The Magic Maker Read online

  John and Marshall Woodbridge, recorded by Esther as having brought Jack to the Langstaffs’ 1945 Christmas carol party, were father and daughter, part of another musical family in the Brooklyn Heights circle. The senior Langstaffs and Woodbridges had been close friends since they were young. John’s wife, Eleanor Woodbridge, known as Butsy, was a pianist who had made her debut at Town Hall in New York during the 1920s, but had (in those days of convention-impelled choice) given up the prospect of a concert career in order to have children. Later she did teach music, though, and David Langstaff was one of her piano pupils. Being also fond of his brothers, she had been writing Jack newsy, comforting letters all through his time in the Pacific. (“Another nice letter from Butsy,” he wrote home. “She is a dear!”)

  Marshall was the elder Woodbridge daughter. Her younger sister was another attractive Eleanor, known as Nancy. Since her childhood Nancy had had little contact with Jack, having been away acquiring degrees first at Vassar and then the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan. But she and her mother were friends of Diane Guggenheim, now Langstaff, and Nancy was not only a painter but an excellent pianist. She also rode horses, at the Woodbridge house near the Guggenheim country home where Diane and her frail convalescent husband often stayed after Jack was finally released from the hospital, and she saw a great deal of them both.

  “Diane would watch me getting the horse over the jumps, and I’d go back to their house,” Nancy says. “I think Jack found that interesting, this person in jodhpurs smelling of horses.”

  She was not always in jodhpurs, though, and unlike Diane, she came from a family as intensely musical as Jack’s. He was desperate now to get his voice back, and Butsy and her daughter were close at hand and willing to help. Diane was certainly musical, but she had always been what her daughter later described as “a needy person,” and was no better equipped to accompany her singer husband at the piano than she was to nurse him back to health. There’s no firsthand record of Diane’s opinions, behavior, or emotions at this point, or even of where she may have been most of the time.

  “Jack and I began to make music together,” Nancy says. “I’d play for him to sing. My mother was a sort of coach, for me and for Jack, on musical aspects like phrasing — to this day I still see her little marks on things. It was wonderful for Jack because he wasn’t ready for a professional coach. He was still recovering — still very skinny, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds.”

  In their 2005 book The Guggenheims: A Family History, Irwin and Debi Unger observe that “Diane’s life was a restless quest for fulfilling experiences and relationships.” Perhaps the restlessness took over early on, when it came to coping with baby Carol; Jack reported later that “Nancy took care of Carol a lot of the time when I was recuperating.” He knew he was falling in love, and he tried to broach the subject to Nancy. She declined to listen, but it made no difference. One way or another, by early 1947 the brief Langstaff marriage was evaporating, by mutual consent.

  In June 1947, with agreement from Diane, Jack went to Reno for a quick divorce, the petition claiming “extreme cruelty, mental in nature” as a necessary technicality. “I had to save money, so I shared a room with a crazy trumpeter,” he said later. He also tried to raise money by giving a concert in Reno, with or without the trumpeter, but for an engagingly characteristic reason this didn’t succeed. Meredith Langstaff wrote to Jack’s Reno lawyer:

  I am very much amused at the odd turn in Jack’s financial plans. Apparently he started to work up a concert to cover expenses when he heard that a three-year-old tot had fallen in one of the irrigation ditches and drowned; this being the third instance of the sort in the course of ten days, Jack felt that he should give the whole proceeds of the concert to the fund being raised to make the irrigation ditches safe against the meanderings of small children.

  I hope you find time to attend the concert.

  Cordially yours,

  B. Meredith Langstaff

  On July 11 the lawyer cabled Meredith: “DECREE GRANTED EVERYTHING CONCLUDED SATISFACTORILY.”

