Between Men

by Richard Canning

  Pity all the same we couldn’t have foreseen the attack this fall on your friend—or the remake of The Women as The Opposite Sex (and the Variety headline Ralph made up trumpeting the hoax: “Luce Lip-Sync Gyps”). She might well have paid a courtesy call on the American ambassadress in Rome, sipped a companionable Campari or two, and spoken a few straight words—delivered a few home truths (as Dawn Powell says), something like, “Listen, bitch, we know who wrote it, and for how much.” Especially since the noise about Trovaso Corradi being interested, because of Visconti’s admiration of the Cukor pic in Mrs. Luce’s (of, for forty thousand bucks George S. Kaufman’s) American comic master-piece. (Rather diverting it would have been, too, than the Barber-Menotti opus for Jurinac—and you know the full T on that, don’t you? They showed it to your friend, hoping to make it her Metropolitan debut, and she said: “Rewrite it so that Erika is the heroine, and I’ll think about it.” As the watchword hereabouts nowadays goes—taken direct from your devoted bodhisattva, Panama Hattie-Three-Sheets, or M. Chowderhead Bahadur Baksheesh: Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.)

  Notes from the Hotel Chelsea: Uncle Virgil, Lone Defender of the Mitigated (aka the Countess Razamowsky) wasn’t there—or claims not. (Paranoy said, “No, he wasn’t there; Nuncle prefers—trahit sua nunque voluptas—to fall asleep nine stories up at home on Twenty-third Street these days rather than in public parterres on Thirty-ninth and Fifty-seventh streets—where love no longer beckons. Not to mention the fact that some people are beginning to say Who? and even to confuse him with the other T, the one with the P up in Cambridge who writes those chorales and sanguine, gusty symphonies that flirt with dissonance but are not besmirched.” He, Nunc, has however heard she’s a hoax and has apparently written to—get this—Mary Garden [they being ‘on s’en passerait’]. Yes, dear old Mary, that pillar of strength, sanity, and perspicacity, known to the world, as was Jenny Lind, for piety, modesty, charitable good works, intrinsic worth of heart and delicacy of mind, and a spotless private life—aka to her intimates “Little Egypt” and “Isadora”—she learned dancin’ in a hurry, and ’fore the days of Arthur Murray.) Written to say so (she is a hoax) in so many words: apparently he is in his own mind the Flugelmann of that small band of vocal connoisseurs convinced that the rising tide of superstition and Kabbalism is too damaging to society to be ignored. This gives him a cause to which he can append his energies, lest he subside altogether, like any number of old bags around town, into beadwork pillows, sailor’s valentines, gin, and jigsaw puzzles.

  (Not to mention the fact that he would much rather dish with Mary over some really significant and timeless issue involving for instance her art versus that of Povla Frisch or the realization at long last of her ambition to sing Kundry—which he could easily arrange with a single phone call to Josephine La Puma and what better venue after all for Parsifal than the Palm Gardens [Madame Middleton would surely graciously demur] than deal with these upstart blow-ins—except to point out of course the fact that Sabatini, after all, did create frissons in her, Mary’s, honor at the Ambassador, whereas what has been created for this Callas at the Ritz, only some new kind of greasy doughnut.)

  Remember, Nunc was all set to denounce you, in Aida (probably for waking him up so rudely in the boudoir scene, with “figlia di Faraoni!” For that and the unfortunate contretemps with the Neri transformation). “Nothing, I fear,” he was heard to whisper to Olin Downes in the can after the Triumphal Scene, “but a rather more hysterical Herta Glaz, costumed in an overexuberant and yet, for a royal personage surely underclad manner, fielding a performing style and a blazing pyrean headdress together suggestive less of Miss Gladys Swarthout than of, say, Miss Margie Hart—and reminiscent of that of the gigantic red-haired harlot impersonated by Bert Savoy.” (Did they run that back to you, at the interval to send you into V-8 overdrive in the Judgment Scene, reducing the presbyter to a mass of quivering mandarin jelly? He later denied saying it at all—claimed he was maliciously misquoted by a rival; that what he’d actually said was “an uncanny portrait of a mysterious heart: she is a fiery Amneris who calls to mind no earlier exponent of the role, but rather the greatest of all Aidas, Theresa Stolz, the toast of the House of Savoy.”)

  (“A likely story,” Paranoy was heard to comment; “the raddled old iniquity was probably at La Stolz’s debut in that role, at Scala, on his Italian journeys. It’s certain he was, with Walt Whitman, an Alboni fanatic—went to both of her Normas!”)

