Chapter Six
Doubts, Delays and Disputes

Marjorie returned in triumph to Paris in April 1932 and to Cécile Gilly’s studio. Madame kept repeating ‘I knew you could do it’, while some of Marjorie’s fellow students took her out to celebrate with a magnum of champagne at a bar near Place Pigalle. Marjorie got soundly drunk for the first and last time in her life and had to be smuggled into her room at the Grodets.

With what was left of the money she had earned at Monte Carlo, Marjorie offered to pay some of her outstanding fees to Cécile Gilly, but Gilly would not accept the money, saying ‘Your success is enough for the time being’. Marjorie paid Henri Grodet what she owed him and pressed some money onto his parents, who had repapered her room in her absence.

Marjorie now set about learning the complete role of Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, while Gilly began pulling strings to secure her an audition with Jacques Rouché, directeur-général of the Paris Opéra. Philippe Gaubert’s support was enlisted and he promised to put in a good word for her and to get Marjorie’s name onto the list for the next general audition of singers. Gaubert, or another of Madame’s contacts at the Opéra, passed on the very useful tip that Rouché was dissatisfied with the singers he had available for the role of Ortrud in Lohengrin. Gilly seized on this opportunity and Götterdämmerung was temporarily set aside while she and Marjorie revisited Lohengrin and the role of the pagan schemer, the foil to Elsa, the latter being the part Marjorie had earlier studied from same opera.1

A formal request for the audition, detailing Marjorie’s success in Monte Carlo, was written by Gilly and posted to Rouché. In early June a reply came confirming that Rouché would hear Marjorie at four on the afternoon of 16 June. In typical fashion, Marjorie dashed to the market at the bottom of the Sacré Cœur steps and bought a remnant of mauve georgette to make herself a new dress for the occasion. In Interrupted Melody Marjorie reports that she was still struggling to get the hem on the skirt straight on the morning of the audition and that the music was far less problematic.

Gustave Bret agreed to accompany Marjorie at the audition and they met at the opera house stage door. The auditions were to be conducted on the stage, so when they entered, Marjorie and Bret were ushered into the palatial artists’ salon behind the stage. There they found several other nervous singers with their accompanists about to face the same trial.

When Marjorie and Bret finally walked out onto the vast stage, she recognised several people sitting in the darkened stalls, including Rouché, Gaubert and two of the company’s leading singers, tenor José de Trevi and bass-baritone André Pernet. Marjorie had heard both these singers on that stage and would join them there eventually, but first she had to convince the elderly, stern-looking, heavily bearded directeur-général that she was worthy of that opportunity.

Marjorie rightly claimed that confidence in her voice and good preparation, along with the success she had achieved in Monte Carlo, had given her a new degree of self-assurance, but that assurance deserted her that afternoon. ‘I was terrified,’ Marjorie later admitted, ‘but as had happened to me before and would happen many times again, I was able to dig a bit deeper and summon up something extra to carry me through occasions like that’.2

Marjorie sang ‘Divinités du Styx’, and the end of the aria was greeted with stony silence. Rouché then asked if she knew anything else. ‘I would like to sing Ortrud’s Invocation from the second act of Lohengrin’, Marjorie replied. ‘We would certainly like to hear you sing that, Mademoiselle’, Rouché said and Marjorie fancied the directeur-général sat up a little straighter in his seat.

Marjorie began: ‘O dieux de haine’ (‘You gods forsaken’) and pitched the exposed A-sharp on the first syllable of ‘haine’ perfectly and with an audacity that made everyone else in the theatre sit up. At the end of the short piece Marjorie hurled the final notes out into the vast auditorium with all the power and brilliance she could muster. Gaubert, de Trevi and Pernet rewarded her with warm applause, but Rouché remained stern-faced. He waited until the applause petered out and then dismissed Marjorie and Bret with a cursory ‘Merci, Mademoiselle … Monsieur’. Marjorie went home not sure whether she had succeeded brilliantly or failed miserably. Confirmation that she had at least made some impression came two days later with a note from Rouché’s secretary asking her to call on the directeur-général two mornings hence.

