Exuberant Grace

The nearest thing in modern opera to the lobster-supper diva of musical fable is exuberant, 42-year-old Grace Moore. Like the Farrars and Jeritzas of the past, she has managed to be both a voice and a glamor girl. She is perhaps the only opera singer in the U.S. who receives emerald necklaces as casual presents from admirers, and certainly the only one who has gone on tour in a Hispano-Suiza complete with French maid and chauffeur.

Last week Grace Moore summed up her three-ring career as diva, musical comedy star and cinemactress in an engagingly frank, somewhat bumptious autobiography (You're Only Human Once; Doubleday, Doran; $2).

The book is as effusively natural as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as full of names as a column by the late O. O. Mclntyre. It tells how Grace wowed the opera public from San Francisco to Bucharest, how she romanced with Artist George Biddle, how Maurice Chevalier declared her his only love and Charles MacArthur locked her in a men's lavatory. Between its name studded lines is the real story: the tale of a shrewd, attractive, indomitably ambitious girl from Slabtown, Tenn., who set out to become a celebrity, played every card just right, and finally got there.

Leg Appeal. Daughter of a small-town dry-goods merchant (her mother was the belle of Cocke County, Tenn.), Grace Moore started her career at 17 by running away from a Washington music school where she had been studying singing. In Manhattan, like hundreds of other stage struck youngsters, she made the rounds of the casting offices. But she had a stronger will than most. When she crashed David Belasco's office and recited the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, he advised her to stick to music. The agent for the Aborn Opera Company was less kindly: "The voice may be okay," he said, "but lift your skirt, girlie, so I can see the legs." "Now, as I look back on it," says Grace Moore, "I've had quite a bit of leg trouble. Managers seemed never to consider the voice as a separate entity from what went on below." Her first bigtime job was as an understudy to Julia Sanderson in Jerome Kern's Hitchy Koo.

Grace Moore had looks and an electrifying personality that would have made her a smash in musical comedy. But to the little girl from Slabtown, opera was still the end in glamor. She saved her Broadway paychecks, worked on her voice, cultivated people. ". . . Never have I underestimated the importance of my rich friends," admits Grace, "because, they have given me the opportunity . . . to sit in the assembly lines of jeweled women who hold down the golden horseshoes of the concert halls of the world. . . . Economic determination is one thing, the mouth of a gift horse another."

Before many seasons were over she was on her way to study in Paris with the parting blessing of the late Otto H. Kahn. In a few years, Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza had signed her for a Metropolitan debut as Mimi in La Boheme.

People's Voice. Grace Moore always had the born trouper's instinct for the big way. At her Metropolitan debut the wings were crowded with newsreel cameramen, and Beatrice Lillie and Miriam Hopkins threw violets from the boxes. When a short time afterward, Hollywood beckoned, Grace hired a Pullman, garnished with orchids and banana trees, and went in state. She may not have become the world's greatest soprano, but nobody could accuse her of not acting the part.

Grace Moore ultimately became the U.S. moviegoer's idea of a great opera star. Music critics have always deplored her dramatic extravagances and lack of vocal subtlety. Of the four roles for which she is known (Mimi, Tosca, Manon, Louise), all have been sung better by others. Her finest performance is her ebullient interpretation of Gustave Charpentier's Louise, in which she was carefully coached by the composer.

But personalities like Grace Moore are not to be reckoned entirely by the operatic yardstick. As she herself states with typical candor: "There may be some who will still say it isn't [a great voice]. But I do have a voice that has made people listen, that seemed to make people happy and exhilarated." With all her faults, she remains one of the few divas since the retirement of Maria Jeritza and Mary Garden who can cause dramatic excitement merely by walking onto the stage.

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