Chapter 24

A: Back in 1972, Rolling Stone asked me to go down to the Cape and cover Apollo 17. That was the last mission to the moon. ... Somewhat to my surprise, I really became quite interested in the whole business of what's the makeup of someone who's willing to sit on top of a rocket and let you light the candle? And I ended up writing four stories for _Rolling Stone_ in about a month. And I thought if I spent a couple of months in expanding them, I'd have a book. Well, it's now 1979 and here we are." (He laughs.) It was so difficult that I put it aside every opportunity I had. I wrote three other books in the meantime, to avoid working on it.

I ended up being more interested in the fraternity of flying than in space exploration. I found the reactions of people and flying conditions much more fascinating. So the book is really about the right stuff -- the code of bravery that the pilots live by, and the mystical belief about what it takes to be a hot fighter jock, as the expression goes. I became interested in people like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier back in 1947. When the seven Mercury astronauts were chosen, they were not the seven hottest test pilots in America, although they were presented as such at the time. The arrival of the astronauts as a type completely upset the competitive hierarchy of flying.

Flying has a competitive structure that's as hotly contested as the world of show business. And the egos are just as big -- in fact, in a way, they're bigger. . ... It's hard to top surgeons for sheer ego. I think surgeons are the most egotistical people on the face of the earth, but pilots usually make the playoffs: they're in there.

Q: Speaking of your other books: how do you manage to know all the hip phrases of the day? Do you spend a lot of time with teenagers?

A: At one time, people thought I was some sort of medium who hung around with children to pick up what young people were thinking and doing. Well, that interested me very much in the '60s, when suddenly young people were doing extraordinary things -- things they had never done, which really boiled down to living lives that they controlled, sometimes in a communal way, going with their own styles, rather than imitating that of their elders. So it was fascinating. I made a point of learning about it.

Sometimes now I turn on the radio and I don't recognize a single song on the charts. Right now I have no idea what any of the top 20 singles are. And I have the feeling that it's probably not worth finding out, because we're now in a phase where we're just filling in the spaces of what was introduced by rock and the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and so on. There's nothing very new, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong.

Q: How do you choose your clothes?

A: Right now I'm in the phase of pretentiousness. During the late '60s I had a lot of fun by making mild departures in style -- wearing white suits instead of blue suits, things like that. That was very shocking and unusual in 1963. Suddenly things reached a point beyond which it really wasn't worth going, as far as I was concerned, when Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman appeared on the _Dick Cavett Show_ in body paint.

There's one direction in which clothes can go that still annoys the hell out of people, and that's pretentiousness. If you wear double-breasted waistcoats, which I rather like, that annoys people. Spats more than annoy people: they infuriate people. Try it sometime if you don't believe me. They think that this is an affront. It stirs up all sorts of resentment. We're in a period now in which the picture of the East Side really is of the man living in the $525,000 co-op, leaving the building at night, both clothed in turtleneck sweaters with pieces of barbed wire and jeans, going past a doorman who is dressed like an Austrian Army colonel from 1870.

Q: Do you do a lot of drawing?

A: I have a regular feature in _Harper's_. I do one large drawing each month, with a caption.

Q: What's your artistic background?

A: I never was trained in art. I worked for a commercial artist a number of summers when I was in high school. And I learned anatomy from drawing boxers in _Ring_ magazine. It was the only way I could think of to learn anatomy.

I've had two gallery shows of drawings. ... And I'll have a book of drawings coming out next year. I find myself very vain about my drawing. I guess I don't feel as sure of myself as I do in writing; therefore I'm always straining to get people's reactions to what I've drawn.

What I do mostly is caricature. I try not to make them too cartoony. This is a period that absolutely cries out for good caricature. Part of it is that the great caricaturists used to be people who were determined to be fine artists. Every artist, whether he was good or bad, learned anatomy very thoroughly. He learned how to render landscapes, buildings, and learned something about costume. So the ones who didn't make it as easel painters might turn to doing caricature, and some of them were spectacular.

