The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  When his brothers and sisters complained to Harold about his extramarital dalliances, he was also resentful. After all, he reminded them, when a man’s wife had departed his bed and company for an indefinite stay with a Swiss analyst, was the red-blooded husband expected to live like a monk until such time as the strong-willed wife saw fit to return? Of course, it was an argument that put the cart before the horse, since it was Harold’s dalliances that had sent Edith abroad to seek counseling in the first place.

  In any case, long before Mary Garden had completed her term as directa of the Chicago Opera, Harold McCormick had become heavily involved with a Polish soprano named Ganna Walska, a flamboyant, full-bodied creature whose singing talent was regarded as inconsiderable, but who did have a knack for attracting rich older men who then had the sense to die and leave her their money. Her first husband, Baron Arcadie d’Engor, was killed in the First World War. She next married Dr. Joseph Fraenkel, a wealthy New York throat specialist she had consulted about a throat problem. Much older than she, he had been so smitten by her that he proposed during their second appointment. When he died, Dr. Fraenkel left her half a million dollars.

  Dr. Fraenkel was still living, however, when Mme. Walska, as she called herself professionally, first met Harold McCormick. Her ambition was to sing with the Chicago Opera, and, learning that McCormick was in New York on business, she telephoned him in his suite at the Plaza and requested a meeting. McCormick tried to put her off, explaining that he was just on his way out the door to catch a train. With this information, Walska stationed herself in the lobby and waylaid him there. McCormick was evidently sufficiently impressed. Within a few months, Dr. Fraenkel had died and Ganna Walska and Harold McCormick were sailing to Europe together aboard the Aquitania.

  The story at this point becomes as complicated as the most improbable opera plot. Also sailing on the Aquitania was one Alexander Smith Cochran, whom the newspapers of the day called “the world’s richest bachelor.” Cochran was said to be worth $80,000,000, and reportedly proposed marriage to Ganna the first night they met. Now Ganna obviously felt she could have her pick of millionaires. McCormick possessed a couple of advantages: he was probably richer than Cochran, and could also get Ganna on the Chicago Opera stage. The disadvantage, however, was that McCormick was already married and Cochran was not. Clearly, Ganna Walska spent the ocean crossing doing some heavy weighing of the odds.

  The purpose of McCormick’s European trip, aside from the pleasure of Ganna’s company on shipboard, was to go to Switzerland and try to persuade Edith to give him a divorce. This took him several weeks of argument, and in the meantime Ganna languished in Paris. So did Mr. Cochran. Finally, reluctantly, Edith McCormick agreed to the divorce, and Harold hurried eagerly back to Paris to give Ganna the good news. He arrived only to learn that she had married Cochran the day before.

  He immediately presented himself at the newlyweds’ suite and, as Ganna later wrote in her memoir, tellingly titled Always Room at the Top, “While Mr. Cochran was still sleeping in the next room in his first day of married life, I was pouring coffee for Mr. McCormick … After my sudden marriage I was more preoccupied with Mr. McCormick’s helpless state than with my own thoughts.” She was not too preoccupied, however, to embark upon the next phase of a remarkable double game in which she would successfully refute the theory that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Her career, she explained to McCormick, still came first, and her ambition was still to perform with the Chicago Opera. This Mr. McCormick assured her she could do. But meantime certain perquisites were required from Mr. Cochran—among them a house in Paris on the rue de Lübeck; a Rolls Royce; a sable coat that cost a million francs; a wedding gift, which was to pick out anything she wanted at Cartier’s; “eight or nine” bracelets from the same store; an annual allowance of $100,000 for pin money; and an immediate long holiday at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where she took an entire floor for herself and six servants. Still, she confessed that Cochran failed to satisfy her “inner being.”

