What Happened to Jose?

Jose Iturbi, at 55, is a pianist who is regarded by a vast public as a saint of the keyboard, by critics as a fallen angel. Twenty-two years ago, when Valencia-born Jose made his U.S. debut, there were hardly enough superlatives to fit his playing. But last March, after his first Carnegie Hall recital in six years, the same judges shook their saddened heads, damned him as a perfunctory performer. They conceded that Iturbi still had his nimble technique, delicate shadings and tone colors. But, as the Herald Tribune's Jerome D. Bohm put it, that made it "all the more regrettable" that he "should care so little about the profounder aspects of his art."

What happened to Jose? So far as he is concerned, nothing. He scorns the critics as people who have decided "that a classical musician must be compatible with their ideas of what a classical musician should be." Adds Iturbi: "If I am not good enough, the audiences will not come any more and I shall give up playing."

"Million-Sized Audiences." A gay and garrulous showman, Iturbi doesn't have to worry about audiences staying away. In eight Hollywood films, he has created an Iturbi following of millions--many of whom never heard a concert pianist in their lives until they went to the neighborhood movie. His records (Victor) have earned him well over $100,000 a year. Last week he wound up his latest U.S. tour with a concert in Miami which won the shouting approval of 2,300 fans. It was a typical Iturbi crowd-pleaser. After his first number, Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata ("a mechanical interpretation with some sweetness interpolated," said the Miami Herald), he noticed latecomers struggling for their seats. He promptly did a pantomime of launching into his second number, running his hands up & down the keyboard without touching the keys. The audience liked it so well that he d'id it again. After the concert, he signed autographs for an hour.

Iturbi's friends, as well as his critics, agree that it was Hollywood that brought out the showman in Jose. Says Producer Joe Pasternak, the man who persuaded him to make his first movie: "At first he didn't care for audiences. But when he had appeared in a couple of pictures, he began to feel the pulsing of million-sized audiences. It excited him, and he began playing to the biggest crowds in the world--the people who watch movie screens."

Jose himself points out that his career in show business began long before Hollywood--in Valencia, at the age of seven. A child prodigy, he got the job of beating out tunes in the local nickelodeon to help support his family. "From the beginning, music meant money to me--it was very serious."

"Be a Good Fellow." Jose is well accustomed to the money now, frets that anybody should think he is not serious about the music. Resting from his latest tour in his porticoed mansion in Beverly Hills, where he lives like a grandee, he reflected last week on his Hollywood career. "When the movies first asked me to play for them, I was worried that they might ask me to play popular music and to play it in a way quite different from the standards of concert playing. But I was allowed to play classical music.

"Then one day Mr. Pasternak said to me: 'Jose, you don't have to do this if you don't want to, but what about a number with Judy Garland--semi-popular?' I thought I would be a good fellow so I said O.K.--on one condition--that it should be a really hot number, at the top of its own class. You know the result. I played boogie-woogie, and I enjoyed it!" (The movie: Thousands Cheer, with Gene Kelly, Kathryn Grayson, Judy Garland and a clutch of other stars, 1943.)

To Please. Playing boogie-woogie once, says Jose, did not mean that he was giving up classical music. "I did it to please. It was like a joke at a party. A man tells one story and it comes off. Maybe he tells another, then another. But if he keeps on telling stories, very soon people do not take anything he says seriously. I did not want this thing to happen to me so I cut the boogie-woogie short. I tell only one joke--then I stop."

The fallen-angel school of critics just disagreed. They thought Jose had never stopped.

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