The Kansas City Star from Kansas City, Missouri • 181

1 'Vi Peter Nero Now Plays In Key of (for Clover) By Margaret McManus a child prodigy, and he Is still not over-confident, but now when he walks the the ground of Flatbush, the ground under his feet feels solid, the concert bookings are solid, and the nnvie and recording contracts feel very solid in his hand. I dont think I was a child prodigy, said Nero. A child prodigy gives concerts in Carnegie hall. I used to give concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. BERNIE Nierow started to study the piano when he was 7.

His father is a social worker and his mother teaches Spanish in the Brooklyn public schools and there was never any money to spare. However, when Bernie, as a boy, started to pick out tunes on a xylophone he found around the house, and when relatives gave them a battered, upright piano, his parents found the money for piano lessons. He was giving concerts and winning prizes from the age of 11 and he was enough of a prodigy to win a 3-year scholarship to Juilliard, although he decided while still in his teens that he did not w'ant to be a concert pianist. He did not want to have to play the music exactly as the composers had written it. He is only happy at the piano when he can take the notes and wrap them in his own personality.

My parents still dont understand this, he said. To this day, I dont think they know what Im trying to do. NERO AND his wife, Marcia, his childhood sweetheart, whom he met when she was 14 and he was 17, still live in Brooklyn. They have two children, Beverly, 6, and Jedd, 3, and they have recently bought a 13-room brick house, with a big, wide lawn, not far from where he and his wife grew up. Id like to get out of Brooklyn myself, he said.

Id like to live in Manhattan or California, but Im traveling so much, its better for my wife to live hear her family and my family. She always has some place she can drop in and somebody close by to take the kids off her hands for a few hours. When Im in a position to cut down on the concert tours, then well talk about where well move. He would like to do more television and he has an idea for a television series which is going the round of the networks and agencies. The truth is that Peter Nero is trying to work out his life and keep his career progressing, and come out on top with both.

If you had played the piano as long as I did, with nobody listening, you could understand what a thrill it is to give a concert for 13,000 people at the Hollywood bowl, he said. Id be nuts if I didnt appreciate that. But if I can just figure out a way to do a limited concert tour, anT compose music for the movies, and be on television more regularly, and stay home too. His cup would runneth over. Vince Howards Bij Break Brought a Teaching Role I was going nowhere.

I didnt even know if I was any good. I felt there was something on the other side of where I was that was for me, but I didnt know how to get at it. I know that great music is personal and, in the piano I was playing, there was not enough of myself. WHEN NERO had an offer to go to Las Vegas, to play in a combo with a bass and a trumpet, he took it, and he stayed a year. It was a years practice with pay, he said.

Nobody was listening out there either so it didnt matter what we were playing. We fooled around, dropped in a little classical music here, a little jazz there, improvised, tried to create something personal, not just be an echo of the comooser. I cant stand to play the same tune in the same way over and over again. When Nero came back to New York, he had developed and polished a style and technique that is strictly his, and he got a chance to show it off in a club here called Jiliys on Fifty-second street. It's an in kind of place where people like Sinatra and Judy Garland like to go when they're in town, and musicians hang out to listen to other musicians.

Nero had a very happy year there and it opened doors to him which brought him a recording contract and television appearances and the concert tours. It was a hard road, and a lonely road, that started in Brooklyn, and could end anywhere. He denies that he was Oscar Is Fickle Hollywood Vince Howard is the young actor who portrays a high school history teacher on the Mr. Novak television series. Before he got the role he was a quality control engineer with a sideline singing job in a Santa Monica night club.

That was where a Hollywood producer saw him last summer and said to NEW York Peter Nero, 29, was born in Brooklyn, in the tough Brownsville section, and he grew up in Brooklyn, a tall, black-haired boy, named Bernard Peter Nierow, who would rather have been out in the street playing stickbalt with the oth-. er kids, than in the parlor, practicing the piano. He lived 30 subway stops from the High School of Music and Arts in Manhattan, and 31 stops from the Juilliard School of Music, where he went Saturdays. Its difficult to find a label for Peter Nero. Is he a classical pianist who also plays jazz, or is he a jazz pianist who gives his own interpretation to the classics? Whatever he is, Nero, who started out to be a concert pianist, takes from the classics and jazz and popular music, and marries them all, in a personal and distinctive way.

