I Can Hear The Music: The Life of Gene DiNovi

Chapter Fifty

The Di Novi clan at the wedding of Zoe and William.

I turned eighty-five on May 26, 2013, but as far as I was concerned, my birthday was nowhere close to the year's real major event. What was even better in personal and musical terms came a few days after the birthday. This occasion, on June 1, celebrated the marriage of my son William to the girl of his dreams, Zoe Pollock.

    After William graduated from Wesleyan University, he found a series of great beginning jobs in American journalism. He started with television, working for the PBS News Hour in the District of Columbia. Then he switched to print with jobs on the editorial side at three different magazines, The Nation, the Atlantic Monthly and New York. Next he moved, in Washington, to a Japanese newspaper, nothing less than the largest daily in all of Japan.

    William was a very busy guy, and along the way, he met Zoe who followed a somewhat similar journalistic path as he did. Zoe's most fascinating job was as a researcher and all-round assistant to Andrew Sullivan, the prominent author, editor, blogger and commentator on many subjects. Since Andrew was Catholic, conservative and gay, he made plenty of waves with his books, magazine articles and blogs, and Zoe was along for the whole ride.

William and Zoe's wedding took place just outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the home of Zoe's parents, Dale and Susie Pollock. Dale is the Dean of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina. In a very intensive career, he has produced several feature films (Mrs. Winterbourne, a 1996 movie with Shirley MacLaine, was one), written a book about George Lucas, and done much else in arts and journalism. Dale's background gave our two families a lot in common. Deirdre and I were happy about that, and we were dazzled by the magnificent wedding that Dale and Susie arranged for the two children.

    My contribution came with the song that Bill Comstock and I wrote for the occasion, Bill writing the lyrics and me composing the music. This was of course in the tradition the two of us established years earlier of writing songs to celebrate milestones in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

    Bill hadn't experienced the best of health in recent times, but he didn't let that get in his way. He and his elegant wife Susan had retired many years earlier to San Antonio, Texas, and he and I worked on the William and Zoe wedding song by mail and phone. I wrote the music first, sent it to Bill, and he got busy on the lyrics. We went back and forth until we felt happy about the finished song.

When Deirdre and I arrived at out hotel in Winston-Salem, I felt immediately welcome. The woman on the front desk turned out to be a jazz fan, and she knew where I fit in the jazz picture. As part of the hotel's greeting, they delivered to our room a bottle of champagne accompanied by strawberries wrapped in chocolate. Even better, there was a Yamaha piano in the lobby, which I was invited to use for rehearsals.

    The Pollock home, when we went out there for the wedding, has a backyard consisting of two acres of gorgeously slopping lawns. That was where the ceremonies took place on a beautiful day with clear skies and plenty of sunshine, meaning there was no need for a tent to shelter the one hundred guests.

    The ceremonial part began down in a glade with a string quartet and the wedding party. Then we came back up the lawns to the house for canapés, and it was during this part of the afternoon when Bill and I presented our song. Bill's son had looked after him through the trip from San Antonio to Winston-Salem, and over the course of Bill's two days in town, he gathered strength and looked better almost by the minute. When he sang our song, he sat on a chair on the porch with me at the piano to his left and the string quartet on my other side. Bill proceeded to do a terrific job of putting the lyrics across.