”Mother lived with all that turmoil, and then she married Daddy Joe, and he was giving her a good life,” Larsen says. ”We felt she deserved to rest. When she set up her home for foster care to receive infants until they were adopted I knew she was really going to be tied down and I told her so. Being mother, she said: `I`ll do it if I want to.` When mother wanted to do something, you respected that. But I don`t think that she expected to keep the one child. Leslie was her first and last one.”
Hearing about Leslie and even seeing him on videotape does not prepare one for meeting him. He is a slight, golden-haired, 36-year-old child-man. In repose, he looks disabled and sometimes babbles nonsense to himself.
But when he plays the piano, his handicaps seem to magically melt away. He has the presence of an entertainer, but no professional performer is so intensely moving. He is, perhaps, most himself when he is playing-and most like everyone else.
Gathered around the Wurlitzer with Larsen, Treffert and May at the home of Pat Smith`s neighbor Ruth Czoschke in Winnebago recently, Leslie gave an impromptu performance worthy of a concert hall. He started out with ”Hymn”
by Vangelis, as the others hummed, their voices rising in the crescendoes. He played and sang ”Amazing Grace” and ”The Lord`s Prayer,” ”I`ve Never Been This Homesick Before” and ”The Old Blue Rocking Chair.” He segued into rousing imitations of Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Durante, not forgetting to say goodnight to Mrs. Calabash. He is a baritone and sings in perfect pitch.
Outside in the yard he took requests. At the mention the Beatles he broke into ”I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with the lyrics slightly garbled. The Rolling Stones? ”Ti-ii-ime is on my side . . . . ” he wailed. He also hummed the theme songs of some 1950s` television shows-”Peter Gunn” and ”The Honeymooners,” with an imitation of Ralph Kramden (”Hey, Norton!”) thrown in for fun. Afterward he was smiling.
Asked if he knows a certain song, Leslie always says yes, and if he doesn`t know it he improvises. Singing a bar or two for him sometimes jogs his memory. His family has no idea about the extent of his repertoire because he has his own titles for pieces, and they have no way to gain access to his codes. They often are surprised by what he knows when he plays spontaneously or fills requests at his concerts.
Leslie speaks with an English accent, one of the ways that May`s influence always will be with him. When he spouted a commercial for the
”Hotshot” vacuum cleaner, embellishing as he went, he sounded like Ringo Starr imitating an oily announcer as he added a fillip, ”So someday I`m going to get you one, if I can find one. For Christmas.”
The spasticity in Leslie`s hands prevents him from playing the piano the way other musicians do, but he manages to reproduce the same music through his own imperfect method of striking the keys. He plays with only nine fingers, the little finger on his left hand being relatively useless. He uses the sides of his fingers and even his knuckles sometimes. He was greatly influenced by Liberace, one of May`s favorites, and so he has a pounding style. He used to demolish pianos within months, until Larsen managed to teach him to lighten up a bit.
Leslie gave his first concert when he was 22 at the Waukesha County Fair in 1974. Since then he has given many concerts in schools, prisons and churches, as well as a command performance for Crown Prince Harold and Crown Princess Sonja in Norway in 1984 and a 26-city concert tour of Japan in 1987. The two-hour concerts consist of one hour of formal performance including a mix of religious songs, classical music and impersonations. The informal second hour gives concertgoers an opportunity to challenge Leslie. They can sing a capella or play any instrument they want, and Leslie will immediately transpose it to the piano.
”We do that because there are so many skeptics in the world,” says Larsen. ”I`ve had people come up and shake their fist in my face and say,
`Don`t you dare tell me there`s anything wrong with his mind. Nobody can sing and play like that and be mentally retarded.`
”We always ask that they challenge him with as difficult a piece as possible, because he doesn`t like to do little things. He wants something difficult. You know why? Because in his mind-I`ve sensed this-he is going to try to show that person up. He wants to do it better, and that`s why he embellishes on it.”
Leslie`s family has consisently turned down offers from agents to manage and promote Leslie, and Larsen recently formed the Miracle of Love Ministries, which she hopes to organize as a nonprofit organization in an attempt to fulfill May`s wish that Leslie be shared with as many people in the world as possible.
”It`s a ministry that means just what it says. ”It`s a miracle of love,” she says. The talent Leslie has is the miracle; Leslie is not the miracle. Leslie is simply an instrument that the Lord is using to proclaim this miracle, this gift He`s given him. The ministry is nondenominational. It simply wishes to bring Jesus Christ to people through this beautiful talent Leslie has, and then we let the Holy Spirit do the rest. God is our agent, and He sends people to us.
”We feel that we have a calling to go mainly to prisons and schools. You have to see it to believe how very, very effective Leslie is in prisons.
