Episode 43: Second Acts
As the Met Opera season begins, a society hostess continues to present the front all is well. Will this be her swan song?
As Cobina Wright hosts the opening activities for the 1930 Metropolitan Season, she wonders who also is hiding their losses from the Crash. Dowager Alice Vanderbilt now leases her prized balcony box to close friends. The glamorous attendees enjoy Verdi’s Aida opera.
Archival music provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, www.pastperfect.com.
Publish Date: October 28, 2021
Length: 19:57
Opening Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
Section 1 Music: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Freddy Gardner, Album Elegance 2
Section 2 Music: Just A Mood by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics
Section 3 Music: If This Is Only The Beginning by Billy Ternent, Album Elegance
End Music: My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands
AS THE MONEY BURNS
Podcast by Nicki Woodard
Episode 043 – Second Acts
00:00
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast by Nicki Woodard. Based on historical research, this is a deep exploration into what happened to a set of actual heirs and heiresses to some of America’s most famous fortunes when the Great Depression hits.
Each episode has three primary sections. Section 1 is a narrative story. Section 2 goes deeper into the historical facts. Section 3 focuses on contemporary, emotional, and personal connections.
00:28
Story Recap
While Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke join the big debutante season in New York, other elites struggle as they continue life unaware that the Great Depression has only begun.
Now back to AS THE MONEY BURNS
Title
00:45
Second Acts
Episode Tag
As the Met Opera season begins, a society hostess continues to present the front all is well. Will this be her swan song?
01:01
[Music – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Freddy Gardner, Album Elegance 2]
Section 1 – Story
[Music Fade Out]
01:18
It’s that time of year again – the Metropolitan Opera season opening.
Every year the supreme society hostess and talented coloratura soprano Cobina Wright gives the opening reception.
Cobina firsts hosts a luncheon on Friday, October 17th at Central Park Casino in New York. Guests of honor are lyric soprano and June 1930 Time Magazine cover girl Miss Lucrezia Bori and Spanish pianist (and future conductor) Jose Iturbi.
01:48
The following Sunday, October 19th, the supreme hostess gives a reception in Long Island at her lovely pink sand castle – Casa Cobina. Her favorite place in the whole world. Her lovely home beckoning all to relax and enjoy the day.
Her loyal servants British butlers Bruce and Fred attend to the guests. The levity and energy always integral to one of Cobina’s parties. No one the wiser the pairing down that has begun from the previous year’s disaster. Cobina uses the remaining funds from Barbara Hutton’s Aunt Jessie Donahue to provide proper refreshments. Yet those funds are dwindling rapidly.
02:24
Cobina musters the strength to smile, knowing that focusing on others will take her mind off her own troubles if however briefly. A beautiful day it is, and one day this will be like a distant memory a blip on an otherwise charming life.
As the guests filter out, Cobina finds Bill on the sand dunes watching their curly headed Lil’ Cobina playing without a care in the world as she feeds some of the birds and skips along the edges of waves.
Mid-week, rumors circulate that another popular hostess will be in New York this winter and providing her services for pay. Returning from France, the roly-poly Elsa Maxwell has turned entertaining into a business and her guests include both wealthy and royalty.
03:05
Monday, October 27th – the opening of the Metropolitan Opera. Cobina with her husband William May Wright are honored guests. Bill has warned her that many lost their fortunes in the Crash like they had.
But that doesn’t seem possible as she greets longtime friends. Forcibly, Cobina smiles as her eyes glance over the luxurious furs, velvets, and shimmering jewels. Several debutantes wearing shoulder bouquets flitter among the crowd. Corsages and bouquets are taboo at the debutante balls but are more than appropriate at the opera.
03:35
Tonight’s predominant color is white, and there are more jewels on display than in previous years. And then there’s the fashion – embroidered silver tulle, pink crystal and satin gown, flame-colored velvet wrap, sable, chinchilla, diamond bandeau, diamond headdress, everyone dressed to the nines with no expense spared and many opulent exhibitions. Cobina herself has a beaded coral chiffon dress that helps her stand out in the crowd.
Nothing has seemingly changed, and in fact is it possibly better for others? Or is everyone wearing a mask too?
