Metropolitan Announcer

When Geraldine Farrar announced to the world that, at 40, she would retire from opera, none but close friends took her seriously. She was still in her heyday--gay, darkly handsome, alive with magnetism. While Caruso was the great voice at the Metropolitan, she was filling the old house with glamour and excitement. Her 40th birthday came on Feb. 28, 1922. Less than two months later she gave her farewell performance. That memorable afternoon streamers were hurled from the balconies, flowers and confetti were piled on the stage. A great audience stood and cheered through its tears.

Last fortnight the world's eyes were again on Geraldine Farrar. In Los Angeles an impoverished, cancer-ridden man who once had been her husband had gone into a bathroom, stood before a mirror and stabbed himself seven times with a pair of common sewing scissors. Reporters telephoned Miss Farrar at her Ridgefield, Conn. home, asked for comment on Lou Tellegen's death. Her reply was characteristically candid: "Why should that interest me?"

Lou Tellegen was burned to ashes which, as a last theatrical gesture, he ordered sprinkled on the waves of the Pacific. Newspapers gave him gaudy obituaries,* told how at 15 he ran off with his father's mistress, how he specialized in love-making while he was successively a baker's assistant, a trapeze artist, a model for Auguste Rodin ("Eternal Springtime"), how he first arrived in the U. S. as Sarah Bernhardt's leading man. The final Hollywood picture was of a broken, hollow-eyed matinee idol who kept having his face lifted.

But Geraldine Farrar was "not interested" in the man she married in 1916, divorced in 1923. The Tellegen interlude, she claimed long ago, left only "a surface scar," "a single service stripe" in a vividly striped career. Besides, last week she was busy with other plans which would once again bring her name and her voice to millions of music-lovers. When the New York opera season begins in December, she will be back at the Metropolitan--not singing on the stage, but in a grandtier box on Saturday afternoons broadcasting descriptions of the operas which are to be put on the air by Lambert Co. (Listerine). Her comments are bound to be keen and intelligent. She still can sway any kind of audience.

The Farrar career has always been well planned, from the girlhood day in Melrose, Mass., when Geraldine impersonated Jenny Lind and attempted to dazzle her audience by singing an Italian aria. Her father was a storekeeper who played professional baseball in the summertime. Though money was scarce, Geraldine was determined to be an opera-singer. She studied in Boston and in Manhattan where she stood in line to hear Melba, Calve, Lilli Lehmann, Jean de Reszke. The Metropolitan offered to let her sing in a Sunday-night concert but, even at 16, she wanted something better. She persuaded her father to sell his Melrose store and, raking and scraping together some $30,000, set out for Europe on a cattle boat.

Miss Geraldine Farrar aus New York was the rage in Berlin from 1901 to 1906. One night she was invited to the Imperial Palace, commanded to wear either lavender or black. She chose her own costume --white--but the Kaiser was interested. At the Metropolitan in Manhattan, where she made her debut in 1906, she continued to have her own way. As the goosegirl in Die Konigskinder she drove the property man to distraction by her successful insistence upon having live geese on the stage. She was the only Metropolitan prima donna ever to have her own permanent dressing room. Two older singers had been bickering for one for weeks but Manager Gatti-Casazza was obdurate. Miss Farrar went to his office casually one day, asked if any one would mind if she took that dirty airless room by the stairs. With Gatti's permission, she fixed the cubbyhole up, lined it with brocade and put a gold plate on the door labeled FARRAR. Only Conductor Arturo Toscanini, her great & good friend, refused to take orders from the spirited young prima donna. Gatti favored the "star" system for its box-office power. Farrar gave Toscanini diamond studs but the conductor maintained that stars exist only in Heaven.

When she retired from the Metropolitan at 40. Geraldine Farrar turned to German Lieder which would not tax her voice. She gave herself exactly ten years on the concert stage. In 1932 she again retired, vowing never to sing again in public.

Her role since then has been that of a country gentlewoman in Connecticut. She keeps birds and gardens, admires the neighbors' babies. Every day her father ("Syd"), who keeps a separate home in Ridgefield, comes over to luncheon with her, eats in his shirtsleeves when the weather is warm. That Miss Farrar's energy and determination have outlasted her once raven-black hair was proven last summer when on the way to the Salzburg Festival, Nazis stopped her German chauffeur, refused to let him pass the border. Miss Farrar got out of her car, hiked a good five miles into town.

*The obituaries were taken mostly from Tellegen's confessions, Women Have Been Kind. Tellegen's wives were: 1) Countess Jeanne de Brockere; 2) Geraldine Farrar; 3) Isabelle Craven Dilworth (screen name: Nina Romano); 4) Actress Eve Casanova.

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