  Nunc is of course most famous—apart from giving Lou Harrison a nervous breakdown—for his pronouncement on another of your favorite pieces of Americana, recently reimmortalized by your favorite new American soprano. “A libretto,” he said of Porgy and Bess, “that should never have been accepted, on a subject that should never have been treated, by a composer who should never have attempted it.” (Clearly, he was aching for two more nevers to make up a resounding Lear-like crescendo, but Rhetoric, the tease, failed him.) Paranoy says Nunc has become like an old Roman principessa (perhaps he’s been influenced by the creation of the mythical “Principessa Oriana Incantevole, deaf since the bombing of Rome, in MNOPQR STUVWXYZ), living on the piano nobile of her mind’s crumbling palazzo, amidst the fantastic wreckage left behind in the wake of bands of marauding visitors (which gave me the shivers, for I’ve always liked the Chelsea).

  This you will like. I heard one old dear say to another on the way out, “It’s true, life is like that. She makes you see it.” And Frances Moore said something I might have said as well of you, had I thought to. “When Maria sings, the painted scene clouds move across the painted moon!”

  Many things said to have happened never did. This, for example, so eerily reminiscent of exaggerations published in the aforementioned text relating to yourself and companions as to invite.

  “The whole theater was an insane asylum—fists waving, pummeling, hoarse guttural exclamations and anguished cries filling the auditorium. Strangers fell sobbing into one another’s arms; delirious women clinging to one another staggered toward the exit doors. There was an undeniable sense of a universal chaos out of which some entirely new era was being created.”

  Paranoy said, “Sounds like Marcia Davenport losing her broadcast mind at Gina Cigna’s debut” (which of course really did happen, on WOR).

  Somebody said Marcia Davenport was there, telling everybody who would listen that this woman was a flash in the pan and that the real news was Jolanda Meneguzer. Paranoy said, “That wasn’t Marcia Davenport; that was Rodney Bergamot’s new drag.” But we know for a fact it was the only child of Alma Gluck, not merely from the way she sat out the intermissions in the stark attitude Dostoyevsky (who really should be raised to render the scene) made the derisive mouth of Nastasya Filipnova decry, to wit: “If I sit in a box in the French theater like the incarnation of some inapproachable dress-circle virtue . . . etc.” Not only, but also because she dropped her program on the steps leading down from Sherry’s on the way out during the final curtain uproar and some deft queen retrieving it for her and spying script, pulled a quick switch then disappeared up the secret Thirty-ninth Street side stairway to the Family Circle. (It all came out the next day on the Line, along with the following.

  “Marcia Davenport? She claims to have once been a member of the highest councils of state.”

  “Surely more a membrane than a member, no?”)

  What was written in the white space in the Steinway ad opposite the billing page went something like this:

  “Bellini.

  “Suddenly, Vincenzo began to sob. He doubled over and buried his head of golden curls in the bent crook of his arm. All of Paris was humming out the window. ‘Qu’as-tu, cheri?’ the Countess whispered, putting down her needlepoint and turning to him in alarm. ‘What is it? Que (Qui?) fait-tu mal? What has disturbed you so?’ ‘Niente . . . niente,’ he muttered (for though joy is a convulsion, grief is indeed a habit, and emotions had long since become his events) his wet face gleaming with tears in the demi-lune. ‘Sono
trieste—e straniero!’”

  And yes, your pet lunatic standee (or is that slandee?) was there for the seasonal opening: the one we call Bartleby; the one you and the countess maintain lives in a broom closet at Patelson’s and forges antique baroque scores. Dressed in the usual semiclerical black, with the worn collar reversed. Listened, as always, to everything from the Fortieth Street lobby, sitting under the bust of Caruso, clutching Fear and Trembling & A Sickness Unto Death, reading from them at intermission, acknowledging (in the piercing and haughty luster of that gaze enjoining any notion of fraternity) nessuno.

  Then a snatch of dialogue: “The theater? Please, my dear; the lights go down, the curtain goes up; people are talking. Boring.”

  When Dolores and Gloria Gotham walked down separate aisles and greeted one another, one wag remarked, “The meeting of Erys and Enyo.” (In the Irish these ones—Strife and Battle Axe—are called Nemain and Babh. They, with the Morrigan, constitute the Major Triad in Big Earth Trouble. O. W. will expatiate for you.)

