Fridays with John

The saga of my biography adventure "concludes," as a years-long drought becomes a veritable waterfall.

Read Episode I and II in the Unauthorized Biography Saga.

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“I WAS WORRIED I HAD BRUISED YOU,” John said.

He was appreciative of my letter, he said, and glad I hadn’t been hurt by his blunt criticism. Something he had told me more than once already was that I really needed more time to do this book well, and I let him know that I’d asked my editor for an extension—a whole extra year—and received it.

I can’t say for certain, but I believe my openness to John’s criticism and my initiative to take more time transformed our relationship, and this fourth meeting was the best one yet. To be clear: I wasn’t taking orders from him—he never demanded or even asked that—but I was listening to him, and I was showing him that I took this effort seriously, to the point where I was willing to be picked apart if it would make the end result better. He wasn’t trying to force me to write things that were more flattering or favorable to him, or asking me to soften or take anything out of the book; he was, I realized, simply holding me to the same standard of excellence that he holds himself to—and this was a very illuminating thing to experientially learn for his biographer.

From this moment on, we were a team.

He agreed to an in-depth interview. I sent a lengthy list of questions in advance, and we arranged to do it in two installments, two days apart. (This was the same week of the Oscars where he was nominated for The Fabelmans.) In the meantime, Steven Spielberg agreed to give me an interview for the book, and several other long-desired interviews came on board as well. John was gladly telling anyone who asked that it was okay for them to talk to me, from Mia Farrow to Kathleen Kennedy.

I met John’s daughter, Jenny Williams, for the first time over breakfast at a diner in Studio City,¹ and she told me how, when I first embarked on this book, John told her that the family should avoid talking to me—but that after his first meeting with me he told her: “I’m still kind of uncomfortable with the idea of anyone writing a biography of me, but it’s okay. I don’t mind if you talk to him. And maybe we can help him a little bit.”

I had gone from the desert to what felt like a waterfall.

That mega interview with John led to another, and another… and I quickly found myself spending a full eighteen months interviewing him, on a regular basis, often for several hours at a time. I would arrive at his bungalow schlepping my laptop bag and a coffee—sometimes I would find him playing the piano—and he would generously answer all of my questions with patience and good humor.

It was cozy but never overly affectionate; he called me “baby” once (his jazz-era term of endearment) but only once. We weren’t friends, weren’t family, and weren’t even colleagues—but we somehow fell into a unique cadence of unguarded intimacy and frankness that I had never seen in any of the hundreds of interviews he had given over the years. John gives cute nicknames to the people he is closest to; I never earned one. I tried out a few on him (“Professor,” “Saint John”), and nothing stuck—but I did like thinking of him as Dutch Uncle John. He repeatedly asked why I was so interested in his early career (calling it schadenfreude when I brought in a stack of his old pop LPs from the 1960s, albeit with a smile), and he bristled at my questions about his critics. He chided me for giving the ones who demeaned his music on snooty academic grounds too much attention; he thought I was hiding behind their opinion and giving them too much credence. At times he seemed quite defensive, bothered by how narrow their—and my—thinking was.

He frequently reminded me I was so young, and that he would like to know how “Tim Greiving” (he sometimes referred to me in the third person) would approach this book in ten or twenty years. He would contrast the nicest speculative praise (“I could talk to Tim Greiving and say I have a feeling that this guy, when he’s 60 years old, is going to be the most famous writer from the film world”) with some lament about how little I understood now, how much knowledge I was missing, how myopic my fascination with film music was. He informed me at one point that we needed to have a “session at the piano” to prove that it’s not actually film music that I like. (This session never materialized, sadly.)

I always keenly felt that I was with the smartest person I had ever met, someone whose opinion of me was terribly important but who was not going to sit around and pay me easy compliments. He was always cordial but never sparing. And in his forthrightness and the sharing of his mind on various subjects, I learned so much about John Williams.

He began bringing me books to almost every meeting: mostly composer biographies he admired, but also other books on music history as well as world history. Some he pulled from his own shelf—the copy of Jan Swafford’s biography of Brahms was one he had actually bought as a gift for André Previn, but never had the chance to give his dear friend before Previn died in 2019. (He tore out the page with his inscription to Previn on it; an incredible, invisible souvenir.) Many he had purchased specially for me.

In the truest sense of the word he became my tutor; he explained why he thought I should read each book, what they meant to him, what piece of the puzzle they signified. His mind was agile and daunting; he could effortlessly riff on the current situation in Israel-Palestine and its long history, or recall a story from his youth, or tell me about a conversation he once had with some conductor or musician 20 years ago or even 50 years ago. I learned pretty quickly that if I asked about most of his film scores, he could call up barely any details; that was simply data he had chosen not to store. But when it came to people from the past, things his father told him, or deep crevices of musical or world history, he had total recall.

There were things I dared not ask him about. I did ask a few timid questions about his first wife, Barbara, and he was more forthcoming than I expected—but the guard never fully came down, and I decided not to press him for more details. In one of our earliest meetings, he shared his overall concern about having a biography and said: “There are personal things with family and so on that I’d prefer not have...” He didn’t finish the sentence. “You would be sensitive to that. You don’t want to do any harm.”