04:14
They eventually make their way to their seats in the golden horseshoe. Whispers abound that the Mrs. Vanderbilt – Alice Vanderbilt will be renting out her private box No. 31 this winter season. The tiny frail dowager has long occupied the seat since the early days, presiding in the box or lending to the various and numerous Vanderbilt family. Other owners of the red plush cubicles have divided or leased their seats. Last year, Alice attended the opening for the first time in several seasons as well as appearing this year.
The Mrs. Vanderbilt claims it is not for want of money but sharing with 3 close dear friends. Alice will keep her precious Monday nights, while select evenings will be assigned as such Wednesday to Mrs. William Jay Schieffelin, Thursday to Mrs. Newbold Morris, and Friday to Mrs. Charles Coster.
05:05
Such a glamorous night reminiscent of a bygone era and seemingly heralding the end of financially tough times. While waiting for the performance to begin, Cobina thinks to herself of her own music career. She has sung at many places but not the Metropolitan Opera. Had she stayed focus, it would have been possible, but then she fell in love and had a family. For the last decade, she has served more as a patron and hostess always giving the opening reception of the Met season.
05:33
The historic Old Metropolitan Opera House opens with a performance of Verdi’s “Aida,” the tale of capture enslaved Ethiopian princess Aida and the young Egyptian warrior in love with her while Egypt and Ethiopia are at war. Maria Mueller plays the titled role and Giovanni Martelli as the warrior and her lover.
From her balcony seats, Cobina fights back tears as the love triangle between Aida, the warrior, and the Egyptian princess play out. Cobina still fears Bill might still have a lover stashed on the side. He is more pulled together than the first months after the Crash, but he still feels distant and lost.
06:10
After Aida’s confession of love for the warrior she presumes dead, the Egyptian princess plots Aida’s death. Cobina can somewhat sympathize with the plot of protecting her love. She looks down at the jewels on her finger, wondering when she will need to pawn them. It’s been nearly a year since the Crash, and they have not recovered.
Unfortunately, the much alive warrior finds Aida and unwittingly reveals an important military secret. He is arrested for treason. Plenty of squabbles with unhappy investors are happening at the office, but Bill isn’t saying much.
06:44
The betrayed Egyptian princess pleads for the life of the warrior to no avail. The Egyptian warrior accepts his fate now accused of being a traitor. Sealed up in the tomb to die he is reunited with Aida who joins him and dies in his arms.
A standing ovation fills the auditorium.
Former pioneer Cobina is certain that the Wrights need only one more shot of luck to get things back on track. Or if not, will Bill, Cobina, and their little girl be buried together?
07:17
[Music – Just A Mood by Benny Carter & His Orchestra, Album Nightfall – Sophisticated Jazz Classics]
Section 2 – History & Historiography
[Music Fade Out]
07:32
The opera with season balcony seats is a longtime emblem of wealth and status. Opera is an art form developed in the Italian Renaissance around 1597 and considered to be high art with a link to aristocracy and royalty. The season begins in late fall running until summer and might feature multiple operas and performances. Naturally, this was the place to show off.
07:54
In the year 1930, many returned to their longtime patterns of social activities. Alice Vanderbilt being one of them though modified. This year she leases out her seats claiming friendship, not needing money behind her choice. But we know well back in Episode 07: The Setting Sun, Alice and the dwindling Vanderbilt fortune was problematic even before the Crash. Alice’s daughter-in-law and society queen rival Grace Wilson’s family had their own balcony Box. 3. In 1926, the future America’s Cup defender and Alva Vanderbilt’s son Harold Vanderbilt sold his coveted box for $200,000.
08:33
Isn’t it ironic one year later, people are flaunting their jewels more than in the prior better off years? That was in New York. In Chicago, there was a report that women donned fake or imitation jewelry for the second season of the Civic Opera despite the assurance of “dress clothes men”, aka detectives, would be in the promenade sections. Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick left her famous Catherine of Russia emerald necklace at her home’s vault and wore instead her diamond ruby earrings. Anytime I see crime report in Chicago, I remember the mob ties to the city.
