Of the two girls, Mathilde—“the pretty one”—had run off at seventeen and married a Swiss riding instructor named Max Oser. He was forty-seven. Muriel—“the plain one”—had the strangest marital history of all. Her first marriage had been a “spiritual” one, to the ghost of Lieutenant G. Alexander McKinlock, Jr., a soldier who had been killed in World War I and whom she had never met. Then she “divorced” her ghost, went on the stage briefly under the name of Naranna Micor, tried her hand at singing, tried running a fashionable dress shop—none of these endeavors was successful—and then married a man named Elisha Dyer Hubbard who was also of her parents’ generation. A wounded First World War veteran, Hubbard was virtually bedridden, but he managed to survive five years of marriage to Muriel before expiring, during the course of which Muriel became a chronic alcoholic. She insisted on having her husband’s dog attend his funeral. Her brother Fowler tried unsuccessfully to have his sister declared insane.
If Edith McCormick had perhaps not been the perfect mother, she certainly found the perfect pet in Edwin Krenn. He doted on her, and except at bedtime they were inseparable. She would make no move without Krenn’s advice. This, alas, would be her downfall, because, if Edith had one fatal flaw, it was her belief that she possessed a financial genius equal to her famous father’s. Though she had all the money she could possibly need, she began to be obsessed with the idea of creating an entire new fortune of her own. It may have been a notion Dr. Jung had instilled in her—that she needed an “independence” of her Rockefeller inheritance.
Though nothing much had come of the idea to turn Villa Turicum into a psychological center—the house remained empty and unused—her interest in Jungian analysis remained strong. She boasted that, through analysis, she had cured herself of tuberculosis on three separate occasions. Soon she began taking on patients of her own—one of whom, she said proudly, was herself, and many of whom no doubt consulted her out of curiosity to meet the celebrated Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Soon their number reached a hundred. Still, she was choosy about those she would treat. One Chicago woman had come bubbling up to her, saying, “Oh, Mrs. McCormick, I would adore having you give me some lessons in psychoanalysis!” Edith’s icy reply was, “I could do nothing for you, and you could do nothing for me.” At the same time, other plans—which had nothing to do with treating the mentally or emotionally disoriented—were brewing in her mind and that of Edwin Krenn.
She wanted to build a city. Not a city for the poor, the ill, or the deranged, but a city for the grandly affluent. This was, after all, still the 1920s; affluence seemed everywhere, and limitlessly on the rise. Her city would be built along the luxurious lines of Palm Beach or Beverly Hills, but it would be built on the shore of Lake Michigan. She would call her city Edithton and, naturally, her architect would be Edwin Krenn.
To carry out this project, she formed the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust, initially financed with $5,000,000 worth of her Standard Oil stocks. In charge of the trust she place Krenn and a boarding-school classmate of his named Edward Dato, who had followed Krenn to Chicago. Edith proudly sent a copy of the trust prospectus to her aging father in New York, along with a detailed description of the Edithton development. John D. Rockefeller was less than sanguine about the project. He wrote to his daughter, “While you are a brilliant and mature woman of great mental capacity, I cannot forget you are my own flesh and blood. Therefore, it seems to be my duty to warn you of the pitfalls and vagaries of life. I would urge you to select an honest, courageous and capable man to advise you in these affairs.”
Obviously Edith believed that she had found two such men in Krenn and Dato, and plans for Edithton continued. Offices were established in downtown Chicago. Over fifteen hundred acres of lakeshore property south of Kenosha, Wisconsin, were purchased for more than $1,000 an acre. Naturally, when sellers learned that the person buying all this land was Edith McCormick, prices went up. Four million dollars was spent in dredging and landscaping a marina capable of berthing large yachts. Krenn had been much impressed by the Spanish-style architecture of such cities as Palm Beach, Coral Gables, and Santa Barbara, and had decreed that the castles which would be built for this millionaires’ paradise must follow that example. Red-tiled roofs, bell towers, courtyards, and Moorish arches abounded—at least on the drawing boards—and every mansion’s design had to have Krenn’s approval.
