The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  She allowed herself a few extravagances. Her attendance at performances of the opera were regular and faithful, and she would make her appearances even when ill. At these times, instead of sitting in a gilt chair, she would recline on a low chaise longue which had been especially placed in Box Number 4 for the purpose. When that happened, people said, “How devoted to the opera Mrs. Belmont is!” And “What great courage Mrs. Belmont has!” If these were the reactions Eleanor expected from her audience, then so be it. She was not only the opera’s great patroness. She was also its star.

  As the first woman on the Met’s board, Eleanor Belmont later described her first meeting with the formerly all-male body as an event she approached with trepidation. “My first meeting in May, 1933, was almost as difficult as an opening night in the theatre,” she wrote in her memoir:

  It is not possible to say who was more perturbed, I or these formal gentlemen, several of whom were friends or had been cordial dinner partners. But mixed company on boards was far from a familiar sight at the time, and when I slipped into a chair, several of the directors looked solemnly uncomfortable. Missouri might have been their home state. As for me, I felt like misplaced matter.

  Still, despite this self-effacing disclaimer, there is no reason to suppose she had any real doubts that she could carry it off. As a woman, she was already a veteran of several other firsts in New York. In 1924, for example, she had been the first woman to deliver a commencement address at New York University.

  If Otto Kahn’s contribution to the Metropolitan Opera had been essentially financial, Eleanor Belmont’s was essentially creative. It was also surprisingly down-to-earth. To a board that was wringing its collective hands about the tragedy of New York City losing a great showplace for a great and classic art, Eleanor Belmont quickly pointed out that her concern was less lofty-minded. She noted that the Met employed six hundred people regularly, plus occasional additional specialists. If the Met closed, a much greater tragedy than an artistic loss would be six hundred more New Yorkers on the relief rolls or in the bread lines. This fact had not occurred to the gentlemen on the board. She, however, knew what it was like to be an out-of-work actress.

  As she usually did in any circumstance, she got briskly to work. Soliciting large gifts from donors in the private sector she immediately ruled out. Such giving was too sporadic, too uncertain, and too unreliable. Furthermore, the New York rich—including herself—no longer had the money they once had. To finance President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social-welfare programs, the rich were being taxed as they had never been before, and so other sources had to be found. One of her ideas was as simple as it was brilliant. Why not, she suggested, make use of the fairly new and enormously popular medium of radio? Saturday matinees of the Metropolitan Opera could, she proposed, be recorded and then sold to radio stations all over the United States. This would accomplish three things. It would provide soothing, and free, performances of opera to frightened Americans across the country. It would also provide immediate revenue. Finally, it would have a public-relations function, and establish the primacy of the New York Metropolitan Opera in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

  Anyone who remembers the 1930s, or even the 1940s and 1950s, will recall the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. In some cities certain radio stations still broadcast the opera to this day.

  Eleanor Belmont had noticed also that a large portion of the American public was addicted to contests and give-aways. In hard economic times, obviously, give-aways were more popular than ever, and the media were full of them. Newspapers gave away silver teaspoons to new subscribers, and movie theatres gave away Fiesta Ware dishes and Shirley Temple glasses to ticket buyers. The magazines were full of contests in which the contestant was asked to describe, “in twenty-five words or less,” why he or she liked a certain product, with the winners to receive prizes ranging from small appliances to large amounts of cash. With the opera established on the radio, Eleanor next proposed a contest. Listeners were invited to describe, in a hundred words or less, “What the Opera Means to Me.” As a prize, the writer of the winning letter would receive a week end in New York, including tickets to a live performance at the Met. While the opera contests would not generate direct income, they would serve the Met in other ways. For one thing, they would provide an informal audience-rating system. For another, they would increase radio listenership, which would please the subscribing stations.

  The opera contests were an immediate hit, and thousands of letters a day poured in, in competition for the weekly prizes. A separate agency had to be engaged to read and evaluate the letters and award the prize. Otto Kahn might have democratized the opera in New York City, but Eleanor Belmont was democratizing it on a national scale.

