Roger, Over and Out

While the prelims are on, the champ goes through his warm-up routine. He flexes hands that have been strengthened by years of squeezing a hard rubber ball. He slips on the gloves for a fast workout on a punching bag. Using an old fighter's trick, he smears Vaseline around his eyebrows to keep perspiration out of his eyes. Then Roger Williams, amateur boxer and former welterweight champion of Idaho's Farragut Naval Training Station, steps onstage for his nightly bout with the piano.

In his most recent engagement at Colorado Springs' Broadmoor Hotel, he came out of his corner fast with the arpeggios of The Sound of Music. Then, with a flurry of rights, he smashed into the weaving octaves of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody. He coasted into the sweeping glissandi of Impossible Dream, and soon the affair turned into a waltz--Fascination, in fact.

Milking the Melody. As the mood became sentimental, the audience breathed "aaahs" of recognition for their favorites, and some women dabbed a handkerchief to their eyes. "The biggest thing I have to offer," says Williams, "is emotion. I think I play with more feeling than any other pop pianist." He eschews technical razzle-dazzle in order to milk the melody, memorizes the lyrics to all his songs so that he can phrase his playing as a singer would (sometimes mouthing the lyrics as he plays). When he gives tunes the full treatment on his recordings, the beat bounces, choirs carol, strings sigh--and listeners buy. In 14 years his 52 albums have sold close to 15 million copies, making Williams, at 43, not only the largest-selling pianist in modern recording history but also the largest-selling instrumentalist of any sort.

What kind of man could play such overblown, frankly corny music with such conviction? The kind who could bemuse the slick show-biz world by acting like the earnest former Sunday-school teacher that he is, addressing his musicians as "gang" or "troops" (except in moments of strain, when he calls them "gentlemen"). The kind who could propose to his wife after their first date, then play the organ for the processional at their wedding--he darted from organ to altar just in time. The kind whose favorite song is To Each His Own and who tacks maxims on the wall of his ten-room hilltop home in Encino, Calif., such as: "In every work that you begin, do it with all your heart and you will prosper."

Everything By Ear. Williams was born Louis Weertz, the son of a Lutheran minister from the corn country of Nebraska and Iowa. At eight, he had learned to play 13 instruments by ear, but he did not get serious about the piano until one of his teachers told him he would never be anything but a music teacher. "That's when I started practicing eight, ten hours a day," he says. "I had a tremendous desire to be famous." He needed it. At Iowa's Drake University, where he got a master's degree in music, professors patronized him because he eked out his income playing in nightclubs. In the Navy he almost lost his right index finger when a gun breech slammed shut on it. In New York, where he studied classics at Juilliard and jazz with Teddy Wilson and Lennie Tristano, he and his wife existed for seven jobless months on spaghetti--even after Williams had won on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts by banging out a symphonic arrangement of I Got Rhythm.

Finally, in 1954, President Dave Kapp of Kapp Records heard Williams play in the cocktail lounge of Manhattan's Madison Hotel. Kapp signed him to the contract that led to Autumn Leaves, his first hit record. That was the end of classics and jazz--and spaghetti. Williams' sole, simple ambition since then has been "to be the greatest pop pianist who ever lived." As the song says, to each his own.

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