Harp Column Blogs: Carl SwansonArchive

Well I hope you all enjoyed the Mildred Dilling saga.  When I decided to write it, I never dreamed it would end up so long.  I hadn't revisited those memories in a long time(she died 24 years ago), and a lot came flooding back.

A very small number of people got annoyed at some of the things I said.  I don't look upon what I wrote as a  'warts and all' accounting of her.  Reading it over again, I don't look at a single sentence as being critical of her, or in any way derogatory.  That's simply who she was, and to bring her personality to life, all of the things I said belong there.

I was listening to Public radio the other day, and someone was interviewed who is heading a project to interview as many people as possible who knew Leonard Bernstein well, and in particular, his childhood friends.  At one point this woman said, "you know, they are all getting up in years, and before too long there won't be anyone left.  We wanted to do this before it was too late."  Well, that's how I feel about what I wrote about Mildred.  There are other people who knew her much earlier in her life and under different circumstances, and I wish more of them would write what they know about her.

It's fascinating to me how some people have carved out a career for themselves with the harp.  I just rented a harp for a few days to a woman who was flying in from out west to do a 4 day job at a resort hotel on Cape Cod.  She plays on Cruise ships most of the time, and she plays 5 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never has music in front of her and never repeats her repertoire on a one or two week cruise.  She has 4,000 to 5,000 tunes to draw on and plays them all by ear or from memory.  Unbelievable.  My good friend Jan Jennings in Florida can do the same thing. And I know there are other harpists out there that can do it too.

Talk to you all soon.

Back to my own experience.  Each time I went to New York, I had to go over to Mildred's apartment and do some work.  It was obligatory.  She would never hire me to just regulate a harp.  She would 'buy' an hour or two of my time and then have me fix a buzz on this harp, adjust a pedal rod on that one, change one or two felts on yet another instrument.  Sam Milligan told me recently she did exactly the same thing to him.  I guess she looked at a full regulation as a waste of money.

If she needed to change a string, or rather, if she needed me to change a string, she would bring out several shopping bags filled to overflowing with used harp strings(wires included!), and fish through those for a useable replacement string.  I think she had kept every single string that had ever been used on her harps. I never once saw a new string envelope at her apartment.

The first time I had one of her harps in my shop for repair, she  called me almost as soon as I had received it and asked in a sweet, innocent voice, "What are you going to do with the strings you take off that instrument?"  Not knowing what was coming, I simply said, "I'm going to throw them away."  "Oh don't do that!" she bellowed at me.  "I have a lot of instruments, and I can use those strings.  I want you to save them and give them to me when you return the instrument." The next time I had an instrument of hers in my shop, she did the same thing, again asking what I was going to do with them.  This time, knowing what was coming, I said, "I'm going to cut them all off and throw them away."  I smiled while she chewed me out again about saving the strings. I have to admit, it was fun goading her!

One time I decided to go to New York just for a short vacation.  No harps, no regulations.  Just visit museums, maybe see a show, and most importantly, hang out with friends.  So I didn't tell a soul I was going.  Fifteen minutes after arriving at my friend's apartment the phone rang.  He answered it, looked at me with a frown and mouthed, "It's Mildred."  I took the phone, dumfounded that she had found me.  "Why didn't you tell me you were coming to New York?" she barked.  "You should always tell me when you are coming down!"  She had apparently called my home in Boston and my house mate innocently told her that I was in New York for a few days.

At some point she put me on her annual Christmas letter list, and I would  receive these long(10 pages or so) accounts of her past year.  I believe I kept them, and if I find them, I may print one here.  They give you an idea of how she perceived herself.

Mildred was a complex and at times contradictory person.  Surprisingly, in spite of her near obsession with money, she was generous to her help.  Whenever she sent me a check to cover a trucking fee, she always included a couple of dollars to tip the driver.  One of the women who drove for Mildred told me that, when they stayed at a motel, Mildred always got a separate room for  her.  "You need your rest as much as I need mine," she told her.  When Mildred's will was read after her death, there were 54 people who were named as recipients of her estate.  $100 to the doorman, $125 to a maintenance man, and so on.

Her last driver, Rita Sharpe, told me recently that on one tour there was a one week  gap in the concert schedule.  They would be out in Utah at that point, and Rita wasn't sure what they were going to do for a whole week.  Mildred said to her, "I'm going to rent a hotel room for us  in downtown Salt Lake City and practice.  You, Rita, are going to have a week to see the sights."

Several years ago, Rita told me another story.  She was driving Mildred on yet another long tour.  The car was a Chevy Suburban( the 3rd or 4th one Mildred had owned) which had already done several tours.  From the beginning of the trip, Mildred kept asking Rita what the mileage was on the odometer. What an odd question, Rita thought.  But she told her each time the question was asked and then forgot about it.  "We were in the middle of Kansas or something like that," Rita said to me.  "The country was flat to the horizon in all directions, and there was not a house, nor car in sight.  Suddenly, Mildred said, "Rita, stop the car!"  "I was mystified, but I did as she said.  Mildred had been watching the odometer because she knew that on this trip it was going to  pass 100,000 miles, and at that moment it just had.  Mildred fished around in her bag and pulled out a bottle of gingerale.  We got out and stood in front of the car in the middle of this flat nothingness, Mildred opened the bottle, and we sang For She's a jolly good fellow!"

One of the last times I saw Mildred was  in her apartment.  She had invited me to come for lunch.  Some friends of hers were coming up from Philadelphia, and then they were all going to a matinee on Broadway later.  We had a wonderful time sitting in that enormous, sun filled living room and listening to Mildred hold court.  When it was time for me to leave, she asked me where I was headed.  "Back to West 100th St." I said (clear on the other side of town). "How are you going?"  she asked. "I think I'll just get on the subway," I said.  "Why don't you do what I do," she said.  "I stand at an intersection and wait for the traffic to stop.  Then I go up to a cab with a fare already inside and ask him where he is going.  If he's going in my direction, I get in and share the fare.  If he's only going part way to where I'm going, I pay some of the fare, get out, and find another cab the same way."  I think my jaw must have made a thud as it hit the ground.  I could just imagine someone in the cab seeing a short, elderly woman with blond hair and an opera cape banging on the cab window, trying to hitch a ride.  Mildred was playing the age card, and I'll bet it worked more often than not.

If you have concluded by now that I did not like Mildred, or have an ax to grind, you'd be very  wrong.  She was strong, colorful, vibrant, difficult, willful, domineering, and many other things as well.  And I admired who she was and what she had been able to accomplish against almost impossible odds. And, difficult spots notwithstanding, I really liked her, and felt privileged to know her as well as I did.

One night I got a call from my friend in New York.  "Mildred died today," he said.  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  She had stopped at my house a month or two earlier.  She had seemed confused.  Suddenly old.  But this still knocked the wind out of me.  A major figure in my life was now gone.

I only knew her for about 5 years.  She was about 83 when I first got to really know her(I don't think anyone ever really knew her age), and she was 88 or so when she died in December of 1982, and right to the end she was still a ball of fire.  I simply cannot imagine what she had been like 30 or 40 years earlier.

Near the end of her life,  Columbia Artists, the owners of the Community Concert series, gave Mildred an award  for having given more concerts for their organization than anyone else in the history of the series.  I think that the quality that made her succeed, above and beyond any other quality she had, was persistence.  She never gave up, and she never took no for an answer.  Never.  We can all learn from that.

THE END