I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.
These days there are a lot of people who just want to be famous. I think that comes from a naive place, because those people generally don't know what it's like.
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
Going to New York to do whatever - show business - it just seemed fun. It seemed fun to go to the big city and meet all kinds of different people and maybe be famous. It was just exciting. So I wasn't scared.
Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.
