Louis Roney: Rustic rivals

There’s a guy I’ll always remember as I last saw him — parental and accusatory — far from the impecunious country boy he had once been. I had known him personally for many years as a charming, affable, rich businessman and philanthropist, a guy with the power to keep himself center stage no matter what subject was being discussed.

I, as an opera singer, (an activity which a small bizarre segment of the race calls entertainment), am apt to color the facts of my life innocently one way or the other just to keep my acting from getting rusty.

Now, I did not come from where most operas or opera singers come from, therefore, when I was singing in Europe I couldn’t feel “right at home” in Mantua, where “Rigoletto” takes place, or in Verona, where “Roméo et Juliette” is set.

Admittedly, standing on stage in the Berlin State Opera, singing “La bohème” — an Italian opera — in German, I found myself asking myself how I managed to get there from the old red-brick grammar school on Park Avenue in the innocent little village of Winter Park where I grew up in the 1930s.

Ditto to my stint at the Paris Opera — or even as soloist with the New York Philharmonic.

I remember vaguely telling myself in those days that I was in the “right ”place — that, if I didn’t absolutely belong on that stage, there was no way on earth I could have gotten there. Let me disclose to you an important incidental: opera stars in any European country are treated as among the most important people in town. Normally they are well paid, fêted and respected in a manner just a level below that which Orlando reserves for its most important and highest-paid citizens, namely, basketball players— (though any one of the Magic players may receive a salary roughly the sum of the wages of whole casts of opera singers!).

I am working on a treatise that justifies this curious phenomenon, a piece called, “Why Throwing a Ball Through a Hoop is a Greater Contribution to the Evolution of the Human Psyche than Singing Beethoven.” I have a sinking feeling I’ll have trouble getting this thing published, so let me know if you want a copy.

I’m meandering a bit in discussing that man I told you about who got upset with me.

How did I make him so mad?

You see, talking with him, I had referred to myself as a “country boy,” that’s how.

I’ve often called myself, “just your run-of-the-mill country boy opera star ” just to make people from Hahira and Yeehaw Junction feel at home with a black sheep who has strayed so far from the rustic fold. It’s a bit of an act, but well meant. A guy born in 1921 and raised in a Winter Park of some 2,000 citizens, I, as a kid wasn’t exactly a model of cosmopolitanism. I found that out when I invaded Boston at 17. But the aforementioned gentleman in question was clearly offended at my applying the adjective “country” to myself.

Recently, while polishing up my Italian by reading in Machiavelli’s “Il Principe,” I came to understand the man whom I had angered. This outraged Florida chap, who had enjoyed a phenomenal business career, had emerged from a past probably even more “bucolic” than mine — and was jealously proud of it.

I think now that he was teed off because he assumed that I was attempting to steal his act.

Moral: It’s perilous to be modest when you’re trying to “out-country” an honest-to-God hick.

About Roney: Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF 2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award (Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)