(6 of 8)
The other Toscanini is the little old man who loves to go to parties, whirl down Manhattan's Hudson River drive from Villa Pauline, his Riverdale home, to Rockefeller Center in his black Cadillac, and play practical jokes on his family and friends. Once he arranged to have a rubber knife put at his wife's place at a dinner party, was furious when she found the meat tender enough to cut with a fork, and didn't use it.
He still has a quick eye for good-looking women, and an obvious attraction to them. He makes a point of telling friends that he never looks in mirrors, even to shave, says, "I hate my face." Friends who went with him to see the first showing of The Hymn of the Nations, the movie he made for OWI during the war, said he looked away self-consciously whenever his image came on the screen. But he dresses fastidiously, is visibly pleased when a friend remarks on a new coat or suit (most of which he still has made for him in Italy).
"A Bad Character." He likes to think of himself as shy, humble, unassuming, courteous—and, off the podium, he usually is. Toscanini the musician seems to be almost as fearful an object to him as it does to others. After an explosive day of ranting, raving, stomping and swearing in rehearsal, he will sometimes sidle up to an intimate friend at a party, and say with downcast eyes: "I have a bad character." Most of his friends know the right response. "No, Maestro, you don't have a bad character; you just have a bad temper." But he will continue: "I was bad. I don't know what makes me do those things, but I can't help it. Do you think I am bad? I am not; I am a good man, really."
Sometimes, on awful occasions, he brings the other Toscanini to a party. Then he glowers in a corner, refuses to talk, turns away food and drinks and generally casts a pall over everything. At one party, a waggish friend suggested hanging a sign around his neck, "Do not feed the Maestro." Another evening was saved only when a nonartistic friend, arriving late, went over to the sulking Toscanini, slapped him on the back and said: "Did you see that Louis-Walcott fight?—worst fight I ever saw." Toscanini brightened immediately. Ramming his fist into his hand, he shouted, "He couldn't hit him, he couldn't hit him." The rest of the evening was a success.
In the past year, since he has had a television set in his home, Toscanini has become an authority on boxing. Although he never attended fights because he considered them "savage," he now knows all the rules and points. When friends visit him at his eight-acre, 22-room estate overlooking the Hudson at Riverdale, they often find him watching a fight, jumping up & down in his chair like an eight-year-old. When a fighter is knocked down, he leaps up, thrusts his finger at the prostrate figure on the screen, yells at him, "Die! die! die!"