With the arrival of fall we went back to our modest home, to our regular school, (a private school yes, but no boarding school for the likes of us, thank you) our regular circles of friends and our normal life. Mother was absolutely adamant that we should be brought up free from the pretensions and attitudes that wealth tended to cultivate. This was a woman who performed for Kings for a living and yet still went to the markets and shopped for our dinners herself. The letter in her hand may be addressed to the Prince of Denmark but she wasn�t about to place it on some servant�s silver tray to be anonymously dispatched when she was more than capable of walking to the post office and purchasing a stamp herself. (It was certainly no surprise for me to discover many years later that the women�s suffrage movement owed a large debt to my mother who made their efforts to get the 19th amendment passed financially possible.)
My brother and I of course could not wait for each school year to end but I can assure you that we were not afforded the luxury of just sitting around and waiting for the month of June arrive. Mother held the blueprint to our futures and there was much work to be done if we were to avoid a lifetime of just being another paying member of the audience, which would never do in her eyes. I gradually came to understand just how little regard she had for the masses that worshipped her. Audiences were nothing but fools who were blinded by her superior wizardry on the stage. She accepted each compliment in the most humble manner, signed each autograph with the most dazzling smile, but underneath it all her devotees were little more than cattle from which she was more than happy to put a steak on her plate from. The chasm that she placed between herself and the business of being herself was her secret weapon to remaining focused and in charge. Mother�s ultimate goal for us was to create for ourselves the same balance of success, adoration and sanity rarely found by others in the business. There was never any doubt that she had great love for what she did and her absolute passion for music (and all the arts) was completely genuine. She firmly believed that you could either worship, or be worshipped and she instilled in us daily how much better it was to be the conjurer, the creator, the adored.
Being her children, Mother naturally assumed we were talented and since no one ever told us otherwise, we never once questioned the matter. Around the age of eight the campaign to find out where our true talents lay began in earnest. We no longer had the luxury of spare time to play with our friends after school for instead our time was now taken up with endless myriads of lessons upon lessons. Music theory, piano, violin, ballet, painting, voice lessons� whatever it was we were to be good at, we were to have as much a head start as was possible. Instead of cutting our teeth on a school pageant or a production by a local thespian society, we made our stage debuts at the world famous La Scala opera house. Of course we were only nine years old and chasing the toy maker in the second act crowd scenes of La Boheme, but a debut is a debut. We performed any time that mother could work us into the action onstage and thus we came to know our way around the shadowy back stages and endless catacombs of all the great opera houses. We relished these opportunities, as performance time was the only time on these trips that we ever got away from the ever-watchful eyes of Nanny Lucci and mother. (Who was naturally too busy with her own performance to worry about what we were up to.) The stage manager was now in charge and his only concern was that we stay out of the way and make our entrances on time. Allen and I spent every moment not onstage investigating cavernous, dank prop rooms filled with unimaginable scores of treasures. Swords, chariots, pyramids, cauldrons� We would make up little operas of our own usually involving us as conquerors of some foreign land or knights fighting for the hand of some lovely maiden.
Mother kept only two people on staff, Nanny Lucci and a maid. As toddlers, the maid arrived three times weekly but as we got older all chores were divided between us equally. When our lessons became serious we were freed again from doing housework and the maid moved in permanently. During my endless rounds of practice arpeggios I often wished I could again return to the time when all I had to do was polish the piano and not play it. I was certain this attitude assured me of future success for our home was always full of musician visitors and not a single prominent pianist I ever asked admitted to loving the process of leaning to play it as a child.
