Prima Donna at Large (7 page)

“Monsieur Duchon!” I called. “Will you come here, please? There's something here you should see.” He came, reluctantly. I showed him the end of the rope. “See, it's old and frayed. The rope should have been replaced long ago. But it has not been
cut
. It simply broke. It was an accident, Monsieur—no one has tried to harm you.”

He took the rope from me and examined the end, looking for signs of a knife blade. He found none. He whirled toward Gatti and started lambasting him for allowing unsafe equipment to be used backstage. Gatti apologized.

Duchon's close call had put an end to the festive air backstage. I hurried upstairs and changed, and by the time I got back down the stagehands had attached a new rope to the roller curtain and pulled it back up to its place in the flies.

The others were all ready to go. Caruso, who was a walking advertisement for good eating, announced he was in imminent danger of starving to death. Toscanini, who was thin to the point of emaciation, declared he really wasn't all that hungry and would be satisfied with something to drink. Emmy backed up Caruso but suggested Sherry's instead of Del Pezzo's. Scotti draped a friendly arm about her shoulders and started explaining to her the superior merits of Italian cuisine. We still hadn't reached an agreement when we went out the stage door, where a mob of fans greeted us—most of whom were screeching “Ger
ee!
Ger
ee!
”

Scotti and Caruso got almost as much enjoyment out of the gerryflappers as I did. For one thing, they were all girls in their late teens or early twenties, and that alone was enough to hold the interest of those two Italian lovers. The girls pushed up against me—not looking for autographs, just wanting to talk, to be a part of what was going on. In the vanguard, as usual, were Mildredandphoebe. Since you never saw one without the other, it was hard not to think of them as one person, Mildredandphoebe. Phoebe was a sort of lower-case personality anyway; it was Mildred who was the leader.

Those two were my most ardent fans (well, my most ardent
female
fans). They came to every performance I gave, kept scrap-books about my career, wrote a newsletter about me that they circulated to other fans, collected souvenirs, and were always, always
there
. They wanted to know everything about me. Occasionally I left tickets for them at the box office, but tonight they'd stood at the back of the auditorium during the entire performance.

“You were just
wonderful
, Miss Farrar!” Mildred cried. “I could hardly breathe, you were so wonderful!”

“Just wonderful!” Phoebe echoed.

“I never heard anything like it,” Mildred rushed on, “I've got to tell you, it was, oh, it was an
experience
for me tonight!”

“An experience,” Phoebe nodded.

I really liked this part of it; Mildredandphoebe could always be counted on to provide me the opportunity to play Queen Geraldine, graciously acknowledging the adulation of a grateful public. It was fun. I assumed my most regal manner and chatted with them a while (Scotti says I put on a British accent for such occasions). One of the other gerryflappers had cornered Toscanini, who was looking around desperately for an escape route. He was not very good at small talk.

“Howja like the Frenchman?” Mildred wanted to know.

“Monsieur Duchon?” I said. “I think he made a most auspicious Metropolitan début and I look forward to singing with him again.” Mildredandphoebe scribbled in the notebooks they carried with them everywhere, an item for the next newsletter.

“I die!” Caruso cried.

I laughed and told the gerryflappers we had to go. “Thank you all for coming, all of you, thank you. But we're tired and we're hungry, and we want to get something to eat.”

“Where are you going?” Mildredandphoebe asked. They wanted to know
everything
about me.

That traitorous Emmy Destinn ended up siding with the men and I was overwhelmingly outvoted. We went to Del Pezzo's.

4

It was my manager, Morris Gest, who brought me the bad news about Pasquale Amato.

“Doc Curtis says bronchitis,” Morris told me. “But I think it's pneumonia.”

That was Morris, all right—a know-everything. “What makes you think that?” I asked.

“The way the doc talked. He seemed more worried than you'd think he'd be, over just a case of bronchitis.”

