Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski

Author:Jerzy Kosinski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2011-01-06T08:00:00+00:00

If only, Osten thought, he could find a way to write and sing rock music and have it known while he would remain unseen—better yet, unknown—by his audience! That would be the ideal life.

Knowing what it would mean if he ever told his father that he considered making a career as a rock performer, Osten kept his thoughts smothered, at the same time growing more and more frustrated. What added to his concern, was the knowledge that Etude Classics was slowly heading toward bankruptcy. Having driven the big saloon singers out of the recording studios, rock was also causing mayhem in the classical music business—all the more reason why Osten couldn’t approach his father. Finally, almost in despair, he decided to seek the advice of his father’s closest friends—Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel.

Both were most extraordinary men. When Jimmy Osten first met them, Lieberson was already president of Columbia Records and Pregel president of the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition, between them, the two men served on the boards of directors and boards of trustees of at least a dozen major corporations, foundations, and institutions. Together they wielded tremendous influence. There was literally nothing about music, the music business, or any contemporary composer, performer, or talent, that Lieberson—who was a composer, author, technical innovator, and businessman combined—did not know; and everything he knew, he knew with the intimate knowledge of those blessed with talent themselves. Older than Lieberson, Pregel was a gifted composer, pianist, inventor, and businessman who was a major shareholder in uranium companies in Africa, Europe, and North America.

The two men had a number of characteristics in common: love of classical music, ready talent for composing and performing, formidable business acumen, and rare executive ability. Both men were handsome, with charming personalities, accessible generally yet sufficiently imposing when they needed to be. Both epitomized financial success. Both made New York their home, but in order to break the city’s frenetic rhythm, both maintained peaceful retreats to which they could escape for recharging—Lieberson to the hills of New Mexico, Pregel to a lake in Switzerland. Both men considered Gerhard Osten a most valued friend, and they were protective of Jimmy Osten.

Although Lieberson and Pregel were worldly, affable, and confident, equally at ease in intimate conversation and at a podium in front of a thousand people, their friend Gerhard Osten, by contrast, seemed to shrivel in public. Almost anyone could intimidate the shy man—from his own secretary to a postman routinely asking for his signature on a special delivery letter. And whereas, to a great extent, Lieberson and Pregel had both sacrificed their composing and their other private interests for what they deemed to be matters of significant public concern, Gerhard Osten, who had never shown musical talent himself, continued at best to be a kindly supporter of a few talented composers, somewhat ill at ease in his corporate position as head of the modest firm of Etude Classics. In the course of the friendship of these three

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