  In 1948 Jack married Nancy Woodbridge. Their life together was full of music from the beginning. She accompanied him at two recitals that July, one a benefit for the Public Hall in Hamburg, Connecticut, and the other at Yale. In May, he’d sung in Handel’s Samson at St. Thomas’s, for the Oratorio Society of New York. From the time he came home from the war, it took his lungs two years to recover full capacity for singing, and he never did attempt the operatic roles he had set out for himself in that letter home in 1945. Instead he shifted his sights, in the general direction of recitals and oratorio.

  Rather than go back to Curtis, he took voice lessons at the Juilliard School of music in New York; as a veteran, he had financial help through the GI Bill of Rights. “And I looked up my great lieder teacher, Leo Rosenek, and studied with him. Nancy used to come to some of my classes, sometimes she’d play Schumann and Hugo Wolf for me — she got lots from him as well.” At Juilliard Jack was what Nancy diplomatically calls “an erratic student. . . . Studying was painful for Jack, he didn’t like it — he loved learning, but not under a rigid routine.” Outside the routine he was also taking lessons from his operatic Uncle Arthur once more, and he found these the most valuable of all.

  Nancy used to go to these lessons too, as Jack’s accompanist. She says Arthur Geary was a very little man with a large voice and a bad temper. “Jack could hardly get through a single phrase before Arthur would say something terrible, and sometimes I’d sit at the piano and cry with anger. There was Arthur telling him how badly he sang . . . but he was a very good voice teacher. He taught Jack how to breathe with his wounded lungs, he taught him tone, technique.”

  Then in 1949 Douglas Kennedy took a part in Jack’s life again. As the longtime director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, successor to Cecil Sharp, he was a prime force in England for keeping folk song from dropping into academic obscurity, and he invited Jack to come to London to make two records of English folk songs for the record label HMV. These were the early days of vinyl records, and HMV, christened His Master’s Voice from its famous logo of a dog listening to an early gramophone horn, was part of the now-giant EMI Group.

  “HMV had made recordings of bands playing folk songs,” Jack said, “and Douglas suggested it would be wonderful to record some of the songs Cecil Sharp had collected.”

  Off went Jack to London, and Nancy with him. Meredith paid their way. They traveled in a freighter carrying iron ore, which was not the swiftest or easiest way to cross the Atlantic.

  “We were the only passengers,” Nancy says. “There was one tiny little stateroom on the ship, and the only exercise you could take was walking around the deck, which the captain didn’t like. We ate with the sailors. And we used the sailors’ bathroom, which had a curtain instead of a door, and Jack had to stand in front of the curtain when I went in.”

  Life wasn’t much more luxurious when they reached London, which was still in the postwar austerity period that gripped Britain until 1951, with food and gasoline even more severely rationed than they had been during the war. They stayed in a boardinghouse. “And I remember Douglas Kennedy picking us up near Lord’s Cricket Ground,” Jack said, “and taking us to those great studios at Abbey Road.” He recorded his folk songs; Nancy said later that she felt they were the best recordings he ever made. She accompanied him on some of them. “And in those days recording was all done on wax — if you made a mistake, you had to do the whole thing over again.”

  And the sound engineer was one George Martin, later to become famous and knighted for his accomplishments in the recording industry, not least the introduction of the Beatles. The lifelong friendships Jack made in England — particularly with George and Judy Martin, and later with Ralph and Ursula Vaughan Williams — had very deep roots.

  Back in America, Jack gave his New York debut recital at Town Hall on Monday, November 14, 1949, “assisted by Felix Wolfes at the Piano.” The New York Times critic
reported that “a strong and sound musical instinct triumphed over an undependable vocal method.”

  His taste, intelligence, and feeling for music of various schools were fine enough to make him worth listening to, even if the way he produced his voice made for inconsistency of sound.

  It is not often that one encounters a young singer with such a natural gift for music. Apparently he has also cultivated literature and languages. When he sang last night in German, Italian, and French, you had the feeling that he thoroughly understood the lines that precipitated the music. This is not a mean accomplishment; there are plenty of singers who sing as if they had not the faintest idea of what the words meant.

