Tension, and release

The hours I spent interviewing John Williams were not always tranquil; not only was he fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of a biography, he was also irked by certain lines of inquiry.

The old adage “never meet your heroes” assumes that our heroes will inevitably disappoint us as human beings. They might be mean or rudely dismissive toward us. They might turn out to be an awful person, maybe even a monster.

What a relief that John Williams was none of the above. People often ask me: “What is he really like?” And I can say, without reservation, that he is everything you would hope he is: modest, gracious, kind, funny, grandfatherly, intelligent, and fundamentally decent. I loved spending time with John, and I came away from our years-long sessions with an even greater respect and admiration for the man behind my favorite music.

But that isn’t to say our sessions weren’t without discomfort or tension. As everyone knows by now, John was never comfortable with the idea of having a biography written about him. I’ve chronicled the booby-trapped caverns I ventured through to get him to even accept my project—and when I use the word “accept,” I do not mean wholeheartedly embrace. Even after we had been meeting for months, and after John had given me hours and hours of interviews, time and again he would lightly say “I still don’t want you to write this,” or he would joke with my wife that he was still trying to convince me not to write it. He was never crazy about the whole project, and jestingly or not, he never stopped reminding me of that fact.

Related to that discomfort, I honestly think he was uneasy about me writing the book about him. He didn’t know me from Adam when I first started meeting with him; he didn’t remember me from any of our previous (short, mostly phone) interviews, and he didn’t know my work at all. On my very first visit, he said his assistant had tried to look up my previous books but couldn’t find them—and I had to awkwardly tell him: this is my first book. (I did give him a sampling of some of my past printed work.) It did help, I think, that I had been published by credible news outlets and even more that I was a teacher at USC, but my lack of “serious” credentials definitely gave him some worry. He often praised the writing of Alex Ross, or David McCullough, or his friend Doris Kearns Goodwin—and how could I possibly hope to be in conversation with any of those titans?

“I love you, but you are not serious people”

It was partly my youth (“you’re so young, Tim” he kept saying) and lack of New Yorker-caliber résumé that made him wary, but it was also my line of questions. My first “faux pas” was bringing in a big stack of his 1960s LPs, the old jazz and pop albums he arranged and conducted on as “Johnny Williams.” He called this portion of his career “scut work,” and constantly referred to it as “schadenfreude”—as if I’d brought in these mementos intentionally to embarrass him. It worried him that I seemed so fixated on this “inconsequential” and, for him, somewhat embarrassing chapter of his life. I kept insisting that the reason I was focusing my early interviews on the era between his birth and the pre-Spielberg years was because that was the era with the most mystery and holes in it—that I was just trying to fill in gaps and get certain things right, not because it represented a major section of the book. (Bear in mind, too, that in the beginning I wasn’t sure how much time I would get with him, so I was trying to prioritize the least-known years.) I think he eventually came to believe me on this, but it did require a leap of faith on his part—and, to his credit, he took the leap.

He is such a stickler for vocabulary and pronunciation, and he corrected me several times on the latter when I pronounced someone’s name wrong. When he read the early draft of my first chapter, he didn’t mince words in the problems he had with the way I wrote, which he described as “a little bit jargony.” He could even be a little—what’s the word—tetchy at times. He sounded slightly annoyed when he asked if I knew what a term like “infra dig” or “adumbration” or “klangfarben” meant, and I had to shamefacedly say I did not. Possibly his most common phrase in our interviews was “Do you know who [X] is” or “Do you know what [Y] is?” referring to some figure in world or musical history, and so many times I would have to wince and say uh… no. He would usually laugh this off and say something like, “I have to remind myself how young you are!” But I don’t think it boosted his confidence that the guy writing his biography knew so much less about him about so many things…

But the main area of tension, I would say, was whenever I brought up critics of his music. I really wanted to know how he felt about / dealt with music or film critics who judged his work as derivative, or pastiche, or plagiarism of other classical composers—because this was a thing that has dogged John ever since the massive success of Star Wars. As a devotee of his, I’ve been confronted with this bugbear for most of my life, whether it was a snobby family friend who told me (when I was in college) that John Williams just stole from Holst and Stravinsky, or the plethora of articles or YouTube videos that “prove” how this John Williams theme was cribbed from this symphony or whatever. It’s been inescapable. And in researching the book, I uncovered piles of classical criticism and movie reviews that harped on some variation of this dig at John’s music. And it wasn’t just some tiny minority of voices or isolated moment in his career; it was incessant. So I wanted to know how he personally handled and responded to this swarm of negativity.

He gave me some powerful answers to that question—about dealing with critics, about whether pastiche and plagiarism were equivalent, and about whether his music actually sounded like (or was influenced by) Korngold or Copland or whomever. But he was also clearly sensitive about this subject, and whenever our interviews came near it (which I swear wasn’t all that frequent), he was clearly annoyed… with the criticism itself, and with me for asking about it.

He said it revealed more about me that I wanted to inquire about this. He said that I cared too much what classical critics or academics thought, and that I was in fact hiding behind their perceived wisdom by even worrying about it.

Perhaps the tensest exchange we had was when, during the book interview process, I wrote an article for Alta Journal on the 20th anniversary of Walt Disney Concert Hall—in which I argued that, largely thanks to John, Disney Hall represented a (partial) demolition of the dividing wall between “serious” classical music and Hollywood film music. He gave me an exclusive interview for that article, which was incredibly generous. In the piece, I quoted from one of the meanest reviews a classical critic had ever written about a concert that John conducted (the critic was Martin Bernheimer, writing for the L.A. Times in 1983). I did this in order to show just what kind of resistance, snobbery, and downright hostility John faced when he entered the classical world, and then to demonstrate how amazing his gentle, nonviolent victory against those hostile forces was.

