovely, Danny.”

  He kissed her on the cheek. Not to acknowledge what she had naively intended as a compliment, but because there were photographer
s watching.

  The following March, at the Tony Award ceremonies, Manhattan Odyssey was chosen as Best Musical of the year. Not unexpectedly, Danny Rossi won for Best Score. Accepting the prize on behalf of Stuart Kingsley, who had won for Best Book, Edgar Waldorf gave a touching little speech about Stu’s teaching commitments making it impossible for him to attend.

  In a frantic round of bidding, MGM carried away the screen rights for a record sum of nearly seven million dollars.

  Not long thereafter, Danny Rossi’s picture appeared on the cover of Time.

  For a long while Danny felt ashamed about the secret Manhattan Odyssey humiliation. Though only two other people in the world knew, he harbored an inner sense of failure.

  Yet, the soul has remarkable powers of regeneration. As years passed, and the number of different recorded versions neared two hundred, Danny gradually began to believe that he actually had composed “The Stars Are Not Enough.”

  And, what the hell, given half a chance, he probably could have.

  ANDREW ELIOT’S DIARY

  May 15, 1968

  Practically living as I do at the New York Harvard Club, I was probably the first guy outside of Cambridge to see a copy of the Decennial Report, which chronicles our class’s progress in the first ten years since graduation.

  I note a tendency of the less successful guys to write longer histories than their more shining counterparts.

  I mean, one character goes on for paragraphs in tedious detail about his uneventful army service, his choice of wife, what his kids both weighed at birth, and so forth. Also how challenging life is in Daddy’s shoe-manufacturing business (“We’ve had to move our operations from New England to Puerto Rico and are now exploring the possibility of relocating in the Far East”).

  The only thing he doesn’t talk about at length is his divorce. That’s where I might have found something to empathize with. Anyway, it’s clear to see through the thick clouds of his verbosity that he’s trying to disguise a life of quiet desperation. He concludes with the philosophical observation, “If the shoe fits, you’ve got to wear it.”

  In other words, he’s taken four whole pages to inform us that he’s on his way to being a successful failure.

  On the other hand, Danny Rossi merely lists the dates of his marriage and his daughters’ births, the things he’s written, and the prizes he’s won. That’s all. He didn’t even offer a pithy conclusion like “I’ve been very lucky,” or “I owe it all to eating Wheaties,” or some such.

  And yet who hasn’t seen his face in all the papers and read at least a half dozen stories that all but deify him?

  I bet a lot of guys who thought he was a weenie are now boasting to their wives and kids that they were buddies with him in the college days. I confess that I even exaggerate my passing friendship with him, too.

  Ted Lambros’s entry was also brief and to the point. He and Sara had enjoyed the decade at Harvard. He was gratified that his Sophocles book had received favorable reviews, and he and his family were looking forward to the new challenge of living and teaching at Canterbury.

  Neither Jason Gilbert nor George Keller sent in a response, both for reasons I well understood. Jason, with whom I’m still in touch by letter, has been through a hell of a lot.

  And George is just the same old paranoid, suspicious nut. He didn’t even vouchsafe any of the meager information he gives me when we have lunch.

  Unlike a lot of my classmates, I thought I’d try to be honest in my capsule history.

  My two years in the navy got a sentence, and I didn’t glorify them. Then I simply noted that after seven years at Downs, Winship, I’d been elected a vice-president.

  Then I said that the greatest joy I’ve had is watching my children grow. And the greatest disappointment that my marriage didn’t work.

  I don’t think many people bothered reading my entry, but I didn’t give much away.

  I didn’t mention that I’m really not that much of a success in investment banking. I owe my promotion to the fact that a couple of buddies and I helped float Kintex, which grew to be the world’s largest producer of The Pill. And hence took off like a wild rocket. (Sheer luck—or was it a subconscious way of regretting that I had allowed myself to have children with such an unfit mother?)

  I didn’t say that though there are thousands of new singles’ bars sprouting all over First Avenue for so-called successful guys like me to meet fairly neat women, my life is desperately lonely.

  I spend every weekend trying to reconnect with my kids (Andy now seven, Lizzie four), to little avail. Faith seems to have given up sex in favor of booze—and her face shows it. Apparently the only time she sobers up is when she’s telling the kids what a bastard I am. And I only have a couple of hours on Saturdays to try to counter this calumny.

  My one solace still seems to come from Harvard. Though I’ve bought a fancy pad in a new high-rise on East Sixty-first Street, I spend most of my time playing squash at the H-Club and socializing with the guys. I help the Schools Committee recruit good men for “the age that is waiting before.” I’m even thinking of running for the Alumni Council—which would give me a nice pretext to go up and walk in the Yard again.