As the building of Edithton began to consume more and more of her time—not to mention her money—there were fewer of her grand entertainments, but Edith had not forgotten how to give them. One such was her seated luncheon for eighty honoring the visit to Chicago of Queen Marie of Rumania. For one New Year’s Eve, she shifted the venue of her party across the street to Krenn’s hotel, the Drake, and in Chicago with Love Arthur Meeker recalled, “The room was full of balloons. There was Edith, stiff as a poker, gravely batting them back and forth across our table, because that was expected of her.”
That there is no glittering city of Edithton on the Michigan shore today is to a large extent Edith’s own fault. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Krenn or Dato was cheating her, but Edith’s approach to the project was so unbusinesslike that the young men’s business methods suffered as a result. She refused, for example, to leave Chicago to visit the building site. (In fact, from the time of her return from Switzerland until her death, she never set foot outside the city limits.) She would not look at the company’s books. She rarely even visited the downtown offices, and on one of these occasions her only instruction was to tell Krenn to tell one of the employees to stop smoking. When Krenn tried to give her a receipt for several million dollars’ worth of bonds she was turning over to him, she waved him away. Everything, she said, should be based on mutual respect and trust; she did not believe in legal documentation. As a result, enormous sums of money passed into and out of the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust unrecorded.
Then came the shattering events on Wall Street in the autumn of 1929, and the death knell of Edithton was struck. Incredible as it seemed, Edith had lost everything—everything, that is, except some unwieldy and unsalable pieces of real estate, for which the tax collector wanted taxes. Everyone had assumed that Edith’s fortune was locked in iron-clad family trusts, but everyone had been wrong. The fortune, quite simply, was gone.
Her brother, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was summoned from New York to try to make some sense of Edith’s affairs. Her relatives chipped in, and Edith was moved from 1000 Lake Shore Drive to a suite at the Drake, where she was placed on a rigid, though quite generous, family allowance of $1,000 a day.
To make her situation more dolorous, she had discovered that she had cancer. Vainly, she tried to cure herself by psychology, but finally even she admitted that she had failed. Arthur Meeker recalls her toward the end: “Her eyes, my mother said—when the latter called to say good-bye before leaving for the summer, and they both knew it meant good-bye for good—were like a frightened child’s.”
She died in the summer of 1932. She was only sixty.
After her death, it was revealed that, in the years since their divorce, Harold McCormick had sent Edith a red rose every year on her birthday. It was also revealed that, during those same years, Edith had kept Harold’s room at 1000 Lake Shore Drive exactly as he had left it—not a stick of furniture changed or moved, his suits still hanging in the closets—in hopes that he might some day return.
Even Edith’s father survived her. So did Harold, who was the same age—they had been childhood friends first, sweethearts later—and of course her ungrateful children, who would now have to wait for their father’s death before receiving any significant inheritance. Harold McCormick took up whistling. He even went on the radio to offer a whistling program. In 1938, he took up marriage again. Recovering in southern California from a series of heart attacks, he married his nurse, Adah Wilson, who was thirty years younger than he. It was his only really tranquil marriage, unsettled only briefly by a breach-of-promise suit for $2,000,000 i
nstituted by a Mrs. Olive Colby. She settled out of court for $12,500, and Adah Wilson McCormick nursed her husband through his final years until his death in 1941.
Later, Adah remarried, had a son, and died bizarrely in a fall from the lip of the Grand Canyon.
If there were any justice in the world, we would have to report that the faithless Ganna Walska squandered her ill-gotten gains on drugs and gigolos, took to the streets, died of a lingering and painful ailment, and is buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere outside Paris.
Actually, nothing of the sort happened. She invested her money very shrewdly, and bought, among other things, the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Here the frustrated performer could work off her histrionic energies as the proprietor of a successful and fashionable theatre. Her new Paris house in the rue du Bac became a sort of salon for visiting artists and intellectuals, and one wall of her drawing room was covered with the exquisite sketches of Erté, the famous theatrical costume designer, including a number of designs he had done for Ganna. She also maintained a handsome winter home in Santa Barbara, where she entertained visitors with fanciful tales of her operatic career, and how this career, of such great promise, had been blocked and sabotaged by mischievous others.
