In January of 1934 Iturbi took on a new protégé—a young violinist named Stephan Hero. Hero and Iturbi’s daughter Maria fell in love almost at first sight. Within two years they were married. Also in January, 1934, Iturbi signed a recording contract with Victor. He had already organized an orchestra in Mexico; within the next couple of years he would repeat the feat in both Peru and Spain. Among the many nicknames he was picking up was “the Itinerant Orchestra Builder.”

There were other nicknames as well—the ones that were not quite so flattering, such as “the Flying Fool” based on his preference for flying to his concerts. In the 1930’s passenger flights were catching on, but it sometimes seemed more planes were falling from the sky than landing. The list of celebrities killed in “air mishaps” was scary: Knute Rockne, Will Rogers and Wiley Post, and Amelia Earheart, just to name a few.

With the danger involved in flying, some wondered if he only flew so much for the publicity. But as many concerts as he was performing in both North and South America, Iturbi had to fly. When he wasn’t playing recitals or as soloist with an orchestra, he was also guest-conducting for orchestras all across the country.

He was becoming involved in radio as well; over the years he would appear on programs as diverse as Columbia Broadcasting’s “To Arms for Peace” special and the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy show. Hollywood was after him, too. As early as 1933 producers were after him; Iturbi claimed that one had handed him a check for $35,000 to appear in a movie. “But they wanted me to kiss young girls and all that foolishness, so I tore up the check.”

There was no mistaking it: José Iturbi was flying high. But the law of gravity says what goes up must come down. And Iturbi did come down, literally, in a plane crash in the wee hours of April 11, 1936. Few accounts still exist of this crash—this account has been compiled from the newspapers and Dalrymple’s account.

They had stopped in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad—Dalrymple was working on a newspaper column and stayed up the entire night, so she was already awake when the pilot decided to fly out earlier than scheduled. It was 4:45 a.m. when she joined Iturbi to ride out to the plane. Launches were out in the Bay, ostensibly clearing a “runway” in the water and lighting a path.

Dalrymple described the early morning as inky black and tropically warm, with no wind to head into, which meant the heavy plane would have a hard time getting off the water. Four times the pilot gunned the engine to take off; the plane began to rise, and then settled back. “We’re almost out of the Bay and in open sea,” Dalrymple told Iturbi in some alarm. The pilot tried once more; again the plane began to rise. Suddenly there was a huge banging noise; the plane dropped back into the Bay and capsized, throwing around the passengers who weren’t belted in. A porthole window exploded, and the plane began to rip apart. A mad scramble for the hatch ensued, during which someone stepped squarely on Iturbi’s left hand. One panic-stricken woman screaming about “sharks in the water” blocked the way.

“Iturbi probably saved my life,” Dalrymple wrote later. He basically threw her up to the hatch. She clambered out and started swimming away from the plane, which was sinking rapidly. Several launches headed toward the bobbing passengers and began scooping them out of the sea. Another passenger, a “big blond man with a large gash on his head” pulled Dalrymple into a launch; she looked frantically for Iturbi but could not find him. “The plane had disappeared and I thought Iturbi had gone with it,” she wrote. In fact, he had been the last person to leave the plane and was the last one rescued.

Iturbi’s left hand was almost useless; Dalrymple noted that he was “pretty badly banged up” and she thought he might have internal injuries. But within fifteen minutes of their arrival back at the terminal, Iturbi was demanding another plane! He still had concerts to perform.

Dalrymple ruefully noted that the “glamorous” wardrobe she had purchased for the South American tour was gone and they were unable to replace their clothes; she eventually arrived in Buenos Aires wearing her stained skirt, a man’s shirt, a pair of slippers and a blanket. Iturbi was in a torn shirt and trousers. He had lost all his scores, as well—but within an hour of arriving at Buenos Aires, he was on the podium with the Colón orchestra, rehearsing for the concert.

Iturbi acted as if the plane crash had been nothing but a minor inconvenience, although according to Dalrymple, his left hand gave him trouble for many months. Still, he continued his 1936 South American tour and finished to accolades throughout the continent.

