Mary Lou Falcone has spent most of her life away from the spotlight. “I made a conscious decision to stay behind the scenes,” she said over lunch recently at Café Luxembourg, a few blocks from Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Fifty years ago, after a brief career as a performer and teacher, Falcone changed course and became a leading publicist in the world of classical music. She worked behind the scenes with leading organizations and artists, including soprano Renée Fleming, pianist Van Cliburn, flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel, Georg Solti and Jaap van Zweden, helping him to gain notoriety over the years Before him, he was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic.
For the first time since she was 28, Falcone is taking center stage to promote a new, personal cause. In early 2019, her husband, artist Nicholas Zann, was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disease. He died in 2020. To raise awareness of the disease and shed light on work as a caregiver, she wrote “I Didn’t See It Coming: Scenes of Love, Loss and Lewy Body Dementia,” a memoir Life, their relationship and Zann’s diagnosis and decline. Falcone, 78, has now embarked on a promotional tour for the book, giving readings, lectures and interviews. In many ways, she’s doing what she’s always done: creating a narrative and then sharing it.
“I’m just telling my own story,” Falcone said.
Falcone grew up in New Jersey as the oldest of three children in an Italian-American family. When she was ten, her father was disabled by a stroke and music became her emotional outlet. As a teenager, she received a scholarship to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. She describes herself as a “chicken soprano” – a soprano who is afraid of the high notes. Many of her colleagues were exceptional singers; Falcone felt that her own talents were lesser. She soon discovered that she could either accept achievement or give it up.
“I didn’t need it,” she said. “I had to communicate. That was different.”
After graduating, she took a teaching position and began a brief acting career that took her to the Saint Paul Opera for several summers. During her third season, she was asked to direct a photo shoot. That sparked something in her. The next year, in addition to her performances, she asked for an internship in the advertising department. The managing director rejected this request. Instead, he asked her to become the company’s publicist.
“He just looked at me and said, ‘I’ve been watching you. You like challenges. Say ‘yes’ and find out,'” Falcone recalls. “And I did.”
Word has gotten around. Soon more customers came forward. Falcone turned some away even though she couldn’t afford it. She only accepted those she believed in and felt she could help. Although she is not an agent or manager, she has advised her clients on matters of repertoire, performance and even wardrobe, helping many of them create memorable public roles.
“I’m a publicist, but also a strategist,” she said.
Fleming, the distinguished American soprano, met with her three times before Falcone agreed to take over. Falcone’s first task was to ensure that Fleming’s first concert at Carnegie Hall sold out the hall. Which she did. She helped establish Fleming as “the diva next door.”
“People respect her tremendously,” Fleming said in a recent telephone interview. Being taken over by Falcone meant receiving an immediate imprimatur.
Deborah Borda, who stepped down as president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic earlier this year and previously led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has worked with Falcone in various capacities since 1988. Borda described Falcone as “a maestra of art.” It is a combination of mysticism, an incredible instinct for recognizing talent and a remarkable generosity of spirit.”
Falcone had never intended to break through this mystery. Even when she knew she had to write about Lewy body dementia, which also affected pitcher Tom Seaver and actor and comedian Robin Williams, she was initially determined to leave herself out of the narrative. Her first draft of the book read more like a disease awareness pamphlet. Friends and early editors told her that no one would care about Lewy body dementia if he didn’t take care of her first. So she rewrote the book, starting with her childhood and then working down to the smallest details, even including a log at the end about what it was like to care for Zann.
“I opened my heart,” Falcone said. “And I allowed everything that I had suppressed.”
But after so many years of waiting, she still wasn’t inclined to concentrate. As Falcone notes in the introduction, “For decades I have shied away from the words ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my,'” preferring to focus on the lives and careers of others, often writing in theirs in my public relations work Voices.” This shyness could be one of the book’s literary devices: many short chapters begin with Falcone’s own voice and then reflect the voice of a family member, colleague or artist. (Fleming confirmed that the passage written in her voice was completely accurate.)
When asked about her literary ventriloquism, Falcone replied: “I, me and mine, that’s the truth,” she said. “It has nothing to do with humility. It has to do with boredom and I don’t want to be boring.”
Falcone is nearing retirement. It only has two clients, Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic. And although she has now become a client herself, she has not done so alone. One of her first actions in finding a publisher was to hire an advertising company that specialized in books. Some of her friends have joked that she is probably the client from hell.
She hopes not. “I think I’m the customer who realizes how hard this is,” she said.
At Café Luxembourg, which she took over as a secondary office, she made it look easy. The host and waiter visited her corner booth to inform her that they had already ordered the book and asked her to sign it. Wearing a forest green tunic and slightly bohemian gold jewelry, Falcone accepted her congratulations with humility and self-possession.
She believes the first act of her career was a performance. The second was the lessons. The third and longest was advertising. And this is her fourth stint as a spokesperson bringing attention to a devastating disease.
“I thought it was going to be hard,” she said. “But I’m just telling my story.”