  Rested from her Riviera vacation, the new Mrs. Cochran now proclaimed herself ready to resume her operatic career and headed for Chicago, where, it was announced, she would sing the title role in Leoncavallo’s Zaza, a little-performed work that was not considered particularly demanding. The debut was scheduled for December 21, 1920, and, since the broad outlines of the Walska-Cochran-McCormick triangle were now a matter of public knowledge, the production promised to be a succès de scandale. Seats for the event quickly sold out. Then, just a few days before the performance, Ganna Walska suddenly departed for Europe again.

  Publicly, the reason given for the opera’s cancellation was that it was “not ready.” But from behind the scenes came other stories. The temperamental star, it seemed, refused to take direction. The musical director complained that her singing voice could not achieve sufficient volume to be heard beyond the first row. The New York conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, a McCormick family friend and relative by marriage,* was called upon for assistance and advice. In view of the situation, Damrosch tried to be as tactful as possible. While conceding that Ganna was “very pretty,” he wrote that, unfortunately, from the “absolutely unanimous accounts of my musician friends who have heard her, her voice is absolutely devoid of charm … What a tragedy, if only she would leave art alone, she would be much happier.”

  Ganna Walska herself blamed the opera’s cancellation on her husband. Mr. Cochran had objected, she said, to certain scanty costumes she would be required to wear, as well as to a couple of lengthy stage kisses which, being the great actress that she was, she had naturally tried to make realistic. Cochran, meanwhile, had hastily left Chicago just a few hours ahead of his wife, angered, it was said, because she had registered at her hotel as Mme. Ganna Walska, not Mrs. Alexander Cochran. Cochran promptly sued for divorce, and, after briefly considering a countersuit, Ganna decided to grant him one, in return for a cash settlement of $200,000.

  Now, by the early spring of 1922, Mme. Ganna Walska and Mr. Harold McCormick were both legally rid of their respective spouses, and were free to marry each other. He was fifty and she about forty—Ganna was always a little vague about her birth date—but before the marriage could take place, McCormick had a bit of business which he felt required to undertake.

  In Chicago there was an eminent surgeon named Victor Lespinasse, whose specialty was urology, and who had been hailed by the American Medical Association for his pioneering work on spermatogenesis and sterility. He had been described by The New York Times as the dean of gland transplantation and the “author of the saying that ‘a man is as old as his glands.’” Through Dr. Lespinasse’s technique, it was claimed, an aging man’s flagging sexuality could be restored to the full buoyancy of a teenager’s. On June 12, 1922, Harold McCormick entered a Chicago hospital to undergo one of Dr. Lespinasse’s rejuvenative gland transplants.

  It was all supposed to be a closely guarded secret, of course. But somehow the newspapers got hold of it, and Harold McCormick managed to make it all the worse by threatening to sue for libel a paper which reported that he had been implanted with the glands of a monkey. If it had not been a monkey, the papers speculated, then it had to have been a human, and a rumor began to spread that the donor of the glands in question had been a young blacksmith. A parody of Longfellow was soon circulating through the perfumed drawing rooms of the North Shore as well as the saloons of Rush Street:

  Under the spreading chestnut tree,

  The village smithy stands;

  The smith a gloomy man is he;

  McCormick has his glands.

  Poor Harold. Edith Rockefeller McCormick would never have permitted herself to become a laughingstock. Now her former husband was one. From her Alpine retreat in Switzerland with Dr. Jung, Edith had no comment.

  Harold, to celebrate his new-found youthfulness and his freedom from Edith, now ordered Ganna’s birthday present. It consisted of an example of every piece of farm equipment which Internati
onal Harvester manufactured, and the lot was shipped to her château outside Versailles, where she woke on her birthday morning to find, as she later wrote, “to my great surprise … a whole regiment of robot soldiers.” Two months after the operation, Harold joined Ganna in France, and married her there. At the time, the newspapers suggested that the marriage was probably not legal, since Illinois law required a one-year waiting period between divorce and remarriage. But Harold’s lawyers assured him that the law stated merely that the couple could not be married in Illinois. (To tie up the legal loose ends, the couple were married a second time, in February 1923, at Harold’s mother’s house outside Chicago.) After this ceremony the bridegroom greeted reporters with “Hello boys, this seems like old times. You know, I’ve been in the newspaper so much, I feel like a newspaperman myself.”