When you hear him playing the piano, you know it is Peter Nero. He dropped Bernard from his name first. Six years ago he dropped the i from Nierow. Three years ago, the went. Nero appears as a guest this week on Perry Comos show, live, from the North-rup auditorium in Minneapolis, 8:30 p.

m. Thursday on NBC. Just about a month ago, Nero gave a concert in the same auditorium. THE BOY from Brownsville sat in the French restaurant looking over Rockefeller center, where much of his first movie, Sunday in New York, was shot. He made his debut, both as an actor and a composer of film scores, in this picture, and he loved it.

How he loved it. He has a contract to do three more movies and it is his hope eventually to work extensively in the movies, and to live in California. He is now doing the concert tours, the one night stands in colleges and city auditoriums, and its rough going the traveling, being away from home and missing his wife and children, and being so tired and keyed-up when he does get home, he can hardly enjoy being there. He has also just signed a new record contract with RCA so that much of his time at home, between concert appearances, is spent at his arrangements and recordings. Look, Im not complaining, he said, but every phase of your life seems to bring its own problems.

You get one solved, and two more pop up. Three years ago, I was ready to quit. I felt I was a complete failure. I was playing the piano in saloons and nobody was listening. I thought, Is this what I studied 15 years for? him, Youd be great in a new television series Im starting.

Could you come by MGM tgmorrow and go to work? Howards break in show business was that simple. BORN IN St. Louis- and a graduate of Vashon high school there, Howard had no particular thoughts about a career in show business until he was in the Army. While serving in Germany he organized a singing group called The Rhythm Aces, which remained together for two years after they left the serv- 1 ice. Howard then spent a year traveling with Billy Wards In 1958 he took an opening with the Radio Corporation of America and appeared settled in a new field as a quality control engineer.

The Howard family includes his wife, Sara, and five children 2 months to 11 years in age. Occasionally he took a night singing job. He was bent over the microphone at a club called the Horn in Santa Monica one July evening last year when E. Jack Neuman, then producer of Sam Benedict, dropped by w-ith his series star, Edmond OBrien. A new series called Mr.

Novak was on Neumans mind. When he saw Howard on stage, be turned to O'Brien and said he saw the singer as the man to cast as a history teacher. Impulsively, Neuman called Howard over to his table. The next day Vince was at MGM, reading lines. And the day following, he was on the Mr.

Novak set with series stars Dean Jagger and James Franciscus teaching at Jefferson high school. TTOLLYWOOD On April 13 the annual Academy Awards --ceremonies will be telecast on ABC. With rare exception, there isnt a star in Hollywood whose biggest dream is anything but the vision of an Oscar in his hands. The Oscar is not only a status symbol, they say, but it assures stardom with a capital more money, more fame, a firm niche on the top rung of the ladder. But is this so? Take Luise Rainer, who won the Oscar as best actress two consecutive years for The Great Ziegfield (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).

Within months of her repeat win, no one hired her for a role of any importance. She has yet to make a comeback of any significance. Then theres Bette Davis, nominated for numberless Oscars and winner of two. Not too long ago, Bette had to advertise in a trade paper that she was available for work. Unlike Luise, Bette made her comeback.

Not too long ago, Rita Moreno won an Oscar for West Side Story and, although she still gets important roles, the Oscar has yet to put her in a position where she can pick or choose her properties as most stars do. OSCAR LY BE FICKLE, but he is loved more than ever. As a child, Oscar did some rather strange things. Two years after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts Sciences was formed, Charlie Chaplin won an Oscar for versatility and genius in 1929. It was an unusual award to say the least, presented to him for writing, directing, producing and starring in The Circus.

Do you remember a 1928 Oscar winner named Joseph Farn- ham? You probably dont because his award was for the best written titles. The category was thrown out the following year when sound made titles relatively unimportant. Who was presented the first miniature Oscar in 1935? Shirley Temple. What two male stars simultaneoulsy got Oscars as best actor in 1932? Fredric March, for Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, and Wallace Beery, for The Champ. It wa3 a freak tie that couldnt be broken- (TV Tim Feature).