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Benny's profuse strains of unpremeditated art topped all the rest, perhaps because he practiced hardest: "Fifteen times more than the whole band combined," in Trumpeter Harry James's estimation. "I never even saw him take a drink," James adds, bugging out his china-blue eyes. "You don't get very near a guy like that." Pianist Jess Stacy gets a little nearer the essential Benny: "All the time I was with Goodman, he was never satisfied. With him, perfection was just around the corner. He's worked hard enough, but I guess the more you work the more there is to learn. I figure Benny will die in bed with that damn clarinet." Failing perfection, Benny got a popular response that can only be described as weirdly intense. At Manhattan's Paramount Theater, swooning, screaming adolescents danced in the aisles and up on to the stage.
THE generation that adored him is now in its early 305, and somewhat sobered by hot and cold wars, yet it goes on buying Benny's records. His Carnegie Hall concert program has sold more than any jazz album ever, and a recently issued selection of pieces that the band broadcast in 1937-38 is on its way to outselling even that. Altogether, some 23 million disks with Benny's name on them have been sold in the past 15 years.
"Success," Benny comfortably admits, "is the easiest thing in the world to take." Yet success was never enough. "Of course, you wouldn't be human if you didn't like having the crowds, but you hate it just as much, too. The frenzy. You say to yourself, 'Don't take this thing seriously or you'll go out of your mind.' " In 1940 he was operated on for a bad back, and in the hospital quiet he found himself wondering if he would ever "know how to do anything but lead a band." He was married two years later, which made the tours harder to take; in the first four months of their union, the Goodmans slept under 73 different roofs. Half of Benny's star performers had left him to form bands of their own. He decided to quit.
That meant a little more time for his family and for his favorite hobby—fishing. Easygoing family life mellowed him, and slowly the shy, warm, honest man emerged from behind the brilliant, hardshell musician. "Yeah, I'm much more tactful than I used to be," Benny confesses with a laugh. "I don't know if it's done me any good!" A friend recalls that "ten years ago he talked like an aviator—if he couldn't explain with gestures, he couldn't explain. He used to blow everything into that clarinet and not leave anything for communication, but now he expresses himself better . . . He'll bore the hell off you with stories about little Rachel and little Benjie." But Benny never left his clarinet standing voiceless and alone very long. He had begun playing classical music for fun, and found he could do it quite well. Leopold Stokowski praised his work, the Budapest String Quartet was eager to play with him, and so was Violinist Joseph Szigeti. Benny commissioned clarinet concertos from Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, played them with the best symphony orchestras. He gave a course at the Juilliard School of Music, illustrating his lectures with longhair licks and runs.