”The ministry is supported by free-will donations, but we`re not trying to make money on Leslie. I gave up my nursing career to care for mother and Leslie. If the world was to know, we`re going in the hole. We`re not coming out ahead.”
Leslie might have had a trust fund by now if a Hollywood production company had not taken advantage of May before Larsen had power of attorney over her.
An Emmy-winning television movie, ”The Woman Who Willed A Miracle” was made several years ago, but May agreed to a contract that paid nothing and allowed all the rights to the production company. It also stated that May`s other children would not be included in the story, preventing them from stopping the production.
”It`s not just the television movie,” Larsen says. ”The Canadians did a documentary called `May`s Miracle,` and I`m sure at the time they knew something was wrong with May. There was no contract at all. They only gave Leslie a chair. That documentary has gone all over the world and probably has made more money than the other movie.”
When he is at home with Larsen and his mother in Arpin, Leslie`s days are regimented because, if left to his own devices, he would sit at the piano for 10 hours straight.
”He doesn`t have sense enough to quit,” Larsen says. ”I finally taught him with a kitchen timer, to get him to stop playing when the bell rings and go sit in his chair.
”The first time I had to test him to make sure. I was outside working and I went back in the house and he was still playing. He doesn`t like to stop in the middle of a song. Any musician wants to finish the song. He probably thought it he got away with one, he`d get away with another one.
”I asked him, `What did you do wrong?` I make him tell me because he knows what he`s done wrong, and he will always first tell me two or three different lies. So I told him I had to discipline him, and to discipline Leslie is simply to take the piano away. So I told him he couldn`t play the piano the next day. That`s all it took. He`s never done it since because he doesn`t want to lose that opportunity to play.
”I let him do exactly what he wants to do when he sits down at the piano. Sometimes I will come in quietly so he doesn`t know I`m there, and I`ll listen. It`s just fantastic. I`m going to start taping it because he will put on whole performance the way that he wants to do it. He imitates all these emcees that he hears on television. He`ll put on a whole Liberace concert, and then he`ll also do a whole church service.”
Larsen also teaches Leslie the words to songs (he can reproduce music effortlessly but not lyrics), and she has to do it very carefully if she wants him to retain it. ”If I let him sing a song after he has heard it, he gets only half the words and that`s what stays in his brain and that`s what he`s always going to want to sing. So I let him play the music first, but I won`t let him sing. Then I teach him all the words, recite them over and over, and I don`t let him sing until he knows them.”
In the last four years, Leslie surprised everyone by starting to improvise. Until then, he was largely a slave to what he heard, and if he heard a piece with mistakes he would play those back, too. He recently learned to play the harmonica and melodeon and wants to play the violin and harp as well.
As Leslie`s musical skills have expanded, his whole being has changed, Treffert says. ”He is more interactive with others than he was, and he has become more animated and more spontaneous. He participates in a conversation. Instead of just being echolalic and repeating what you say, he takes you somewhere.”
Treffert observes that Leslie`s motivation seems to be equal parts pure love of doing something well and reaping reinforcing praise and a driven, almost obsessive behavior. ”At times it looks very friendly and what we call egosyntonic, which means pleasurable, and at other times it seems like a force.”
The specter of Leslie`s biological mother always hovers over discussions of his remarkable talent. Treffert says it would be important to trace the incidence of musical ability in Leslie`s birth family, but attempts to locate his birth mother have been unsuccessful.
”I sincerely believe that Leslie`s mother didn`t know that Leslie was blind and retarded,” says Larsen. ”I have the birth certificate, so I know what her name is, but I`m not going to disclose it. The birth certificate doesn`t state a father`s name, and by that I`m assuming she wasn`t married. She`s Scandinavian. She was a Lutheran. She was 28 years old at the time he was born, which makes her in her 60s now.
”And I have a feeling I met her. At a concert in Texas, a lady cornered me in the dressing room. Definitely a Scandinavian lady. It was the type of questions she asked me and the pain on her face. She talked like she was going to cry any minute. When she started asking what type of child was he, how was he to take care of, was he a good baby, I almost asked, `Do you think you`re his mother?` now I wish I had. Because I did think she was the mother, I assured her that he was a beautiful baby and a joy to take care of.
”If Leslie`s mother would ever show up, I`d open my arms to her. I`d share Leslie with her.”
In the meantime, Treffert plans to continue his search for clues through the window on the brain that savants like Leslie provide.
”Each savant is a miracle,” he says. ”A miracle of uniqueness, of belief and of determination. By learning about that uniqueness as we can, by taking lessons from belief in each other and by using savant determination as an inspiration, this mix of scientific possibilities and human interest can propel us further ahead in understanding both science and human potential.”
