The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  In the autumn of 1917 she was off across the Atlantic through waters filled with German U-boats and enemy destroyers disguised as tramp steamers to inspect United States Army camps in Europe and report on Red Cross needs at the front. Though there was, as she reported later, “a general feeling of tension” during the voyage, as the ship zigzagged to avoid the U-boats, she and her fellow passengers managed to keep their composure. Arriving in France, she presented a letter of introduction to General Pershing, commander of U.S. forces there. It read: “Mrs. Belmont is one of the few really able people who are also gifted with the power of expression. She wishes to help in every way, and then, on her return home, to put before our people, as vividly as only she can do, what the real needs of our troops are. She has a man’s understanding, a woman’s sympathy, and a sense of honor and gift of expression such as are possessed by very few either among men or women.” The letter was signed “Theodore Roosevelt.” Though she was only thirty-eight, a grande dame was clearly in the making.

  She would make a number of other transatlantic crossings in behalf of the Red Cross before the war was over.

  Throughout the prosperous 1920s, when most of the great American private art collections were being completed, it had become clear that, for all the glamour and prestige that an art collection conferred upon the collector, there was something a little sordid about the whole business. With prices at record highs for both Old and New Masters, the possibilities of fraud and forgery abounded, and even the meticulous B.B. admitted that he occasionally made mistakes. And, though Joseph Duveen virtually carried the booming art market on his shoulders, there was no question that he was essentially a manipulator and high-pressure salesman, with no more scruples than a side-show pitchman. The bitter jealousy and rivalry among the art dealers themselves extended to the collectors, whose infighting, of course, was abetted by Duveen. (At Duveen’s death in 1939, a rival dealer delivered this ambiguous eulogy: “We miss him, but we are glad that he is gone.”) Behind the beauty of the paintings, it was not a pretty scene.

  Perhaps this was why, though Eleanor and August Belmont had plenty of paintings—many of them inherited from his father—they were never serious art collectors. In her memoir Eleanor Belmont wrote, “In retrospect, the past seems not one existence with a continuous flow of years and events that follow each other in logical sequence, but a life periodically dividing into entirely separate compartments. Change of surroundings, interests, pursuits, has made it seem actually more like different incarnations.” One of these compartments, or incarnations, was definitely artistic—as Shaw had said, she was an artist—but the art she chose to support was not one of the plastic ones. Though she continued to toil for such diverse causes as the Red Cross—and was given its Gold Medal in 1934—the National Institute of Social Sciences, the Adopt-a-Family Committee, and the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee, her real love remained the theatre and, in particular, opera.

  Opera, after all, did not lend itself to the hucksterism of a marketplace. An aria, once sung, could not be sold at auction.

  24

  LEADING LADY

  Eleanor Robson’s first taste of grand opera had been during her long run in New York in Merely Mary Ann. She had met the dramatic soprano Milka Ternina, who was singing Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, and one night, after the curtain had run down on Mary Ann, the young Miss Robson hurried down to the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street to catch what she could of Mme. Ternina’s performance. When she arrived, the curtain was just going up for the final act, and so she did not have to buy a ticket. But, since there were no seats, she had to stand. She nonetheless got to see and hear one of the ripest and richest scenes in Wagner, the fiery immolation of Brünnhilde. It was theatre beyond theatre, and Eleanor Robson was an instant opera addict.

  For all its gorgeousness, opera in the United States just a few years earlier, at the turn of the century, had been in serious trouble. The reason, though it was not immediately apparent to those involved, was simple: opera had become the exclusive domain of the upper crust. In New York, for example, two autumn events—the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Horse Show—marked the “official” beginning of the winter social season. One attended these events to demonstrate that one had successfully returned from Newport, to show off one’s new clothes and jewels, and to indicate that one was prepared to resume society’s demanding rituals. In the press, these occasions were treated more as fashion shows than as artistic or athletic performances, and the implication that opera was only for the carriage trade had an intimidating effect on ordinary mortals.