  Mr. Langstaff’s program, which covered quite a bit of territory as to schools and composers, was not sufficiently varied in quality. Much of it was slow, sad, and subdued. But because he is a good musician he managed to give it variety. Handel, Bach, Mozart, Gluck, Schubert, Wolf, Brahms, Duparc, Debussy, Mary Howe, Samuel Barber, Randall Thompson, Douglas Moore, Celius Dougherty, and old French and English songs were differentiated and grasped. Felix Wolfes helped with sensitive accompaniments.

  Mr. Langstaff’s voice is ample in size and pleasant in quality. But it is constricted in its upper range; it lacks breath support; it is not sufficiently colored or controlled. Since Mr. Langstaff is young, it is not too late to repair the damage. He has time to become an outstanding singer.

  A year later, on November 13, 1950, he gave a second recital at Town Hall. A different critic for the New York Times was equally avuncular.

  He has gone far toward overcoming the vocal deficiencies reported after his debut a year ago. The voice is limited in range but its extremes are no longer forced, except when he grew tired at the close of each half, and, although it has little natural resonance, it is liquid in quality and varied in color. And he used it with the easy eloquence of a folk singer.

  Ballads in French, German, and English formed the substance of his program. The baritone sang Cantaloube’s arrangements of folk songs from the Auvergne and another sweet group from ancient France with impeccable diction even when the melody bounced with high spirits. Lieder by Brahms and Schumann received the same unaffectedly artful treatment and so did some rather disingenuous songs by contemporary American and British composers.

  James Quillian provided the piano accompaniments for Mr. Langstaff, who seemed to take as much joy in his music as he gave.

  Of the “rather disingenuous” contemporary American songs, one was by Nancy’s sister, Marshall, and one by Jeanne Behrend. Then, as later, he enjoyed showing off the work of friends — so long as it was good enough.

  The critic for the Herald Tribune said of the 1950 recital:

  Mr. Langstaff projects sentiment surely and maintains a mood firmly. As a musician, he seems to understand his own limitations, and he chose a program which leaned heavily on music of a folk nature. But there is no criticism here, for in all his numbers he gave his phrases wings, kept them moving and sprightly. Mr. Langstaff is not yet an assured technican. His range is rather limited and the size of his voice small. But he accomplished a remarkable amount with what technique he has already acquired. Mr. Langstaff really sings, and he makes music doing it.

  There’s a quality in these reviews that you find too in a 1950 comment by Edward Sackville-West in the New Statesman and Nation, in London; he’s reviewing two of Jack’s HMV recordings:

  These records are wholly delightful and should on no account be missed. Mr. Langstaff is, it appears, an American: his voice is charming in quality, admirably controlled, and his diction is excellent. It is a long time since I heard folk songs delivered with so unemphatic an appreciation of their humor and pathos.

  You can feel these critics struggling to point out some limitations (even Sackville-West, with his enigmatic “Mr. Langstaff is, it appears, an American”), but it’s clear that he had captivated them. Even in the formal structure of recital or record, Jack was already accomplishing the thing he did best: making people enjoy music.

  Until he was about thirty-five, he and Nancy lived in a third-floor walk-up in New York. (“At number 415 East 50th Street — we knew some people who owned a brownstone there, and we rented the top floor.”) Brooklyn Heights and the family Christmas carols were in easy reach, just over the Brooklyn Bridge. Life was now a mix of music and babies: John was born in 1950, Gary in 1952, and Deborah in 1954. Living with three small children at the top of three flights of stairs, Nancy had her hands full, and she accompanied only the occasional local concert; Jack was away a lot of the time. He gave recitals all over the country, with assorted pianists.

  The balance of his programs was still idiosyncratic, Nancy says. “He liked to begin with Handel, the big operatic songs. Then maybe Debussy. Singing in English mostly, because of his audience. And he’d end with a group of traditional songs, which no one else was doing then. He sang Britten, too — nobody else did, they were singing the French and the Germans. Jack searched out English composers, and Americans like Barber and Copland — though he never liked Copland much, those arranged folk songs weren’t his favorites.”