Los Angeles Times, Nov. 12, 1983

John, after reading my published article, did not see it that way. He called it a “solipsism” (another vocabulary word he was disappointed I didn’t know)—a breach of etiquette. In fact, he considered it a “screaming solipsism, that didn’t need to be there.” I had never seen him so viscerally bothered, and the atmosphere in the room that afternoon was tense. He was calling me on the carpet, asking why I would quote from such a “nasty” critique in an otherwise “puff piece,” and asking why I clearly cared so much about the opinion of academics and elites who dismiss his music. It wasn’t the first time we had talked about this, but it was our most intense exchange, and it rattled me. I did my best to explain my reasoning for thinking/writing about his most savage critics, and argued that, if he and I were talking about some bygone classical composer who was dogged by a constant and particular accusation—even if we disagreed with that accusation—it would be relevant to a biography or article about that composer because it was part of their story, for better or worse. He acknowledged that argument was valid, but he insisted that my preoccupation with his critics was a symptom of my own insecurity, or my giving precedence to the wrong voices.

“We maybe shouldn’t meet anymore,” he said that afternoon, “because I don’t want to be defensive with you.”

He was defensive… and sensitive… and honestly quite vulnerable in that exchange—and I learned some valuable insights about him and his relationship to all of this, as uncomfortable as it made me. But I also gave, and continue to give, his comments a lot of thought—because I learned that when John Williams critiqued me, in his bluntly “Dutch Uncle” style, there was always real substance to his critique. Was I too insecure in my love of his music, and did I give too much credence to his harshest critics? Why did I feel so defensive of his music, and film music as a whole? Why did I care what the academics and classical intelligentsia thought of him and, by extension, of me?

His diagnosis has been a helpful and guiding light for me, because I had to admit that I probably did have a chip on my shoulder, having heard so many condescending knocks against my idol’s music for most of my life. I was insecure, and I did care too much what those elitists thought. At one point the introduction to my book touched on the critics of John’s music, and I was mercifully advised to take that portion out (although the book does address this facet in its own way). I was having dinner not long ago with Doug Adams, a fellow writer about film music and one of my early role models, who relayed a conversation he had many years ago with Howard Shore. The great composer told Doug that, if you want people to take film music seriously, you have to stop being so defensive about it.

Wisdom.

John and I navigated the turbulence of that tense colloquy (another word he likes to use), just as we had in a few previous conversations. I took his commentary to heart, and I’d like to think I grew from it—just as I added many new words and historical facts to my brain. And, bless him, he continued to meet with me, to share his thoughts and memories, to trust me. Just as he had done after his unsparing feedback to my early chapter, he followed this meeting with extra softness, making sure he hadn’t hurt me. John is amazing and more complex than most people realize; he doesn’t really have a temper, and he doesn’t like interpersonal conflict, although he can be quite blunt in his disapproval and frustration—but then he’s so quick to release tension, and repair.

I can’t even fathom how uncomfortable and painful my presence and my biography project were for him. It must have felt like somebody was coming over and peeling his skin with a citrus knife—and that somebody was a kid who didn’t know what the term “citrus knife” meant, and whose hands were shaking from inexperience. I often realized just how little I knew, how many gaps there were in my education, how bloody naive I was. And yet… he continued to meet me and give me his stories and his time, and trust that I wouldn’t make a complete mess of it.

We bonded in a unique way, this “biography victim” (his words) and I. A unique and complicated affection developed, a tenderness that was occasionally tinged with slight bruising. We weren’t doing battle, but I was operating on him, poking and prodding and occasionally puncturing. He graciously allowed my clumsy scalpel, almost literally putting his life in my hands, and in doing so I think we came to care for each other. No, I can’t speak for him; but I definitely came to care for and love this man.

And I did my best to justify his uninsured trust by writing my book with dignity, with care—“challenging every word,” avoiding jargon, and trying not to cause any harm. He composes music and conducts himself with such dignity and excellence and humility, and I aspired to achieve something at least in the vicinity of those virtues. He was, as always, my guide.

In the year since John read my completed book, which he was extremely benevolent (though not effusive) about, our relationship seems even warmer, more familial. I think he had always kept me a little bit at arm’s length—to protect himself, but also because he didn’t know how the book would turn out. Now that he knows, and whatever his real opinion of it might be, he’s just been unbelievably sweet and caring toward me. He didn’t like the original cover of the book, which he (hilariously) critiqued every inch of, just as he had done with the early chapter draft I showed him. This was a few months ago, and at the time he was considering possibly doing a public, moderated conversation with me when the book came out; when I playfully told him he should tell audiences how much he doesn’t like the cover, he said, “No, I’ll never say anything negative about the book.”

Can you see why I love this guy so much? How magnificent, how selfless, how dignified is that?

We did end up changing the cover; it’s the one single thing he asked if I would consider changing in this entire thing he took to calling “our book.”

---

Publication Day™ is almost here! Just a reminder that I’ll be hosting a virtual town hall at 10am PST on Tuesday, September 2. And there are many new book events listed on my website, which I will continually be updating. I hope I see you out there in the real world!

Thank you, as always, for reading and for your support.