  Merely attending the opera, furthermore, conveyed no social status. It mattered where you sat, and the only acceptable seats were the little, and fairly uncomfortable, gilt-and-red-plush chairs in the arc of private boxes that ringed the first balcony—the Diamond, Golden, or Dress Circle, as it was variously called. No other seating in the auditorium was socially acceptable. The opera boxes, each with its owner’s name engraved on a brass plaque at its entrance, provided a compendium of People Who Counted in New York society. There was not even a way for the ambitious parvenu or outsider to climb into this perfumed circle. The boxes were sold for as much as $30,000 each, but even so they rarely became available, and were passed on from one generation of a family to the next. Ownership of opera boxes was also strictly controlled by a board of directors, who saw to it that only the right people were admitted to the club. No Jews, of course.

  Meanwhile, even within the Dress Circle there was stratification. Most of the boxes were owned outright by box holders, but a few less desirable ones could be leased. (Jacob Schiff, the banker, who was an opera lover and also happened to be Jewish, was made a box-holding exception, and was permitted to lease a box “for certain performances.”) There was no logic to it. Some of the “best” boxes, such as Mrs. Astor’s Number 7, had the poorest sight lines to the stage, and in all the boxes the acoustics were generally bad. It didn’t matter. By 1900, society’s rules had been laid down: if one didn’t own a box at the opera, one might as well do what Eleanor Robson had done, and stand.

  Opera had become something one didn’t attend to hear and see music performed. One went to opera to be seen, and to see who else was there to be seen. It mattered little what was going on onstage, though there was a marked preference for Italian opera—perhaps because Italian was a language almost no one understood, and there was therefore no reason to take the trouble to follow the words. In the boxes, the behavior of the people who thought of themselves as setting the social standards had become notoriously rude. While sopranos onstage strained to reach high C, the box holders chatted and visited and waved to one another, or departed mid-aria to refresh themselves at the bar. Mrs. Astor had set the example of arriving late and leaving early, and others followed her lead. Since she had demonstrated her preference for Monday-night performances, that became the most fashionable night at the opera. During the rest of the week the boxes stood largely empty.

  That the gentry should have established such an impregnable beachhead in “democratic” America on an art form which, in nineteenth-century Europe, had been popular with poor and rich alike, might seem peculiar. But the same thing was going on on the Continent as well, and opera-going was becoming an increasingly aristocratic pastime. As the kings took over the opera house, the commoners moved out. In New York, the gentrification of the Met had meant that opera performers and managers had grown more cynical. When no one was paying attention anyway, when opera was simply a high-society status symbol, why trouble to deliver a good performance? When no one cared, when the stars of the evening were the men and women in the boxes and not the poor souls struggling through the music onstage, what did it matter whom you booked or what opera you decided to put on?

  Unfortunately, the situation at the Met had begun to be noticed where it hurt, not in the boxes but at the box office. Ordinary New Yorkers, who might have enjoyed an evening of opera,
were discouraged from it. Sitting in their plebeian orchestra seats, they disliked being scrutinized, through lorgnettes and opera glasses, by their betters in the Dress Circle above. There were pleasanter ways in which these people could entertain themselves. Others, who had no knowledge of opera, were usually too daunted by the experience of attending once ever to want to try it twice. The language of the singers was unintelligible, the complicated plots were difficult to follow, and no attempt was made to educate or enlighten this group of prospective customers in the skimpy program notes. And so the New York opera-going public had been reduced essentially to two groups: the “swells” in the boxes, and the Bohemians—actual opera buffs who took the cheap seats in the topmost gallery. To these, a third group was occasionally added: out-of-town tourists who bought orchestra seats in order to crane their necks upward and backward to stare at the swells.

