Lillian on Wax

Phonograph antiquarians, who hunt for sacred if scratchy records out of the dear dead past, had a wonderful prize offered them last week. It was a 1912 disc of the late great Lillian Russell, singing the hit of her career, Come Down, My Evenin' Star. Copies were issued by Manhattan's Collectors Record Shop. The recording showed its age. The sound of the little string orchestra that accompanied Lillian had the antique flavor of the wormholes in a Gutenberg Bible or the patina on a Hellenistic bronze.

But what surprised youngish musicians was the fact that beauteous Lillian Russell was also obviously a woman of voice. She took her high notes with operatic aplomb, turned her phrases with the delicacy of a diva. There was even a hint in the recording of the lump in Lillian's throat which she frequently got when she sang this particular song. That catch in the throat had a history.

Paris Green. Come Down, My Evenin' Star was the work of a tunesmith named John ("Honey") Stromberg, who wrote for the revues at the old Weber & Fields Music Hall when David Warfield, Fay Templeton, DeWolf Hopper and Willie Collier were among its stars. When Lillian made her debut there in 1899 in a travesty on The Girl from Maxim's, Honey Stromberg was her musical director. For four years he wrote his finest tunes for her. One day in 1902 Honey, an acute sufferer from chronic rheumatism, was reported seriously ill at his home in Freeport, Long Island. He asked Lillian to visit him, told her he wanted to write her a specially beautiful number. A few days later he took a dose of Paris green and died. In his overcoat pocket was found the manuscript of Come Down, My Evenin' Star.

As a singer, Lillian Russell might have cut a minor swath at the Metropolitan. Trained in opera from infancy, she claimed to be able to negotiate high Cs eight times a performance, seven performances a week. But when Nellie Melba told Lillian to stick to the music halls, where her reign was absolute, she took the advice.

Evergreen. Long after Honey Stromberg's death, she sang his song for Diamond Jim Brady at his oyster and beefsteak gorges at Bustanoby's. John D. Rockefeller once paid $500 to hear her sing it. In 1912, at a Weber & Fields reunion, when Lillian was 51 and over 170 lb., she was asked to do it again. As she broke, monumentally, into Come Down, My Evenin' Star, an audience including Arthur Brisbane, William Randolph Hearst, Diamond Jim Brady, Conde Nast and Charles Dana Gibson blubbered frankly over its boiled shirts.

The missing record of the song was found by Jack Caidin, head of Collectors Record Shop, in a New Jersey attic. It was a privately made 12-in. waxing, signed as a souvenir for one of Lillian's long-forgotten admirers, and had never been reprinted. Caidin had been looking for it for a long time. Last week his business with copies of the disc told him he had made no mistake.

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