A Prime Minister, a Composer and Who Shot J R Ewing?

 

A chilly day in November 1980 I was waiting at the entrance to the Algonquin Hotel in to meet Harold Macmillan and escort him to a suite where he was to be interviewed for the Casper Citron Show, a New York radio institution. I was nervous: I had never met a (former) Prime Minister before. Mr Macmillan was in New York for the great publishing event of the year, the launch of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria.

 

The Algonquin Hotel, 44th Street, New York. The hotel was famous as a place where literary New York would meet.

 

I was Vice President of Grove’s Dictionaries, Inc., a Delaware corporation, with its office in Washington, DC, and a very modest four members of staff. Even before publication day we had sold 3,000 sets at about $1,000 each. Macmillan arrived with a well-prepared quip to flatter a young employee. “Is this the face that sold 3,000 sets?”

 

Harold Macmillan and President Kennedy

 

I was to learn that Macmillan was a consummate performer. The Casper Citron Show was his first, and least high-profile, media event. He had a number of anecdotes and witty remarks prepared for the interview. As we progressed to increasingly high-profile interviews, he told the same stories, and cracked the same jokes, polishing them so that for the biggest event they would be pitch perfect.

 

Casper Citron

 

The big event was the Dick Cavett Show on PBS television, filmed not in a hotel suite, but in a theatre in New York with a live audience. When we arrived at the theatre, there was a long line of people waiting to be admitted, but as members of Macmillan’s retinue we were ushered immediately to front row seats. In those days, TV cameras were large pieces of equipment connected to their power by large cables, which radiated out from the “living room” set. When Cavett introduced him, Macmillan walked towards the set, and then made a big show, leaning on his stick, of being apprehensive about stepping across the cables. This was a ploy to convince Cavett that he was dealing with a frail old man. That old man just happened to have a razor sharp mind and the wiles of a fox.

 

Dick Cavett interviewing Winton Marsalis

 

 Pinchas Zukerman

The really big night was on St Cecilia’s Day (the patron saint of music), 22 November 1980. This was to be a big occasion, in a spectacular setting, enhanced by a few dozen trees. The line-up was also spectacular. We had hired as our publicist a young woman, Stephanie Cooper,  who specialized in the Classical music scene. Stephanie was a friend of Pinchas Zukerman, so she booked him and his accompanist to play two sonatas. His fee was $10,000: I remember the number well since my annual salary at the time was $35,000. Our speakers, apart from Macmillan, and Stanley Sadie, the editor of Grove, were the composer Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein. The mercurial Bernstein was a real coup for our event. He had agreed to attend on three conditions: that we provide a car to collect him and take him home, that he be given a free set of Grove, and that we provide his personal bottle of his favourite whisky.

 

Virgil Thomson

 

The evening was proceeding splendidly when Bernstein was invited to speak. Macmillan rose from his chair on stage and held out his hand, but rather than shaking hands Bernstein enveloped the old man in a startling bear hug. Bernstein would refer to Grove in his speech as “a great achievement”, a remark that our copywriter noted and which we used in publicity for many years until ordered to desist by Bernstein’s lawyers. However, his opening comment was somewhat tactless. He remarked that the British are good at dealing with setbacks. For example, they can be engulfed in a political scandal (a reference to the Profumo affair) and go on to produce this “wonderful achievement”.

 

Leonard Bernstein

 

Then he turned to what he had really come to say. Bernstein had been a great admirer of J F Kennedy and a regular guest at his White House (Macmillan, incidentally, had been a friend of JFK and of his wife Jackie). It happens that JFK was shot on St Cecilia’s Day 1963. The New York Times traditionally ran a front page story on 22 November to mark the day, but in 2001 the JFK story was displaced to the inside pages by the revelation of who had shot J R Ewing in Dallas the previous night. Bernstein was outraged and used our event to lambast the fickle American public. One of our guests, the actor and TV personality Kitty Carlisle Hart, was heard to remark “Lennie’s flipped again”. Then a man in the audience stood up to shout Bernstein down.

 

With the help of another guest, my boss Nicky Byam Shaw, the chairman of Macmillan Publishers, managed to persuade Bernstein to return to his bottle of whisky. After months of planning, I was dismayed that my big evening in New York City had descended into a shouting match. However, this incident confirmed that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Associated Press put a report of the rumpus on its wire service and over the next days press clippings from all over the USA arrived in quantities we could never have dreamed of without the help of Lennie Bernstein. I recall customers replying, when I asked how they had heard of Grove, “that Bernstein business”.

 

The Starlight Roof, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Park Avenue, New York

 

The Waldorf launch was without doubt the most spectacular event in my publishing career, which would last another 36 years. And Grove was the most successful element of that career. Before the second edition, published in 2001, we sold tens of thousands of sets in hardback, a deluxe edition bound in North African goat skin, and a paperback. We had some celebrity customers. Paul Simon’s office called one day to ask if we could deliver a set the same day if it was paid for by a cashier’s cheque. The next week we saw a photo of Simon on the front cover of a magazine, his set of Grove displayed behind him. Brian Eno once told an interviewer, who asked him what were the rewards of success, that it meant that he could buy a set of Grove.

 

Perhaps one of my more exotic sales took place in a hotel lobby in Washington, D C. A Korean choral director, aptly named Dr Bang Song Song, had called our office to ask if he could pay for two sets with travellers’ cheques. South Korea was a military dictatorship and foreign currency was difficult to obtain in Korea. Since he was traveling on official business Dr Bang had special access to dollars. We met in the lobby, he signed the cheques and we delivered his books to Seoul. I met Bang Song Song again in 2001 at the residence of the British Ambassador in Seoul, who was holding a reception to mark the publication of the second edition of The New Grove. I don’t think he recognized me, but Bang Song Song is a name I will never forget.

 

When I worked at Macmillan, I learned that one of my friends there had her own Bernstein story. Alison had worked for a music publisher. Bernstein was in London and wanted to see the conductor’s score of the piece he was to conduct. Now, large scores are expensive and are not reproduced in multiple copies. Bernstein had a cigarette hanging from his lips as he pored over the score. The ash at the end of the cigarette grew longer and longer, threatening to fall on the precious score. Alison did not dare tell the great man to stop smoking, so she decided to blow the ash away from the score – and all over Bernstein’s suit.

 

I have always been grateful to Lennie Bernstein for unwittingly giving my publishing career a small boost, even though I felt decidedly ungrateful that night in 1980.