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He also likes children's programs on television. A friend recently caught him watching Du Mont's program "Small Fry Club," asked him, "What are you watching, Maestro?" Toscanini replied, never taking his eyes from the screen: "Fry Small." Last month, when NBC first televised his concert, the Maestro watched the audience and musicians on a set in his dressing room until it was time to go on.
"No Pancia." Toscanini himself is still in fighting trim. He is slightly heavier than he once was, but likes to point to his midriff and say, "Look, no pancia.'" He can still bound up stairs two at a time, although he seldom does because, he says, people think it's undignified. Often before rehearsals he jumps up on an office couch, feet together, to test his legs. Before a recent performance, he jumped up & down trying to reach the ceiling, crying, "I am an old man. Why has God afflicted me with the blood of a 17-year-old?" He is continually on the go, sleeps only three or four hours a night, has never had an operation or been seriously ill. He has all of his own teeth, although friends suspect that when he recently insisted on being driven into Manhattan without telling anyone where he was going, he went to a dentist to have a tooth pulled.
When, on their golden wedding anniversary, NBC gave the Maestro and buxom Carla Toscanini a clock that supposedly would run for 50 years without rewinding, Toscanini beamed happily and said: "Just think, when this clock stops, no one here in this room will be here but me." Last week Carla was in Italy, and son Walter and his family were staying with the Maestro at the big house in Riverdale. Daughter Wanda visits frequently (with her pianist husband, Vladimir Horowitz). He often talks by telephone with his other daughter Wally, the Countess Castel-barco, who lives in Italy.
Toscanini was baptized a Roman Catholic, but has seldom gone to church in recent years, except for the first communions of his two grandchildren. He refuses to conduct without a heavy, brass-framed strip of pictures of his children in his pocket. (The strip includes a picture of son Giorgio, who died at eight in South America.)
A man with a deep moral sense, he is outraged by man's inhumanity to man. The worst tantrum he ever threw was on the day of the Austrian Anschluss. He tried to rehearse, but left the podium after the first minute. He didn't stop raging until he had almost kicked a massive table to pieces, pulled all his scores from their shelves, nearly wrecked his dressing room. Then he sat down and cried.
Scrupulously honest, he detects sham of all kinds instantly. Years ago, after Richard Strauss had asked him to conduct the first performance of his Salome, then gave it to another conductor, Toscanini went all the way from Milan to Vienna to tell him, "Strauss, as a musician I take my hat off to you; as a man [Toscanini here went through a furious pantomime of a man clomping on hats repeatedly] I put on twelve hats."