Word: rubinstein
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...MANY YEARS by Arthur Rubinstein; Knopf; 600 pages...
...this concluding volume of one of the true-life romantic sagas of our time, Arthur Rubinstein conquers new continents, uncounted women and, seemingly, mortality itself. He pursues his improbable but triumphant course down to the present, when, at 93, retired from public performing, partially blind, he still reigns as a favorite of the gods, an ageless symbol of the unquenchable passion for the well-lived life. His wide-eyed narrative, dictated to an amanuensis, is diffuse and repetitive, often couched in a quaint, flowery style. But his gusto and warmth carry him through, as they have in so many technically...
...Rubinstein's first volume, My Young Years, the settings are international, the incidents colorful and the supporting cast spectacular. He has a night on the town with the Prince of Wales, whose spindly piano he inadvertently demolishes with one mighty chord. An actress in Greenwich Village cajoles him into playing by standing on her head, "exposing her bare secrets"; she turns out to be Tallulah Bankhead. In an audience with Mussolini, he feeds il Duce a line for a speech. He sits for Picasso, who sees him 24 different ways. Round the world he goes, bumping over the Alps...
...tireless in the bedroom as on the road or concert platform. His chief paramour in this volume is the sensuous Italian contralto Gabriella Besan-zoni. She and Rubinstein tour Latin America like a couple of gypsy children, piling up gold pesos under their bed as they go. Other liaisons are briefer: the demimondaine "Charlottavotte," whom he enjoys between the lifeboats on a crossing to South America; the American actress who is so enchanted by his playing that she offers herself to him for the night as a tribute; and many a French bourgeoise "who apparently needed a diversion from...
Incredible as it seems, at 50, with four decades of performing behind him, Rubinstein had yet to catch on in the U.S. Then he signs with a "fat and important-looking middle-aged gentleman" named Sol Hurok, and soon America too is at his feet. When World War II drives him from his Paris home, he settles for a few years in Hollywood. There he earns huge fees for dubbing the sound track of films like Song of Love, buys a Cadillac and plunges into the party circuit with such elegant cronies as Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann and Marlene Dietrich...