Mimi went with Marjorie to the opera house on this occasion and waited in an anteroom while Rouché’s major-domo (as tall and broad as his master was short and slight) conducted Marjorie into the directeur-général’s grand office. There Marjorie was confronted by someone she described as a completely different Rouché, the charming, dignified former chief executive of a perfume empire and the benevolent sovereign of his artistic domain. ‘We enjoyed your singing very much the other day, Mademoiselle Lawrence,’ he said, ‘and I am going to engage you. You must begin work with us immediately.’ As Marjorie left, Rouché promised to send a contract ‘shortly’.

What Rouché offered was not a position as a principal in his company, but as ‘une pensionnaire’, the term used at the Opéra to describe an artist on probation and not unlike what is offered to singers today through opera companies’ young artists development programs. Marjorie would work with the music staff and the production staff at the opera house, attend rehearsals of operas she might one day sing in, observe the established stars at work and understudy certain roles.

Considering how successful Marjorie had been in Monte Carlo that offer might seem like a consolation prize or even a backward step, but it should be remembered that the Paris Opéra was the flagship of French vocal art and being a ‘pensionnaire’ at the Opéra was at least the equivalent of being a principal in a provincial opera house; Marjorie was more than content.

Marjorie began work at the Opéra the following week. She worked first on the role of Ortrud with Maurice Fauré, head of the music staff and the most senior of the company’s team of expert repetiteurs. She also attended all the rehearsals for the current production of Lohengrin. Here Marjorie encountered for the first time at close range Germaine Lubin, a singer who would have a profound influence (negative as well as positive) on her future. Germaine Lubin had joined the Opéra in 1914 and quickly established herself as the company’s leading dramatic soprano, a position she held until the end of the Second World War, when she was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and banned from singing.

As Marjorie watched and listened to Lubin at the rehearsals of Lohengrin her impressions of the great French diva could not have been other than positive. Lubin was a strikingly beautiful woman with large ice-blue eyes. Svelte and regal, she might have matched the visual ideal Wagner had in mind for roles like Elsa, Elisabeth and Isolde. Lubin had been Litvinne’s most successful pupil and her expansive voice had a plangent, bell-like timbre. She was also an accomplished vocal actress, bringing originality and an attractive vulnerability to all the roles she sang. These qualities were amply demonstrated as Lubin brought Elsa to life in rehearsal, even without costume, wig and make-up. Later when Lubin became aware of Marjorie as a rival she revealed an unattractive side to her personality, but for the time being it must have been a case of admiration from the ‘pensionnaire’ and indifference from the diva.

The veteran heldentenor Paul Franz sang Lohengrin with a clarion voice and the accumulated wisdom of a long career, but the contralto assigned the role of Ortrud was not in their class. It must have been frustrating to Marjorie to hear this singer struggling with the high tessitura and making heavy weather of the Invocation, knowing that she could do so much better if she were given the chance.

In the months that followed Marjorie worked on Valentine (in Les Huguenots), the ‘Walküre’ Brünnhilde and Rachel (in La Juive), not only with Fauré and other repetiteurs, but also with the Opéra’s leading stage director Pierre Chereau. Chereau helped Marjorie to formulate her own methods for portraying the physical aspects of character and encouraged her to develop her own acting style. In later years Marjorie’s acting would be described as ‘plastique’, ‘energetic’, ‘convincing’ and ‘sincere’—legacies of a great stage director who found the time to work with her when she needed guidance most. Chereau and his American wife, the actress Abby Richardson, also became good friends of Marjorie’s and she sought their advice many times about aspects of her career, especially when obstacles loomed.

The summer of 1932 passed and there was still no sign of the contract Rouché had promised and, while the contract remained unsigned, Marjorie remained unpaid. In Interrupted Melody Marjorie claimed that it was the malevolent influence of Germaine Lubin that delayed the contract and that the older singer feared Marjorie as a rival—the same line she took when discussing Melba. By the end of that summer Lubin would certainly have been aware of Marjorie and no doubt had heard the stories going around the opera house about the promising young dramatic soprano from Australia, so she may well have intimated to Rouché that she was his foremost priority. The real reason for the non-appearance of Marjorie’s contract, however, was much simpler and much less sinister.

To appease the labour movement and protect the interests of native singers, the French Government of the time had a policy limiting the number of foreign singers permitted to sing in French opera houses. Many foreign-born singers overcame this by becoming French citizens. Others relied on being included in the small quota allowed to appear as guest artists and the even smaller number permitted to join French opera companies as full-time company members because they could sing roles no one else could.