  All this began to change, however, in 1903. This was the year that Otto H. Kahn was offered a place on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. Kahn, also Jewish, was Jacob Schiff’s partner at the prestigious downtown banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and that a Jew should have been invited to join the Met’s board was certainly unusual. But then so were the circumstances. The Met was desperately in need of money, and Kuhn, Loeb was now doing business that was on a par with J. P. Morgan’s. Kahn seemed a likely source of cash, which he had plenty of, and he had access to even more Wall Street money from his partners and friends. Mrs. Astor might not approve of Kahn’s appointment to the board of “her” Met, but it was something close to an emergency measure. Besides, Caroline Astor was entering her twilight years, and her vise-like grip on New York society had begun to loosen. Times, at last, were changing.

  But what no one suspected in 1903 was that, for the next twenty-five years, Otto H. Kahn not only would succeed in revitalizing the Met financially, but would also revolutionize the role of the opera in the city’s cultural life. The first thing he did was engage a new impresario, the talented Austrian-born Heinrich Conried, who announced that instead of sticking abjectly to Italian opera, the Met would begin offering works in German and French as well. Conried brought with him a young Italian tenor named Enrico Caruso. At first, both Conried’s offerings and Caruso’s performances were greeted with indifference by the critics. But in December of Conried’s first season, when he presented the first American performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, the critics went wild, and it dawned on New York that something exciting was at last happening at the stodgy old Met. Triumph began to follow critical triumph, and lines began to materialize at the box office.

  When, four years later, Heinrich Conried was forced to step down because of poor health, Otto Kahn approached Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who for the preceding ten years had been the successful general manager of Milan’s La Scala. Gatti agreed to come to New York, but only on one condition: that he could bring with him La Scala’s celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini. Thus, in one fell swoop, were two giant talents brought to the Met.

  Otto Kahn’s own great talent, however, was not simply in acquiring other talent. It lay more in the field of public relations. He was a natty, dapper little man with a bubbly, champagne-like personality, and he was a natural fund-raiser. For every gift of $50,000 to the Met, he announced, he would make a matching gift of his own. One of the first to take him up on this challenge was William K. Vanderbilt, and for several years the two millionaires were in lively competition over the size of their large checks. Also, unlike the box holders of old, Kahn did not stare balefully at his economic inferiors. He was a smiler and a hand-shaker, and he became the Met’s unofficial greeter—standing outside the marquee, urging people to come in, showing them to their seats, chatting with the audience during intermissions. No detail escaped his eye. He saw to it that the “story” of each opera, no matter how unlikely it might be, was outlined in the Met’s program, and that translations of the librettos were also available. When the décor of the ladies’ washroom displeased him, he had it done over. Most of all, he was a genius when it came to handling the press. Many of the music critics of the day, it had to be admitted, knew rather little about music, and some had been elevated to critics’ desks from writing obituary notices. Kahn nurtured a camaraderie with them. During long musical passages, or whenever he noticed a critic’s eyes beginning to glaze with boredom, he would gently nudge the critic and suggest that they repair across the street for a glass of whiskey, or perhaps catch part of a vaudeville show. The critics responded by giving the Met’s productions rave reviews.

  While he was doing all this, Otto H. Kahn was also quite literally buying the Met. When he first went on the board, he had been given two hundred shares of Metropolitan Opera stock. As more shares became available, he bought them, and presently he owned 2,750 shares, or 84 percent of the company. Five blocks away, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, stood the Manhattan Opera House, which was owned by Oscar Hammerstein I, the father of the lyricist. Kahn decided that two opera houses in the same neighborhood were too many, and so Kahn paid Hammerstein a reported $1,200,000 to dispose of this competition. Just how much of his personal money Kahn contributed to the Metropolitan Opera has never been known—Kahn did not believe in releasing too many figures about his philanthropies—but it is assumed to have been between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000.

  It was not until 1917, however, that the Met’s board offered Box 14 in the Diamond Horseshoe to Opera House Kahn. At the time, the press called the event “notable,” and remarked that only twelve boxes had changed hands in the last eighteen years. With typical aplomb, Kahn accepted the gift. But he never used the box. It was reserved for visiting dignitaries, such as President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. When the dignitaries came, Kahn saw to it that the box was filled with fresh flowers.