“There's no such thing as ‘just' a case of bronchitis for a singer,” I said sharply. But pneumonia or bronchitis, it was still bad news. Amato would be out longer than anyone had counted on. Poor Pasquale. Poor us.

“Gatti-Casazza doesn't have all the schedule worked out yet,” Morris went on, “but I think you'd better get used to the idea of singing
Madame Sans-Gêne
with a house baritone. Duchon won't learn the role. Gatti said so himself.”

I can't say I was surprised.
Madame Sans-Gêne
is the soprano's opera, with all the other parts more or less orbiting around her role. Amato was amiable enough and secure enough to sing the baritone part without fearing loss of stature, but I didn't think Duchon was cut from the same cloth. He was too used to being center stage; even Escamillo in
Carmen
was a lesser effort for him.

“Sorry I missed your
Carmen
the other night,” Morris said sheepishly. “Everybody's saying it was great. But the Old Man had scheduled a family gathering that night and, well, you know how it is.”

I knew. Morris was a little intimidated by his father-in-law—whom he never referred to by name, only as the Old Man. Morris Gest had been my manager for some years now; he was an aggressive man who'd started out as a ticket scalper and then gone on to bigger and better things. Morris had one of those rubbery faces that can be absolutely trustworthy one minute and downright conniving the next. But as long as his conniving face was put on in the service of
my
career, I didn't mind. He took a little getting used to, but he was a good manager. I think he was afraid of nothing at all in the world except possibly the aforementioned father-in-law, a soft-spoken man who loved controlling other people, including Morris Gest. Interesting relationship there.

Morris had come to my apartment to work out some details of a Friday morning musicale at the Biltmore he'd scheduled me into, but the mention of Duchon had set him thinking. “What do you know about that tour the Frenchman's come for? Where does he go from here?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I believe Gatti mentioned it was a last-minute thing. Duchon probably doesn't have the details worked out yet.”

Morris started grinning, and I could almost see the dollar signs in his eyes. “You mean he doesn't have a manager?”

“Morris, it's a
fund-raising
tour. For Alsatian war relief. There's no profit to be made.”

“Sure, sure. But there's such a thing as good will, you know. I help him a little now, he helps me a lot later. Besides, he'll have to sing a few times for himself, won't he? To cover expenses?”

If there was any way to make some money out of Duchon's fund-raising tour, Morris was the one to find it. “Well, good luck,” I said, meaning it; Philippe Duchon and Morris Gest should make an interesting combination. “But remember he's committed to stay in New York until Amato is back on his feet.”

He shrugged. “It'll take a while to get things set up.” He got up to go. “Say, is there a back way out of this building? I had to work my way through a bunch of gerryflappers to get in here.”

“Where—out front?”

“Yep. What do they do, just hang around hoping you'll come out?”

I shook my head in amazement; those girls had some sort of sixth sense about these things. “As a matter of fact, I'm going to be leaving for a luncheon engagement in a few minutes. But I don't know how they knew about it.”

“Yeah? Who you having lunch with?” Morris was never shy.

“No one you know,” I lied. I told him how to find the tradesmen's entrance and ushered him out. I didn't want him to know I was meeting Philippe Duchon; Morris would pester me to put in a good word for him, or—even worse—invite himself along.

The invitation from Duchon had been a complete surprise; it arrived in the form of a note carried by a handsome young valet who spoke no English. I wondered what the baritone wanted. We had a rehearsal scheduled that afternoon, and Duchon had timed the luncheon so we'd have about half an hour to talk after eating. So whatever it was couldn't be too important; nothing of significance ever gets said in thirty minutes.

I wrapped up warm against the cold. Out front were a dozen or so girls shivering in the winter weather. Mildredandphoebe were not among them; these girls turned out to be neophyte gerryflappers because they asked for autographs, something the old-timers no longer did. These new girls had a tendency to hang back, too unsure of themselves to start a conversation with an opera star. So I started the conversation, chatting a few minutes before I got into the limousine. Never neglect your public.
Never
.

