FOUR

 

MRS. AMBROSE SMALL

 

At first glance, Theresa Kormann and Ambrose Small seemed comically mismatched. She was the charitable, pious do-gooder. He was the rule-breaking bon vivant. But they were both ambitious children of Toronto entrepreneurs.

Theresa’s father, Ignatius, was born in Alsace in 1835, which had been French or German, depending on the most recent war. He came to Canada as a young man in the middle of the nineteenth century and met his wife, Mary Eva, in Waterloo, a community where you could find schnitzel just as good as in Germany.¹ The couple married and moved to a hamlet sixty miles north called Carlsruhe. It was named for the German city of the same name (although their version started with a K), wedged between the French border and the Black Forest. The southern Ontario farmland was mostly flat with soft rolling hills, and Ignatius was the village’s first postmaster,² divvying up the mail each week for the hamlet’s scattered residents. He spoke French, English, and German and soon came to the attention of the movers and shakers of Grey County.

When local member of Parliament Alexander Sproat heard that Ignatius was heading back to Europe in the summer of 1870, he floated the idea of employing the “very well-educated man” to recruit German and French settlers on Canada’s behalf. Sproat raised the matter with George-Étienne Cartier, a Quebec politician who had helped wrangle the Confederation of Canada three years earlier. Sproat would have written to the prime minister “but for his severe illness.” (It’s suspected that the well-lubricated John A. Macdonald had acute pancreatitis in the summer of 1870.³) “[Ignatius] now resides in the Township of Carrick,” Sproat explained, “where there are a very large number of Catholics. If we could make him an emigrant agent, he would do a lot of good.”⁴

Ignatius Kormann became a salesman for the Canadian dream. At taverns and restaurants in France and Germany, he talked up Canada’s rich farmland and boundless opportunity. He was well regarded by the government, but there were occasional complaints—like that time one of “Mr. Kormann’s German settlers” allegedly murdered a local in a Quebec village and caused “much excitement and fear” among the old settlers, who complained that they had been forced to huddle together at night for safety.⁵ In addition to the Europeans Ignatius cajoled across the Atlantic, he and Mary Eva added new citizens to the country roughly every two years, consulting their Bible for good Catholic names. By 1871, there was Francis Xavier, Josephine Maria, Henry, Joseph, Maria Magdalena, Francis Ignatius, and Maria Theresa, seven months old.⁶ (Elizabeth, Emma, Mary, and John were still to come.)

A few years later, the family had moved to the outskirts of Toronto, where Ignatius worked as a butcher, a sausage maker, an importer of French wines, and a “commercial traveller.”⁷ In the early 1880s he and Bavarian Lothar Reinhardt took over the Walz brewery, naming it Reinhardt & Co. Brewery. Reinhardt was a formally trained brewer,⁸ and they modernized the plant with steam engines and cranked out thousands of barrels of lager beer a year, “unsurpassed for purity, quality, flavour and uniform excellence.”⁹ Few things riled people in Toronto more than booze, but German-adjacent brewers had a small advantage with the moral reformers—their lagers were seen as a lighter “temperance” beverage.¹⁰ When Reinhardt moved on, Kormann bought him out and renamed the brewery for his family: Kormann Brewery.¹¹

Ignatius and Mary Eva bought a sturdy brick home at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge Streets in 1885. Their dining room had an onyx table with beautiful linen and silverware. Fine oil paintings decorated the walls, and the ledges were lined with Mary Eva’s fancy bric-a-brac.¹² Robert Simpson, the wealthy retailer who had made a fortune on his mail-order department store, lived down the street. The family was on the rise—the older sons were working as clerks, piano tuners, and bookkeepers, and the Kormanns had enough money to send two of their younger daughters¹³ to St. Joseph’s Academy, a Catholic boarding and day school near the provincial parliament buildings, a ten-minute walk from their home. The school was run by the Sisters of St. Joseph.

