"Many conductors would have fought shy of the populism of this project, but James has an instinctive knowledge of what the medium is about," he says "And Yefim was the natural first choice as pianist. Once the most powerful concert agent in the business, now head of Sony, Peter Gelb is the man most likely to know which way the wind is blowing. Yes, he is indeed pleased with his handiwork for Disney. Moreover, he has other seasonal goodies up his sleeve: Charlotte Church's second album, Tan Dun's World Symphony for the Millennium, and Carl Davis's Gilbert-and-Sullivan soundtrack to Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. As controller of the Fantasia soundtrack rights throughout much of Europe plus the Far East and Australia, he looks like having an even better one. As music producer for Disney's revamped Fantasia, Peter Gelb is having a good Christmas. As controller of the Fantasia soundtrack rights throughout much of Europe plus the Far East and Australia, he looks like having an even better one.

Moreover, he has other seasonal goodies up his sleeve: Charlotte Church's second album, Tan Dun's World Symphony for the Millennium, and Carl Davis's Gilbert-and-Sullivan soundtrack to Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Once the most powerful concert agent in the business, now head of Sony, Peter Gelb is the man most likely to know which way the wind is blowing. As music producer for Disney's revamped Fantasia, Peter Gelb is having a good Christmas. And he had a standard response to those who told him he hadn't written another novel as good as Catch-22: "Who has?"Joseph Heller, writer: born New York 1 May 1923; married 1945 Shirley Held (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1984), 1987 Valerie Humphries; died East Hampton, New York 12 December 1999.. He once said: "The only time I let myself cry was when the pet dog died when I was 50."He was thrilled when Gore Vidal suggested several years ago that the term "Helleresque" might replace Kafkaesque as a description of a particular kind of nightmare situation. But I still can't help it."His mother once told him he had "a twisted brain" and he tended to agree, citing the occasion when, late in her life, he visited Lena in hospital and mistook another elderly grey-haired woman for his mother.

He was, friends agree, compassionate, sarcastic, generous - and incredibly complicated He always hid his emotions from scrutiny. "I associate money with life and an absence of money with death I can't help it I can try a guess at the reason. He itemises how much he earned for each of his salaried jobs, what he was paid for his early stories, what his first book advances were and how much the film advance for Catch-22 was, yet says scarcely anything about the break-up of his 35-year marriage to Shirley.Heller used to say he would commit suicide if he lost his money He knew why he had this obsession It was not to do with the poverty in which he grew up It was a more fundamental association. With Closing Time, he was finishing off a lifetime's writing, the title indicating that he felt his writing days were complete. That and his autobiography together represented a kind of summation. Not of his life, because he drew no conclusions, but of his writing.In a sense, he had already written an account of his life in his novels but even so his autobiography is a disappointment, largely because of its selectivity His interest in money is almost a leitmotif of the book. He is more forthcoming about what he earned at different times in his life than about his own children.