Word: mehtas
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Meantime, his marriage was burning out. "I would come home from a world of travel and music," Mehta says, "and smell the diapers boiling. We grew apart." In 1964 the Mehtas got a divorce. "It just happened," Carmen says now. "I never did anything nasty to him, and he never did anything nasty to me." Mehta asked his younger brother Zarin, an accountant who had immigrated to Montreal via England, to look in occasionally on Carmen and the children (a daughter Zarina, now 9, and a son Merwan, 7). Zarin looked in occasionally, then more often. In 1966 Zubin...
...Mehta's attachment to Israel and all things Jewish is even closer than his bond with Vienna. "I would convert to Judaism," he often quips, "if the operation didn't hurt so much"-but he claims that he follows his own faith devoutly. When Barenboim married Jacqueline Du Pre in Israel last summer, Mehta flew over, donned a skullcap and prayer shawl, and joined the Orthodox Jewish ceremony as "Moishe Cohen." The officiating rabbi became suspicious because Mehta did not speak Hebrew. "I'm a Persian Jew," Mehta explained to him, "and we don't speak...
Living-Room Opera. With his domestic ties severed in Montreal, Mehta has focused his interests in Los Angeles. Besides the Philharmonic and his parents, who moved there in 1964 when his father became a teacher-conductor at U.C.L.A., those interests prominently include, in the words of one of his friends, "girls, girls, girls." A long, tempestuous affair with the "baby Callas" of the opera world, fiery Greek-Canadian Soprano Teresa Stratas, is now stalemated, as much because of conflicts between their careers as between their temperaments. But Mehta has shown no inclination to mope around about it-at least...
...Mehta is a gypsy in his private life too. He has no home, lives year-round in hotels, refuses to hire a manager, pressagent or secretary. He entertains in restaurants. "Come, come, come," he urges after a performance, sweeping everybody in his dressing room along, and conducting the seating arrangements like a symphony. At an Indian establishment such as Manhattan's Kashmir, he orders a scorching native dish like shrimp vindalo; elsewhere he will eat ordinary American food as long as it is liberally doused with Tabasco sauce. His table talk ranges knowledgeably over such topics as Kafka, Canadian...
...Tempest. To keep in touch with distant friends, Mehta runs up telephone bills of $1,500 a month, thinks nothing of playing recordings by the great German Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler over a transcontinental wire to Barenboim. Sleepless in New York City at 5 a.m. one day just before New Year's, he suddenly realized that in Vienna, where it was 11 a.m., the Vienna Philharmonic would be playing one of its traditional New Year's Johann Strauss concerts. He put in a call to the concert hall, had the manager hold the phone...