The religious congregation was founded in France in the seventeenth century, but a few sisters came to Toronto from the United States in 1851 to care for the sick and vulnerable. They filled the city’s infrastructure gaps,^*1 opening an orphanage, schools, and later, four hospitals. They also taught in parish schools as well as in their own academy, where Theresa and her classmates were the future of Catholic Toronto, foot soldiers in lace and pearls. In addition to their academic lessons, the sisters taught the women “the exact width of a ladylike smile, the exact rhythm of a curtsey, the exact position of the head, feet and arms and hands, while sitting, standing and walking, the exact intonation of polite speech.”¹⁴ St. Joseph’s Academy was not far from the Kormann home, but Theresa boarded there for her final year of study.¹⁵ Grades were read aloud at a monthly assembly, discipline was dispensed by hairbrush, and both visitors and mail were heavily regulated.¹⁶ The closest thing to a prom was the annual library ball, where the women dressed as their favourite literary figure.¹⁷

Theresa loved to write. Years later, she penned a story seemingly inspired by her academy years for the alumni journal. The story was about an intelligent teenage student named Ethel heading home for the Christmas holiday, and Theresa described the ringing bells on the horse-drawn carriage, creating a merry scene. The protagonist, Ethel, had beautiful black eyes and was “her father’s pet.”¹⁸ When Ethel arrived home, there was a bouquet of roses and a big present under the tree with a pearl ring inside and a card inscribed “From your first lover.” Ethel tried to hide the gift from her father, embarrassed by the inscription.

“Who is he, my Little One?” her father asked.

Ethel cried. She didn’t know who sent them.

“Her father took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, ‘My little sweetheart, who ever loved you before your father? Am I not your first lover? It was I who sent the roses.”

Before her 1887 graduation, Theresa posed for a photograph with four other students who could afford the luxury.¹⁹ She was the moon-faced graduate with the soft, delicate features standing on the pelt of a jungle cat. Her hair was pinned in a loose updo, a garland of flowers pinned to her chest.

1887 was a big year. Sir John A. Macdonald held on to power in the federal election, Toronto’s first pro baseball team won their league with the help of slugger Ned “Cannonball” Crane,²⁰ Theresa graduated in the early summer, and Ellen Small died at Christmas. The Kormann and Small families were likely connected through their downtown businesses: Ignatius Kormann brewed beer and Dan Small sold it by the pint at his hotel and tavern.²¹

They were close enough that a few years after Ellen died, the Kormanns’ eldest daughter, Josephine, married the widower Dan Small, a man twenty years her senior.²² (Shortly after the wedding, Ignatius died unexpectedly, leaving the brewery to the care of his wife and children.) At twenty-eight, Josephine became a stepmother to children who were closer to her own age. Ambrose was twenty-five, and Florence and Gertrude were fourteen and eight. Josephine was soon pregnant: Percy was born in 1892, Madeleine followed in 1894, and the family made some lifestyle changes. Dan finally gave up the hotel and saloon at the theatre and opened a liquor store a few blocks north.²³ The Smalls moved into their first proper house, on a short stub of a street called Moss Park Place in the Garden District downtown, near Queen and Sherbourne Streets and the Kormann Brewery.²⁴

As the new century dawned, Josephine was busy with her family, and Theresa, a single woman of thirty, travelled the great cities of Europe, honing her singing voice with the French and Italian masters. The Toronto papers said Theresa’s voice sounded like the very essence of youth: clear, healthy, and hopeful.²⁵ “While abroad she won many complimentary paragraphs from European Journals,” the Sisters at her old school proudly noted. Theresa had even been given the chance to sing at the Basilica in Lourdes. “Dear Teresa is a true child of St. Joseph’s—very grateful and very faithful.”²⁶

By the standards of her time, Theresa was inching past marrying age, but there was a promising candidate close to home. Ambrose Small, the stepson of her sister, was a few years older, handsome and ambitious, and technically a Catholic. By now, he had risen through the ranks of the Toronto Opera House from treasurer to manager to lessee—the first local to do so in “some years,” the Star said, marvelling at his achievements.²⁷ He had reformed “the Home of blood and thunder” with high-class entertainment at low prices and looped the theatre into an existing American theatre circuit, which guaranteed a steady supply of shows. Small liked the idea of the circuit and started making deals with other Ontario theatres, building a network of his own.²⁸ He partnered up with Detroit theatrical promoter Clark J. Whitney to learn the ropes. They had profit-sharing agreements for theatres they were both involved with.²⁹

Ambrose had done a good job making the Toronto Opera House relevant, but there was more competition every year. A new theatre called the Princess had opened on King Street, a few blocks northwest of the Grand.³⁰ It was the city’s first modern theatre, one of the “prettiest opera houses on the continent,” with a large stage, electricity throughout the building, and seats that were designed so that every person had a good view. It was “one of the best equipped and most thoroughly tasteful houses of amusement in America,” the Globe said on its opening weekend in 1895.³¹ The Grand had well-earned prestige, but the Princess was gaining momentum.³² On the eve of the 1901 season, the Star made note of a management shakeup in Toronto’s theatre world. O.B. Sheppard, the elder statesman of the Grand Opera House, had jumped to the Princess and taken his booking connections with him. That meant there was an opening for a manager at the Grand Opera House, so Ambrose swooped in to make the best of it: “This old-established theater may expect a new impulse from his activity,” the Star noted.³³