Duchon had selected Delmonico's, on East Forty-fourth Street, probably the most famous restaurant in New York City. (Right across the street was Sherry's, which I would have preferred.) My host was already there, rising quickly from the table when he saw me come in. Duchon was a new celebrity in town and I was a well-established one, and between the two of us we captured every eye in the place. I followed the smiling maître d' across the room (not too fast), and this time Duchon did take my hand. When he gave a low Gallic bow, a most satisfying murmur ran through the restaurant.

We ordered, both of us eating light because we had several hours of hard singing ahead of us. Toscanini had called a brush-up rehearsal of the middle two acts of
Carmen
with full orchestra. The Maestro had made it clear that the rehearsal was not solely for the benefit of Duchon; the rest of us, he said, were getting a bit ragged. Hmph.

When we'd finished eating and were lingering over coffee, Duchon finally got to the point. “I want to apologize,” he said, “for my boorish behavior when first we met. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, Miss Farrar.”

“Call me Gerry.”

“And you must call me Philippe. I can only plead ignorance as an excuse. I did not understand how distinguished a colleague I was speaking to. I hope you will forgive me.”

Meaning that if I were a nobody, rudeness was permissible? “Of course I forgive you, Philippe. Think no more about it.” There, wasn't that gracious of me?

“Ah,
merci
, Gerry,” he smiled. He had a nice smile. “Nevertheless, I feel I owe you some explanation.”

“You don't have to explain anything.”

“But I wish to explain. I can't have the beautiful and gifted Geraldine Farrar telling everyone what a boor Philippe Duchon is.”

Protecting himself. “Very well, I'm listening.”

“You must understand that I have had experiences you have never been through—experience with the Germans, I mean to say. Americans are wonderfully innocent people. Your country has never been invaded, for instance. Your childhood was not destroyed by soldiers killing and burning and destroying everything in their path, is this not true? You cannot understand the suffering of those who lost everything because of
Germans
.”

He made the word sound obscene. I also got the impression that he was sneering at
me
, because I had not been subjected to the same abuses he had. Tactless he might be, but his anguish was real so I merely said, “Tell me what happened.”

“You may know that Alsace is my homeland. That is, it was my homeland, when I was a boy. The Germans came when I was fourteen, during something the politicians dignified by calling it the Franco-Prussian War. It was a rape. They killed my father and took our land. They violated my mother and my sister, and the only reason I was allowed to live was that they wanted someone to take care of their horses for them. My mother and I eventually escaped to Paris, but to this day I do not know what happened to my sister. The Germans simply
stole
Alsace from France. And the rest of the world stood by and let it happen.”

Oh, the poor man! No wonder he was so unforgiving toward anything German. Who wouldn't be, after that? I thought of saying something about soldiers in wartime turning into beasts or that to forgive was divine, but it was so embarrassingly inadequate that I ended up saying nothing.

“And now they're doing it again,” he continued bitterly. “Only this time they will be content with nothing less than all of France. It is happening again, but on an even bigger scale than before.”

“But this time the rest of the world isn't just standing by and watching. The English—”

“The English are helping, yes. But they are not enough. Only the Americans are strong enough to tip the scales. But you shilly-shally, you hold back! Does the war have to be fought on your own soil before it means anything to you?”

I was slightly taken aback. “Well, everyone is saying it's only a matter of time—”

“Time, time! There is no time! How many Frenchmen must die while you take the
time
to make up your minds?” Suddenly he recollected himself and made a visible effort to calm down. He sat in silence for a few moments and then said, “
Ma chère
Gerry—again I beg your forgiveness. I know you still have ties to Germany and must feel torn by what is happening. But you must understand that where the Germans are concerned, I am incapable of objectivity. I beg your indulgence.”

I reassured him the best I could. It occurred to me that a lot of Europeans must see us the way Duchon did—fat, rich Americans unwilling to exert themselves to help people in trouble. On impulse I said, “Your fund-raising tour—would a joint concert help, do you think? You and I together?”