  Inevitably, there were critics who carped and complained that Mrs. Belmont was “cheapening” the opera, as, in a sense, she was. The times demanded a more egalitarian approach. Among her innovations were group discounts for children and students. Working through the music departments of New York’s high schools, she established programs whereby students could attend the opera for as little as 75 cents apiece. Members of the Old Guard elite who still sat on the Met’s board were appalled by reports of wads of chewing gum stuck to the red plush seats, but Eleanor Belmont countered that what she was doing was trying to encourage a new generation to be opera lovers. If the students learned to love the opera, she argued, they would also learn to respect the opera house. And, as she had predicted, as the number of student programs increased, the cases of chewing-gum despoliation declined.

  At one point, it was decided that the famous old gold curtain which had graced the Met’s proscenium for more than fifty years was in such fragile condition that it would have to be replaced. The company’s business manager felt lucky to have found the owner of a movie house who was willing to buy the old curtain for $100. “I’m afraid I cannot go along with that,” said Eleanor. She had the curtain taken down—it weighed ten tons—had it cleaned, and, using her network of volunteers, had it cut up and sewn into such souvenir items as glasses cases and bookmarks. Sales of Gold Curtain Souvenirs netted $11,000.

  In spite of these innovations, money remained a desperate problem for the Met, but there were occasional bright moments. One of the brightest occurred on the night of February 2, 1935, when the magnificent voice and figure of Kirsten Flagstad, the Wagnerian soprano, came bursting upon the scene singing Sieglinde in Die Walküre. The audience gave her a standing ovation at the end of the first act, and when the final curtain rang down, the audience was cheering and standing on the seats. The critics raved over the discovery of the new star, and for the next few years the news that Flagstad was singing in any role guaranteed a sold-out house. (Later, Signor Gatti-Casazza, who had negotiated her contract, would claim that her acquisition had amounted to a $25,000 annual legacy for the Met, and he was probably right.)

  But Flagstad left the Met in 1941, amid criticism and controversy, to spend the war years with her husband in Nazi-occupied Norway. And long before Flagstad’s New York debut, Eleanor Belmont had been working on what would be her most important and lasting contribution to the opera, the formation of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Later, she would admit that she had no idea at the time whether the Guild would work, or quite how it would work. But, noting that “Cathedrals are built with the pennies of the faithful,” and knowing that large individual donations would not be forthcoming, she decided to concentrate on the pennies.

  Again, the idea for the Opera Guild was simple. In return for an annual membership fee ranging from $100 down to $10, a person could join the Guild. The Guild member was then entitled to certain perquisites and privileges—first crack at hard-to-get tickets, for example; discounted prices for certain performances; a subscription to a periodic opera newsletter. Most attractive, perhaps, was that Guild members could attend opera rehearsals. These were often tempestuous affairs, with displays of fiery artistic temperament by divas and
directors alike, and were often far more exciting to watch than the finished performances. Thus by joining the Metropolitan Opera Guild one could, for a small sum, enjoy all the special privileges that had theretofore been exclusively reserved for the wealthy box holders in the Diamond Horseshoe.

  Early in 1935 the opera board, rather grudgingly, had given Eleanor Belmont a modest budget of $5,000 to organize her Guild. She began by assembling an imposing roster of names to decorate her Honorary Committee. At the head of the list were President and Mrs. Roosevelt. The governors of nine states lent their names to the letterhead, along with New York’s popular Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and some two hundred celebrated Americans—in the arts, business, and society—across the country. The psychological allure of the Metropolitan Opera Guild was therefore very powerful from the beginning. By joining, and for just a few cents a day, one could achieve, or feel one had achieved, the social status of a Vanderbilt … a Mrs. Astor … a Mrs. August Belmont.

  The Honorary Committee contained her showcase names. For the slightly less illustrious members of her working committee, she was careful to include important people from the media—C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Time; book publisher John Farrar; David Sarnoff of RCA (Guild membership would of course be promoted on the opera broadcasts).