Theresa Small

The season kicked off during the Toronto Industrial Exhibition (renamed the Canadian National Exhibition in 1912). Every year, the exhibition drew tens of thousands of people to Toronto to marvel at cutting-edge technologies, horse races, and pheasants that were better than any birds you might find in the old country.³⁴ It always coincided with the opening week of Toronto’s theatre season, which shut down during the unbearable heat of summer. O.B. had a matinee performance of Way Down East at the Princess—a “simply homely” story of a woman’s life. The show was a sensation with the ladies and proved “that the Princess will be as popular with the high-class matinee goers as the Grand was in its palmiest days.”³⁵ Ambrose had the comedy duo of Ward and Vokes yukking it up at the Grand with a “farcical extravaganza” that featured twenty-three musical numbers.³⁶ Ambrose knew it would be a difficult go in the crowded entertainment landscape. A burlesque theatre, the Star, had opened around the corner, and the Shea brothers, from Buffalo, had a popular vaudeville theatre on Yonge Street. Small knew the Princess would have an impressive season, so he played the quantity game instead. He quietly built his empire, securing leases and contracts in small towns like Ingersoll, Chatham, and Stratford.

His most important acquisition was tucked into the social pages of the newspaper in 1902. Ambrose was engaged to marry Theresa Kormann: the devout Catholic daughter of a small Toronto brewing empire. Theresa’s father, Ignatius, had died in 1891, and now her mother faced a terminal cancer diagnosis. Mary Eva, who had been running the brewery with her sons since her husband’s death, died two weeks before Theresa’s wedding, leaving behind an estate of $72,000, including real estate, stocks, horses, and about $30,000 cash.³⁷ “Deceased was a woman of great force of character which was shown conspicuously in the successful administration of the large business in which she became the head on the death of her husband,” the Globe noted. “In the social circle in which she moved Mrs. Kormann was much loved for her tenderness of heart and warm friendship.”³⁸

Ambrose and Theresa had a subdued wedding at St. Basil’s Church^*2 a couple of weeks after Mary Eva was buried. Theresa wore a silk crêpe de chine gown studded with lace medallions and pearls, and held a clutch of white roses and ferns as she walked down the aisle with her brother, passing paintings of biblical violence on the walls. Candles flickered for her dead parents and the dead of the parish, and the soft light caught the diamond sunburst in her dark hair—a gift from Ambrose. Ambrose held Theresa’s hand and delicately jimmied the wedding ring in place—he’d had it made specially, using his mother’s old wedding ring.³⁹

Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose Small returned from their honeymoon to their new home in Rosedale. It was a three-storey brick mansion with a separate staircase for staff—hot in the summer and drafty in the winter, with stained glass windows, wainscoting, and engraved brass door knobs. Their new neighbourhood radiated wealth. The streets were romantically landscaped, curving this way and that, the imposing homes decorated with embellished stone work, heavy pillars, and stained glass.⁴⁰ Ambrose had a growing business, and Theresa had several thousand dollars she had inherited from her mother’s estate, along with a few stocks and bonds that she’d purchased before their marriage.⁴¹

At her first official reception as Mrs. Ambrose Small, there was a “spring-like softness in the air.” Theresa wore her wedding gown and accepted the compliments of her new neighbours. There were crimson roses and lilies of the valley and dainty snacks.⁴² Years of teas unfurled ahead of her, with tables resplendent with flowers, and society ladies murmuring their approval. Some of the neighbours were descendants of the landed gentry, but many were the new class of leaders—politicians, lawyers, doctors, industrialists. Toronto money was best respected when it had a few generations to “mellow,” but you could speed it along with the right kind of socializing and charitable work.⁴³

Ambrose didn’t care much about rules. His main concern was money, and not long after their wedding, two things happened that would entrench his plans to make more of it. Clark Whitney, his business partner in the Ontario circuit, died in March 1903, and several days later, the Toronto Opera House—managed by Ambrose—was destroyed by fire. The blaze was blamed on faulty insulation of an electric wire. A janitor smelled smoke before he went to bed, but he couldn’t find the source of it, and neither could police. He woke up gasping at 4 a.m. when the room he shared with his wife and children filled with smoke. As fire and smoke snarled through the theatre, and the janitor piled his furniture into a tower for his family to climb to escape through a skylight. It was “as thrilling as any of the most sensational scenes that had been depicted on the theatre’s stage,” the Globe said.⁴⁴ A Detroit company owned the charred remains, and Ambrose Small, who leased the building, told the papers it would be rebuilt.