She laid the blame for most of her career misfortunes at the feet of the perfidious McCormicks.
Among the stories she liked to tell were these:
The producer of the Ravinia Summer Opera outside Chicago had pursued her for weeks, begging her to perform for him, offering her the then-unheard-of sum of $1,000 a performance. Finally, she agreed to accept his offer. But mysteriously the promised contract was never delivered. She learned later what had happened. Edith McCormick had heard about the offer, and had bribed the producer, offering him enough money for a whole season of operas, provided Ganna Walska never be permitted to set foot in Ravinia.
She had sung the lead soprano role in The Mikado one summer in Nice. (She actually had done this, at least for one performance.) Critics from all over the world had been ecstatic—all, that is, except the reviewer from the Chicago Tribune, a McCormick-owned paper. Later she found out why. Bribery again. The critic has been paid by a rival soprano to write an unfavorable review. (In the files of the Chicago Tribune is a cablegram dated February 22, 1925, saying that the mayor of Nice had banned Ganna Walska from giving another performance in his city; the audience’s reaction to the first performance had been so vociferously unfriendly that the mayor feared that any further appearances would erupt into a riot, in which the beautiful star might suffer bodily harm. The cable added: “M. Audier, the director of the opera, concurs with the Mayor’s opinion.”)
There had always been some question about Ganna Walska’s age. Most published accounts of her gave her birth date as “about 1893.” But in September of 1967, in an interview for Opera magazine, M. Erté, who knew her well, told the interviewer that she was then “about eighty-five,” which would place her actual birth date some ten years earlier.
In the spring of 1971 she appeared briefly in the news when some items from her jewelry collection—including one large diamond which she had named The Mogul—went on the block at Sotheby–Parke Bernet and fetched a tidy $916,185. It was not that she needed the money. It was just that she didn’t wear any of the big pieces any more.
Living quietly in the semitropic loveliness of her Santa Barbara estate, called Lotus Land, she became known as a gently dignified, sweet-faced little old lady, always interested in the arts. By the early 1980s, though age had slowed down her activities somewhat, she was still willing to open her beautiful home and spectacular gardens for charity benefits, particularly when the beneficiary had something to do with music or the theatre.
And, as this is written—in the early summer of 1981—that is where Ganna Walska is: alive and well at Lotus Land, every inch a grande dame.
PART FIVE
The Loneliest Millionairess
15
“GUPPY”
Cincinnatians like to point out to newcomers that Cincinnati was a city when Chicago was still an open prairie and Cleveland no more than a wide place in the Erie Canal System. Cincinnati reckons its existence from 1788, the year a Kentuckian named John Filson and a couple of partners purchased 740 acres in a natural amphitheatre beside the Ohio River surrounded by a handsome semicircle of hills and bluffs. Filson, an amateur surveyor, began laying out plans for his new city. He was also something of a scholar, and appears to have been fond of word games. He christened his city Losantiville, which sounds French but is actually a kind of reverse acronym. The basin of land that Filson and the others bought lay on the shore opposite the point where the Licking River enters the Ohio. The “L” in Losantiville therefore stood for Licking. Os is the Latin word for mouth; anti, of course, means opposite, and ville is French for city. Thus, read backward, Losantiville meant “the city opposite the mouth of the Licking.” The name, however, did not last long. John Cleves Symmes, another early settler, thought the name ridiculous, and allegedly bellowed, “Losantiville! What an awful name! God damn it, call it Cincinnati!”—honoring the Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans’ society of Revolutionary officers to which Symmes happened to belong. Symmes’s choice won, and outsiders have never since been quite sure how to spell it.
