Debutante

Music's great human-interest story ten years ago was that of Mary Lewis, jolly blonde soprano who had run away from foster parents in Little Rock, Ark., attained the Ziegfeld Follies and suddenly thereafter the Metropolitan Opera. After her rags-to-riches headlines pretty Mary Lewis was quickly forgotten by most Manhattan music writers. She married German Basso Michael Bohnen, soon divorced him for wealthy Robert L. Hague, oil and shipping tycoon.

Last week Mary Lewis Hague made another debut--at the Versailles night club in Manhattan, where she wore a slinky, electric-blue sequin dress, sang better than most night-club singers Shootin' High, Did I Remember? and, with snapping fingers and swaying hips, Les Filles de Cadiz.

For her reward Mary Lewis received five full minutes of bravos, five huge baskets of roses and chrysanthemums, five close-up flashlight shots, all accepted breathlessly and with apparent surprise. Loudest applause, no matter what she sang, came from Mary Hague's own guests, among them Husband Hague, Jimmy Durante, George M. Cohan and James J. Walker who, when he was New York's mayor, married Mary Lewis to Basso Bohnen.

New Yorkers who wondered last week why rich Mary Hague should want to come out of her luxurious life as mistress of the whole 21st floor of the Ritz Tower Hotel, where she collects coins, miniature paintings and small-sized dachshunds (she now owns 18), were not satisfied by her explanation that she wanted "the smell of the sawdust." But her future plans told more. This winter she hopes to make the opera Manon for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to sing weekly for the Coca-Cola radio program, and next spring to be a guest artist at the Coronation Concerts in England.

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