  By 1929, Kahn himself was getting on. He was sixty-two, and he and Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini had been at the Met for more than a quarter of a century. The Met’s coffers were now filled with enough money to ensure funding for lavish productions long into the foreseeable future, or at least as long as any future could be foreseen. Other thoughts began to occupy him. He was toying with the idea of returning to his native Germany. He was also flirting with the notion of conversion to Roman Catholicism. That was the year he decided to retire from the Met’s board, to devote himself to rest, travel, and reflection. Another, younger person could assume his mantle. Four years later, he would die.

  By 1933, of course, the foreseeable future had not come to pass. Instead had come the Great Crash. The Metropolitan Opera, like the rest of the country, was again in serious trouble. The huge reserve funds, which had seemed more than ample in 1929, had collapsed with the stock market. Wealthy individual patrons, who had once thought nothing of writing out large checks in return for the status that came with supporting grand opera, were now exceedingly scarce. Gone was the well-dressed scramble to buy $30,000 boxes; boxes were up for grabs at clearance-sale prices. At the general-admission box office, business was dismal. In a depression, it seemed, the last thing New Yorkers wanted to spend money on was opera tickets. The Met seemed likely to close its doors unless desperate and original measures were taken. That was the year the board of directors decided to invite its first woman to join. Eleanor Belmont’s devotion to the opera was by now well known. She was the obvious choice.

  There were certain subtle ironies here. Having lost a prominent Jewish patron, the board had chosen a new one who was “sort of,” but not really Jewish. Also, just as Eleanor’s in-laws had been successful in getting society in both New York and Newport to overlook, if not entirely forget, the fact that the first August Belmont had been Jewish, so had Eleanor—always the trained performer—with her mastery of society’s rituals, customs, and manners, not to mention her attention to society’s pet art, the opera, succeeded in getting society to overlook the fact that she had once been that less-than-proper thing, an actress on the stage.

  August Belmont, Jr., had died in 1924, leaving El
eanor Belmont a still-beautiful widow of forty-five. As a youngish widow her performance had been impeccable. Not a breath of scandal had surrounded her name—no lovers, no escapades, no indulgences. Now, ten years later, she had settled firmly into the role of grande dame. It was as though she had accepted the chapters of her life as a series of theatrical assignments to be carried out with the same poise and grace and born-to-the-role aplomb she had applied to her work in the theatre, but the ingenue had matured into a leading lady. She had let her full mane of fine hair, which had begun to grow prematurely gray in her early twenties, go snowy white. She wore it in a simple but attractive style, pulled into a loose bun at the back of her head, with soft waves framing her face. It was a style that suited itself to hats, which Eleanor Belmont liked to wear, even in her own house. It befitted a woman who, in her own house, carried a reticule on her wrist as she moved from room to room.

  She had retained her creamy Englishwoman’s complexion, which, framed by the white hair, made her appearance striking. She had allowed her girlish figure to become a bit matronly, but this again was appropriate. When, in the 1920s, American women raised their hemlines, Eleanor Belmont did not. At her age it would not have been seemly. Her mature figure seemed designed for long dresses, just as her pale arms seemed designed for white opera-length gloves which were always a part of the grande dame’s royal wardrobe.

  She had never been known to lose her temper, and yet, when asked for an opinion, she was always firm. A favorite Belmont opening was, “If you will permit me, I will be absolutely frank.” If she disagreed with a suggestion, she would say, “No, I’m afraid I cannot go along with that.” And so, cool, self-confident, elegant and obviously enormously self-controlled, Eleanor Belmont moved through her daily schedule of philanthropic and artistic duties. If, in the first generation, the Belmont name had been slightly tainted in society, the regal first lady of the second generation had redeemed it.