At the time Rouché made his offer to Marjorie he had filled his current quota of foreign singers. Wanting to secure Marjorie’s services, Rouché applied to the Ministry of Labour for permission to exceed his quota by one, using the argument that Marjorie could sing roles he could not cast adequately with native singers. The ministry procrastinated. Months passed. Rouché became frustrated. Marjorie became angry and disappointed.

So why did Marjorie blame Lubin when she came to write Interrupted Melody? Well it may have been because Lubin had become a soft target by then, vilified in the press and accused, in her own words ‘of just about every crime except eating the flesh of babies’.3 It might also have been a simple case of prima donna bitchiness on Marjorie’s part, but if it was, then Lubin had given her good cause to resent her in the interim.

Working unpaid at the Opéra put another enormous strain on Marjorie’s finances, until yet another of Cécile Gilly’s vast network of contacts provided some relief. The impresario turned conductor Marcel Fichefet suggested that Marjorie contact the director of the opera at Nantes who desperately needed a singer to cover the role of Brünnhilde for the two performances of Die Walküre he was planning. The company’s regular dramatic soprano, Fichefet explained, had not turned up. Marjorie pointed out that Jacques Rouché might see this as disloyalty, but Fichefet argued that as long as she was not bound by contract Marjorie was free to accept other engagements. Marjorie took Fichefet’s advice, Henri Grodet phoned the theatre and Marjorie and Mimi caught a train to Nantes the next morning.

When Marjorie and Mimi arrived at the Théâtre Graslin in Nantes, a dress rehearsal for Die Walküre was about to begin. The missing soprano had still not arrived and a chorus member had been recruited to ‘mark’ the role of Brünnhilde. The director asked if Marjorie would join the rehearsal there and then. While the first act, in which Brünnhilde does not appear, was being rehearsed, Marjorie changed into her costume.4

The director of the Nantes opera was so delighted with Marjorie’s singing that day that he regretted having given the role to another, promising that if she did not arrive Marjorie would sing both performances. If she did arrive, he added, he would insist the other singer relinquish the second performance to Marjorie. The missing soprano, Georgette Caro, turned up in time for the first performance but the outcome was happier than it had been in Monte Carlo with Nemeth and Tosca. Caro relinquished the second performance to Marjorie without argument and agreed to sing Sieglinde, the other soprano role in the opera that night.

On 24 October Marjorie sang Brünnhilde, the role she would be most closely associated with throughout her career, for the first time on any stage, in the ancient capital of Brittany. Her Siegmund was the Norwegian tenor from the Vienna Staatsoper, Gunnar Graarud, and Wotan was sung by Paul Cabanel, a stalwart of the Paris Opéra. Reports of this performance seem not to have survived, but an anecdote in Interrupted Melody hints at Marjorie’s complete success. After she had sung the intensely moving closing scene of Die Walküre with him at the rehearsal, Cabanel put his arms around Marjorie and announced to all present: ‘At last, Wotan has a daughter who looks and sounds as though she is a child of the gods’.5

Satisfying though this brief trip to Nantes was, Marjorie calculated that she made a profit of eight francs from it—the Nantes opera had paid her 600 francs for the performance and her expenses totalled 592 francs. To make matters worse, on her return to Paris she found there was still no sign of her contract from the Opéra. Disheartened, she returned to work there in order to keep faith with Rouché and to keep alive the now fading hope that the contract would one day arrive.

In desperation Marjorie now took a bold step. With Gilly’s approval, she sought an audition at the Opéra-Comique, the rival opera house in Paris. Both theatres are state-owned and complement one another, the Opéra presenting ‘grand’ opera and the Opéra-Comique performing lighter works, sometimes with spoken dialogue. There was and still is, however, a lot of crossover of repertoire between the two houses (situated just 500 metres apart) and fierce competition for audiences, creating intense rivalry.6

Marjorie was invited to attend a general audition as she had at the Opéra. She turned up with seventy-four other singers to be heard by the director Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi—and a team of carpenters busily (and noisily) at work on the stage. Marjorie had prepared arias from three operas she knew were in the Opéra-Comique’s repertoire: Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’, Margared’s aria from Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys and the ‘Air des lettres’ from Werther.

