Vladimir Horowitz

UPDATED POST (original version published on Nov. 12, 2011):

Ukranian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) was a twentieth-century pianist who embodied the grand piano style of the late nineteenth century. His legendary technique and artistry remain a source of inspiration for generations of pianists and listeners.

His solo career began in the Soviet Union, where he quickly established himself as a bravura performer possessed of an astonishing technique. He was allowed to leave Russia in 1925 as part of a mission to propagate Soviet culture abroad. However, he decided not to return and accepted the honorary citizenship of Haiti in 1929, in order to facilitate international travel. In 1945 he became a citizen of the United States.

During his early performing years Horowitz developed a reputation as an eccentric who dressed in lurid, extravagant clothing (mostly in pink and red) and hung out in sailors' bars in port cities, often seen wearing make-up. His homosexual activities fed the gossip and rumor mills.

Kenneth Leedom, who still lives in lower Manhattan, relates that long ago he answered Horowitz’s newspaper ad for a personal assistant and became his lover for five years, although Horowitz was married at the time. Leedom recalls that Horowitz had an uncontrollable temper, often yanking a corner of a tablecloth so that everything on the table crashed to the floor. Emphasis on OFTEN. In spite of frequent tantrums, Leedham said that Horowitz also had a sweet, lovable side. “He really adored me.”

Horowitz's same-sex interests at this time were no secret to his friends. In Berlin, he hired the first of these live-in “personal assistants”, who would accompany him in all his travels, both business and personal. He kept up this practice after his marriage, and his wife tolerated it. In 1933, Horowitz had performed for the first time with legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini, and he soon thereafter married Toscanini's daughter, Wanda. Because of his strong sexual interest in men, friends expected the marriage to last no more than a month. The couple went on to have a daughter, but Horowitz found himself temperamentally unsuited for the role of father.

In 1940, Horowitz began psychoanalytic treatment with Dr. Lawrence Kubie, a psychiatrist who specialized in "curing" homosexuals, especially celebrities. Among Kubie’s other patients were Moss Hart and Tennessee Williams. Horowitz separated from his wife in 1949 after failing to change his sexual orientation and underwent electroshock therapy to cure depression.

Later in life Horowitz was seen in New York City's gay bars and discotheques, where he displayed a more relaxed attitude toward his homosexuality. Eventually reunited with her husband, Wanda learned to tolerate and accept his eccentricities, including his sexual attraction to men.

Horowitz's legacy is preserved through his outstanding recordings. Although Horowitz was a leading interpreter of Liszt, Schumann, and Rachmaninov, he was an insecure performer who often suffered debilitating episodes of stage fright. On many occasions he had to be literally pushed onto the stage. He was a major promoter of music by composers relatively unknown in the United States at the time: Prokofiev, Szymanowski, Scriabin, Kabalevski, Scarlatti and Clementi (example below). As well, he championed American gay composer Samuel Barber.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan awarded Horowitz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States. Three years later he died of a heart attack.

Note: I remember stumbling upon his grave quite by accident in Milan, Italy, about ten years ago. I was looking for the family crypt of Arturo Toscanini in the enormous Cimitero Monumentale. When peering through the metal gates of the crypt, I noticed the gilded carved letters that indicated Horowitz was buried in the tomb of his father in law, alongside wife Wanda and daughter Sonia.








Horowitz was a great promoter of the piano sonatas of Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), at a time when Clementi was considered passé. Here Horowitz performs a movement from Clementi’s Op. 25, No. 5:

Moss Hart

American playwright and theatre director/producer Moss Hart (1904-1961) considered George S. Kaufman his greatest collaborator. Among the hit comedies they wrote together were You Can’t Take It With You (1936 – Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Oscar for Best Picture) and The Man Who Came To Dinner (1939). Hart also wrote a best-selling autobiography called Act One (1959), about which George S. Kaufman said, “I’m very pleased for Moss that Act One is on the best seller list. I simply feel that it should be under fiction instead of non-fiction.” Kaufman knew what he was talking about.

Hart’s wife Kitty Carlisle (1910-2007) was committed to protecting her husband’s secrets. A socialite, opera singer, stage and film actress and cabaret performer, she was married to Hart for the last fifteen years of his life, and their union produced two children. Although Hart died in 1961 of a heart attack at age 57, she lived for another 46 years, never remarrying. In Steven Bach’s biography of Hart, Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart (2001), the author revealed that throughout his marriage Hart was a closeted bisexual. Miss Carlisle made no public comment about the contents of the book, but until her death she continued Hart’s own attempt to heterosexualize his life story, despite his physical relationships with literary agent Lester Sweyd. MGM screenwriter Charles Lederer and many of the homosexuals mentioned in Hart’s autobiography. In a 1939 letter written by Hart to Dore Schary (later president of MGM Studios), he wrote the damning words, “We shall once again lay in each other’s arms and taste the sweetness of sin – I love you very much.”

After his death Carlisle sealed Hart’s diaries and prevented access to materials that contained evidence of his sexuality. Nevertheless, Hart’s name cropped up on lists of bisexuals by Yamaguchi Fletcher, Adrien Saks and others.