  Alas, the musical comedy was far from over. Not until a generation later, when Winthrop Rockefeller married “Bobo” Sears—or, still later, in 1959, when Steven Rockefeller married Anne Marie Rasmussen, a Norwegian maid who worked for his mother—would the press have such sport with a marital alliance of two persons from widely different backgrounds. Ganna’s parents, it was pointed out, were Polish peasants. She was described as an “aging diva,” and a “prima donna past her prime,” who had an “impossible voice,” and who had never sung in an important role.

  Ganna, of course, was outraged. She still thirsted for—and intended to have—an operatic career, and viewed herself as the victim of sinister forces, cruel fate, a malevolent press, ignorant and jealous critics, and a hostile, uneducated and unappreciative public. “People made about me quite wrong impression,” she wrote to her new sister-in-law in her fractured English with its erratic spellings, “and they imagine that I am foolish, vane, consited personne who imagines that she can sing because she is pretty and through her husband’s money tried to push herself. As I a matter of fact I am entirely, not consited, but wrongly or rightly (to be seen some day!) quite sure that something is in me that I should deliver a message and leave something behind me as an example. I want other people to know that Harold did not marry a foolish woman, but a person who wants to give at cost of terrible suffering and undiscrable misery.”

  Undaunted, she forged on. An American concert tour, sponsored by her husband, was an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. She was becoming a public embarrassment not only to her husband but to the entire McCormick family. The family did its best to keep stiff upper lips, but Harold was asked to step down from Harvester’s board. In Ganna’s bitterness at what she considered her unfair treatment, she began to say outrageous things. She stated publicly that she only tolerated Harold because of his money. He had promised her that his money could buy her success and fame, but he had let her down.

  Then came the publication of her Always Room at the Top, the “message” she felt she had been put on earth to deliver. In it she revealed that if Harold had disappointed her, she had also disappointed him. Harold, with his freshly transplanted lustiness, had wanted a bed partner. She had expected a Platonic union, a marriage of the minds. Harold, she wrote, tended “to idolize the physical expression of love. Nature in her wisdom having fulfilled him by giving him four children had chosen for his second wife an idealist who was able to put so much value on the richness of his soul that she could not even imagine the possibility of his preferring to seek further for a gross and limited pleasure rather than being satisfied with the divine companionship of the spiritual love she was willing to share with him.” She added, unkindly, that Harold had become “insatiable in his search for the realization of the physical demands—insatiable because they were unattainable for him anymore.”* She hinted that there were other details of her husband’s sexual appetites which she might reveal if and when she so chose.

  All this was too much for the McCormicks, including Harold. He and Ganna separated in 1931, and were divorced not long afterward. To be rid of her cost him $6,000,000, roughly one quarter of his Harvester holdings. But at least he silenced her.

  “I have my life, he has his,” she told the press. “Every artist must have her rights.”

  * Writing to his sister Anita from the Adirondacks in 1925, he marveled at how he had learned “so much about simple living … If you could have seen me washing the dishes after the meal … going to the market and ordering only what was needed … you would have said, ‘Can this be Harold?’—but it was him!”

  * Harold McCormick’s older sister, Anita, had married Emmons Blaine, whose sister Margaret was married to Damrosch.

  * Considering Ganna’s shaky command of English, it is clear that her “autobiography” was heavily ghostwritten.

  14

  MRS. McCORMICK RETURNS

  While Harold McCormick was trying manfully to cope with his second wife, his first wife returned to Chicago, ready to pick up the sceptre of social leadership that she had laid down eight years earlier. There had been speculation that, after the divorce, Edith McCormick might abandon Chicago and move to New York, where most of her relatives lived, but she made it clear that this was not to be. The big house at 1000 Lake Shore Drive was reopened, its furniture uncovered, its chandeliers removed from their bags, the rugs rolled out, the paintings, silver, and china brought up from their vaults. The gold service would once more be brought out.