  In its first year 2,000 people became Opera Guild members. Year by year membership climbed, and soon it topped 60,000. By 1957, over and above the hundreds of thousands of opera tickets that had been sold to Guild members, the Guild had turned over more than $2,000,000 to the Met. Furthermore, as Eleanor Belmont liked to point out with a little smile, the original $5,000 underwriting which the board had granted in 1935 had never been touched.

  And throughout those years the annual highlight of the New York opera season had become the moment, at the very end, when the stately Eleanor Robson Belmont—“the woman who single-handedly saved the Met”—stepped out of the wings, walked slowly in front of the gold curtain to center stage, turned to face her audience and tilted her lovely chin upward to catch the key light, and then delivered her beautiful and moving speech in behalf of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. And, when it was over, to stand, eyes lowered, head bowed just slightly so that the light caught the glacier-white hair, to receive her standing ovation.

  “She was always the consummate actress,” says her long-time secretary Patricia Shaw, “and I mean that in the best, classic sense—in the sense that a great actress is happiest when she knows she is pleasing other people. Everything she did was orchestrated to give pleasure to others.” Throughout the 1930s, for example, another of Mrs. Belmont’s main interests was unemployment, and what to do about it, and the more she worked for Unemployment Relief in New York, the more she realized that private giving—though it was touted as “the American way”—was not the solution to the problem.

  In 1933, invited to address a meeting of Jewish women for the Joint Distribution Committee, she stepped to the podium and began, “If you will permit me, I will be absolutely frank.” Three thousand women, including Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, hitched forward in their seats. Private charities, trying to keep 13,000,000 unemployed Americans alive, were wasteful and haphazard, she said. “The major portion of the relief program should be assigned to the city, State or Federal Government,” she said, “and the amount agreed upon … as necessary to carry out an adequate program, should be obtained by special taxation … I do not believe it is a wise policy to carry on the work of serious emergency relief with voluntary contributions. The system is as wrong as that of voluntary enlistment in times of war. It simply means that you penalize the generous.”

  England, she pointed out, was suffering its own Great Depression, and yet it had an unemployment-insurance plan. In the United States this was sneeringly called “the dole,” though it provided “a definite, though modest, relief for all.” Furthermore, it “recognized government responsibility.”

  It is ironic, perhaps, that the widow of a preeminent American capitalist should have at that point advocated the kind of government social-relief programs which Roosevelt did indeed adopt, and which became the models for many of the American welfare programs which Ronald Reagan, in the name of capitalism, would like to see abolished.

  After her husband’s death Eleanor Belmont had gradually begun editing the number of her addresses. The Belmont mansion on Madison Avenue was sold, the building razed and replaced by an office building. By-the-Sea joined a number of unwieldly Newport “cottages” which are now open to the public and toured by curious visitors eager to see the grandeur of the trappings and paraphernalia of a social era that will probably never come again. Home for Eleanor Belmont became a large apartment at 1115 Fifth Avenue at Ninety-third Street, facing Central Park and the Reservoir and filled with heirlooms, photographs, and mementos of all the other Belmont houses and yachts and the private railroad car. For several years she also maintained a summer home called Ledge Rock Cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine, but by the late 1950s she had given that up as well, and home was just the New York apartment.

  As she entered her eighties she didn’t go out or travel or entertain as much as she once had. (In 1949, at seventy, she had paid a farewell visit to G.B.S. at his house in Ayot St. Lawrence, in England.) Still, she liked to give little lunches, famous for their sparkling conversation, in her apartment, and she kept her full-time secretary busy with correspondence. Whenever it was physically possible, she went to the opera—often in a wheelchair now, to be lifted from it and placed on the special chaise in her box.

  Her final years were also spent collecting various awards and honors. She had been named chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, had held that position for seven years, and was then given a lifetime appointment as founder and president emeritus. She had received a gold medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences (to add to the one she had received from the Red Cross), and a medal for outstanding civic service from the Hundred Year Association, a New York philanthropic group. The Theodore Roosevelt Association also gave her its distinguished service medal. She had received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale and an honorary Doctor of Letters from Columbia.