Marjorie’s singing was so spectacular that the carpenters downed tools to listen to her sing the Lalo aria. When she finished Gheusi asked his assistants who had sent ‘this great singer’ to them. The assistants looked dumbfounded, so Marjorie provided the answer. ‘I do not come on anyone’s recommendation, Monsieur. I have only my voice to recommend me.’ Gheusi assured her she needed no more and immediately offered Marjorie a contract to make her debut as Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana in two weeks. Marjorie accepted and Gheusi instructed his assistants to draw up a contract and post it to her.7

On the way home Marjorie called on Pierre Chereau and his wife to tell them the good news, but Chereau’s reaction surprised Marjorie. The director, who was better informed about Rouché’s negotiations with the Ministry of Labour than Marjorie was, gave her a despairing look and said she must speak to Rouché before she signed the contract from the Opéra-Comique. Chereau could not or would not tell her more, but Marjorie trusted him and so the next morning she tried to see Rouché, but the directeur-général was too busy. She tried twice the following day, on both occasions without success, so wrote a note to Rouché explaining the offer she had received from Gheusi and left it at the stage door.8

The next morning (a Saturday) Marjorie received a lettre pneumatique requesting she visit Rouché that afternoon.9 With Mimi once again in tow, Marjorie presented herself at the directeur-général’s office and was whisked into Rouché’s presence by the towering major-domo. Lying on Rouché’s desk was Marjorie’s contract.

It is unclear whether circumstances had prompted Rouché to pull some extra strings when he discovered he was about to lose a promising young singer or whether he had been sitting on the contract for some time. Marjorie never suspected him of deviousness, in fact she came to admire Rouché unreservedly and trust him completely. It is difficult, however, to accept that he had been able to accomplish in one Friday evening and one Saturday morning what he had failed to do for months. On the other hand, Marjorie’s ‘green card’, which entitled her to sing at the Opéra, did not arrive for several more weeks, suggesting negotiations between the Opéra and the ministry were ongoing. Such considerations were of no interest to Marjorie, of course; she had her contract and thereby a regular income at last.

The contract stated that Marjorie was to continue her preparation at the Opéra, but gave no date for her debut. That, the document indicated, would occur when Rouché considered she was ready and when an appropriate role became available. The contract also specified that as an artiste of the Opéra, that house had exclusive rights to her services in Paris. She could apply for a congé if she wished to accept stage engagements in the provinces and she could appear in concert and on radio in Paris, but not in staged opera in any other theatre in the capital. Marjorie signed, Rouché kissed her in continental style on both cheeks and a dazed Marjorie tottered out into Mimi’s supporting arms, whispering ‘I’ve got it!’10

Mimi, Henri and the elder Grodets tried hard to match Marjorie’s jubilation back at Avenue Trudaine, but they understood better than she how business worked in France. Monsieur Grodet was especially worried. He took Marjorie aside and said ‘Mon enfant, you have already made a deal with Monsieur Gheusi. What about that?’ Marjorie brushed their concerns aside and, when the contract from the Opéra-Comique arrived the following Monday, she returned it unsigned with a brief note stating that she was now an artiste of the Opéra, and therefore no longer able to sing at the Opéra-Comique.

The Grodets had been right. A letter arrived a few days later threatening Marjorie with a writ for breach of the verbal contract she had made with Gheusi in front of witnesses. Marjorie was terrified at the prospect of legal action. She rushed to the Chereaus seeking their advice and they told her to go and see Rouché again and to take Gheusi’s letter and, they suggested, Gunsbourg’s contract for Monte Carlo the following year. Marjorie took their advice and laid the whole matter before Rouché. He set the Opéra’s legal advisers to work and Gheusi capitulated, but Marjorie was never invited to sing at the Opéra-Comique again. Gunsbourg, for his part, took a pragmatic approach to losing his new discovery and eventually invited Marjorie back to give a concert in the Monte Carlo Opera House. As Marjorie confides in Interrupted Melody, with the relief of being extracted from this contractual mess came the realisation that the two great opera houses of Paris had been vying for her services. ‘Even if my brother Lindsay did consider my progress slow,’ she wrote, ‘I thought I had done pretty well’.11

In the months that followed Marjorie also did pretty well in other spheres. On 8 November 1932 she took part in a ‘Wagner Festival’ organised by the radio station ‘Porte Parisien’. For a fee of 300 francs she sang excerpts from Tannhäuser and Die Walküre accompanied by the radio station’s excellent orchestra. A month later she returned to Porte Parisien’s sumptuous studios on the Champs Èlysées to participate in a ‘Saint-Saëns Festival’, singing her old standby from her ‘contralto’ days, ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’ and an aria from Saint-Saëns’s opera L’Ancêstre, which Felia Litvinne had first sung at the opera’s premiere in Monte Carlo in 1906.