  The work was varied, to say the least. Within a sample summer, he was giving a recital of Byrd and Dowland on a university campus; then a bunch of sea chanteys at the Waldorf-Astoria with the University Glee Club of New York City; then starring for a week in the musical Anything Goes in Worcester, Massachusetts; then teaching folk song at a summer school for the Country Dance Society of America. He had a manager now, Henry Colbert of Colbert-LaBerge Concert Management; he was a busy singer.

  At one point in the mid-1950s, Henry Colbert sent him to see Leonard Bernstein, the wunderkind who was only two years older than Jack but already world famous as a conductor. “He’s writing this show called Candide,” said Colbert, “and I want you to sing for him.”

  So Jack went. “I was so naive,” he said. “I got Candide mixed up with Shaw’s Candida, so I thought I should sing something British, maybe Gilbert and Sullivan. I walked in and there was Bernstein, and he said, ‘What will you sing?’ And I said, ‘The ghost song from Ruddigore.’ And do you know, he just sat down at the piano and played it, right off.”

  And Bernstein hired Jack to play Candide for the backers’ audition, a single performance for the show’s potential investors — but that was all.

  So the round of recitals and concerts went on. Jack sang for Young People’s Concerts at Constitution Hall with the National Symphony Orchestra, and at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic. He sang medieval music for the annual Garden Party for the members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He toured. He went several times to Britain, to give recitals or to record folk songs. But he wasn’t making a great deal of money.

  Carol Preston, the teacher who had revealed the world of folk song and folk dance to Jack when he was fifteen, had moved in 1938 to Washington, D.C., after being appointed headmistress of the Potomac School. With her went her friend Helen Seth-Smith, as associate headmistress — and there they stayed, for the next twenty-three years. Carol had remained a close friend of the Langstaff family, and she and Helen had a cottage out in the country, which Jack and Ken had visited.

  Another old friend remembers being invited there to a weekend party with them — and remembers too the effect Jack had on her, which was shared by numbers of spellbound ladies in the course of his long life. “It was a glorious weekend,” she says, “nonstop wonderful, with Jack singing folk songs, and sword dancing. He was the man of my dreams. But he was twenty-six and engaged to be married, and I was seventeen years old. So he married Nancy, and I went to university.”

  Now, in 1955, Carol Preston came up with her second beneficent effect on Jack’s future. He and Nancy had just had their third baby, Deborah. The Potomac School had moved out of the city to a large new campus in McLean, Virginia, and Carol had been asking Jack to give her the names of people who might come to run the school’s music program. Finally she asked if he would come and do it himsel
f.

  Jack protested that he wasn’t a teacher, and at first he refused. But Carol persisted — this was, after all, the woman who had pulled him out of the coat closet in grade school — and eventually Jack agreed. As they both knew very well, now that he had a wife and three small children to support, he needed a day job. The school would pay him a regular salary, Nancy would also teach there, and their children could attend the school. And Carol promised that he would be allowed to continue his career as a singer at the same time.

  “He never got to the point where he could support himself solely by singing,” Nancy says. “You have to be at the very top to do that. I think he hoped he would, at the beginning, but it didn’t happen — partly because what was appreciated at that time was a much more operatic kind of voice. Jack had a more personal voice; it wasn’t what the public expected. He wanted to sing lieder; he was drawn to the so-called art songs rather than opera — though he did like to do oratorio in churches, like Elijah.

  “So we went to Potomac.”

  The Potomac School had opened in 1904, with 48 students, on Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. It was a day school, and since its move four years earlier to the 55-acre campus in McLean, Virginia, it now had more than 400 students, from kindergarten to grade 8. Initially, grades 1–3 were coeducational; grades 4–8 were girls. Nancy taught the lower grades, and Jack taught the girls to sing.

  “His teaching was not traditional, and he didn’t have a good sense of how to control a class,” Nancy says. “He’d yell at them, very loudly. But once he got into teaching them the songs, they were absolutely with him.”