Diseuse

In a small theatre 50 stories above the street, in Manhattan's Chanin Building, a "mobile"-one of the famed contraptions of Sculptor Alexander ("Sandy") Calder-stood on the stage, its burnished discs blazing in the spotlight. Before it, in slinky black gown and monkey-fur jacket, swayed a woman whose saucer eyes, blazing teeth, and hair like a jackpot of fresh-minted pennies made her look remarkably like Harpo Marx. A friendly, arty-social audience applauded. Marianne Oswald, diseuse (singing actress), friend of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, was making her U. S. debut.

Savagely, in a can-opener contralto, Mile. Oswald ripped into La Dame de Monte Carlo, Poet Jean Cocteau's half song, half chant of the tables, the croupiers and "always the Mediterranean waiting." The mobile was removed, its discs and wires jittering gently. Mile.

Oswald, miming for all she was worth, hoarsely sang about stars in the sky, a hungry man, a family with 15 children, a man hearing sounds in the night, a child escaping from a reformatory. In one number she was accompanied by a harpist as curvesome as the treble clef: beauteous Daphne, wife of socialite Editor Harry Adsit Bull of Town & Country.

Born in Lorraine, Marianne Colin took her stage name from a stage character she much admired, unhappy Oswald in Ibsen's Ghosts. For her, not only Cocteau but Andre Gide, Louis Aragon, Arthur Honegger, Maurice Yvain have written songs.

She arrived in the U. S. last summer, observed, in her apprehensive English: "I walk through the streets and I do not see children and I do not miss them. I ask myself, why is this? And then I realize that the men have children's faces." A woman with a raft of friends, Diseuse Oswald got for her debut the sponsorship of such child-faced U. S. men as Malcolm Cowley, John Erskine, Langston Hughes.

John Dos Passos, William Saroyan. Her backers have been much impressed by two eminent French appraisals of Marianne Oswald : "She is an actress of song. She has a kind of bestial ugliness. But beauty passes, as they say, and the art of this ugly child will remain."-Colette.

"She sings neither well nor ill. Let specialists define her talent. The important thing is that she sings as a torch burns. She is alternately the geranium of the suburbs, the scar of crime, the lantern of the brothel and the whistle of the police. "Cocteau.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.