MY MANY YEARS by Arthur Rubinstein; Knopf; 600 pages; $16.95
Synopsis: In the first installment, music fans, our hero left his boyhood home in Poland to make his way as a pianistic prodigy. Life seemed a feast of caviar, sex and pampering by the fashionable names of European art and society. But precocity was not enough. He needed discipline to rise from idleness and a suicide attempt and gain "the necessary hold on my career." By 1917, when he was 30, he felt he was ready. Now on with the story.
In this concluding volume of one of the true-life romantic sagas of our time, Arthur Rubinstein conquers new continents, uncounted women and, seemingly, mortality itself. He pursues his improbable but triumphant course down to the present, when, at 93, retired from public performing, partially blind, he still reigns as a favorite of the gods, an ageless symbol of the unquenchable passion for the well-lived life. His wide-eyed narrative, dictated to an amanuensis, is diffuse and repetitive, often couched in a quaint, flowery style. But his gusto and warmth carry him through, as they have in so many technically flawed recitals. He succeeds in making his adventures almost as stirring to the reader as they are to him.
As in Rubinstein's first volume, My Young Years, the settings are international, the incidents colorful and the supporting cast spectacular. He has a night on the town with the Prince of Wales, whose spindly piano he inadvertently demolishes with one mighty chord. An actress in Greenwich Village cajoles him into playing by standing on her head, "exposing her bare secrets"; she turns out to be Tallulah Bankhead. In an audience with Mussolini, he feeds il Duce a line for a speech. He sits for Picasso, who sees him 24 different ways. Round the world he goes, bumping over the Alps in a cargo plane, hopping a banana boat in Panama, crossing Siberia on a dingy train. Wherever he stops, he is taken up by the wealthy and titled, and he embraces their patronage uncritically: he recalls not a single knave or bore among them.
He is as tireless in the bedroom as on the road or concert platform. His chief paramour in this volume is the sensuous Italian contralto Gabriella Besan-zoni. She and Rubinstein tour Latin America like a couple of gypsy children, piling up gold pesos under their bed as they go. Other liaisons are briefer: the demimondaine "Charlottavotte," whom he enjoys between the lifeboats on a crossing to South America; the American actress who is so enchanted by his playing that she offers herself to him for the night as a tribute; and many a French bourgeoise "who apparently needed a diversion from the routine of marital life." But at 45 Rubinstein marries Aniela Mlynarski, 23, the attractive daughter of a Polish conductor, and they set about having their four children. The playboy is transformed into the proud papa. Proud but sometimes perplexed: the first time Rubinstein's daughter Eva asks him to play something, he goes to the keyboard, deeply touched, only to find that she meant on the phonograph.