Louis Roney: Glass Houses

An old American Indian proverb goes: “Don’t judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

Can we ever learn how to judge even ourselves really fairly – to shut out hubris and to arrive at an objectivity mitigated only by self-forgiveness?

When you’re in the check-out line at the supermarket, can you escape the headlines screaming at you from racks of strategically-placed scandal sheets?

These outrageous magazines report as reliable fact all manner of immoral and/or outlandish things which famous people supposedly have done.

Once spread, can a vicious lie ever be effectively erased? Lies have long and tenacious afterlives. Retractions make dull reading while fabrications refuse to lie down and die.

Can we ever learn to judge other people dispassionately? How can we dare to pass judgment upon those who are, to quote Thoreau, only “marching to a different drummer?”

In this, the autumn of my life, I think of the idols of my youth, of how they fell from grace as I came to learn more about them. And, I think too of their resurrection to lofty pedestals after I stopped judging them – stopped insisting that they excel not only in their own superhuman things, but in things all too human.

Oh, the heroic athletes who toppled to dust when my idealism butted heads with reality! “The truth shall set thee free” – oh, yeah? Well, maybe, down the road.... But first, the truth shall make thee pretty damned miserable.

Whattaya mean, Babe Ruth is also the “Sultan of Beer Drinkers?”

Bobby Jones did what in Hollywood?

You mean to tell me Jack Dempsey was a draft dodger in the war?

Just say again that Bill Tilden was queer, and I’ll knock your block off!

Much later, I heard that lots of my favorite singers reveled not only in high notes but in high lives as well. I knew established singers and managers in New York, I heard lots of rumors – many of which I later learned were true. Artists’ amorous peccadilloes are quick to leak to those in the profession. Sexual adventurousness makes the tastiest gossip and is, in my opinion, the easiest transgression to understand and to forgive.

But in musical circles in those days, little if anything regarding the bizarre in a singer’s private life ever hit the press or the airwaves.

Word of mouth was the only accepted medium. Widely-asked questions often answered themselves: Aren’t singers incurably romantic? Can they help falling in love with each other when they’re singing all those passionate love duets?

Of Caruso’s three kids, why was only his daughter Gloria born in wedlock? Did his two sons’ mother, also a singer, really refuse to marry the great Caruso?

Did Ezio Pinza really “put the make” on every attractive woman he saw? Why did he split with the great German soprano, Elisabeth Rethberg, with whom he had lived for years in New York?

Did Mario Del Monaco suddenly leave Italy for several years in the middle of his career? Was he mixed up with a young girl – a relative?

What about the so-called “big boozers” among singers? Were John McCormack, Jussi Bjoerling, Lawrence Tibbett, and John Charles Thomas really the monumental topers they were reputed to be? How did they manage to sing?

Was Eleanor Steber a wee bit tipsy when she fell off the horse in “Girl of the Golden West” during that Saturday matinee broadcast that proved to be her last performance at the Met?

Did great tenor Franco Corelli, who walked off the stage at the end of the first act of that very performance, later cave in to stage fright at the apex of his fame?

Did Kirsten Flagstad customarily drink a whole quart of champagne while warming up in her dressing-room before she sang?

Did great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson leave the Met at the top of her career because the I.R.S. was set to impound her Met paychecks to pay back-taxes? How did she manage to return to the Met years later?

Was Grace Moore really a poor little mountain gal from Tennessee – or was she a very well-off girl who went to fashionable Ward-Belmont school – a haven for daughters of Southern landed gentry?

With all the money Tito Schipa had earned and saved, why did that great tenor’s corpse lie for weeks in a Brooklyn funeral home until my teacher, Renato Bellini, and his wife arranged to have their old friend properly buried? And Tito’s very young wife, where was she?

What about the tragic death of my friend, the handsome tenor Brian Sullivan? Why was his dead body found on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland after a rehearsal of “Lohengrin” under fired Met conductor George Sebastian?

Oh, where have they gone, those halcyon days when people could buy a loaf of bread at the store without confronting printed headlines which assassinate people’s reputations, wreck personal lives, and sour their hard-won love affairs with an adoring public.

Alas, the great old credo, “noblesse oblige,” has been replaced by today’s ignoble, “S___w you! (Sue me if you can afford it.)”