Suffering from writer’s block, manic depression and numerous nervous breakdowns, Hart developed an addiction to psychoanalysis. His therapist, Lawrence Kubie, strongly disapproved of Hart’s gay alliances and pushed him into eventually adopting an entirely heterosexual lifestyle. Kubie was known for “conversion therapy” that resulted in redirecting gay or bisexual patients to heterosexual lives. Kubie saw Hart twice a day and conducted shock therapy once a week. As a result, at age 42, Hart married Kitty Carlisle, an act that greatly surprised most of his friends and associates. After getting married, Hart ended his friendships with many "out" gay men, but Arthur Laurents reported his embarrassment at the wedding reception at Hart’s house in Bucks County, PA, when Hart suggested that the men take all their clothes off when there were no women around. Following a performance by Kitty Carlisle at Bucks County Playhouse in 1948, Hart proudly presented his infant son to the audience, declaring, "Now they won't be able to say I'm gay anymore."

Although a tortured man psychologically, Hart enjoyed tremendous professional success. He directed huge Broadway hits such as My Fair Lady (1956 – Tony Award for Best Director) and Camelot (1960). During the latter production, actor Robert Goulet maintained that Hart behaved in a “notably flirtatious manner” toward him; others involved in Camelot confirmed this. Hart’s screenplays included major successes such as A Star Is Born (1954) and Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947).

Personal note from your blogger: One of the first professional stage productions I ever saw was a revival of Hart's Light Up the Sky.

Michael Kaiser

Michael Kaiser (b. 1953), president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, married his long-term partner John Roberts (at right in photo by Margot Shulman), an economist, on August 31, 2013.






The wedding took place at the Kennedy Center with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiating. The ceremony marked the first time a Supreme Court justice had married a same sex couple. Justice Ginsburg, 80 years old and a long-time friend of Kaiser, is an opera enthusiast and frequent patron of the Kennedy Center. The recent Supreme Court rulings about same sex marriage did not influence the wedding between Kaiser and Roberts, because it has been legal for same sex residents of the District of Columbia to marry since 2009.

Kaiser’s expertise in arts management has earned him international renown from his work with American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Opera House, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Kansas City Ballet. A native of New York City, he early on aspired to be an opera singer but soon realized his deficiency in that field. He instead went on to earn degrees in economics and management and in 1981 founded Kaiser Associates, a strategic planning company with elite clients such as IBM and General Motors. He changed fields in 1985 when he became general manager of the Kansas City Ballet, an arts institution that was on the brink of bankruptcy at the time. During his six years at the helm, the ballet company experienced a complete turnaround, able to pay off its debt and attract larger audiences as a result of Kaiser’s programming initiatives and management skills. In 1988 his family suffered a personal crisis resulting in Kaiser’s donating a kidney to his sister, Susan.

In 1991 Kaiser became executive director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, also in dire straights, and achieved similar success. An even greater challenge came in 1995, when Kaiser became executive director of American Ballet Theatre, then sinking under $5.5 million in accumulated debt. Once again, Kaiser worked a near miracle, and within three years all of the debt was retired, while reaching larger audiences and expanding the company’s educational initiatives. During that time the Chicago Tribune dubbed Kaiser the “Turnaround King.”


His greatest challenge and most spectacular results began in 1998 with his leadership of the Royal Opera House in London, home to both the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera. Burdened with a projected $30 million deficit while in the middle of a major renovation, the institution was in crisis artistically, with an acrimonious board of directors, a tarnished reputation and openly critical patrons. Michael Kaiser came to the rescue, and then some. Within two years, the deficit was somehow paid off, the new building paid for and opened, and an endowment fund established to protect the security of the Royal Opera House's future. Kaiser’s success was nothing short of miraculous.

Michael Kaiser photographed by Nancy Ellison:

But he was just getting warmed up. In 2001 Kaiser was named president of the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington DC, a position he holds to this day. While the Kennedy Center was financially stable, Kaiser set about enhancing its status as our nation’s center for the performing arts. His first theatrical festivals (notably six musicals by Stephen Sondheim) set box office records. He negotiated long-term associations between the Kennedy Center and Russian and English ballet, opera and drama companies. He organized international festivals that brought many arts organizations and performers to American audiences for the first time. He pumped new life into the Kennedy Center’s jazz music and family-oriented programming while increasing its annual education budget to $25 million, more than any other arts organization. Kaiser created the Kennedy Center Arts Management Institute, which provides advanced training for young arts administrators, as well as a mentoring service for national ethnic arts groups. As well, Kaiser established a fellows program that allows student and practicing arts managers to experience the day-to-day workings of the center’s marketing, fund raising, programming and operations functions.

In 2009 Kaiser launched Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative that provides cost-free arts management consultation for non-profit 501-c-3 performing arts organizations across the nation. Later that year he became a weekly blogger for the Huffington Post. As well, Kaiser serves as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State. He is the author of five books, three of them related to arts management. Among many awards and recognitions, Michael Kaiser was named Washingtonian of the Year in 2004, became the first American to receive China’s Award for Cultural Exchange (2005) and was the recipient of the Kahlil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award by the Arab American Institute Foundation (2009).

Let’s wish Mr. Kaiser as much success in his recent marriage as in his professional endeavors.