We all grow up thinking we're in an era of progress, because we have had so much technological progress. But it simply doesn't work that way in art and literature. We're living in an era -- to use Mencken's phrase -- of the "Sahara of the beaux arts."

I wrote about that in _The Painted Word_. In fact, I'm doing a sequel to that now. It will be an article for _Harper's_ magazine. I'm moving into the areas of architecture and serious music and dance. It's very enjoyable to work on a subject like that after a long haul of writing about astronauts -- essentially because it's easier.

Q: What do you like to watch on TV?

A: To be honest, my two favorite shows are _Mannix_ -- which, alas, is no longer except in reruns -- and the _Johnny Carson Show_. I just think he's terrific. It was such a common currency among those in the general category of intellectuals to like the _Dick Cavett Show_ and not the _Johnny Carson Show_. And that is so much the party line that it takes awhile to dawn on you that Carson is really extremely funny. Dick Cavett, he has a lot of talent, but when it comes to wit, and even in handling the language, he's simply not in Carson's league.

There are a whole bunch of shows, I must say, in which I simply don't know who these people are. A lot of general-circulation magazines today are really television magazines. _People_ magazine is a television magazine. Look at these people. Who are they? Who are Mindy and Mork? I mean, I've never seen the show. And yet, they're obviously extremely well-known.

These magazines now, in an era in which general circulation magazines are in trouble, have hit upon this idea: all these people that are watching television will have the thrill of recognition if we write about the people they've seen on television. So _Sports Illustrated_ will tend to give you a kind of a rehash of the game of the week or the fight that everyone saw on television. It's kind of funny. At first, television was always cannibalizing the printed word for material, and now it's suddenly turning around.

Q: Do you have any other major projects coming up?

A: For years I've been telling myself that I was going to try a _Vanity Fair_ type of novel about New York, and I think I should probably try to make myself tackle that next. I've debated whether to make it fiction or nonfiction. My fiction writing has been confined to one short story that I did for _Esquire_. And I was surprised that it was harder than I thought to write fiction. I thought that I could sit down on a Sunday afternoon and knock out a short story, because you could make things up.

Another thing I'd like to try is a movie script. I've done one -- a series of vignettes about life in Los Angeles. ... But many talented writers just go bananas in trying to write for the movies. Because they're not in charge of what they're doing. All that a good director can do is keep from ruining the script. He cannot turn a bad script into a good movie. He can turn a good script into a bad movie. And often, I think, it happens, because the director is given a power that he simply should not have.

Q: Do you feel a lot of pressure on yourself when you sit down at the typewriter, as being one of the trend-setters in American writing today?

A: It was terrible after my first book came out, and I suddenly got a lot of publicity I never dreamed I'd get. I was still working with the _Herald Tribune_ as a general assignment reporter at the city desk. And I suddenly was made aware by publicity that there was something called the Tom Wolfe style. And this can really do terrible things to you. I wrote a whole series of just dreadful article because the first phase I went through was: "Well, I'll be damned. I have the Tom Wolfe style, I guess I'd better use it." And so I started writing these self-parodies. The second phase was: "I've got to stop this. It's self-destructive." And I would write something and a bell would go off and I'd say, "That's Tom Wolfe style. Now is that good the way I've used it there, or it is bad the way I've used it?" And this became very troublesome.

When I did this book, _The Right Stuff_, I decided I really was going to try to tailor my language to the mental atmosphere of pilots, and somehow make my tone what I have elsewhere called the downstage voice. You're writing in the third person about other people, but your own writing style takes on their tone. So I think the result is a book that seems different in style, and is sort of an experiment for me.

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WESTSIDER PINCHAS ZUKERMAN Violinist and conductor

10-13-79

"Travel is not fun anymore," sighs world-renowned violinist, violist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman. "It used to be. Now there are all the checks and securities at airports, and the hotel standards have gone down. The old-style luxury hotel is gone. Now it's a businessman's Ramada Inn, kind of hit-and-run hotel. But you learn to live with it."