Marjorie continued to work hard at the Opéra and her diary for the autumn and winter of 1932–33 details regular coaching sessions with Maurice Fauré and Pierre Chereau. There are also many dozens of little printed notes among her papers of this period instructing her to attend rehearsals of Die Walküre, Siegfried, Aida, Tosca, L’Africaine and Hérodiade.

Marjorie also appeared as a soloist with the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Albert Wolff at a benefit concert and undertook several recording tests for La Compagnie Française du Gramophone, the Paris branch of ‘His Master’s Voice’. These tests were made over two days just before Christmas 1932 in the Salle Chopin in Pleyel’s building in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but no other details—how they came about, what Marjorie sang or how successful the tests were—have survived. Presumably nothing came of them, for almost a year would pass before Marjorie returned to the studios of Voix de son Maitre to make her first commercial recordings.

With the Opéra’s approval, Marjorie also fulfilled opera engagements in Lille and again Nantes, both of which were arranged by Fichefet. She returned to Nantes for another performance of Die Walküre and to sing Valentine and Brunhilde in performances of Les Huguenots and Sigurd on stage for the first time. At Lille she also sang Aida, also for the first time, and repeated Brünnhilde in Die Walküre.

Paul Cabanel sang Wotan in Die Walküre in both cities and also the role of the King in Aida in Lille, so shared the stage with Marjorie at each of the Lille performances. Marjorie was delighted to be singing again with such an accomplished artist and commented on how comforting and stimulating it felt to be resting her head on this Wotan’s mighty chest. Cabanel seems to have been experiencing similar stimulation and now had his heart set on giving Marjorie more than a public hug.

With an attractive voice, a sensitive approach to his art and a distinguished military record, Paul Cabanel, now in his early forties, was still a fine figure of a man. As photos of the day show and as Hollywood would certainly have described, he had ‘sexy’ eyes. Cabanel may well have been another who qualified for Marjorie’s term ‘a dinger of a bloke’, but in his case she chose to label him ‘a big, strong, slick-tongued purveyor of Gallic blarney’.12

The first rehearsal in Lille followed just four days after the last performance in Nantes, so Marjorie and Mimi travelled up from Nantes to Lille with Cabanel and he made his move on Marjorie during that journey. The pair left Nantes as colleagues and arrived in Lille as lovers. It was a short affair, one of those brief encounters gossip columnists would have us believe happen all the time in the world of greasepaint and celluloid and it seems not to have had a lasting effect on either party. When both returned to Lille for two more performances of Aida the following month, the affair was ended and for a very practical reason. The tenor singing Radames also fancied Marjorie and threatened to disrupt the performances if the baritone didn’t back off.

Marjorie and Cabanel’s relationship is, however, relevant to another matter. There was a rumour circulating in Australia at the time and which still occasionally surfaces that in 1933 Marjorie gave birth to an illegitimate son, fathered by someone famous. If one subscribes to that theory then Paul Cabanel would seem the most likely candidate for the child’s father. However, there is no evidence to substantiate this rumour—no hints in letters, no curious entries in diaries, no unexplained documents and no long interruptions to study or work schedules—so until concrete evidence is produced to the contrary, it is fair to dismiss this claim as rumour.

Marjorie freely admitted that she enjoyed sex and believed the enjoyment of it was her right as a young and healthy modern woman. This liberated attitude would have shocked her maiden aunts back in Winchelsea, but it was quite unremarkable in the sophisticated milieu of Paris during the interwar years. There is no evidence that Marjorie was ever promiscuous, but she did admit to getting carried away by male charms more often and less wisely than she should. This she attributed to having grown up without a mother’s guidance.

