The Secret Life of Glenn Gould
Chapter FIVE
GLADYS and CYNTHIA
Floyd said it was possible that Gould thought about having a deeper relationship with her. “I’m not sure what he expected, probably more [than music]. But did I want to give up my career? It’s possible it could have developed into something more, but I wasn’t ready. I was a slow developer.” According to Floyd, at one point Gould invited her to come to his apartment on St. Clair Avenue, but she did not go. “I knew then that he needed mothering. I don’t think [a romance] would have worked. I’m a fairly strong personality. It would have been a catastrophe for me.” But she said their relationship remained healthy in its platonic state and they got along well, partly because they were both intellectual and liked to be alone — and Gould seemed to like both those traits in a woman. “Our musical backgrounds were similar, although I didn’t start [piano] until I was ten. He enjoyed sparring with me, but he respected my opinion and Glenn seemed to want to protect me as a person. We were both puritanical and we had a mutual friend, who slipped some gin into my lemonade. Glenn became incensed and very angry. He told the man he had no business doing that.”
At about the time he was chummy with Millman, the twenty-three-year-old Gould was talking about quitting the concert stage. He told CBC interviewer Eric McLean on April 25, 1956, that he wanted to shift his career from concert performances to composing. “I’m a little afraid if this career keeps on going, it’s going to seriously interfere with what I really want to do, which is composing . . . I’m longing to retire [from performing] at twenty-six. I have a lot of projects for two years and an opera. I’m a very slow composer.” This, despite the fact that McLean said Gould’s album of the Goldberg Variations was selling marvelously.
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