Since making his American debut with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein 11 years ago, he has been a soloist with every major orchestra in Europe, and acted as both conductor and soloist for most of the leading orchestras in America. His schedule of 120 concerts a year is solidly booked until 1982, and he has a discography of several dozen recordings on four labels. For personal credits, Pinchas -- or "Pinky," as he prefers to be called -- has lived on the West Side for 17 years, been married to Eugenia Zukerman for 12 of those years. They have two daughters, one of whom is a skilled pianist.

The _New York Times_ has called him "one of the world's leading violinists," the _London Times_ has said he is "absolutely without peer," and the _Washington Post_ has labeled him "the most versatile of all major musicians." Born in Israel, the son of Polish survivors of Auschwitz, he was invited to perform at the White House last year for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. "I want to tell Sadat he should set up a recording studio inside the pyramids," he joked before the event. This year, Pinky's greatest honor was his appointment as music director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the only full-time chamber orchestra in America.

But the most astonishing thing about this burly, muscular man who speaks nostalgically of the "old days," may be his age. He's 31.

"I think I had as normal a childhood as one could expect from a talented boy that had to work," he muses in his living room overlooking the Hudson River. Serious one moment, clownish the next, he frequently punctuates his remarks with loud belly laughter. Pinky's sense of humor is one of the things that endears him to his close friend, violinist Itzhak Perlman, who lives six floors above. They were born three years apart, grew up a few miles from each other, and both came to New York with the help of violinist Isaac Stern to study at Juilliard.

The pair sometimes travel together for concerts, and according to Eugenia Zukerman, "they do things like imitate apes at airports." Eugenia herself is an extraordinary woman. Besides being a wife and mother, she is a flutist with an international music career of her own, frequently appearing in recitals with her husband. In addition, she is a highly talented writer who has written free-lance articles for many leading publications, and now devotes three or four hours a day to her first novel.

On October 19 at 10 p.m., and for the next three Friday evenings, Channel 13 will present a series called _Here to Make Music_, which documents Pinchas Zukerman's musical collaborations with Perlman, Stern and others. Zukerman's life story is told through the use of recordings he made before the age of 10, old photographs and candid interviews, producing a portrait that is often fascinating.

"I think music on TV is getting definitely better in America. They're ahead of the game at the BBC and in Europe, but they're quickly catching up here," he notes. "Sometimes they overcompensate with pictures for the sake of making a so-called 'interesting' show for the guy sitting with his slippers in the living room, drinking a glass of beer. They're afraid to leave the camera on the same musician for three minutes. That's why you've got this flute playing, and you see this horn player picking his nose."

When I ask Pinky about critics, the color rises in his cheeks. "Don't get me on critics," he warns, before launching into an unrestrained diatribe. "First of all, they're not critics as far as I'm concerned. They should be reporters. But they never report what goes on in the concert hall. The public stood up and clapped for 10 minutes. Say it, damn it! Don't say that bar 56 was not right in the Beethoven G Major Sonata. Who cares? It's so stupid!

"I'm a great fiddle player. They all say that. Fine. It's understood, it's granted. It's there. Okay. So instead of criticizing my fiddle playing, they say I'm becoming aloof, and this and that. ... One week they tear me to shreds for my conducting. The next week I get these rave reviews. Now, how can one person be that different in one week? What do they think, that I'm a duet?"

Asked how much time he spends practicing, Pinky replies: "As much as I need to. I don't think about time. You either live music or you don't. ... Music is an unending art form which demands your complete attention and perfection at all times. What a wonderful thing to be able to say -- I'll be able to say it in maybe 15 or 20 years -- that I have gone through all of Schubert's works. What an incredible achievement that is! I can tell you, it's a lot more satisfying than flying an airplane."

-- THE END --