100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 28

It is an unexpected statement to come from a bandleader and drummer known more for arrogance than modesty, but in an hour-long interview, Buddy's complex personality unfolds itself in all its richness, and he proves to be far more than a flamboyant, free-thinking musician who pulls no punches.

In Buddy's hands, a snare drum comes to life: it whispers, shouts, purrs, snarls, chuckles, gasps or roars, as the mood of the music strikes him. He began playing in 1921 at the age of 4, when his parents -- vaudeville actors from Brooklyn -- included him in their act and then made him the star. By the age of 7 he had toured the world as "Traps, the Drum Wonder." At 15, he was second only to Jackie Coogan as the highest-paid child performer in America. He began recording in 1937, joined bands headed by Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey, and finally formed his own band in 1946. Over the next 20 years, as both a drummer/bandleader and as the highest-paid sideman in the business, he made hundreds of recordings with some of the biggest names in the history of jazz -- Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Harry James, Thelonius Monk.

Then in 1966 he formed his current band, the 15-man Buddy Rich Orchestra. In December he brought the band to the chic, newly remodeled Grand Finale on West 70th Street. Seated at his drums in the center of the orchestra, he effortlessly mixes snare, tom-tom, ba.s.s drum and cymbals in a whirling, benumbing ma.s.s of sound.

Back in his huge living room, which is decorated much like a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, Buddy says that his nightclub gigs are rare. "We do about nine months on the road, which includes Europe and the Orient. All the cities of this country. Most of the tours I'm on are 90 percent concert halls and schools. ... The main reason is educational. It's good for the young people to discover all of a sudden that music isn't just a guitar and a drum and a bad out-of-tune singer. ... I think as young people become more sophisticated in their tastes, they begin to realize that jazz is just as high an art form as cla.s.sical music."

One of his chief gripes about jazz in America, he explains in a voice as rough as sandpaper, is that "during the season you might see 15 or 20 award shows on television dedicated to country and western slop, but you'll never see a jazz presentation in its true form. When there's an extended piece of music, they usually cloud it up with dancing girls and trick lighting and anything that distracts from the music, instead of presenting the music as the attraction, the way they do in Europe."

Another sore spot is the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. "I'm heavily into sports cars; I used to race long ago. I find that the restrictions placed on us today are insane, contradictory, and hypocritical. ... I don't know anyone on the highway who actually does 55 miles an hour, and it's just another way of making money for the state or the local community, and I think it's no better than a *ing stickup!"

He doesn't keep any drums in the apartment, and never practices. "I want my days to be as a man, and I want my nights to be as a working man.

In the day, I exercise, I do karate -- I have a black belt -- and totally disengage myself from the person I am at night." His apartment is shared by Buddy's wife Marie and their 25-year-old daughter Cathy, a singer.

"My wife is just as beautiful today as she was the day I married her,"

Buddy says proudly. "She used to be in pictures, but she gave it up when we married. Now she's a wife and a female and a woman, and she's not into ERA and she's not into 'I got my thing man and you got your thing.'

She's a woman, and wears dresses so that I know she's a woman. That's what I like."

He often performs free at prisons and hospitals, but refuses to give details.

"I do these things for the good that it does for me," he a.s.serts. "To have someone write about it takes the goodness away from it. I'd rather not have anybody know what I do as long as I know."

Buddy suffered a heart attack in 1959 and has had others since, but apart from giving up liquor, he has made few adjustments in his whirlwind lifestyle. "I really don't think of past illnesses," he declares. "I think I'm healthier and stronger today than I've ever been in my life. I smoke more now, and I run around more, and I do more exercise. I don't put too much reality into warnings about 'don't do this and don't do that.' Do what you have to do, and do it. If you cut out -- it was time."

WESTSIDER GERALDO RIVERA Broadcaster, author and humanitarian

6-2-79

>From hundreds of local television stations across the nation, many personalities have risen up through the ranks to become national figures on network, but few have risen to far or so fast as Geraldo Rivera.

In 1969, the year he graduated from Brooklyn Law School, Rivera decided to become a poor people's lawyer, and over the next 12 months he took part in 50 trials, most of them in criminal courts. Then his career took an abrupt turn: in June 1970 he was offered a job at WABC-TV's _Eyewitness News_, and Rivera quickly accepted. His aggressive, probing style, matchless reportorial skills, and charismatic presence gained him the a.s.sociated Press' first-place citation as top newsman of 1971 -- an award he received three more times in the next four years.

