As soon as Marjorie’s life returned to normality—albeit an altered one—she began looking about for ways to help others. Altruism had not figured large in Marjorie’s philosophy during the first thirty or so years of her life, but that was changing. The process had begun with the Bundles for Britain concert, when in 1939 she was touched by the plight of Australians and Britons at war. Thereafter the transformation gained momentum. Marjorie’s brush with death, the experience of learning to rely on others, a new-found faith and Tom’s benevolent influence all combined to make Marjorie a more humble, less egocentric person, with these qualities remaining with her for the rest of her life. She would never lose her feistiness or her determination, but henceforth these would be balanced by the compassion and serenity that is characteristic of many people living with a disability.
One obvious group Marjorie could assist were the victims of polio, and the concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom was the first step in that direction. There Marjorie had made the acquaintance of Basil O’Connor, President of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. O’Connor was a shrewd middle-aged lawyer and the architect of the successful ‘March of Dimes’ campaign which funded support for victims and research for a polio vaccine. O’Connor recognised a kindred fighting spirit in Marjorie and appreciated the enormous publicity value she might offer his cause.1
O’Connor had once been Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s partner in a law firm and was still an intimate friend of the President and Mrs Roosevelt. He was also privy to a fact many Americans were unaware of at the time—that the reason why ‘FDR’ always appeared in public seated was because his legs were partially paralysed, the result of poliomyelitis contracted in 1921.2 Possibly at O’Connor’s suggestion, Marjorie and Tom were invited to the President’s sixty-first birthday luncheon at the White House on 30 January 1943.
As noted earlier, Marjorie had sung at the White House on two previous occasions and Mrs Roosevelt had been happy to acknowledge their acquaintance whenever their paths crossed. She had also gone backstage to congratulate Marjorie after the Met testimonial concert, but this was the first time Marjorie and Tom had been invited to the White House in a social capacity and they were delighted to accept. Tom and the Boggs family were staunch Democrats and the little Marjorie had observed of American politics had led her to support the same party, over and above her personal admiration for the Roosevelts.
That day Marjorie and Tom joined Robert Young, James Cagney, Dennis Morgan, Edgar Bergen, Loretta Young, Al Jolsen, Jack Benny, Roy Rodgers and other luminaries of the American stage and screen to partake of a surprisingly frugal lunch in the State Dining Room. Eleanor Roosevelt was a gracious hostess to all her guests, taking a particular interest in Marjorie. Conspicuous by his absence, however, was the President who was in Casablanca in North Africa at a secret meeting with Winston Churchill.
Two weeks later the Australian Association of New York hosted a ‘Victory’ dinner for Marjorie to celebrate her thirty-sixth birthday and her return to her profession. Two hundred people turned up, including Basil O’Connor. After the meal, O’Connor rose to his feet and said he had a letter he wished to read to the assembly. He removed a long white envelope from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket, opened it, carefully unfolded the single sheet it contained, adjusted his glasses, and then read in a voice that had commanded attention in the nation’s great courts of law.
Dear Miss Lawrence:
I am asking my old friend Basil O’Connor, President of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, to bring you a message at the Victory Dinner, so appropriately tendered to you at the Town Hall Club in New York City.
Your courage and faith and determination in overcoming the after-effects of infantile paralysis and thereby restoring to the public the opportunity of enjoying your beautiful art—all result in a victory—your victory—which is an inspiration to everyone at any time.
But today when all we love and cherish is jeopardized by those who take their rules of life from the brutality of barbarism and preach and practise that all but the physically perfect should be summarily liquidated, your victory exposes with the light of truth the godlessness of the lie they teach.
In the days ahead, while we fight for life itself, those whose trials and sorrows may be many and heavy will courageously carry on in the spirit you have so nobly exhibited.
Mirrored in your great victory for many years to come, those beset with burdens and harassed with handicaps will see the glory and the satisfaction of the good fight well won.
From an old veteran to a young recruit my message to you is ‘Carry on’.