  Whereupon I myself saw, wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, either Dalí or the false Dalí (the latter, I’m inclined to think, as there was no version, true or false, either of Gala at his side, only a gaggle of the living foredoomed). Whoever he was he was heard to proclaim, much to the consternation of the score desk gnomes, “The music is irrelevant with Callas—she is elsewhere from the first measure. I have in my life in the theater come upon only two incarnations of the tragic muse, this woman, Duse and Margarita Xirgu.” “Who? ” one score desk gnome wailed.

  (I might have told him, but Lorca’s ghost came floating at just that moment out of the men’s room, flashed his eyes, put a finger to his lips, and yet I heard him say, “You know how I have suffered in this city, I cannot bear to be here, I don’t know why, but do not allow this terrible man to profane by speaking it the divine name of Margarita Xirgu!” I promised him I would prevent all further discourse of the only woman he could ever love, and then I felt his chill ameliorate and indeed his dark and diminutive ectoplasmic form dissolve in the light of Sherry’s chandelier.)

  Ralph nearly slugged some old transparency on Saturday who stood there cackling, “Darling, when Bellini said, ‘Bring death by means of song,’ do you suppose he meant this?”

  All right, I can’t not talk about it all night. She may have three voices, all of them archetypes capable of defining for a generation the music she sings, but for me—to keep the triad argument going—she is everything in two of the three great essential manifestations of the Triple Goddess as envisioned by Mozart in the letter to his father wondering if he could snag Da Ponte after Salieri was through with him. That is to say the seria and the mezzo carattere. I don’t see that she can ever be the buffa, which you can and have been. I’m sorry, but there it is.

  The immediate problem, according to one seer, is: she is at the Met up against the psychic remnant of the greatest Norma of the early century, and cannot, for all her genius, best it. (She’s even known to have given on the subject of the sometime vaudevillian who once gave voice lessons and sang a piece of the Verdi Requiem with Joan Crawford, “with her voice you can’t compare us—it’s not fair.” Fair? Sounds like the canard about Princeton boys and a certain specified reciprocal erotic configuration.) Whatever the reason, this Norma, unless it undergoes a metamorphosis (or unless she starts some class of blazing affair in Gotham) is not going to be the one. Anyway, according to everybody that’s already happened, yes? In London—twice: and that’s the second part of the argument, that having done that, she simply will not be given what she was given there: so that the two great Normas of the century as it turns out will have been Ponselle here and her there. You know how people go on. (It’s true, life is like that.)

  Fortuna favet fortibus. (Aloha.)

  “This is not a job for a music critic,” one vilificator avowed, “this is a job for a plumber! When she did Butterfly in Chicago, I said I’d rather be listening to Ganna Walska. Tonight I’d rather be listening to Ina Souez singing with Spike Jones! I am inclined after hearing this performance to believe the rumor that it was this voice—this woman—who gave Anita Cerquetti a nervous breakdown! I mean really. What has issued from those distended jaws is a voice such as it would be madness to attempt describing. There are indeed two or three epithets which might be applicable to it in parts. One might say, for instance, that the sound was harsh and broken and hollow, but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sound can ever have scorched the ears of humanity. There are two particulars, nevertheless, which might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation. In the first place the voice seemed to reach one’s ears from a vast distance—as from some deep cavern under Broadway. In the second place, it impresses itself upon the sense of hearing as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress themselves upon the sense of touch.”

  An even more coquettish exchange took place outside Sherry’s between gentlemen (unlikely ever to marry). “Well, obviously a reputation as full of hot air as the Hindenburg, and likely to meet a similar end.” Pause. “Oh, I don’t know, darling, not unless she gets really desperate and tries dropping anchor in Jersey.”

  And then a knowing—maddeningly knowing—apprisal. “Shot to shit in seven years; terrifying!”

  For my part, I’ll tell you that I have never—not even from you, not even from Lady Day (who is the only one finally to compare either of you with) heard emotional deprivation voiced with more molten anguish, whether in one voice worried into three folds, as you insist, or from the three voices the Italians demark, whichever. At white heat, which I felt she reached nearly as often here as at Covent Garden, she is the end of the known histrionic world. The mint of the musical genius—the way, like you, she does her count from within, and is so always and never marking; the way her preemptive attack and swell to full volume in next to no time allows for split-second, almost improvisatory variation from phrase to phrase within the context of the line . . . all that exquisite finesse that gives bel canto the stamp of a particular performer in a particular strait. She is with you and Victoria one of the trinity of exponents of that ars subtilior in which the giddy pleasure of rhythmic invention explodes. Such amazing, hard-won control veils only somewhat her dangerous and forbidding affect: a raging, and not so musical torrent (hence the “argument” in performance between her art and her ballistics) in contrast to your dark still well that could make me lose my mind, were it not lost.