Had I had the experience of loving a mother and of being loved by a mother, I’m sure my early love affairs would have been, let us say, better balanced than they were. Loving and being loved were experiences novel to me and when they did come into my life I went completely overboard.13

Marjorie experienced a different kind of ‘overboard’ when Jacques Rouché walked into one of the rehearsal rooms at the Opéra one afternoon where Marjorie was working with Maurice Fauré. He listened for a moment then asked Fauré about Marjorie’s progress. Next he asked Marjorie: ‘How is Ortrud coming along? Do you have that ready yet?’ Marjorie replied she certainly did and Fauré backed her up with ‘Oui Maitre, elle est très bien préparée’. Rouché turned again to Marjorie and said ‘Bien, you will sing it next week’.14

Marjorie was elated—she was finally to have the opportunity she had dreamed of since first arriving in Paris—but with the elation came inevitable nervousness. The cast list for Lohengrin on Saturday evening, 25 February 1933, was posted the following day. Paul Franz and Germaine Lubin were to repeat their familiar portrayals of Lohengrin and Elsa and ‘Mademoiselle M. Lawrence’ was to sing Ortrud. The role of Telramund, Ortrud’s ambitious husband, had been assigned to Martial Singher for the first time. Marjorie had rehearsed many times with this young baritone, just three years her senior and a former pupil of Maurice Fauré. In years to come Marjorie and Singher would appear together in North and South America and forge a lifelong friendship based on mutual respect. His presence in the cast was a comforting and steadying influence for Marjorie.

As the new members of the cast, Marjorie and Singher were given just two stage rehearsals with piano and none with the orchestra. Lubin didn’t turn up to either rehearsal, which meant that the long scene between Elsa and Ortrud would have to be sung ‘cold’ on the evening of the performance. Not unjustifiably, Marjorie (and probably Singher) felt slighted by the prima donna not deigning to attend either of the rehearsals and failing to extend to them the professional courtesy they felt they were entitled to.

When the curtain rose on the first act of the opera that Saturday evening, the audience observed a slight, youthful figure sitting diffidently on the throne-like chair provided for Ortrud, her face made up none too convincingly to look older and evil. Many must have wondered whether she could possibly succeed in the role of the pagan sorceress—one of Wagner’s most febrile creations.

Ortrud has little to do in the hour-long first act except to react to the other characters with menacing glares and join in the musical ensembles, but at the beginning of the second act she returns to the stage for two long and intensely dramatic scenes—the first with Telramund, the second with Elsa. Marjorie and Singher inspired and supported each other in their scene and this gave Marjorie time to settle down before her encounter with Lubin. Lubin glided onto the stage looking incredibly beautiful and singing like an angel—most of the time to the audience rather than to Marjorie.

By the middle of this exchange, the soprano has had two showpiece arias (one in each act), while Ortrud still awaits her opportunity to demonstrate her skill and power in a solo, but when that opportunity finally arrives, it is as if the composer were rewarding the singer for her patience. Ortrud suddenly throws off the humble guise she has been feigning and invokes her ancient gods to wreak havoc on her enemies. Settled vocally and fired up by Lubin’s churlish behaviour, Marjorie launched into the passage she had sung at her audition with Rouché. She mustered all her vocal might and again hurled the top notes out into the vast auditorium, finishing this time with her arms stretched defiantly skyward.

Applause in mid-scene is discouraged at the Opéra, but the audience were not going to let this display of vocal amplitude pass unrewarded. Thunderous applause drowned the orchestra. The conductor, François Ruhlmann, kept the players going and Lubin returned to the stage and tried to deliver her next line, but the applause rather than diminishing grew. Ruhlmann and Lubin tried again, and the soprano had to sing her line three times before it was heard. As Marjorie put it, ‘the fat was now in the fire and sending up clouds of blue smoke’.15

At this point Ortrud leaves the stage to do some plotting, which meant that Marjorie then had a break before returning at the end of the act to spit more venom at Elsa and Lohengrin. In the last act she has a third opportunity to steal the show with another passage of intense declamation which, if well delivered—as Marjorie did that evening—can focus the audience’s attention on Ortrud rather than Elsa as the opera reaches its end.

When the curtain fell, the other principals and the chorus gathered around Marjorie and Singher and congratulated them, but not Lubin, and during solo bows she stood directly in front of Marjorie. As they left the stage Marjorie offered her hand to Lubin, but Lubin turned away. There were plenty of others who wanted to shake Marjorie’s hand and plant kisses on her cheeks. Rouché, the Chereaus, Fauré and Ruhlmann all came to her dressing room, the latter admonishing Marjorie for prompting the interruption in the second act but assuring her he couldn’t wait to conduct her in the Ring and in any other roles she was cast in.