First-time visitors to Cincinnati, expecting to find a rawboned mid-western town on the order of, say, Omaha, are usually surprised to find a city of fine old houses, stately squares and parks, gas-lit streets and hills where, as in San Francisco, homes with the finest views command the highest prices. Even in 1819, Cincinnati startled visitors with its subtle mixture of Old World elegance and southern charm. Graham A. Worth, who came to Cincinnati around that time to direct the Branch Bank of the United States, exclaimed later, “Talk to me of the backwoods—these people live in the style of princes! The costly dinner service—the splendid cut glass—the rich wines—the sumptuous dinner itself.” Even Boston was impressed with the degree of culture achieved by Cincinnati; a correspondent from the Boston Courier in 1816 was moved to comment on “Pianofortes by the dozen in Cincinnati.”
Cincinnati used to be able to boast that there was no real poverty in the city. Everyone was hard-working, and everyone was reasonably prosperous. Some people, of course, had become very rich. Two world wars, and subsequent migrations of blacks from the rural South and whites from Appalachia, would change all that, and Cincinnati now has its share of poverty proportionate to that of any other American city, but the fact that the city was so stable for so long is reflected in a certain complacent, nil admirari urban attitude. The people who became very rich in the early days, furthermore, tend still to be very rich.
Among the “first-cabin” families are the Tafts—still very much around—who produced both a United States President and a United States Senator. For years the grande dame of the Taft family was Mrs. Charles P. Taft, Sr., who reigned over, among other things, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Nor can one overlook the Longworths. It was said of the first Nicholas Longworth that he owned more land than anyone west of the Allegheny Mountains, and one of his descendants, Nicholas Longworth III, would become a congressman, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the husband of Alice Roosevelt. In the Longworth family, one of the more remarkable ladies was Maria Longworth, an early feminist and artist who founded the Rookwood Pottery, which produced ceramic ware famous for its unusual designs and glazes.
All the prominent families knew one another, and society was very close-knit. Mrs. Charles P. Taft’s best friend, for instance, was Mrs. Thomas J. Emery, and the two ladies regularly sent “breakfast letters” back and forth to each other via their coachmen, even though their houses were very close. The Emerys are an altogether extraordinary family. The first Emery, Thomas, was born in England and came to America in 1832, bringing his wife and a young son, Thomas Josephus Emery, Jr. Soon a second son, John Josiah Emery, was born, and the groundwork for a small but important family dynasty was laid.
Th
ere has always been a pleasant logic to Cincinnati’s prosperity. The rich farmland around the city meant corn, and corn meant fodder for pigs. (At one point Cincinnati cheerfully earned the nickname “Porkopolis” because it had become such an important pork center.) Pigs provided bristles for brushes, hides for shoes and gloves, sausage for the city’s early German-immigrant population, and lard for candles and illumination. When John D. Rockefeller came out with kerosene as a substitute for lard oil, it was discovered that lard could also be used in soap making, and two Cincinnatians, William Cooper Procter and James Gamble, managed to make a very nice thing out of that. Procter & Gamble is still one of the city’s flagship industries. Even in hard times, it is pointed out in Cincinnati, people still need soap, and from the soap business Cincinnati has earned a reputation as a “depression-proof” city.
Thomas Emery, however, started out as an “estate and money agent,” with a specialty of selling “country seats, situated from one-half a mile to eight miles from the city, not surpassed for elegance of buildings, gardens and orchards in Hamilton County.” Later he branched out into the lard business, and by 1845 his Emery Candle Company was one of the most successful in the country. “In the candle business we had a new process of distilling cheap greases,” he said later of his success. “Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits large for a number of years.”
Thomas Emery died in 1851, after falling through a hatchway in his factory, but his two young sons were ready to carry on. (There were also two girls, Kezia and Julia, who inherited large shares of their father’s fortune, but Kezia died and left everything to Julia, and then Julia died and left everything to the Salvation Army of England.) This was a long time before kerosene, and John D. Rockefeller was still an owlish schoolboy, but the Emery brothers shrewdly decided that, though they would keep the candle business, they would devote their principal energies to what had been their father’s first love: real estate. They formed Thomas Emery’s Sons, Incorporated, “Builders of Hearths and Homes.” One of their first big projects was the Hotel Emery, opened in 1877. Borrowing from the Piccadilly and Burlington arcades in London, the Hotel Emery had a block-long heated arcade of shops running through it, and office space above, which was unique in America at the time.
The Grandes Dames Page 17