Tales of Waring: i put him in his place

After the apprentices change their views about themselves and the world they take the second step and become warriors, which is to say, beings capable of the utmost discipline and control over themselves.[3]

"There was the ground rules, right there. I wasn't being disrespectful. I said it with a big smile on my face. Y'know, it was a joke, and I was tellin' him I took his remark as a joke."

Bill laughed. "The next day he had me –; no, it wasn't the next day. It was three or four days. We had to go back in the studio for the second session; and he had been out to Shawnee and back and he came in and gave me a BOX of shirts," Bill laughed, "from Shawnee; golf shirts.

"He says," (rudely), "'I can't have my producer looking awful. Here, put some decent shirts on'."

Mj said, "As ‘producer’—; what would that mean? Was that producer of the road show?"

The interviewer paced inwardly, trying to digest this. He was back on bull fours, chewing and churning, posing questions, wishing he could knock Bill off balance and wear him down until he cracked and gave him the psychoanalytic scoop he wanted.

But what exactly did he want? He wasn’t sure. "Of the records: only. Did he put out one record a year; or how many?"

"But that's not what you ended up doing, producing records. You did a lot more than that!"[5]

Bill nodded and changed the subject, not easily distracted except when he chose to be. "I think what I got along with Fred for is one, this mysteriousness. He couldn't figure out where the hell I was at, and I think with Fred Waring that's a very big thing."

Fred's girls joined the men in a unison that was upbeat and syncopated, even jazzy.

Mystified by Bill’s tack for some reason, mj tried to keep up with him. "Were you doing that consciously? Was it part of your business style?"

"Oh no, no. I kept him at arm's length; yes. I realized right away that when you deal with a man like Fred Waring, 'familiarity breeds contempt' is the truest thing in the world, unless I have a bigger house than he, and he wants to be near me. But the closest you can ever get with a man like a Fred Waring is to have lunch with him once in awhile, in a setting, you pick up the tab, he picks up the tab. As a matter of fact, I picked up the tab with him."

"And I think the fact that he saw me come out at my expense to see the show, t'fly out to see the show –."

Peacemakers were supposed to get people together again. Mj tried to see both sides, Bill's and Fred's, but could see nothing now but thick fog around him everywhere in all directions.

The glee club belted it appassionato. An upbeat Gershwin-like piano swirled throughout.

"Well," said Bill, "not all these things were done to impress him. I was doing it because I really wanted t'understand this man. When I do an artist or when I work with an artist, I go all out to totally understand 'im."

Mj ‘saw’ nothing. Nothing fit at the moment into one of the forty nine or so psychoanalytic cubby holes they had said things should fit in, not that this freshman shrink could see, anyway, and that made him feel lost, utterly lost.

The arrangement went four-part now, and pianissississimo, with a crescenDO, then DEcrescendo, ...-

[1] Like this cartoon, many in the Waring collection suggest that some of the artistically and psychologically perceptive cartoonists could not help but see a few of the darker corners of the Waring personality and world.

[2] "Night and Day," by Cole Porter; Decca: “The Best of Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians.” See “Bibliography.”

[3] Castaneda, The Fire from Within, p. 23.

[4] When he first had to deal with Fred Waring, Bill was a Decca man, producing Fred’s records in the city. It was only later that Fred invited him to come up to the Poconos, and later still that he hired Bill directly to work for the Pennsylvanians. This history has been/will be mentioned in other footnotes, but bears repeating if only to emphasize the point that the history of the Bill-Fred relationship was coming up during the interview in non-sequential chunks, and young Dr. mj, for whatever reasons, was having a hard time digesting and absorbing it – so to speak – in order to put the chronology together in his head and commit it to understanding, as he very much needed to do, just as any doctor or biographer would, in order to interpret cause and result, among other things. Just as the Democrats kept complaining about the drip drip of minutiae tidbits about Trump and Russia, and then started applauding themselves around December of 2018 and January of 2019, when they began to feel that they might be close to detecting a very important, interpretable and comprehensible pattern in all of the jigsaw puzzle of events. (Though only Time would tell how right or wrong they were.)

[5] At this point Bill and Fred were just starting to get to know each other. Bill still worked for Decca in Manhattan. They had assigned Fred Waring to him, and Bill was supposed to produce his records, because no one else at Decca could stand Fred any more, partly because of his impossible and demanding disposition and also because he had fired each one who had tried (as Bill had explained earlier in the evening). Later, once Fred got to know Bill a little bit better, he started offering him jobs at the Waring Organization offices in Delaware Water Gap, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania; which today (2018) are only about a ninety minutes’ drive from Upper Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge.