Still, she had been too shy to initiate the conversation, assuming — perhaps hoping — that sooner or later Terry would broach the subject.
And now here they were perilously close to trespassing on the most intimate details of her personal life.
“Why so silent?” he inquired amicably. “Or are you thinking of the best approach to catch Mr. Rossi in our butterfly net?”
“I’ll be frank,” Maria began. “I’m a bit reluctant to broach this with Danny because it kind of blurs the lines of demarcation between our separate work and our… marriage.”
She hesitated. And then suddenly added, “Hey look, on second thought, I agree about his loyalty to Philadelphia. I’ll bring up the idea of his doing a series for us, if we can come up with a concept.”
“Well, Maria, you’ve got the creative brain. What do you think Danny Rossi should do for a television encore?”
Instinctively she knew. “Well, if I can say so, he is one of the best pianists of his generation —”
“The very best,” Moran interrupted.
“Anyway, I would think he’d be the perfect person to do the history of keyboard music.”
“Something like ‘from harpsichord to synthesizer,’ ” Terry replied, kindled by the notion. “I think that’s absolutely fantastic. If you snare him, I’ll squeeze every penny from our budget to give him the lushest deal this station ever offered.”
Maria nodded and stood up. “Of course, he’ll probably say no,” she said quietly.
“Well, if he does, I’ll love you all the same.”
To her surprise, the idea excited Danny. “I’d have only two ironclad conditions,” he said. “First, the tapings have got to be tailored to fit the days I’m already committed to being in Philly.”
“Obviously,” she agreed.
“And second, I want you to be the producer.”
“Why me?” she asked, somewhat taken aback. “Wouldn’t that be uncomfortable?”
“Hey listen,” he replied, “if we’re going to match the level of the other series, I’ve got to have the best possible studio team. And you are without question the savviest producer they have.”
“Have you been reading my clippings?”
“No, I’ve been running some of your videotapes late at night. I think your work’s terrific.”
“All right, Rossi,” she replied, unable to mask her delight. “But I warn you — you play temperamental artist with me and I’ll shoot the whole damn thing from your bad side.”
“Okay, boss.” He smiled. And then added, “Hey, we could tout this thing as coming ‘from the team that brought you Arcadia.’ ”
Maria lay awake that night wondering what was on Danny’s mind. She hadn’t thought her argument was that persuasive. To be honest, however good their studio facilities now were, they were still no match for New York or L.A. And was that quip about Arcadia anything but a casual joke?
They had been so happy in those Harvard clays, their collaboration animated by their passion.
“How does he do it?” an astounded Terry Moran exclaimed, as they sat side by side in the control booth.
“Well,” Maria answered proudly, “he knows the keyboard repertoire backwards and forwards. And, as you can see, he loves to drive himself.”
Even she had not been able to persuade Danny to devote a fill day for taping each of the thirteen episodes. To the amazement of the crew, who bad never seen such prodigious energy, he insisted on doing three hour-long programs in a single day — and night — session.
“God, where does he get the strength?” wondered the engineer. “I mean, I sit here at the end of the day with my face melting on the control board. And he’s out there talking and playing like some virtuoso Peter Pan.”
“Yes,” Maria agreed thoughtfully, “there is a bit of the Peter Pan in him.”
But there was more than that. There was Dr. Whitney’s cocktail, too. In fact, Danny could no longer fly on merely one weekly injection. So the doctor had provided him with capsules that included, among other things, Methadrine to tide him over.
The second program of that session, an hour on Chopin, was musically and verbally flawless. With typical Rossi bravado, he’d left the hardest segment for the very end: an introduction to that keyboard acrobat, Franz Liszt.
Danny was munching a sandwich in his dressing room when Maria poked her head in.
“Mr. Rossi,” she said, “I don’t think you could possibly top that one. Why don’t we wrap and do Liszt next time?”
“No way, Madame Producer. I want to finish this taping with a tour de force.”
“Aren’t you tired at all?”
“A bit,” he confessed. “But when I see camera one light up, it’ll turn me right on.”
“I bet you wish Liszt were still alive, Danny.” She smiled. “I somehow think you’d like to see his face when you outdo him at his own cadenzas.”
He rose, walked over, and kissed her on the cheek. “See you on the floor in fifteen.”
Danny showered, changed clothes, redid his makeup, and walked down to appear punctually at 8:30 P.M. for his third and final taping of the day.
The first half-hour went with metronomic perfection. Danny sketched Liszt’s childhood in Hungary; his father’s early pressure on the boy; his debut at the age of nine; his lessons with, among others, Salieri — Mozart’s nemesis — and Czerny — Beethoven’s greatest pupil — who so admired the young boy’s talent that he refused any fee for his lessons.
Watching his face on the monitor in the control room, Maria could not help but feel that at this moment her husband was thinking of his own teacher, Dr. Landau.
And so it continued, with colorful accounts of the great pianist’s conquests first of Paris, then of London — all before he was sixteen.
“It was at this point,” Danny commented, “that the young musician began to feel the strain of his endless schedule of travel and concertizing. He was, one may say, a jet-setter before the invention of jets. In fact, it was scarcely yet the age of the railroad. And it took its toll.
“When he went with his father to the seashore to recuperate, the elder Liszt, also weakened by their travels, contracted typhoid and passed away. His final words to his son were, ‘Je crains pour toi les femmes,’ roughly translated, ‘I’m worried about what women might do to your music.…’ ”
Staring intently at the monitor, Maria suddenly felt her heart beat faster. Could he possibly be talking to her? Could he be saying in public what he was afraid to say in private? That he had wasted his youth on empty promiscuity. But at last was changing… growing up? She now realized why he had left this program till last. For he knew that — perhaps for the first time in his life — he would be speaking from the heart.
They stopped for technical reasons, tape changes, and even one or two muffed lines. Thus, it was well after ten by the time they reached the most difficult part of the broadcast.
Danny was explaining how Liszt deliberately created music so difficult that only he himself could play it. And in fact, when his pieces were published, he had to revise and simplify the music for the hands of normal mortals.
It had been Danny’s devilish inspiration that, at this point in the program, he would play from the original manuscripts to show how the great man himself might have sounded.
Knowing what a challenge lay ahead for her husband, Maria called a ten-minute break, during which she made the crew double-check everything. She wanted no mechanical foul-ups, lest a perfect performance by Danny require a retake because of some technical failure. She also wanted to give him a breather to gather strength at this late hour of the evening.