09:08
Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida with the libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni was originally commissioned for the Cairo’s Khedival Opera House premiering on December 24th, 1871 then made its way around the world. In 1873, Buenos Aires and New York’s Academy of Music then onto Germany, Hungary, France, Sweden,… On June 30th, 1886, after several disputes with other conductors in Rio de Janiero, the baton was handed to a 19 year old cellist Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the opera from memory thus beginning a promising career for which he is better known today.
On November 12, 1886, Anton Seidl conducted the performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera, where there alone Aida has been performed over 1,100 times since then.
10:00
The Met, as the Metropolitan Opera is more commonly referred, was founded in 1883 with the original location at 39th and Broadway. The large auditorium was state of the art for its time with acoustics. It was the largest building of its nature surpassing the older venues in London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Naples.
New safety precautions included fireproof designs. In a book by Herr Folsch, over 516 theatres ended in complete destruction from fires, and 460 of those had been within the last 100 years. Gaslighting caused a lot of the issues in the other structures. Iron and brick incorporated into the design and away from more flammable materials, like wood only in the main auditorium would hopefully ward off a similar fate. However on August 27, 1892, the Met caught fire and would be closed for that season and reopened in 1893 with its now signature gold and red plush interiors. The Met would relocate to Lincoln Center in 1966 where it currently resides today.
11:02
The first set of members included the Morgans, Goulds, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Roosevelt families. Essentially relatively new money that was excluded from joining the more prominent Academy of Music. On April 22, 1880, the 22 members and founders gathered at Delmonico’s, one of the early restaurants in New York. They raised funds for the building which would include 3 tiers of boxes for the wealthy industrial families. This new opera house would open 3 years later on October 22, 1883, with a performance of Faust. By December 1883, the Met had several performances of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, and the Academy of Music featured Verdi’s Aida.
11:43
Only the older Academy of Music could not compete with newer and well-funded Met. Within 3 years, the Academy of Music’s opera season folded to the Met. The Academy of Music venue would later host vaudeville performances from 1888 onwards and religious sermons by Reverend Thomas Dixon from 1895 – 1899. It would serve as a place for labor rallies in the 1900s before being demolished in 1926 along with its neighbor Tammany Hall. In 1927, a movie theatre named Academy of Music would be built across the street, which served as a large music venue in the 1960s & the 1970s and renamed the Palladium in 1976.
12:23
For its earlier years, the Met hired visiting performances of already established pieces before later commissioning original works. In its second season 1884, German Leopold Damrosch became general manager and general conductor. Unfortunately, he would pass away in 1885. His son Walter Damrosch would serve as assistant conductor at the Met 1884-1885, had a long and promising career with the New York Symphony from 1885-1928, and later worked in radio. He was also a composer – The Scarlett Letter (1896) and Cyrano (1913) among them. Walter particularly enjoyed conducting Richard Wagner’s music. Leopold’s other son and Walter’s brother Frank Damrosch will found the New York Institute of Music Art which will merge with Julliard. Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center is named after this family.
13:14
Both Walter Damrosch and Arturo Toscanini were involved in Cobina Wright’s musical career and honored guests at her parties. It was in fact the night of a dinner party held for Maestro Toscanini, in which Cobina Wright first learned her husband Bill Wright’s stockbroker business might not be as stable as thought (see Episode 14 – A Small Sum).
13:34
An opera can have anywhere from 1 – 5 acts depending on its structure. The term soap opera comes from the mini serialized radio and television melodramas sponsored by soap manufacturers. The first official soap was Painted Dreams for Chicago’s WGN radio station and debuted on October 20th, 1930 and lasted until July 1943.
Many participants in our larger tale are trying to determine the second acts of their lives, unaware that their problems are only beginning. Some are stuck in a moment like an epic depicted in an opera, while others venture into soap opera territory.
14:15
[Music – If This Is Only The Beginning by Billy Ternent, Album Elegance]
Section 3 – Contemporary & Personal Relevance
[Music Fade Out]
14:36
I hope you are enjoying the rather entangled web of tales I’m spinning. This convoluted and complex world is absolutely fascinating in all its various parallel peripheral connections. It helps not only sketch the overall parameters but more finely tuning color and shading the details within multiple layers.
