Music: Piano Playboy | TIME

Jose Iturbi’s Falstaffian zest does not begin or end with music. He has logged 1,400 hours as a pilot, over 20 years as a topflight pianist, thousands of miles as a motorcyclist, and hundreds of rounds as an amateur boxer.

While he practices at his piano, Valencia-born Iturbi often dictates letters to his secretary or talks to his two grandchildren. He speaks to his grandchildren in Spanish, to his butler in Italian, to his close friend Director Jean Negulesco in French, to others in a somewhat mangled English.

His latest protégé-playmate is little, dark-haired Don Perone, former New England featherweight champ, who has lived in Iturbi’s Beverly Hills mansion for six months. Iturbi employs him as coffee-pourer and sparring partner, and rewards him with singing lessons. Although Perone was wounded at Salerno by a bayonet that pierced his stomach, Amateur Boxer Iturbi has persuaded Perone to return to the ring. Perone will make the great sacrifice next month against a local fighter selected by Iturbi. He would much rather sing.

In the Money. Last week Iturbi collected a $118,029.69 royalty check from RCA-Victor for six months’ sales of his phonograph records. It was one of the biggest single royalty checks RCA-Victor has ever issued. It put him in a class with some of Victor’s all-time moneymakers: Caruso, Alma Gluck and Marian Anderson. Added to his Hollywood salary of about $100,000 a picture, and an annual income of $200,000 from concerts, it established Pianist Iturbi in the financial big league in music.

Most of the royalties came from a two-record album of the pieces Iturbi played anonymously in the movie life of Chopin, A Song to Remember,* and Iturbi’s record of Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat, which sold 800,000 copies.

Liszt in Technicolor. Of the many “serious” musicians to trek to Hollywood (among them Lawrence Tibbett, Lily Pons, Risë Stevens), only Jose Iturbi and Wagnerian Tenor Lauritz Melchior have made the grade, by their ability to be themselves on the screen, to get off foolish lines with M-G-M stars Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson.

Iturbi mugged with Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh, played The Donkey Serenade and conducted an 18-piano ensemble in a Technicolor thrashing of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. In his fifth picture (Holiday in Mexico) he appears with three other Iturbis—his sister, Amparo Iturbi, and his two grandchildren, Antonia and Teresa.

He loves the movies. M-G-M lets him keep the clothes he wears on the screen, so he has not bought a suit in five years. Says Iturbi: “The radio—ooh. If you make a mistake everyone hears it. They do not see you as a personality, they do not realize you are human. But the movies, ah. You repeat, you dub, you play perfect.”

This week Iturbi is auditioning musicians, 40 at a time, for his new 96-piece Iturbi Symphony Orchestra which he will take on tour this summer. He will conduct from the keyboard while playing Liszt and Beethoven concertos. The Iturbi orchestra will fill six Pullman cars, a baggage car and a private car. Said Iturbi: “Details are carried out by my managers. I’m just interested in the idea . . . I’m not interested in the difficulties.”

Iturbi knows that some fellow musicians and a good many critics deplore his Hollywood monkeyshines, and the flashiness that has come into his playing. Says he: “To some musicians the only great thing in the world is a Beethoven symphony. With me life is like a meal, and music is the roast beef. But what good is roast beef by itself? I must have my coffee and dessert and cigar . . . my airplane, my boxing and my motorcycle.”

*Because he is under contract to MGM, Iturbi received no screen credit for his work in the Columbia picture.

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