  The years with Dr. Jung, however, had changed Edith in certain ways. For one thing, she appeared less interested in the welfare of the Chicago Opera, and less interested in displaying her furs and jewels, although she still turned out in them from time to time. Her new crusade, not surprisingly, was for psychoanalysis, and one of her notions was to turn her long-unused Villa Turicum into a psychoanalytic center, staffed with Jungians who would provide psychiatric care and counseling for the entire city of Chicago. She also had a new man—of sorts.

  His name was Edwin Krenn, and Edith described him as an “architect,” though he did not appear to practice at his profession and had no visible means of support, and as “the son of a famous European painter,” though the painter was never identified. She had met Krenn at Dr. Jung’s clinic and, naturally, she described him as brilliant. She had selected him to help her reorient Chicago toward psychology and psychoanalysis. “It was pointed out to me,” she said on her arrival, “that psychologically Chicago will be the greatest center in the world. That is why I have come back here to live. That is why I have planted my roots in the soil, hoping they will grow deeper and deeper. I am vitally interested in psychology.” For psychology, she would be Chicago’s standard bearer. Krenn’s duties would be to help her carry her dreams to fruition.

  Chicago did not care much for young Mr. Krenn. Short, plump, baby-faced and dandified, he seemed mainly interested in his collection of custom-tailored suits, which soon numbered more than two hundred. One Chicagoan described him as “small and blond, with pudgy, dimpled fingers,” and another was reminded of a “newly hatched duckling.” It was perfectly clear that Krenn was being kept by Mrs. McCormick, but it was also obvious to everyone that their relationship was entirely chaste.

  Edith McCormick continued to be a woman of punctuality and ritual, but with Krenn she devised a somewhat new routine. He had been given a large suite of rooms at the Drake Hotel, just across the street from 1000 Lake Shore Drive, and at precisely 9:15 every morning Edith would telephone him there, and they would plan their day. At 1:00 P.M. on the dot, Krenn would arrive at Edith’s door bearing a small floral nosegay for his patroness. Then they would lunch. Usually they would lunch at home, but occasionally they would be driven to a nearby hotel or restaurant. Whenever they were observed together, it was noticed that their conversations were stiff and formal—even sedate—and that they never addressed each other by first names. If there were no other guests, they spoke in formal German. Their afternoons were devoted to language lessons, which they took in separate rooms, and then, around four, Krenn would reappear. The Rolls Royce would be waiting and, with the chauffeur and footman and at le
ast one but sometimes two detectives, they would go to the movies. Sometimes they would manage to take in as many as four movies in an afternoon and evening, and the driver and footman always parked outside the theatre, even when the film happened to be showing in one of Chicago’s seedier neighborhoods. Then they would be driven home, where two butlers, stationed on either side of the front door, waited to usher Mrs. McCormick in. Unless it was an exceptionally early evening, Krenn did not enter Mrs. McCormick’s house. Everything was rigidly circumspect; that way, there could be no talk, no scandal. Edith explained why she had lost her taste for travel. She could see as much of the world as she wanted in the movies.

  Usually, after her movie-going evenings, Edith went straight to bed. But sometimes she would summon her staff and spend an hour or so rearranging the furniture. This was definitely post-Jungian behavior, the sort of thing she had never done before.

  Some people suggested that Edwin Krenn was an emotional substitute for Edith’s dead son. Certainly he was a more reliable person than any of her remaining three children, all of whom had gone on from structured childhood to lead variously disordered lives. Her son Fowler, who would later become president of International Harvester, had, in 1921, married Mrs. Anne “Fifi” Stillman. A considerable difference in their ages could not be ignored. In fact, Mrs. Stillman was the mother of Fowler’s Princeton roommate. Furthermore, Mrs. Stillman and her ex-husband had been principals in a well-publicized divorce fight, in which adultery had been charged on both sides. Fifi Stillman had claimed that her husband was keeping a Follies girl. Her husband countercharged that she had exchanged favors with an Indian guide in the backwoods of Canada.