Word: egos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Musical Ego. Into Miller's mid-Manhattan office three days a week troop 40 or 50 professionally bright-eyed song publishers, each with a few tunes for Miller's examination. If he likes a song, it's in; if not, he may edit or recommend. Next step for Miller: find the right singer to sing it. Says he: "Every singer has certain sounds he makes better than others. Frankie Laine is sweat and hard words-he's a guy beating the pillow, a purveyor of basic emotions. Guy Mitchell is better with happy-go-lucky songs...
...music as he is from RCA Victor's Christmas list. He foregoes nightclubbing and dancing, avoids any nonbusiness connection whatsoever with pop songs. Says he: "I wouldn't buy that stuff for myself. There's no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere...
When the mood is on him, Lanza, can gorge his ego as freely as his stomach, and his studio bosses have sometimes tried needling him to deflate his head as well as his hide. Whether such needling does him much good is a question. Lanza hungers for praise of his voice, and, though he gets plenty, from 500 fan letters a day and from the personal entourage of nine which he rules like a comic-opera Latin American dictator, he also supplies it himself. From idolizing Enrico Caruso as far back as his childhood, he has passed through the stages...
Busy as a beaver, he estimated his peak output at 350,000 words a year, occasionally resolved to ease off. "My New Year resolution," he swore to Ego at the beginning of 1945: "To do the work of two men instead of three." By then, that 13-year labor of self-love had grown to seven volumes (final total: nine). Into it, Agate had poured his "insane desire" for immortality, and a volley of educated banter ranging from Bernhardt to boogie-woogie, censorship to Sartre...
Ibsen & Spam. Like the rest of the series, The Later Ego (Egos 8 & 9) is larded with letters from friends and fans, old reviews, quotations from favorite authors. But these are only walk-on bits. The leading "character" is still James Agate, and the role he plays with the most zest is Victorian-conservative-at-bay. From modern art to modern man, he was convinced that the 20th Century was a dubious conspiracy against good sense, good taste, and good James Agate. Wearing the chips on his shoulders like epaulets, he waged a steady duel with his time...