The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  With Queen Victoria, the first volume of which appeared in 1972, she entered for the first time a field already claimed by a talent the equal of hers — Elizabeth Longford’s Victoria RI had been greeted as definitive for its time in 1964, and some commentators questioned the need for another Life so soon. In fact, both books hold their place: Mrs Woodham-Smith was careful not to read her predecessor and, whilst covering much of the same ground in great detail, produced a very different work. No other life of Queen Victoria has defined quite so sharply the exact nature of the young Princess’s horrible childhood (Mrs Woodham-Smith perused the Conroy Papers at Balliol with particular thoroughness) or shown quite so clearly the emotional violence recurrent in the Queen’s marriage to Albert.

  In this, of course, she prepared the way for Victoria’s hysterical mourning to open the second volume of the biography, on which she had been working since 1972. Characteristically she unearthed such a wealth of attractive new information on such figures as Sir John Conroy, Princess Feodora, the Queen’s half-sister, Henry Cole, planner of the Great Exhibition, and George Anson, Albert’s private secretary, that she was actively looking forward to assembling a further volume of “brief lives” to complement the main work.

  In life as in scholarship and literature Cecil Woodham-Smith was a perfectionist, content only with the highest standards even in such everyday matters as dress, furniture and food. A good lecturer and most entertaining in conversation, she was sharply witty in speech, but sympathetic and generous in action, especially to her fellow-writers and to young people. In 1960 she was made a CBE, made an honorary Doctor of Literature at the National University of Ireland in 1964 and at St Andrews in 1965. She was an honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s.

  Cecil Woodham-Smith, CBE, historian and biographer, was born on April 29, 1896. She died on March 16, 1977, aged 80

  JOAN CRAWFORD

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  A HOLLYWOOD STAR PERSONALITY IN THE GRAND MANNER

  MAY 12, 1977

  Her most devoted admirers would never have claimed that Miss Joan Crawford was an actress of great range or adaptability: her secret lay rather in doing one thing at a time and doing it superlatively well. She never puzzled her public by appearing in quick succession in a wide variety of parts; at any given period of her career the filmgoer who went to a Joan Crawford film knew just what sort of thing to expect, and knew too that he could expect it to be the best of its kind. Nevertheless, during her long reign as uncrowned queen of Hollywood she showed a remarkable ability to remodel her public personality in accordance with the demands of the public, a quality which betokens, if not necessarily a great actress, at least a great star.

  She was born at San Antonio, Texas, at a date variously placed between 1901 and 1908 and her real name was Lucille Le Sueur. She did not take the name of Joan Crawford until after her success in Sally, Irene and Mary in 1925. She once wrote of herself that she was convinced from childhood that she possessed talent, but was uncertain what that talent might be. At first it appeared to be for dancing, and she began her professional career as a song-and-dance performer in a small café in Chicago. From there she graduated to the chorus of a J. J. Shubert revue in New York called Innocent Eyes, and then into that of one called The Passing Show of 1925. Here she was seen by an MGM talent scout and invited to Hollywood.

  She appeared in her first film the same year. This was Pretty Ladies, which starred Norma Shearer and ZaSu Pitts. During the next three years she appeared in a number of films, among them comedies with Harry Langdon and Charles Ray, but did not make any great mark until Our Dancing Daughters (1928), which first established her as one of the most potent and enduring legends of the American screen: indeed, since the death of Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford could claim to be the only major star of silent films still at the top of the acting profession in Hollywood.

  After this film her progress was rapid: a number of similar films followed — Our Modern Maidens in 1929, Our Blushing Brides in 1930 — which all served to strengthen her position as the foremost representative of “flaming youth” on the screen. In the early 1930s, however, she began to broaden her scope with dramatic roles in such films as Grand Hotel (with Garbo, Wallace Beery and John and Lionel Barrymore) and the first talking version of Rain. But in 1936 the mood of the times was changing, and in accordance with the new demands of the public a new, “mature” Joan Crawford was seen in a series of sophisticated comedies, most notably The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), The Last of Mrs Cheyney (1937) and The Women (1939). It was at this period that an American exhibitor made the much publicized statement that a number of top stars, among them Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford, were “box-office poison” — which, though frequently quoted, did not prevent any of the people concerned from continuing their highly successful careers for, in several cases, another 20 years or so.