Cordially yours …
As Marjorie recalled in Interrupted Melody, Basil O’Connor paused at that point and had deliberately held the letter where she, seated beside him, could not see the White House crest or the signature while he read it. When he announced the signatory’s name—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—carefully refolded the letter, placed it back in its envelope and presented it to Marjorie, she unashamedly burst into tears as the rest of the gathering erupted into spontaneous applause.3
If Marjorie had needed any further persuasion to throw in her lot with O’Connor’s group, that letter—a singular honour for an Australian—provided it. Thereafter she took part in numerous fund-raising concerts for the foundation and visited polio victims wherever her travels took her. Shortly before his death in 1972 Basil O’Connor cited Marjorie as among those who worked unceasingly to destigmatise the disease and bring comfort and encouragement to its sufferers.
Marjorie also began to set aside complimentary tickets at each of her performances to be used by polio victims. She did this for the first time when she sang the first of her complete performances of Tannhäuser at the Met and the Kennys brought along two charming little girls aged eight and ten. Both were wheelchair-bound and both probably enjoyed the sodas and doughnuts Marjorie offered them in her dressing room after the performance rather more than the long and confusing opera.
Those performances of Tannhäuser set the seal on Marjorie’s return to professional music-making. After the first, the normally hard-to-please Olin Downes made no secret of his admiration for her performance:
Physical obstacles have in no sense lessened Miss Lawrence’s interpretative powers. The limited scope of her acting in no way limited her presentation of the part. Her gestures were admirably planned and composed. She carried the scene. But the burden must be carried by the voice and Miss Lawrence’s was fresh and dramatic, the tones skilfully coloured. Because of this, all aspects of the Venus music were fully communicated. The sensuous, sustained song of ‘Geliebter, komm!’ was as convincing as the fire and majesty of Venus’s outburst, ‘Zieh hin’ and ‘Kehrst du mir nicht zurück’. In sum this was an exceptional, complete revelation of the passage, done so eloquently that the audience interrupted the performance with applause. There are singers in full possessions of their physical resources who have not accomplished nearly as much as Miss Lawrence did.4
At the Chicago performance, which took place on Marjorie and Tom’s second wedding anniversary, the audience was so enthusiastic that Lawrence Tibbett (singing Wolfram) jokingly asked if Marjorie had brought her own cheer squad.
‘Yep, Larry, all four thousand of ’em’, she replied and the exuberant baritone roared with laughter and whacked her soundly on the back. Claudia Cassidy, the much-feared music critic of the Chicago Tribune added her voice to the approbation, telling her readers Marjorie sang ‘radiantly’ and ‘magnificently’ with a voice that had taken on ‘a new and lovely lustre’.5
Marjorie’s success as Venus prompted the Met to consider other roles she might sing either seated or carried on stage. Several (including Ortrud) were informally discussed but no decisions made.6 The role Marjorie most longed to sing there—Isolde—was not among them. Marjorie was therefore doubly delighted when her new agent cabled to say that Beecham wanted her to sing two performances of Tristan und Isolde at the Montreal Arts Festival in May.
Marjorie assumed these would be concert performances and cabled back accepting the offer and asking for details. No reply was received, until a few weeks later when Wilder rang to say there would be only one performance and that Beecham and Herbert Graf wished to call on her that afternoon to discuss it. The conductor, director and agent duly arrived and Marjorie learned the performance was to be fully staged. Beecham laughed off her objections and said that Graf had worked out all the production details—Marjorie would remain on Isolde’s ship-board couch during the first act, be seated on stage when the curtain rose on Act Two and be carried on by Kurvenal in Act Three.
The other singers engaged for the performance were all happy to cooperate. Tristan was assigned to Arthur Carron, an English dramatic tenor with a robust voice who had been at the Met for several seasons without making much impact or challenging Melchior’s supremacy in the roles they shared. Elizabeth Wysor, then at the beginning of a distinguished career, was prepared to be an unusually mobile Brangäne, circling about her mistress, and the young Julius Huehn, with whom Marjorie had sung many times in New York, was ideally built to carry Isolde on stage in the last act.
Marjorie’s last performance of Isolde had been six years earlier in Lyon and sung in French. She had matured greatly in the interval, both vocally and emotionally. Beecham had seen she was ready to give something extraordinary and that she had the vocal resources to surmount the technical difficulties of the role in a way Flagstad could no longer manage, and Traubel probably was never able. Beecham pushed her hard, making no concessions and she did not disappoint the faith he had in her. There are, tragically, no recordings known to exist of that performance, but there are ecstatic reviews.
