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Rubinstein was scheduled to play only four concerts in Spain, but his hot-handed treatment of Spanish music so floored the audiences that he crisscrossed the country for 120 additional performances. He was feted and fawned over like a toreador. The Queen Mother, Maria Cristina, invited him to the palace for tea. King Alfonso XIII became an intimate. ("He was the most tone-deaf man I ever knew," says Rubinstein. "From the time he was seven, he was accompanied by a man assigned to nudge him whenever the national anthem was played.") His new success led to a tour of Latin America, where the Mexicans carried him through the streets on their shoulders.
Bunch of the Boys. The Rubinstein who returned to Paris in 1920 had money, a growing reputation, and a still unsatiated hunger for the gay life of a gadabout bachelor ("I was 90% interested in women," he chuckles). He shared an apartment with a count, tooled around the boulevards in "a little carriage," and "was thin as a stick because I never went to bed until the morning." On Saturday nights he toured the cafes with a bunch of the boys—Milhaud, Auric, Poulenc—and helped popularize their music, as well as that of his friends Debussy, Saint-Saens, Ravel and Heitor Villa-Lobos (whom he had discovered playing the cello in the pit of a Rio de Janeiro movie theater).
He hobnobbed with dukes and princesses, sat up all night drinking champagne with Cocteau and Picasso ("I knew him before he was Picasso and I was Rubinstein"). He cultivated a taste for fine wines, rich food, rare books, imported cigars, expressionistic paintings. He was the darling of Europe, hopscotching from the Riviera to Vienna to London, charming friends in eight languages.
A Double Life. But he was troubled. "Musically speaking," he recalls, "I was leading a double life. At home, I was a different man. I loved the classics, but I knew I could wow any audience with De Falla's Fire Dance. I was too little involved in the job I had to do, which was to develop my talent." Then in 1926 he met Aniela ("Nela"), the handsome, honey-blonde daughter of Polish Conductor Emil Mlynarski. She was 17, he was 39. When he finally got around to proposing to her beneath the Chopin monument in Warsaw, Nela was doubtful. It seems that Rubinstein's lady of the moment, sensing a rival, had followed him and was threatening to make a scene. He got rid of her, made up to Nela, and after a persistent courtship married her in London in 1932. A year later they had their first child, Eva.* That started Rubinstein thinking about the future. Says he: "I didn't want people telling my child after I died, 'What a pianist your father might have been!' " In 1934, he took his family to a mountain cottage in southeastern France, rented an old upright piano and set it up in a nearby stable. Often playing by candlelight, Rubinstein labored for three months, working as much as nine hours a day, polishing his technique and repertory. The discipline took. Into his fingers he poured his long-suffocated musical genius; it began to open like a long-forgotten well. And then, he says, "It was like that line in My Fair Lady: 'By Jove, he's got it!' I became a pianist." He was 47.