Though scarcely serious as verse, it articulates an exaggerated social position which Louis would always elicit from his, frequently frenzied, admirers. His energy, creativity and inexplicable self-assurance cowed the weak and awed the strong. Since he was at that time (July, 1944) many characteristics in search of a character, self-definition often came in strange, unpredictable forms and from exotic directions.

Sometimes independence can get you into trouble, as Louis soon found out. Throughout his life in New York he would have run-ins with the law of varying degrees of seriousness: the first one came in the mid-forties when he was selling his earliest broadside, Pen and Sword , on the streets. This "eleven by seventeen, double folded sheet" contained articles by Louis on the social condition as well as some excerpts from leftist writers; it came out "irregularly," a thousand per printing, and sold for a nickel from 1945 through 1948. Although all copies now seem to be lost, it is clear from interviews taken only several years later that his ideas were as yet somewhat crude and lacked the idiosyncratic wrinkles that he began to develop in the sixties. (In 1946 he and Naila wrote a United Nations march hymn which he either sold or gave away; all thousand copies of this work are also lost.) One day he was led into a side street by a policeman. When he asked why, after waiting a couple of minutes, he was answered by a paddy wagon that pulled up and into which he was, unwillingly, pushed. By the time they reached the station house one of the cops had a torn shirt. The night court judge fined Louis two dollars after the arresting officer charged him with causing crouds. With the money Louis left a copy of Pen and Sword with the judge. His first, he notes wryly, "but not last, brush with the law."

The single most exciting and long-lasting encounter of his earliest years in New York, though, was his romance in many keys with the New York Philharmonic. There are several versions of the course of events which extended over four years: Louis's, a reporter's and the wife of conductor Artur Rodzinski, Halina's ( Our Two Lives , New York, 1976, pp. 247- 248). Louie, as he preferred to be called during this stretch of time ("people get Louis mixed up with Lewis"), was scarcely inconspicuous: "His face was long, pale, ascetic, his cheek bones were high. The hairs of his flowing brown beard glistened. . . . His long thick hair was tied in a knot at the back . . . and a brown kerchief knotted about his neck was decorated by a silver chain from which hung an Indian arrowhead." So it was that he was noticed his very first Sunday in New York when he sat front row center at the Philharmonic broadcast concert, Bruno Walter conducting, Joseph Schuster cello soloist in Strauss's Don Quixote . At this point the accounts differ. According to Louis, smitten with devotion, he found the stage-door entrance one day soon afterwards and managed to climb a flight of stairs before the doorman, Joe Nelson, soon to become a bosom buddy, stopped him. At this very moment fate, wyrd or Antoninus's "concatenation of circumstances" intervened in his behalf, for the orchestra rehearsal was at intermission and none other than Mr. Schuster himself, positioned perfectly, noticed his admirer. He had no trouble recollecting the singular man in front row and asked Louis if he would like to attend the rehearsal. Hardly was Louis's reply delivered when maestro Rodzinski himself was fetched to make the invitation official. Then, in a "monumental moment," the conductor led Louis down the center aisle of Carnegie Hall to a seat and said "Enjoy yourself."

According to the Philharmonic press agent in the 1945 P.M. article, Artur Rodzinski noticed Louis at the stage door entrance to Carnegie Hall and was shocked by this man "with the face of Christ." So stricken was he that he did for Louis what he would do for no one else: allowed him to attend all rehearsals and gave him some new clothing. Soon Louis made friends with many of the members of the orchestra, even becoming something of a good luck charm, a "mascot." They took up collections to supplement Louis's meager income from modeling or, according to Halina Rodzinski, "making leather belts." Under the patronage of the conductor, who was undergoing something of a religious conversion at the time, Louis had great privileges, but, even more important, he witnessed the day-to-day livelihood of making music. For a while, all was bliss. Summers, there were concerts at Lewisohn Stadium in the Bronx; for the rest of the year there were the rehearsals, which he never missed, when he met many of the stars of the musical world.

First, there were the internationally famous soloists like Schnabel and Elman. Then, there were the conductors, a dazzling display of supernovae: Metroupolis and Szell, for instance. The latter asked the orchestra's trombones to "sound like granite" during Brahms's Fourth Symphony and Louis wrote a letter noting that the effect could be achieved if they would forego vibrato (Louis would always prefer pure, straight tones); Szell agreed. Leonard Bernstein, at the start of his career, once conducted Louis to the men's room; on another occasion he called one of Louis's compositions "Shubertian," but never chose to play any of the scores Louis would send him during his long tenure. In 1945, at a grand affair in Madison Square Garden, Arturo Toscanini conducted the combined Philharmonic and NBC orchestras in an evening of Wagner. There the great one spied the anomoly, and when Artur pressed Louis upon Arturo the young devotee was moved to press the maestro's hand to his lips. Toscanini pulled it away, however, observing that he was "not a beautiful woman."

Louis made many friends in the orchestra, talented musicians who were by and large "princely" to him: Bill Lindser played first viola on the two suites recorded on Epic in 1954; Julius Baker, the renowned flutist, recorded the Tell It Again album in 1957; the Weiner-Sabinski duo recorded several compositions on the first Prestige album in 1957. Harold Gomberg was so friendly that Louis would later write a madrigal about him and his instrument: "Mister O, Mister Boe, Mr. Oboe player, the orchestra would like to have an "a" before it starts to play."

The smooth and the sweet relationship, however, soon soured, in part due to professional jealousies and in part due to Louis's growing independence. According to Mrs. Rodzinski, Louis sold a suit, an overcoat and a walking stick that Artur had given him. Louis counters that a thief broke through the lock to his room and exited through the trapdoor with the goods. The real difference at the time, though, was not in how the conductor's clothing disappeared but why: Louis, on "the crest of an independence kick," would stand firm about his right to dress as he wished. Yes, he would take the handsome shoes Halina purchased for him and treasure the gifts from her husband, but more and more Louis relied less and less upon garments other than those of his own making. As soon as he cobbled together his own first pair of shoes (in April of 1944) he "hobbled" over in them to the Lotus Club to join the orchestra at its annual affair. On the drive home, as the Rodzinski's took Louis to his door, Artur asked him if he wanted to come live with them at their Massachusetts farm and their East 84th townhouse, against the wishes of his wife, obviously, who objected that there wasn't room enough. If she had not presented an obstacle Louis just might have accepted, and things surely would have been very different. But as time unravelled, a distance grew between the two men, exacerbated, doubtless, by grumblings from the orchestra, some of whose members resented Louis's privileges as well as a collection taken up in his name. When Artur insisted that they have a long talk about clothes Louis replied that it need not be longer than this: he would dress in his own style. Although permitted this license, attitudes cooled. Against the "bitchiness of frustrated players," and against what appeared to be a wife's desire to prevent her prominent husband from going to extremes, Louis had little recourse. But while he was there he learned much: "orchestration and administration of same," and, up close, the quality and the variety of the music that would be his life-blood through the difficult years ahead. His favorite composition at this time, he revealed, was Mozart's G Minor Symphony, because of its "perfect blend of the classic and romantic ideal." These Philharmonic years were a time of synthesis, of acquisition, of growth. Afterwards he would write more and more of his own music, "write my fool head off," and develop his own interests, models and idiom. His years of attending rehearsal, of listening not only to what was being played but learning also what went into the playing, fueled rather than deflected his ambitions. He would always "cherish" these moments and these people; he would always be "grateful" to the Rodzinski's. Moving on, he would always glance fondly back.

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