It reopened that November as the Majestic with the romantic religious musical Mary of Magdala, an appropriate blend for Ambrose and Theresa’s first anniversary. “It is not perhaps a work of genius,” the Globe reported on opening night. “The theme is the regeneration of a woman’s soul through the saving grace of the influence of Jesus of Nazareth.” One of the leading actresses of the American stage, Mrs. Fiske, played Mary Magdalene. (The reviewer thought Mrs. Fiske did an admirable job, even if she had a quick, nervous way of speaking. Judas was played with a sinister edge, top notch indeed.⁴⁵) Although they didn’t own the theatre when it burned to the ground, one historian noted that the blaze encouraged Ambrose and Theresa to embrace geographical diversity in their future theatrical assets.⁴⁶

Theresa used some of her family money to help Ambrose purchase theatres he had been leasing, including the Hamilton Grand Opera House (1903) and the London Grand Opera House (1905).⁴⁷ They soon owned the Majestic too, and Ambrose continued to acquire leases in smaller cities. With his old business partner dead, Ontario was his for the taking—no profit sharing involved.⁴⁸ (Whitney’s heirs did sue for a portion of the profits. Small didn’t want to divulge any of his business details, so he didn’t file a statement of defence. An appeal court eventually sided with Ambrose, ruling that the death dissolved the partnership.⁴⁹) Small went full tilt. He entertained Broadway producers on yachts; he had a telegraph company wire election results to his theatres so the audience could keep up with Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s victory in 1904; and, in 1905, he was rumoured to have a $200,000 offer to purchase his first love—Toronto’s Grand Opera House.⁵⁰

It was soon his, and the money poured in like a capitalist’s fairytale. He showed authentic pictures of the San Francisco earthquake with piano accompaniment, and signed an endorsement deal for Bell pianos. There were summer trips to New York and Quebec. The Smalls had one of the first motor cars in the province and built one of the city’s first garages in their backyard. The treasured family car had the macabre distinction of being one of the city’s first to run over a pedestrian. Ambrose loved to drive, but it was the chauffeur at the wheel that day in 1906, driving Theresa, Josephine, and Dan Small home from an afternoon in High Park. The driver ran over a nurse who was waiting for a streetcar before her shift at the asylum. As with most pedestrian deaths in the early days of automobile excitement, Jane Porter was blamed for her own demise.⁵¹ The death didn’t sour Ambrose’s enthusiasm for the open road. He liked to buy two new cars every year. He also purchased extravagant gifts for his wife: pearl necklaces, diamond pins, a sealskin coat trimmed with chinchilla, and a silver fox fur coat when the chinchilla coat wasn’t good enough.⁵²

High Park, 1912

Ambrose Small sent his New York contacts postcards from his yearly summer travels around the world before the First World War.

When the theatre shut down in the heat of the summer, Ambrose and Theresa lounged on steamship cruises to Europe and Asia, which featured diving shows at the pool. His friends said that Ambrose only relaxed on the water, rocked asleep by the waves in his first-class suite. At the time, most people traversed the ocean to serve in a war or bury their mother in the old country, but the Smalls travelled for pleasure. Ambrose sent postcards of Hong Kong gamblers, Japanese theatres, and Hawaiian surfers to the booking agents in New York, and Theresa brought her camera, dreaming up the presentations she would give when she returned. She had a reputation as one of Toronto’s best “woman speakers,” and she always returned to St. Joseph’s Academy to talk about her travels. The sisters who listened to her tales of faraway lands swore they could feel the scorching Egyptian sand underfoot, see the long shadow of the camel at sunset.⁵³ Theresa brought a little piece of the world home to Toronto, and the religious sisters always presented her with a bouquet of roses, which she dutifully left at the chapel so they could breathe out their fragrance for the Lord.

^*1 The Sisters of St. Joseph were instrumental in supporting the city through many of its early struggles. They helped sick and dying famine migrants who arrived in Toronto, as well as the orphans created by those deaths, and also helped during the diphtheria epidemic of the 1890s. They founded St. Michael’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, and Providence Hospital.

^*2 The church, run by the Basilian Fathers, was an important symbol for Toronto’s Catholics. Captain John Elmsley—a late in life convert to Catholicism—donated the land and requested that his heart be entombed in the west wall when he died in 1863. It is still there to this day.