Goodbye, Little Caesar

In Chicago one day last week, James Caesar Petrillo, 66, called in the press. He scurried nimbly behind the gleaming 8-ft. walnut desk (''the biggest damn desk I could find at Marshall Field's"), flung himself down in the swivel chair and surveyed the crowded office with snapping blue eyes. "You gotta fight like hell to get up." he said, "then it's goddam tough to get out."

After 18 years as president of the American Federation of Musicians, the heavy-jowled Little (5 ft. 6 in.) Caesar of U.S. music had decided to call it quits. "I don't want to get out," he said, "but I'm tired." He added that he would stay on in his $26,000-a-year job as president of Chicago's Local 10 until he can get his half-pay pension ($10,000 a year) from the A.F.M. next year. Union officials began pleading with him to stay on longer.

Calling the Tune. The son of a Chicago sewer digger, Petrillo ''went into the union business" fulltime at 23 after he had failed to make an earning go of playing the trumpet ("If there was 14 trumpets in the band, I was the 14th trumpet"). When he hit the top, he called the tune: nobody, from Liberace to Rubinstein, it turned out. could play an instrument for pay in the U.S. without his consent. "What's the difference," he demanded, "between Heifetz and a fiddler in a tavern?" Once he decided to give a concert honoring Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly for political favors, and "suggested" to 23 bandleaders, including Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring. Tommy Dorsey and Kay Kyser, that they bring their orchestras to Chicago at their own expense. They all came, and with them the orchestras of three national radio networks.

While gleefully making enemies, all of Caesar's gall was lavished on a stubborn fight for the rights of musicians against mechanization. He fathered the union contract that requires network stations to hire a quota of "live" musicians whether they ever tootle a note or not. In 1951 he removed one major obstacle to the release of old films to TV by approving the project, provided that the studios 1) rescored the films (i.e., started from scratch with union musicians), and 2) paid 5% of TV profits into the Music Performance Trust Fund. He scored his biggest victory over canned music in 1942 when he pulled his musicians out of all the nation's recording studios and demanded that they get a royalty on every record sold. The record companies held out for 27 months, and President Franklin Roosevelt made a personal plea to Petrillo. But Jimmy stuck to his guns, wangled a contract that last year brought the musicians' fund about $5.5 million from recordings.

What's Featherbedding? Last week Petrillo was his old peppery self. "You know," he said, "music salaries have gone up at least 200% since I became president [of Local 10] in 1923. I remember I played from 8 to 3 on Saturday night in the Belmont ballroom. Five bucks. Now you'd get 20. But what we're looking for is work. If the salary is $300 a week and no one is working, that don't mean a thing to me." Did he approve of featherbedding? He snorted. "What is featherbedding? We have a rule you have to have 15 men at a banquet at the Palmer House. I Say they want twelve. We have the right to make a minimum, just like they got a right to say they just want twelve."

Would he pose with his trumpet? "I'll pose with it," said Petrillo, "but I won't touch the mouthpiece. These goddam germs." (His phobia against germs is so strong that he will only touch pinkies when introduced; legend has it that in his long career he has shaken hands with only two people: Harry Truman and Celeste Holm.) Suddenly, he tired of the questions. "I wish you guys would get the hell out of here so I could get a bottle of beer." Then he looked at the trumpet lying on the desk. Said Little Caesar: "Good thing I don't have to go back to that trumpet, boy."

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