The Secret Life of Glenn Gould by Michael Clarkson

Author:Michael Clarkson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2013-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

But my boss told me, “You’re in your early twenties — you can’t just go off and do that!”

— Carol (Hodgdon) Goodfriend

Chapter TWELVE

Crushed by CAROL

While falling in love with Cornelia Foss, Glenn Gould remained attracted to other women. To the folks at Columbia Records in New York, the pianist had a crush on Carol Hodgdon, the secretary of one of Gould’s producers, Paul Myers. “I knew Glenn adored her — many times when he came to my office, he came to see her, not me,” Myers said.

“It was thought that Glenn was sweet on her,” said his other Columbia producer, Andrew Kazdin, who worked just down the hall from Myers. “He always went out of his way to find her.”

Hodgdon was young, bubbly, charming and well educated — “a nice girl from a good Connecticut family, everyone’s kid sister,” Myers said. Gould met her in 1963 when he was about to make the switch from stage performer to studio musician/documentary filmmaker.

“He used to call me every day for long, long chats,” said Hodgdon, now Carol Goodfriend. “He was obviously very philosophical and was studying the work of [George] Santayana [“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”]. And he was prophetic in technology. Music technology really hadn’t been invented but he told me how he was learning to maneuver music with an enhanced sound that became really quite astonishing. He was blending video and music together. Obviously in his brain, he could see what we are now doing on the Internet and in films and theater.” Gould seemed attracted to Hodgdon’s love of the outdoors. She had majored in music at Smith College, playing the piano and doing some singing, while taking part in competitive skiing, swimming and tennis. “I was an austere athlete,” Goodfriend said. She was attracted to Gould, as well — “but I wasn’t in awe of him; I grew up as a practical New England girl.” Still, the two occasionally flirted. “I was a flirt who liked to have fun, but we never mentioned sex,” she said. “I already had a boyfriend and it never occurred to me he might have had a crush on me, but I was naive in those days. I thought of him as a brain guy, a sweet guy, an amazing guy.”

In 1965, Hodgdon said, Gould asked her to go to the end of the world with him — Hudson’s Bay — for what would become one of the signature works of Gould’s new career as a radio broadcaster, his Solitude Trilogy. It was supposed to be a solitary, soul-searching journey for Gould in his first full year away from the chaos of an international concert career, but he wanted Hodgdon to share with him the train trip of thousands of miles from Winnipeg to Churchill on the shore on the famous frigid bay. “I was interested in geology and geography and I really wanted to go with him, and it would have been a great adventure,” Hodgdon said.

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