Rouché asked Marjorie to call on him in his office the next day and at the meeting he tore up Marjorie’s existing contract and gave her another with double the wage. Rouché also asked Marjorie what she would like to sing next and Brünnhilde in Die Walküre was agreed upon. According to Marjorie, that role became her exclusive property during her time at the Opéra—the first of her titularies as they are called in France—wrested from the grasp of Germaine Lubin. Marjorie also claimed that after that evening she frequently had to step in to replace Lubin in an assortment of roles. Neither of these claims is true. Lubin continued to sing the ‘Walküre’ Brünnhilde occasionally and the number of times Marjorie replaced Lubin were almost equalled by the number of times Lubin replaced her.

In Interrupted Melody Marjorie paints Lubin as a singer whose voice and career were in decline and who resented the undoubted competition Marjorie represented. The second part of that claim is true. Whenever Marjorie and Lubin passed one another in a corridor at the Opéra, Lubin cut her dead and when Marjorie pressed the point one day and said mischievously ‘Don’t you recognise me, Madame?’ Lubin glared at her through her lorgnette and replied that she had no recollection of her whatsoever.

After that first Lohengrin, Lubin also refused to appear on stage with Marjorie, although she relented three years later and allowed Marjorie to appear as her servant, Brangäne, in two performances of Tristan und Isolde. Like most Australians, Marjorie put great store in being sportsmanlike and giving everyone ‘a fair go’, so in the light of Lubin’s actions it is not surprising that Marjorie’s admiration for the older singer turned to contempt.

The image of Lubin as a singer in decline, however, is nothing more than a product of that contempt. Lubin had another eleven years of triumphant singing ahead of her and she might have gone on for many more had silence not been imposed on her. At forty-three she was probably not singing with the same freshness and ease that Marjorie then was and it is doubtful if she ever commanded the same brilliance and freedom above the stave that set Marjorie apart from other Wagnerian sopranos, but Lubin’s qualities lay elsewhere.16

Although Marjorie would probably have been reluctant to admit it, she was influenced by Lubin’s art. That is not surprising when one considers that Lubin was the only great Wagnerian soprano Marjorie had heard perform on stage regularly up to the time her own career commenced.17 Consciously or not, Marjorie adopted Lubin’s conception of Brünnhilde as a youthful, vibrant, even seductive ‘daughter of the gods’, adjectives that were often applied to them both by critics, but seldom to their Germanic or Nordic rivals. It also seems likely that Marjorie followed Lubin’s example in her use of portamento as a grand and potent expressive device. Both singers shared this gift, both were praised for it and both criticised for it when the device was occasionally overused. Lubin and Marjorie share too a certain Gallic felicitousness in the way they enunciate Wagner’s text, which is touching and apparent, whether they are singing in French or German.

There are also qualities both these singers share with Litvinne and with the great French soprano of the next generation, Régine Crespin, whom Lubin coached when she attempted the Wagner roles. Listening to this quartet of grande dames via recordings, it is not difficult to discern a peculiarly ‘Gallic’ style of Wagner singing, a style that was unique enough to differentiate Marjorie from other Wagnerian sopranos when she reached New York and earn her a niche of her own in their company.

The occasion on which Marjorie made her debut at the Opéra was another routine performance of a familiar opera and, as Martial Singher was familiar to the press from other roles and Marjorie was an unknown quantity when the curtain rose, there were few music critics in the audience. Gustave Bret was there of course, but he can hardly be considered an objective commentator. He told readers of L’Intransigent that Marjorie was ‘one of the greatest Ortrud’s in history’18 and Pierre Ferroud, who admitted in his review in Paris Soir that he had never heard or heard of Marjorie before, concurred:

Mademoiselle Marjorie Lawrence’s singing of the role of Ortrud for I believe the first time was a revelation. After hearing so many singers struggle with the difficult music of this part, it was a pleasure to hear a young singer who could ignore those difficulties and sing with the abandon the composer intended.19

The resounding success Marjorie had scored at her Opéra debut ushered in a new, busy and rewarding phase in her career. She continued to take occasional lessons with Cécile Gilly and their relationship remained very close, but after being a student for so long Marjorie was anxious to cast off that label. There were more performances of Lohengrin at the Opéra with Germaine Hoerner replacing Lubin and Georges Thill taking over the title role, another Les Huguenots in Nantes and two performances of Tannhäuser in Bordeaux.