  During the 1940s, after appearing with notable improbability as a mink-clad heroine of the French resistance in Reunion in France (1942), Joan Crawford was absent from the screen for three years through illness. Her return in 1945 with Mildred Pierce gave her one of her most spectacular successes and an Academy Award, as well as setting the pattern for her next few films, all of which, with slight variations, recounted the rise of a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks” to fame and fortune, though seldom to happiness. Particularly memorable were Humoresque (1947), from a screenplay by Clifford Odets about a rich music-lover who becomes too closely involved with her protégé, and Flamingo Road (1949) with its intriguing glimpses of Miss Crawford as a dancer in a fifth-rate roadshow. Sudden Fear (1952) marked a further development; from now on a new toughness and sometimes even savagery marked the characters she portrayed in such films as Torch Song, Johnny Guitar and Female on the Beach. In 1957 she came to this country to make her first British film, The Story of Esther Costello.

  After a year or two away from the screen after the death of her fourth husband Alfred Steele, she returned in a series of strong roles in more or less horrific films, starting with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, in which she starred for the first time with her one-time greatest rival Bette Davis; after this came The Caretaker, Straitjacket, another film with Bette Davis, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Trog (1971).

  Of her performances perhaps the most memorable were those in Grand Hotel, The Women (as Crystal Allen, the shopgirl vamp), Sudden Fear, Torch Song (as a savagely successful stage-star who is wooed at last to reason and domesticity) and Autumn Leaves, the story of a middle-aged woman who marries a man half her age. Joan Crawford was a personality in the grand manner; Hollywood will never be the same without her.

  She was four times married, to: (1) Douglas Fairbanks, junior, (2) Franchot Tone, (3) Phil Terry, (4) Alfred Steele. Steele, who died in 1959, was chairman of the Pepsi-Cola Company and after his death Joan Crawford joined the board.

  Joan Crawford, actress, was born on March 23, somewhere in the period 1901-1908. She died on May 10, 1977, aged between 69 and 76

  MARIA CALLAS

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  POWERFULLY DRAMATIC OPERATIC SOPRANO

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1977

  Miss Maria Callas, the most colourful, exciting and traditionally powerful prima donna of the mid-twentieth century, whose career showed the hallmarks of genius, died yesterday at the age of 53.

  Ever since 1948 she has added something intensely flamboyant and vividly personal to the world of international opera, for in the age of the common man, when even sopranos, whatever their quality, are expected to be rather like everybody else, she insisted upon being entirely herself.

  Maria Meneghini Callas was born in New York, of Greek parents, on December 3, 1923; her second name she took from her Italian husband, Giovanni Meneghini, whom she married in 1947, but she took Greek citizenship in 1966 to facilitate a lengthy divorce suit which ended the marriage. She had returned to Greece with her family in 1936, and studied at the Athens Conservatoire. She was seen several times at the Athens Opera during and immediately after the Second
World War — her first role was that of Martha, in d’Albert’s Tiefland — before marriage took her to Italy and the beginning of the most spectacular career in modern operatic history. After an initial appearance in the Verona amphitheatre in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, she was at once accepted as a brilliant exponent of the “heavy” soprano roles: Aida, Turandot, Isolde, Brünnhilde, and Kundry fell to her advance without a struggle, but the note of the incredible was sounded when within a single week in 1949 she not only sang Brünnhilde in Die Walküre but also deputized for an indisposed coloratura as Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani, dealing accurately and spectacularly with the elaborate vocal gymnastics of the role.

