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Little Fiend. There are few musicians today who can claim such a firsthand connection with "the old days." Rubinstein was born in 1887, in the shabby industrial town of Lodz, Poland, where his father owned a small handloom factory. He was the last of seven children. "My mother did not want a seventh child," he explains, "so she decided to get rid of me before I was born. Then a marvelous thing happened. My aunt dissuaded her, and so I was permitted to be born. Think of it! It was a miracle!"
As a toddler, he would eavesdrop on his sisters' piano lessons, and by the time he was three he was "a terrible little fiend" about music, screaming when his sisters struck a sour note, banging the piano lid down on their fingers. At four, he was performing at charity concerts, pressing his engraved calling cards on everyone he met: ARTUR THE GREAT PIANO VIRTUOSO. It annoyed him even then that people always asked if he was any kin to the great Anton Rubinstein, and so he took to prancing around town with the words NO RELATION inscribed on the front of his sailor cap.
At eight, he was playing in Berlin under the sharp eye of Josef Joachim, who soon brought the Wunderkind to Barth. At eleven, he played Mozart's Concerto in A Major with the Berlin Symphony. In 1906, thanks to the influence of a U.S. music critic who had heard him play at Paderewski's Swiss villa, the young pianist was signed for a tour of the U.S. It was a dud. At his debut in Carnegie Hall, the critics dismissed Rubinstein for being, as one put it, "half-baked—not a prodigy, not an adult." Those were the days when he was playing with more fire than accuracy.
King & Queen. Dejected, Rubinstein returned to Europe, and for the next four years he missed as many meals as he did notes. Nothing seemed to go right. He tried suicide, but the frazzled belt he used snapped under his weight. "The American critics were right," he admits. "In those days I dropped maybe 30% of the notes. My difficulty was that I had so much vitality and dash that I could get away with murder in Europe. But in America they felt that because they paid their money they were entitled to hear all the notes."
At length he drifted to London and soon became a favorite performer in the great salons. He chummed around with Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Norman Douglas, Joseph Conrad, and he often stayed up half the night playing chamber music with such pickup partners as Pablo Casals and Jacques Thibaud. When World War I came, he went to Paris and served for a time as a translator for the Allies. Then his friend John Singer Sargent introduced him to a wealthy patroness who arranged for him to play in Spain. He needed a passport, so the lady wangled forged papers through a friend who was the mistress of the Russian ambassador.