In 1975 he became the traveling co-host of _Good Morning America_ on ABC network; in the 20 months that followed, his a.s.signments took him to more than two dozen countries. Continuing his upward climb, he was next transferred to the _ABC Evening News_ with Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner. Finally in 1978, he was named to his present position -- as special correspondent for _20/20_, ABC's weekly hour-long news magazine show.

Over the past nine years, Rivera's special reports have earned him virtually all the major awards in broadcast journalism, including several Emmys. It was one of his earliest doc.u.mentaries, however, that brought him the most recognition. t.i.tled _Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace_, the 1972 expose focused on the conditions at Staten Island's Willowbrook inst.i.tution for the mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded. The broadcast resulted in an unprecedented response from viewers. So many offers of a.s.sistance poured in that Rivera was able to set up a national organization known as One to One, whose goal is to give ongoing, individualized attention to r.e.t.a.r.ded persons. Since 1973, One to One has raised more than $2 million, and helped to build almost 60 group homes throughout the New York metropolitan area, each housing approximately 12 r.e.t.a.r.ded persons of the same general age range.

On June 6 from 8 to 10:30 p.m., One to One will present a TV special that will combine top entertainment with personal accounts of r.e.t.a.r.ded people, their parents, and the role of the media in helping to shape public awareness. The entertainers include Paul McCartney and Wings, Neil Sedaka, Debby Boone, Ed Asner, Angela Lansbury and the Captain & Tennille. Geraldo Rivera shares the emceeing ch.o.r.es with his ABC colleague John Johnson.

"The show will be both taped and live," says Rivera in an interview at his West 60th Street office. "We've designed the program so that it's not a cla.s.sic telethon where every two seconds they say, 'Please send us your money.'"

Among the more dramatic moments is a tape of the Seventh Annual Wall Street Charity Fund Boxing Match, which raised thousands of dollars for One to One. "For the first year, I'm not the main event," comments Rivera, who scored a technical knockout over his opponent in 1978. "My nose was broken last year, and they took out all the scar tissue. They decided that my nose had given enough for the cause."

He learned most of his boxing "just street fighting growing up." Born 35 years ago on the Lower East Side to a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, he was christened Gerald Rivers and hispanicized his name while in college. There are no scars on his ruggedly handsome face. With his neatly styled hair, easy smile, and air of casual masculinity -- one of his favorite outfits is a denim jacket over a T-s.h.i.+rt -- Rivera could easily pa.s.s for a professional athlete turned matinee idol. Yet it is primarily his literary ability, combined with a sentimentality backed up by facts, that has made him a type of media folk hero. His doc.u.mentaries have earned him 78 humanitarian awards.

In addition to his more than 3,000 news stories, Rivera has written four books, including one on Willowbrook. "I've been back there many times, and it still stinks -- literally and figuratively," says Rivera in his customary vibrant tone. "But it's now a much smaller place. Willowbrook started with 6,500 people, and now it's well under a thousand. It has become, in fact, one of the better inst.i.tutions. But inst.i.tutions are not the answer. There's no such thing as a good big inst.i.tution."

With his commitments as chairman of One to One, his heavy travel schedule for _20/20_, and his new daily commentary on ABC Radio, Rivera likes to spend free evenings at home with his wife Sheri at their apartment near Lincoln Center. A Westsider since 1975, he names the Ginger Man and the Cafe des Artistes as his favorite dining spots.

Asked about the biggest difference between his present career and his earlier career as a lawyer, Rivera says: "Now I have the power to cause positive change in a dramatic way. When you have an audience of tens of millions of people, it's a multiple in terms of influence and impact, and the effective delivery of information. As a broadcaster, I've found that one person can make a difference."

WESTSIDER NED ROREM Author and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer

6-17-78

The world has always been fascinated by artists who excel in more than one field. There was Richard Wagner, for example, who wrote the words and the music to all his operas. Cole Porter and Bob Dylan are two others who have proven their mastery of both language and composition.

But while these three men combined their talents to produce great songs, Ned Rorem has employed his musical and literary gifts in a different way.

By keeping the two separate, he has gained a huge reputation as a composer of serious music and also as a prose writer of formidable style.

In 1976 he won the Pulitzer Prize for music. And last month Simon and Schuster published his eighth book, _An Absolute Gift_.