  In the winter of 1969 the New York Times writer Deirdre Carmody was about to leave her office for a vacation when she received an urgent summons from her editor. Eleanor Belmont, she was told, had just had her ninetieth birthday and was far from well. Before she could leave for her holiday, Miss Carmody was told, she would have to write Mrs. Belmont’s obituary, to which the Times was giving the unusual distinction of a full page. Miss Carmody spent most of the night marshaling the facts of Eleanor Belmont’s life and writing the long story. She filed her copy and then left for her vacation, fully expecting to see her story in the Times in the next few days or, at most, weeks.

  But the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, and the Carmody obituary did not appear. Mrs. Belmont’s health, it seemed, had improved. The appearances at the Metropolitan Opera were becoming rarer, but they still occurred.

  Deirdre Carmody, in fact, would have to wait nearly ten years—until October 26, 1979—before seeing her obituary of Eleanor Belmont in print. Eleanor Belmont had died in her sleep at 1115 Fifth Avenue. In less than two months she would have been a hundred.

  She had never learned to play the trombone, but she had fulfilled George Bernard Shaw’s prediction that old players never die “until old age makes them incapable of working the slide.”

  PART EIGHT

  First Lady

  25

  “A HARD WOMAN TO SAY ‘NO’ TO”

  It may have become apparent that among the various characteristics America’s grandes dames have shared has been a certain imperiousness, along with a certain stubbornness. It has been said of several of them that they “thought like a man,” and it was observed often that these ladies liked to get, and usually succeeded in getting, their own way. But at least one Texas woman, Mrs. Barbara Dillingham, finds sexist connotations in
such observations. “You never hear that sort of complaint being made about a man,” says she. “You never hear anyone say that Henry Ford ‘likes to get his own way,’ or that Ronald Reagan ‘likes to get his own way,’ or that Louis XIV liked to get his own way. Getting your own way is all right for a rich and powerful male. But when a rich and powerful woman likes to get her own way, then that’s considered a bad sign.”

  Mrs. Dillingham was referring specifically to her old friend, the late and legendary Miss Ima Hogg of Houston, a woman who was frequently taken to task for “liking to get her own way.” “Miss Ima wanted what she felt was right,” says Barbara Dillingham. “When they were planning to build a freeway smack through the center of one of the city’s most beautiful parks, that seemed wrong to her, and she fought it. She said, ‘They built a tunnel under the Bois de Boulogne—why can’t we?’ Well, that was one battle she lost, but she didn’t lose many.”

  Among other things, Ima Hogg was a battler.

  When introducing herself to people, she would always pause slightly: “My name is Ima … Hogg.” The little pause was for more than dramatic effect. The introduction, delivered in a firm, even voice, guaranteed that the recipient of this information would not laugh; Ima Hogg’s name was one thing about which she saw absolutely nothing funny, and the little pause said, in effect, “Yes, you have heard me correctly. My name is Ima … Hogg.” The little flash of her blue eyes which went with the introduction seemed to add, “And I wish to hear no further comment on this subject!”

  In connection with her uncommon name, two legends that grew up about her never ceased to irritate her. One was the story that her father had given her the name out of spite, to humiliate and denigrate her. The other was that her father had been equally malefic in naming his other children—that Ima Hogg had a sister named Ura, a brother named Hesa, another sister named Shesa, and so on. Actually, she had no sisters, and her three brothers had been given down-home Texas names that were plain as Job’s turkey: Will, Tom, and Mike. Also, Ima Hogg worshiped her father, and the suggestion that he would have been capable of a cruel joke distressed her. Still, the stories about the Hogg family nomenclature persisted—set in motion, she always believed, by political enemies of her father’s—and have continued to this good day. There are still otherwise well-informed Houstonians who will confidently speak of Ima, Ura, Hesa and Shesa Hogg.