  From then onwards she began to drop the great heroic roles from her repertoire and to specialize in the bel canto heroines of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, to which she added those of the early and middle period Verdi operas. The unhappy Lucia of Lammermoor, Verdi’s Violetta and Gilda, Bellini’s Norma and Cherubini’s Medea were roles in which she spectacularly succeeded, and she found herself in demand, with audiences at her feet, wherever such works were sung. Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia provided her with a great success as Fiorilla; she sang Euridice in the first modern performance of Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Florence in 1951. The change in her repertoire was no more startling than the change in her appearance; her Brünnhilde had been an imposingly Wagnerian figure, but the new Callas of the great Italian operas was slim, elegant, “glamorous” in the sense that Hollywood has applied to that adjective, and as fiery in her dealings with conductors and impresarios as was her Tosca — a role she never relinquished — in dealing with Baron Scarpia. Like any of the great sopranos of the past she knew her worth and expected to dominate conductors and colleagues as well as her audiences. Unlike most singers of the twentieth century, she never moved outside opera, although her versatility within that wide field suggests that she might have sung other things no less memorably. When asked why she never gave a song recital, the story goes, she replied that she had never found time from operatic engagements to learn the songs that she might sing.

  The effectiveness of her style and the magnetism of her personality made her one of the most powerfully effective instruments in the revival of interest in bel canto opera after 1945. There have been, and are, voices more sensuously beautiful in themselves than was that of Maria Callas, capable of a more moving pathos and equally attractive throughout as wide a register: in vertiginous regions towards the high E flat that was her upper limit, Callas’s voice was usually thin and, when she was in less than her best form, it could be shrill. It was, however, remarkably athletic and accurate, so that Norma’s Casta Diva, an aria published, and usually sung, in F was, in her performances, put up to the G that is supposed to have been Bellini’s original key for the aria. Her florid singing, especially in her lower register, was always brilliant and exciting.

  It was, however, the dramatic truth of her performances which conquered the operatic world. Her greatest days coincided with those of Joan Sutherland, and whilst the Australian prima donna seemed incapable of singing a note which sounded less than perfectly and fully moulded, Maria Callas held her own against the tremendous opposition of Miss Sutherland’s well-nigh perfect voice because she was, in reality, an actress of genius whose field of action was opera and not spoken drama. She developed to an unusual degree the power of timing action and gesture along the line of their music in a way which seemed always dramatically true and could, by the force of her personality and the exactitude of her characterization, convince any audience that the speed or slowness of such actions and gestures was that natural to the character at the moment in question. Not only, as she played them, were Isolde and Aida real personalities whose tragedies referred to the depths of human experience; the harassed heroines of Bellini and Donizetti too became equally real personages of heightened intensity. The music of the closing scene of La Traviata may itself suggest that Violetta is weak and mortally ill, but Callas’s interpretation went beyond that; it had the somewhat frenetic gaiety which can be associated with tuberculosis and it added to the halting pathos of the last act a voice made husky and veiled by the progress of the disease.

  For many years Maria Callas’s relationship with the late Aristotle Onassis, the shipowner, was the most widely publicized affaire in the world. She denied, however, that after Onassis married Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the American President, she attempted suicide.

  The glamorous and fiesty Maria Callas at her London hotel before her appearance in La Traviata in 1958

  Almost as well publicized was the action which, in the late 1960s, Onassis and Callas brought alleging non-fulfilment of an agreement made with their former friend, Mr Panaghis Vergottis, another Greek shipowner. The case went finally to the House of Lords, with Vergottis seeking a retrial, but the Lords upheld Mr Justice Roskill’s earlier decision that Callas was entitled to receive shipping shares in return for an advance of £60,000, the venture having been made to provide for her on her eventual retirement.

  By 1965, when she last appeared at Covent Garden, she had no more operatic worlds to conquer, and her dramatic genius seemed to express itself powerfully in these domestic fields. Her withdrawal from the opera stage was not, however, a complete retirement. In autumn 1973, with the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano and the pianist Ivor Newton, she undertook a series of recitals — her first with piano accompaniment — in Europe, ending with two performances in the Royal Festival Hall. Her programmes consisted mainly of arias and duets from Italian opera, sung with her accustomed dramatic intensity. Though, in other respects, her personality seemed to have mellowed into a new cooperativeness and warmth, she generated in the calm surroundings of the Festival Hall the intensity of feeling that had belonged to her stage performances. Her audiences, refusing to leave the hall, or to end their tumultuous homage, will remember her as a splendidly elegant, slim, and gracious personality at whose command they sorrowed, rejoiced, feared and adored.

