(8 of 10)
Meantime, his marriage was burning out. "I would come home from a world of travel and music," Mehta says, "and smell the diapers boiling. We grew apart." In 1964 the Mehtas got a divorce. "It just happened," Carmen says now. "I never did anything nasty to him, and he never did anything nasty to me." Mehta asked his younger brother Zarin, an accountant who had immigrated to Montreal via England, to look in occasionally on Carmen and the children (a daughter Zarina, now 9, and a son Merwan, 7). Zarin looked in occasionally, then more often. In 1966 Zubin, who was rehearsing the Israel Philharmonic in Haifa, suddenly announced that he wanted to dedicate the concert to his brother, who was "getting married to a very nice girl." To whom? "To my former wife," Mehta replied. Nowadays, whenever he is in Montreal, he stays with Zarin, Carmen and the children—including now Zarin's daughter, four-month-old Rohanna —and everything seems friendly.
Living-Room Opera. With his domestic ties severed in Montreal, Mehta has focused his interests in Los Angeles. Besides the Philharmonic and his parents, who moved there in 1964 when his father became a teacher-conductor at U.C.L.A., those interests prominently include, in the words of one of his friends, "girls, girls, girls." A long, tempestuous affair with the "baby Callas" of the opera world, fiery Greek-Canadian Soprano Teresa Stratas, is now stalemated, as much because of conflicts between their careers as between their temperaments. But Mehta has shown no inclination to mope around about it—at least not alone; he is rarely seen without a girl on his arm.
Mehta is a gypsy in his private life too. He has no home, lives year-round in hotels, refuses to hire a manager, pressagent or secretary. He entertains in restaurants. "Come, come, come," he urges after a performance, sweeping everybody in his dressing room along, and conducting the seating arrangements like a symphony. At an Indian establishment such as Manhattan's Kashmir, he orders a scorching native dish like shrimp vindalo; elsewhere he will eat ordinary American food as long as it is liberally doused with Tabasco sauce. His table talk ranges knowledgeably over such topics as Kafka, Canadian hockey, the Greek military junta, Malibu real estate, pingpong and yoga.
"He lives," says a friend, "in constant motion"—careening around freeways in his green 3.8 Jaguar sedan, hobnobbing with such Hollywood types as Edward G. Robinson and Director Vincente Minnelli, fencing with Film Composer Bronislau Kaper ("Not much control," says Kaper, "but great imagination and aggressiveness"), digging jazz at Drummer Shelly Manne's club, singing all the parts in impromptu living-room opera performances with such musical friends as Ivry Gitlis and Pianist Daniel