Tin Cups at the Met

In the Depression-ridden 1930s, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera faced what Critic Irving Kolodin referred to as the "Operdaemmerung": the house was half empty night after night, much of the gold had drained out of the golden horseshoe, and management was not sure from one month to the next whether the curtain would rise again. What saved the Met more than anything else was Mrs. August Belmont's idea for replacing the top hats and tiaras with an auxiliary known as the Metropolitan Opera Guild. In the 25 years since then the guild has grown into the nation's biggest, most dedicated band of opera supporters.

Last week the Met gratefully honored the guild and Mrs. Belmont. Onstage, Barry Morell, Dorothy Kirsten, Leonie Rysanek, Zinka Milanov sang arias from L'Africaine, Louise, Tannhaeuser, Boheme, supported by the Met orchestra, chorus and ballet, while Mrs. Belmont, 80, sat in the center box, as firmly as ever part of the Met scene. During intermission. General Manager Rudolf Bing presented to Mrs. Belmont a silver tray with the engraved signatures of the board members and guild staff.

Lessons from Lionel. In the year of its founding, the guild had 1,239 members. Today it has a membership of 55,000--predominantly female--in all the states and 51 foreign countries. Many a present-day Opera Guilder never steps inside the Met, but the membership is bound together by its ritualistic devotion to the Met's Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts and by the guild magazine, Opera News, which combines first-rate scholarship with the kind of prompter's box chitchat that opera fans feed on. With dues at $6 and up, the guild has raised $2,000,000 for the Met, has paid for 14 new productions (including a new Ring cycle, a fine new Magic Flute, last year's Simon Boccanegra) and helped pay for dozens more.

Mrs. Belmont, the guild's founder, began her career on the other side of the footlights. Born Eleanor Robson, the daughter of an English stock-company actress, she followed her mother to the U.S., got a job in stock in San Francisco, soon found herself touring with Lionel Barrymore, who undertook to educate her by reading aloud from Kipling's Jungle Books. Her first success, the title role in Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann, so moved critics during the play's three-year run that they "always seemed to write about new-mown hay when they saw it." Shaw went to Merely in London in 1904 and saw more than hay: "I'm forever yours devotedly. I take no interest in mere females, but I love all artists." To prove it, Shaw wrote Major Barbara for her. At the top of her profession, the 30-year-old actress married 57-year-old Banker-Philanthropist-Sportsman August Belmont after making a Pollyannaish farewell appearance as Glad in Frances Hodgson (Little Lord Fauntleroy) Burnett's Dawn of a Tomorrow. Actress Robson's last stage line: "I'm going to be tuk care of now."

Whole New Audience. As the wife of August Belmont, she helped take care of thoroughbred horses (she named their famed foal, Man o' War), plunged vigorously into volunteer work, became a box holder at the opera. When the Met board approved her plan for a guild in 1935, she set to work 16 hours a day lining up recruits, began to "democratize" the Met by persuading big New York stores and women's business and professional groups to help buy tickets for their employees and members. She threw open some rehearsals to guild members, organized reduced-price student matinees that brought a whole new audience into the house.

When she heard that the Met was going to sell its old gold curtain to a movie company for a mere $100, she snatched it, had the four tons of grimy brocade cleaned, chopped into convenient pieces and sold for souvenirs. The guild's take: nearly $12,000.

Flamboyant stunts like that earned her an accolade several years ago that she values even more than the silver tray she carried away from last week's 25th anniversary celebration. "Mrs. Belmont," said an admirer, "has taken the tin cup out of opera."

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