  The greatness of Maria Callas was that of an actress able to impress on the improbably romantic heroines with whom she was associated, or upon the melodramatics of Tosca, a passionate reality which she had found, earlier in her career, in the more profound and exalted works of late Verdi and Wagner. Singing was not, for her, an end in itself through which she could express all there was to say about a character; it was another instrument in the hands of a powerful, vivid and exciting romantic actress.

  Maria Callas, operatic soprano, was born on December 3, 1923. She died on September 16, 1977, aged 53

  NADIA BOULANGER

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  TEACHER, CONDUCTOR AND COMPOSER WHO MADE AN UNRIVALLED IMPACT ON THE MUSICAL LIFE OF THE 20TH CENTURY

  NOVEMBER 13, 1979

  Mademoiselle Nadia Boulanger, the remarkable all-round French musician, died on October 22 at the age of 92 after a long life of intense activity in more than one branch of music. Famed chiefly as a teacher, who attracted to Paris students from all over the world, she was also a conductor specialising in vocal music of all periods and in her time had been assistant to her former teacher, Alexander Guilmant, at the organ of the Madeleine in Paris. As a composer she won the second Prix de Rome in 1908 with a cantata, La Sirène, and had songs, orchestral pieces and incidental music (to d’Annunzio’s Città morte) to her credit, but it is chiefly through others that her great influence was exercised, either through her interpretations of other composers, or through her pupils.

  Her family had a tradition of music going back to her grandfather, who had won a prize for cello playing in 1797. His son, her father, taught singing at the Paris Conservatoire for 27 years. Her mother was a Russian, née Princess Mychetsky, who was an accomplished singer. Her younger sister Lilli, who died in 1918, made a mark as a composer.

  Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris on September 16, 1887. She was trained at the Paris Conservatoire under Fauré for composition and obtained first prizes in harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and accompaniment, so that what
ever her imaginative endowment as a composer she could not be other than a first-class musician, as the rest of her career showed. On her first visit to England in 1936 she introduced Fauré’s Requiem and in the following year she conducted a whole programme for the Royal Philharmonic Society, which included works by Monteverdi, of whom she became (and remained) an expert interpreter. Years later she came to England to take part in Bath Festivals, when she directed programmes that exactly represented her taste, consisting of Monteverdi, Stravinsky and Fauré. It was observed on one of these occasions that this unlikely conjunction of styles indicated that Mlle Boulanger’s musical personality favoured clarity, objectivity and serious devotion, which are the qualities that her pupils find most strongly marked in her.

  There is no doubt that she was a great teacher — and teachers of composition are rare, since if they are too strong minded they will suffocate their pupils’ individualities. Mlle Boulanger did not altogether escape this danger and was sometimes charged with teaching an arid form of pseudo-Stravinsky to all comers. Indeed her disciples were sometimes jocularly called products of la Boulangerie. But there is other testimony to her ability to preserve and stimulate the individual personality. Among her American pupils were Copland, Harris, Bernstein and Piston; among her English ones, Lennox Berkeley and Professor Lewis. She taught at three institutions, the Paris Conservatoire, the École Normale de Musique and the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, and was indefatigable into her seventies in exerting her magnetic personality upon her pupils and upon the groups of singers and players she gathered round her for carrying her ideas of interpretation into effect. As far back as 1925 she first made a lecture-tour of the United States; she came to Britain pretty frequently during the past 30 years usually to broadcast for the BBC, sometimes to take master-classes at the Royal College of Music; she made records of Monteverdi; indeed she impressed herself upon the musical life of the twentieth century as few but great composers and international virtuosi have done, and certainly as no other woman did. As long ago as 1937 she conducted a concert given by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the first woman to conduct a whole programme for that society.