I never probed about any problems his children may have had, or what kind of a father or husband he was. Jenny became an invaluable resource, candidly sharing with me stories of her home life growing up, challenges her mother had, the relationship each of the three kids had with their parents. She told me sweet stories about the family poodle and the neighbor kids next door, and more painful stories about mental illness and repressed emotion and barriers of communication. I am indescribably grateful to Jenny for her trust and candor, and the book is so much richer because of her.

If my book is any good, it’s because of these two

John and I never socialized, never shared a meal together—although I did go to his house on a few occasions. I also met him at Tanglewood (in August 2023), where I flew out to hear Anne-Sophie Mutter perform his second violin concerto, and where he arranged to sit and chat with me in Highwood, a special building on campus filled with memories of Leonard Bernstein and other ghosts.

Alison and I flew to Tokyo the following month to see John conduct the Saito Kinen Orchestra, and he agreed to sit with the two of us for an hour at his hotel the day before the concert. I thought it would just be pleasant small talk and that he would mostly spend it charming Ali—but he immediately turned to business, and started sharing new revelations with me about his father’s financial insecurities. He casually referred to it as “our book,” then caught himself and said “your book” (though I’m not really sure that it was a slip of the tongue).

Suntory Hall, September 5, 2023

With his wife Samantha, John started jokingly referring to my biography as War and Peace because of how long he assumed it must be getting, and he would even pitch me joke title ideas—like Close Encounters with the White Goddess. I said I thought that might be a little too esoteric. (It shan’t be after you read the book.)

Even through all of this deluge of participation and happy camaraderie, he would often reiterate that he still didn’t think there should be a book about him—he told Ali in Japan that he was still trying to convince me not to write it—but then he would go and say something like, “If you could make this thing a page-turner, it might do very well,” or (and I quote): “This is going to be a great success. And I know that the Nobel voting committee is going to come after you when you’re 90. Why? Because you’ve written ten of the greatest biographies in the history of American literature.”

He was absolutely endearing, always occasionally a Dutch uncle, warm but not overly tender, incredibly serious and professional but also funny and almost always with a twinkle in his eye. I had always loved John’s music; now I had fallen in love with John.

“I didn’t want any book about me,” he restated, well into our adventure together.

I haven’t changed my mind at all. I just feel, Tim, I don’t want to subscribe to this biography or do anything pro or con with it. I’d rather not be in any book. But this is something you’re going to do, and I can’t stop you from doing it. I wish I could. On the other hand, if you can do a good job I’d be very grateful to you. But I’m still trying to convince myself that you can. And this is where I don’t want to hurt you or injure you in any way—otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.

I could feel this push-pull inside of him at all times—sometimes in the same sentence. But for whatever blessed reason, he decided to put his reservations aside and help me, to encourage me, and to make a crazy amount of time for me. Even his meticulous (constructive) critiques of my writing were gifts of his time and energy. He decided to teach me in the process of our activity as biographer / biography-victim (his term, said with a laugh). I was not only given hours and hours of quality one-on-one time with my idol, but I gained an education from one of the greatest teachers of my life.

I let John read the entire book when I finished, and while there was still time to make changes; it felt like the least I could give him after everything he had given me… but I was still terrified. He hadn’t exactly gone soft on my previous samples of writing, and this was the whole kit and caboodle—and an enormously sensitive dossier to hand over to a reluctant biography “victim.”

Several weeks went by without a word. Then, one day, I got an unscheduled phone call. John, plainly and without any effervescence, congratulated me; he told me it was a “serious” book, and that it would be a feather in my cap. I still don’t know how this is possible, and I’m convinced he made a deliberate choice to keep his (no doubt) many reservations to himself, but he only had three tiny—and I mean minuscule—notes.

One was a single-word correction to a quote I included at the beginning of the book. In one of our earliest interviews I had heard him say: “I have never been an artist, Tim. I am a simple magician.” I loved that quote so much that I immediately knew I wanted it to open the book. Now he told me that he would never have called himself a “magician”—he must have said musician. I checked the tape, and he was right, so I fixed it.

But we all know the truth.

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Thus concludes the backstage saga about how my biography went from unauthorized to… well, still technically unauthorized, but written with John’s complete participation and help and blessing. It turns out no request really is too extreme.

I’ll certainly be sharing more stories about my time with John, things we discussed in those eighteen months of interviews, fun anecdotes, and more—but I just wanted, here at the beginning of this pre-publication journey, to lay out the whys and hows of my book’s existence before moving onto other areas (that are less about me).

Thanks to everyone who has given me such encouraging feedback so far. I’m glad you’re enjoying the Substack, and I hope you continue to enjoy it as the next few months bring us to Publication Day. [GUESS WHAT. You can pre-order the book here! Wow!] I really want to start sharing more treasures and stories about John’s actual life, things I discovered in the five years I spent researching the book, as well as posts pegged to major anniversaries of films and all kinds of other columns related to the life and music of John Williams. We’re just getting started.

See you next Tuesday!

1. When I ordered a lox and cream cheese sandwich, Jenny asked if I was Jewish. Incidentally, the first person who ever asked me that question was composer Marvin Hamlisch. I’m not Jewish—although my maternal grandfather, Bernard Jaffe, was half Jewish (via his father; his mother was Catholic), so it is a non-distant part of my DNA, and I take it as a high compliment whenever I’m asked.