Looking Backward

When Manhattan's Carnegie Hall was a dozen years old, in 1903, a youngster named John Jackson Totten landed a job as an usher. Over the next 24 years, Usher Totten worked his way from top-balcony tyro to hall manager. Last week Carnegie Hall let down its hair, set up tables on its stage for the first time in history, and served up a banquet for Manager Totten's Soth anniversary.

The anniversary made 67-year-old John Totten reminiscent. He could say one thing of all the musical greats he had known: "Every one of them was a showman." Polish Soprano Marcella Sembrich always meticulously arranged her own bouquets of flowers before concert time, then, when they were presented to her at intermission, gathered them to her ample bosom with expressions of pleased surprise. No performer likes listeners to walk out early, but Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski once set something of a Carnegie Hall record for displeasure. Spotting a woman leaving while he was playing, he left the piano in midphrase, dashed through the wings and into the corridor after her, crying, "You have spoiled my concert!"

Another pianist, Walter Gieseking, has a horror of looking up from the keyboard and seeing somebody swaying in time to the music. Totten's suggested explanation: "It might make him seasick." The late great Tenor John McCormack "thought flowers were unmanly," and delivered himself of some spluttering Irish oaths when he was once pelted with roses. Conductor Arturo Toscanini has a still stronger aversion: "He thinks flowers are for dead men."

Conductors' behavior in the wings, says Totten, is often as idiosyncratic as their gestures on the podium: Boston's legendary Karl Muck would never see visitors after a performance; Serge Koussevitzky saw all comers. Leopold Stokowski makes his escape right after his last bow--"through the basement, if necessary."

Totten has a special soft spot for the late George Gershwin, first remembers him as a music-hungry youngster to whom he gave occasional free passes. Later, Composer Gershwin gave Totten free tickets to his Broadway openings.

Keeping the 2,yoo-seat hall in running order in season is a seven-day-a-week job for Totten. It calls for the administration of a 130-man staff, and for patience in dealing with artists who sometimes think they know more about his job than Totten does. And it calls for a kind of benevolent chicanery: on one occasion, a touring orchestra wired that it expected to rehearse the next day--at the time already scheduled for another rehearsal. Totten thought hard, arranged for the vans with the incoming instruments to break down just long enough for him to dovetail the schedules.

John Totten still likes his job, has no plans for retiring. He also testifies that he really likes music. But in all his years as manager of Carnegie Hall, he has never quite found time to sit through an entire performance.

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