  In short, I’m no happier than the garrulous shoe salesman. On the other hand, I think I hide it a little better.

  Ted Lambros prepared himself for his new life at Canterbury with typical enthusiasm. He spent the summer of ’68 packing books and notes, improving his old lectures, and—most important—taking tennis lessons at Soldier’s Field.

  As they were settling into the ramshackle house they had rented from the college on North Windsor Street, Sara cautioned him, “You know, honey, if you actually beat Bunting, he’ll never vote for you.”

  “Hey,” he replied jocularly, “you’re speaking to the great tactician. I’ve got to be just good enough for him to want to keep me as a sparring partner—or whatever they call it.”

  But there was more than the tennis vote to worry them. The department had three other senior classicists—and also influential wives.

  Naturally, there had to be a separate dinner with each couple. Henry Dunster made the first move and invited them. The present Mrs. D. was Henry’s third, and there was every indication that she might not be the last. Predictably, he made a sort-of-pass at Sara. Which did not flatter her at all.

  “I mean, he wasn’t vulgar,” she complained to Ted as they drove home, “it’s that he was so ludicrously tentative. He wasn’t even man enough to be an honest flirt. God, what a creep.”

  Ted reached over and took Sara’s hand.

  “One down,” he whispered, “three to go.”

  The next hurdle on this steeplechase to tenure was a dinner with the Hendricksons—Digby, the historian, and his loving wife, Amelia. Theirs was indeed a marriage of true minds, for they thought as one. They shared a love of hiking, mountaineering, and a fervid paranoia that everyone in the department was out to steal Digby’s history courses.

  “I think it’s awful,” Sara commented, “but in a way their jealousy is understandable. History, after all, is the foundation of the classics.”

  Digby took her point and ran with it a little further.

  “Not just the foundation, Sara, it’s the whole shebang. Literature is nice, but what the heck, when all is said and done it’s only words. History is facts.”

  “I’ll buy that,” said Ted Lambros, specialist in literature, clouding his mind and swallowing his pride.

  Sara had already started action on the distaff front. In fact, her “friendship” with Ken Bunting’s wife had blossomed into weekly soup-and-sandwich luncheon dates at The Huntsman.

  Dotty was a self-styled social arbiter who neatly pigeonholed the Canterbury wives into one of two categories: “real class” or “no class.” And Sara Lambros of the New York banking Harrisons was certainly genuine cream, not Reddi-Whip. And since Dotty was, as she put it, a blueblood from Seattle, she regarded Sara as a soulmate.

  The
only difference was their marriages.

  “Tell me,” Dotty asked in furtive tones, “what’s it like being married to, you know, a Latin type?”

  Trying mightily to keep a straight face, Sara patiently explained that Greeks, though dark and—to some eyes, perhaps—a little swarthy, weren’t quite the same as “Latins.” Still, she understood the interrogatory innuendo and replied that she assumed all men were basically alike.

  “You mean, you’ve known a lot?” asked Dotty Bunting, titillated and intrigued.

  “No,” Sara answered calmly, “I just mean—you know—they have the same equipment.”

  Dotty Bunting turned a vivid crimson.

  Sara quickly changed the subject and sought Dotty’s counsel on the “real class” children’s dentists in the area.

  One thing was clear. If Mrs. Bunting had a vote, Sara certainly would have it. It remained to be seen what influence she had on her husband. And that could be determined only when the two couples actually met for dinner. Again, consistent with traditional collegiality, the Buntings asked the new arrivals to their home.

  The conversation, as anticipated, was tennis-oriented. Bunting jocularly accused Ted of dodging his innumerable invitations to “come and hit a few.” Ted volleyed back that he’d been so involved in setting up the house and starting courses that his game was far too rusty to give Bunting even token competition.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s only being modest, Sara,” Dotty Bunting gushed. “I bet he even played for the varsity.”

  “No, no, no,” Ted protested, “I wasn’t nearly good enough. Tennis is one of the few sports Harvard actually is not bad in.”

  “Yes,” Ken allowed, “it was a Harvard guy who beat me for the IC4A title back in fifty-six.”

  Unwittingly, Ted had reopened the most painful wound in Bunting’s sporting memories. Ken now began to hemorrhage verbally.

  “I really should have won it. But that Jason Gilbert was such a crafty New York type. He had all sorts of sneaky little shots.”

  “I never thought of New York people as particularly ‘crafty,’ ” Sara said ingenuously. “I mean, I’m from Manhattan too.”