Marjorie also claimed that immediately following her debut at the Opéra she was offered engagements to sing at Covent Garden and at the Vienna Staatsoper, followed shortly after by an offer from La Scala, Milan. She turned all these offers down, she said, on Rouché’s advice. There is no documentary evidence to support this claim, but interest from London and Vienna at least was probable. Scouts from other opera houses were invariably in attendance at the Opéra whenever a new singer was announced and, so spectacular was Marjorie’s debut, they would not have ignored her. If Marjorie did turn down an offer to sing at Covent Garden in 1933, she must have rued that decision when later she struggled to get a foothold in the British capital.

Another consequence of Marjorie’s triumph as Ortrud was her first batch of fan mail, some of which she kept all her life. Habitueés of the ‘hen roost’, where Marjorie and Archie Longden had sat through many performances, wrote to her—young females who admired her voice and her pluck and young males who admired her appearance. A small clique of stage-door ‘Jeans’ also assembled whenever Marjorie appeared thereafter—mostly elderly roués who pressed flowers and invitations to supper on her. Germaine Hoerner, who was just a year older than Marjorie but who had been at the Opéra for four years, showed her how to deal with them. Hoerner also helped Marjorie negotiate the politics of life in a large opera company and, like Singher, became a valued and trusted friend.

On 9 April Marjorie sang her first Brünnhilde in Die Walküre at the Opéra, with Franz as Siegmund and Marcel Journet as Wotan. It was another triumph, with Pierre Ferroud telling his readers that he had witnessed the most exciting portrayal of the ‘Walküre’ Brünnhilde it had ever been his privilege to see and hear.20 Robert Dézarnaux, writing in La Liberté, pointed out that there were both vocal and histrionic rough spots in Marjorie’s assumption of the role that would need to be ironed out by experience, but concurred with his colleague that it was a very exciting and satisfying performance.21

Several critics commented on how athletically Marjorie acted her part in this opera. After spending her childhood leaping onto horses, climbing trees and throwing sticks, springing from stage rock to stage rock while waving her spear above her head as Wagner instructs Brünnhilde to do on her entry posed no difficulty for Marjorie, but it surprised the critics and the audience who were accustomed to more lethargic leading ladies.

Rouché offered her the part of Salomé in Massenet’s Hérodiade next, and she did two performances of that in May. During all this activity, Marjorie continued to live with the Grodets and she was joined there for a couple of weeks in the spring by an unexpected but very welcome visitor, her brother Percy—except that he was no longer ‘Percy’; he was now ‘Cyril’.

During Marjorie’s absence Percy Lawrence had been putting his piano-playing skills to practical use as a piano salesman in Melbourne, but was finding the insular world of Melbourne stifling and threatening. Percy was homosexual and being gay in a place like Melbourne in those days was fraught with perils. Percy longed to leave Australia and to transform himself into one of the ‘beautiful’ people in the sophisticated world his sister now inhabited. The only thing Percy had managed to do to effect that transformation up until the time he arrived in Paris was to discard the name Bill and Elizabeth had given him and replace it with a more exotic one. He had chosen ‘Cyril’, he explained, because of its association with Russian royalty. To accomplish the rest, Cyril needed his sister’s help.

Marjorie had known about her brother’s sexual orientation for a long time and she was way past being shocked by it. Ada Boddington, four years residence in Paris and her own exploration of sex had made Marjorie tolerant of many things she had not even heard of in Winchelsea. She also loved her brother and the bond that had been forged when they ran away from home together was still strong. Marjorie agreed to help Cyril (as she and we will now call him) if he came to live in Paris. As her income had begun to increase and her debts decrease, Marjorie had thought seriously about getting an apartment of her own and she promised Cyril that if he returned the following year he could share her new home.

Cyril was also able to fill Marjorie in on all the details of their father’s death and the disputes that were still going on over Bill Lawrence’s will, how divisions that he and she would never had thought possible had torn the family apart and how unexpected sides to characters they thought they knew had been revealed. As Cyril put it: ‘It’s a bloody mess, Marge’. Marjorie was now glad she was distanced from this ‘mess’ and had other things to occupy her. To her surprise and delight, Rouché had offered her a fantastic role in a new opera by a distinguished living composer which was about to receive its world premiere at the Opéra.