But then he returned to the United States. The Spanish Civil War had begun on July 18, 1936—it was only natural that someone should ask Iturbi how he felt about what was going on in his native country.

“ Spain needs a strong man, a man with a backbone,” he told the press. But he never named a particular person, and never implied that the “strong man” was Francisco Franco, leader of the insurgents. Still, that was how the remark was taken. After this a group of women from the American League Against War and Fascism soon showed up, threatening to picket his concerts.

From July of 1936 things went straight downhill. On August 19 th there was another brouhaha, this time in the middle of a concert. Iturbi was conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Robin Hood Dell; the soloist was his friend, Albert Spalding, playing Beethoven’s violin concerto. Two mayors were also visiting: Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York City, and S. Davis Wilson of Philadelphia.

According to one witness, Wilson arrived at least ten minutes after the music had begun, and he and his entourage walked down the center aisle. “Part of the crowd cheered. Others hissed.” Photographers emerged, their flash-bulbs popping. Iturbi, with his back to the audience, had no idea what was going on and tried to keep conducting, but the audience’s hisses and boo’s were unnerving. Spalding finally stalked off the stage in exasperation. Iturbi followed. A moment later, the audience heard a burst of Spanish epithets, and a chair flew across the stage, “narrowly missing the third violinist.” He apologized the next day, calling the whole incident a “misunderstanding.” But he now had two new nicknames to add to the pile: the “Latin Firebrand” and “Turbulent Iturbi.”

Iturbi shocked America again a few days later, this time walking off a stage in Cleveland when the audience added their own sound effects to a concert by munching hot dogs and quaffing soda pop during the concert. He told the orchestra, “Understand—the trouble is not you. You played beautifully. But I can’t stand these hot dogs—pop—whistles and street cars!”

Then, at a concert in Toronto, Iturbi made an unthinking statement that would haunt him for years. Discussing the role of women in music and sports, he said, “Women are physically limited from attaining the standard of men, and they are temperamentally limited, besides.” He instantly was tagged as a misogynist. Iturbi apologized, but years later he told a Variety staff reporter that the whole thing was a misquote anyway. “I said women were inferior to men in some spheres but superior to them in others,” he said. “The press left out the last half of what I said.”

In early August of 1937, the fires were burning high again. “Iturbi Blocks Broadcast of Popular Songs,” read the headlines. In an event where a concert was being broadcast live from the Robin Hood Dell, Iturbi refused to use the network’s program and used his own instead. The network program had included the Philadelphia Orchestra playing both classical and popular music. Also, two soloists were scheduled to sing popular numbers.

The problem, according to Iturbi, was that the program Allen planned to broadcast was not the program Iturbi had agreed to. Four days prior to the concert Iturbi had submitted his program, he said, and it had never been disapproved. But when he arrived to conduct, he found the program altered, with the two soloists leading the broadcast—and worse, the broadcast had already begun. Iturbi listened to the first two numbers with rising ire, then stopped the broadcast. NBC switched over to an “emergency” program of organ music while Iturbi argued it out with the management backstage. When he came back, he followed his originally prepared program, and the second soloist, did not sing.

Multiple newspapers quoted Iturbi saying “I-Love-You” and “Kiss-Me-Now” songs were “trash.” Iturbi denied it. “I didn’t say the music was trash. I said the idea was trash. I love American music.” He added a practical reason for his insistence on using his original program. “Doing it their way meant the entire Philadelphia Orchestra would have sat idle for 35 minutes.”

The problem of “popular music” would re-surface through the years, however. In 1941 Iturbi and the management had a disagreement over the contents of a radio program in which Benny Goodman was to play with him. Iturbi dropped out of the program. The same thing happened years later on television when he refused to work with singer Rosemary Clooney (“I don’t perform with cheesecake”) on a Perry Como special.

nd yet he played boogie-woogie numbers in his movies and military concerts, applauded composers such as Freddy Martin who wrote lyrics set to classical tunes, and continued to popularize new songs on radio.