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To him, each day seems almost a continuous round of shelling out money. "Someone comes in and wants 30 fans for Fledermaus. How much do they cost? $1.50 apiece. All right. In two hours he wants sequins to put on the fans . . . Can we use beer mugs in the champagne scene? Of course not. Those little things add up to a total effect. Before I know it, I've spent $750 or something like that." There is always the question of whether or not to allow rehearsals to run into overtime, which can within minutes run into three figures. To find out if rehearsals are going on, Bing, as a somewhat awed singer put it, "is every place, checking up all of the time." If by chance they are not, some hapless assistant is almost certain to hear a cold voice inquiring: "There was no rehearsal of Trovatore at 3? Why?" The answer had better make sense.
Bananas for Tea. He looks in on almost every performance—a habit he got from Ebert. He usually takes notes, sometimes races backstage to correct some defect he finds intolerable. He has a direct phone from his box to backstage, but says, with a grin, that he thinks someone has disconnected it: "No one ever answers." Some part of the night he usually finds time to do some planning with his staff: Gutman, Rudolf, the business office's Reginald Allen, the box office's Francis Robinson, production's Horace Armistead and Publicity Director Margaret Carson.
Fifteen minutes during the day Bing usually reserves for himself. Along about 4, his secretary brings in tea; he pulls out a sandwich and a banana from his desk drawer and munches and sips.
Sundays, when no operas are scheduled, Bing stays in bed most of the day, gets up only to run with his dachshund Pip in Central Park, and to write to his mother, who has now moved back to Austria. Nina Bing usually goes to several operas each week with her husband. Otherwise, the Bings rarely take time to go out together in the evening.
The Word Refurbish. Despite his dislike of the big claim, Rudolf Bing takes due pride in the Met season thus far. There have been criticisms and complaints, and Bing himself has made some of his own. His credo is that "after the curtain goes up, there can be no apologies. The performance must stand on its own as it is." To make his performances stand more sturdily on their own, he scheduled fewer operas (21 this season v. 24 last), more rehearsals. Even so, he still had to "sit and see these awful things [in Traviata and other old productions], but what can I do? I am not a magician—there is just so much time and money."
He has "given up hope of trying to redo old productions without starting at the beginning. People ask why I don't restage Carmen, say, even if I have to use the old sets. How can I ask a new stage director to take over a job when the floor plan is already laid for him; when, if in his mind he sees people coming in through a door, they must come in through a window because the old sets have a window where he wants a door? Altogether, the word refurbish makes me a little sick."