  (In fact there is some confusion of effect between you. One knows that fiatto is as distinct as a fingerprint, but were not the grain of your instruments so nearly opposite: were not her voice so molten and yours so radioactive, one might be forgiven for arraigning you in the court prosecuting her for mass audience illusion-homicide, and vice versa.) If I found any fault at all, it was in the occasional end phrase: she tends nowadays to run out of steam (the operative word, I’m afraid, among the naysayers was scrannel) certainly in relation to London, in ’52, and the consequence seems to be that she dwells a fraction of a second too long on certain final notes, until the fevered brain refires. That and (I know we don’t talk about wobble, but) the wobble you can at times now indeed play jump rope with, and the undeniable fact that she sometimes sounds absolutely like a coyote. (Somebody cackled, apropos the much-mooted Dallas engagements, “They are gonna love her out there—she yodels!”) Like a coyote or like an egregious example of the notorious bad fifth (of which I know something myself, coming from a family of poitin distillers) in Henri Arnaut’s fifteenth-century treatise on the Pythagorean tuning—and that is frightening. (And reminds me, though I never thought I would be reminded, of Mark Twain’s description of that animal as “a living, breathing allegory of want.”)

  During the first intermission a combustible discussion of the sort much valued nowadays in existentialist New York got going at the bar in Sherry’s—not over anything so insignificant and contingent as La Divina’s wobble: rather over the question of Norma and motherhoo
d. One or two loons posited that you had to have been a mother, and three or four more took the opposite view—the Golgotha Church organist (redolent of vetiver and inhaling Benedictine like Vicks) going even so far as to insist you shouldn’t even have had one. Team A cited Ponselle and the big Z as non-moms, and Neri and thee as moms (both with lost children). I thought Ralph would choke to death on rage and spit. I found it riveting: in my experience it was the first time in the history of categories that you and the Old Foghorn have ever been put in the same file, except as women or as members of the cast of Aida.

  I of course could only think of the truth of the matter, of that boy in Jerusalem, who has certainly passed the age of the bar mitzvah. Will he remember you? Does he realize who you are? You never said you were his mother, only the neighbor, fair enough, but he must remember his years with you, your tutoring him in the Torah like a Deborah in the wilds of Ruthenia. Deborah is “swarm of bees.” “Busy little bees full of stings, making honey.” You could never have stung the boy, only fed him on honey. I wonder do I sound jealous when I speak of this great work of yours. No, I don’t think so, only mindful that I myself was in another context a boy fed on honey. Incidentally, apropos lineups, I thought you’d want to know where they put her in the rogues’ gallery in the lobby. Right next to you, flush left of the north, or Fortieth Street box office window. It took me a while to remember whom they had moved: Mary C-V, who’s now batting her eyes between Milanov and Blanche Thebom. So there.

  Electing to abjure the felicities of the recessional (the gangways were, as Ralph declared, “imbedded crowded”), I cut out through the pass door to the executive offices (my prerogative now that I am an employee of the place—if that’s what the translator of Salomé is entitled to call himself [and what else can I call myself, “Bosey”? Or put another way—the way of wit: “I never call myself, dear; I’m always in; too bad. I’d like to be able to give myself a piece of my mind once in a while, but my answering service is down on strong language”]). Whereupon, the big Z, with that ample vestal Maisie Halloran in tow, loomed up in the prospect (evidently having just left the Del Monaco dressing room, where God knows what ...) very like the Queen Mary emerging from a North River morning fog into her waterfront berth. “Zo, vot are you doink, smilink like it vuz your vedding? I am goink to cabel Mawrdew Czgowchwz on you!” “Madame, don’t bother, I’m confessing. How could I live with myself and keep such a passion secret?” She looked balefully from Maisie to me. “You Irish could do anything.” Poor Maisie looked pilloried (after decades of selfless toil organizing socials, and especially after the latest salvo against Z by the Callas lobby in English Opera, calling Mama’s Aida in particular ridiculous, and excoriating the Slavic pitch. Mary was heard screaming only last weekend, “She’s the only Aida in history who sounds Ethiopian! She researched that pitch—it’s the way they sounded!”).