Word: jose
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
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...
...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...