At 54, Rorem has become somewhat of a fixture on the New York artistic scene, who no longer sparks the controversy that he once did. But in Paris, where he spent nine years during his early career in the 1950s, Rorem was as well-known for his socializing as for his music. With his handsome, youthful good looks and boyish charm, his biting wit, and his wide knowledge of the arts, he became a close companion of many of the leading literary and musical figures of France.

His recollections of those years were carefully recorded in his first book, _The Paris Diary_, published in 1966 amid fanfare on both sides of the Atlantic. It was quickly followed by _The New York Diary_, which was more popular still. Since then, Rorem's books have appeared at fairly regular intervals, all of them either diaries or essays, or a combination of both.

In print, Rorem comes across as being somewhat disillusioned with life and art. In person, however, he is a warm, sincere host. With a tendency toward shyness that does not come through in his books. Rorem makes all of his remarks so matter-of-factly that nothing he says seems vicious or outrageous.

Leaning back on the sofa of his large Westside apartment, with one hand resting against his chin and the other stroking his pet cat Wallace, Rorem answers one of the first questions saying that yes, he is upset by the negative review that _An Absolute Gift_ received in the _New York Times_.

"A bad review in the Times can kill a book," he explains. "It killed my last book. And I don't think it's fair that they gave my new book to the same reviewer. He made some of the same statements that he did last time, with almost the same wording. But just today I got a very good review from the _Was.h.i.+ngton Post_. And I hope there will be something in the _New York Review of Books_. That's even more important than the _Times_."

Rorem is considerably more versatile as a composer than as a writer. His output includes five operas, three symphonies, and "literally hundreds of vocal pieces for solo voice and ensembles of various sizes. And instrumental music of every description." He is considered by many to be the world's greatest living composer of art songs. Generally he sets other people's words to music. Asked for the definition of an art song, Rorem says, "I hate the term. I composed dozens of arts songs before ever hearing the word. It's a song sung by a trained singer in concert halls."

The piece that won him the Pulitzer, surprisingly, was not a song at all, but an orchestral work t.i.tled _Air Music_, which was commissioned for the U.S. Bicentennial by the late Thomas Schippers and the Cincinnati Symphony. This summer the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy will premiere a new, major composition of Rorem's, _Sunday Morning_.

"I feel very, very, very lucky that I'm able to support myself as a composer of serious music," he says. "My income is not so much from royalties as from commissions, prizes, fellows.h.i.+ps, and official handouts, such as the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Fellows.h.i.+p, which I now am living on."

Born in Indiana and raised in Chicago, Rorem began composing music at the age of 10. He was never attracted to pop music, and today he likes it less than ever. "Inasmuch as pop music goes hand in hand with high volume, I bitterly resent it," he says. "When the Met Opera gives a concert in Central Park the same night that the Schaefer Beer Festival gives one of their concerts, they're crushed like the runt beneath the belly of a great fat sow."

When a desire for more s.p.a.ce and lower rent drove Rorem from Greenwich Village to the West Side 10 years ago, he feared that he was moving to "a big, nonartistic, bourgeois ghetto." He soon changed his mind. In _An Absolute Gift_ he makes the statement: "From 116th Street to 56th Street, the West Side contains more first-rate artists, both performers and creators, than any concentrated neighborhood since Paris in the 1920s."

One of Rorem's favorite Westside businesses is Patelson's Half Price Music Shop at 160 W. 56th Street, right across from the stage door of Carnegie Hall. "It's the best music shop in America," he testifies. "They have everything or they can get it for you."

All of Rorem's books carry a fair amount of philosophy. But the only principle that the artist claims to have stuck by during the entire course of his life is: "I've never sold out. I've never done what I didn't want to do.

... I've never been guided by other than my heart. And certainly not by money."

WESTSIDER JULIUS RUDEL Director of the New York City Opera

4-22-78

In 1943, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made an announcement that the old Mecca Temple on West 55th Street would be converted into the City Center of Music and Drama. As a result, a new major company was born -- the New York City Opera.

A young Jewish immigrant, Julius Rudel, who had fled Austria with his family not long before, immediately went to City Center in search of a job. He was hired as a rehearsal pianist, and in the years to come his talents blossomed forth in many areas. Working quietly behind the scenes, he became the Opera's indispensable Mr. Everything, who not only knew every phase of show production, but could be called on to conduct the orchestra and even take the place of a missing cast member on stage.

Rudel's versatile musicians.h.i.+p and his personal charm did much to knit the company together.