Despite how we feel at any given time and with a certain amount of myopic focus to our individual perceptions and experiences, we are nonetheless connected with others.
15:02
I have not had many experiences with opera. Barely a handful, one seeing a tiny performance at Schloss Schonbrunn in Vienna. For my birthday, I bought a ticket for a mini show piece that night of 2 performances each – ballet, orchestra, and opera. The musical pieces were very good, but I was more enamored of the palace as my historical royal obsession marveled at its opulence. The Habsburgs abdicated after World War I, and thus it had not been plundered like poor Versailles. One can see things as it once was, an era and a life long gone.
A little ironic maybe as I grew up far from wealth or royalty, though I had plenty of interaction with various wealthy over the years. My more formative years were far simpler. My high school straddled its former more upper middle class roots while spiraling into lower middle class as the neighborhood and residents changed during my years. Big old houses surrounded by crime ridden streets – of which I was a victim but that is for another time.
16:02
During my senior year, my vice principal wanted to give a group of students their first introduction into opera. He chose 10 high achieving kids which included me and 10 kids who were reformed delinquents in a program called SNAP. One evening we boarded the school bus to downtown Houston for a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin.
On the bus, I sat away from my usual classmates needing a little solitude and tired of the ass kissing likely to happen in the front with my vice principal and half the overachievers. Instead I became surrounded by the delinquents and the other half of overachievers as I was one of the few females and the one who came off as the most friendly and approachable. Very few realized that delinquents weren’t taboo in my mind as my brothers had likely done the same if not more than they had. This set was trying to reform. They were actually very polite and more nervous than the rest of us because they felt more out of water and worried about expectations.
16:54
At the music center, we had nosebleed seats which afforded us the luxury of reading the electronic subtitles. Within our section, I was in the middle divide between the two groups conversing easily with both. Sadly, the opera set and costumes were very simple and not nearly as luxurious as I would have desired. Obviously, I am a history and partial art culture buff. I can’t even really tell you the story of the opera well from watching it – I’ve never been good in understanding poetry or music, especially if foreign, and can only tell you practically nothing other than it was a tale involving a tragic swan.
It was a simple night. The next day my vice principal thanked me for maintaining and achieving the primary objective of mingling both groups. For all of us, that night would far be more about the mixture of groups than any performance we saw. It was a calm night in the middle of a dark period of my life that was about to get a lot darker in a couple of months.
17:46
My dearly beloved brother who was quite a delinquent died of cancer. Upon his death, I learned my own English teacher had been his SNAP teacher years earlier. He tried to apologize for not helping my brother more, but I assured my teacher my brother didn’t want his help and would have rejected any effort.
It would be years later that I had my experience in Austria, the grandeur was more but they were solo pieces. On that European trip, castles and palaces were my primary objective. First, I went to Versailles and then made it to Bavaria for Neuschwanstein Castle, which inspired the Disney castle. Neuschwanstein is a fantasy castle with swan in design themes and even in its name. The castle itself inspired by Wagner’s Lohengrin.
18:30
My last interaction with opera was when I saw parts of the Chinese Monkey King while in Beijing at the old Peking Opera Zhengiyici theatre with my mother and sister. I dragged them into the night for an adventure to the 300 year old wooden theatre for a very intimate experience. It too was confusing, but we loved it.
Random asides when pulled together tell a more elaborate story. Now do you understand why I tether back so many seemingly unconnected strands.
The best of any art brings us altogether and relates us back to the common experiences of being humans.
Hook
19:09
[Music – My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Billy Cotton, Album The Great British Dance Bands]
Next when we return to AS THE MONEY BURNS…
A doting mother always wants her child to blossom, but sometimes the child especially a teenager grows outside of reach.
Until then…
Credits
19:24
AS THE MONEY BURNS is an original podcast written, produced, and voiced by Nicki Woodard, based on historical research. Archival music has been provided by Past Perfect Vintage Music, check out their website at www.pastperfect.com.
Please come visit us at As The Money Burns via Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Transcripts, timeline, episode guide, and character bios are available at asthemoneyburns.com.
19:57
THE END.