Montreal Herald readers who had been foolish enough to miss the event learned the next morning:
Miss Lawrence’s Isolde was like a dream come to life. She went through the whole opera radiantly, singing with sunshine in her voice and reaching heights of tragedy in the last act the like of which it has never been our privilege to witness before.7
The conductor was also sincerely impressed by his star’s performance. Sir Thomas was a master of hyperbole, but one gets the impression that a statement he made to the press was unexaggerated and came straight from the heart. It was, after all, made after the performance when he had nothing to gain from it. ‘You can quote me gentlemen’, he said. ‘The finest and most imposing dramatic soprano today is Marjorie Lawrence. No other Wagnerian soprano can equal her, except perhaps Flagstad, and in my opinion Miss Lawrence is the fresher of the two. Montreal has heard the best sung Isolde anyone is likely to hear anywhere in the world today.’8
News of Marjorie’s triumphant Isolde in Montreal reached New York the same evening and demands that she be given the role at the Met flooded the press and the opera house over the following weeks. It also raised the hackles of a couple of singers and brought to a head a controversy that had been brewing since Marjorie’s return.
Traubel pre-empted any move of Johnson’s by informing him that if he allowed Marjorie to sing Isolde, then Marjorie could also sing all the Brünnhildes for him as well, because she, Traubel, would not. This formidable woman, who towered over Johnson, also reminded him that she had come to the Met’s rescue when they had lost both Flagstad and Marjorie and expected their loyalty in return.9 Melchior was also getting tired of playing second fiddle to Marjorie and unlike Tibbett he did not find the public adulation of her amusing. In the first draft of Interrupted Melody there is a paragraph which was later edited out. It is published here for the first time:
I was told that Melchior resented the enthusiasm with which audiences greeted me and my work and joined in a plot because he felt having me in a cast detracted attention from his singing. I was sickened that fellow artists could be capable of such shabbiness towards me—especially those who had taken part in my testimonial concert. I came to realise that some of them had imagined the concert would be my operatic swan song; that once it was ended I would go my way doing a little radio and concert singing and leaving the glories of the Met to them.10
Just who (apart from Traubel and Melchior) Marjorie was referring to is unclear. Some who did not join ‘the plot’ can be at least identified. These included Schorr, who had recently retired from the Met but who was delighted to appear in concert with Marjorie in Carnegie Hall that year, and Tibbett, Brownlee and Thorborg, all of whom remained staunch allies.
Other forces were at work against Marjorie as well. Traubel informed Johnson that she thought the performance of Tannhäuser she had attended as an audience member was tasteless in the extreme and unworthy of the company.11 Traubel was partisan, but her sentiments echoed those of some of the Met’s most influential subscribers. Some of these accused Johnson of turning their opera house into a freak show. Others accused him of exploiting Marjorie’s disability and a few more accused Johnson of pandering to Marjorie’s desire to exploit her own situation. There were even rumours that Marjorie was not really disabled at all, that she had made a full recovery and was now feigning paralysis as a publicity stunt.
Johnson found himself in a dilemma. He wanted to help Marjorie out of affection for her and he wanted his patrons to be able to experience the exceptional work she was still capable of. On the other hand, he could not afford to alienate Traubel, Melchior or the less sympathetic of his influential subscribers. Reluctantly, he offered her more performances of Venus in the next season, but, for the time being, nothing more. The pro-Marjorie faction kept up their pressure on Johnson to let them hear ‘the best sung Isolde anyone is likely to hear‘ and Tom added his dime’s worth by referring to the anti-Marjorie faction as ‘cowardly dogs’ and pestering Johnson to give Marjorie the opportunity he knew (and believed Johnson knew) she deserved.
If the Met felt constrained in their dealings with Marjorie, concert promoters did not. Wilder booked Marjorie for concerts with the nation’s leading orchestras and conductors all over the United States and beyond—to Canada and Cuba. It must be said that a large part of Marjorie’s appeal was her personal history and the massive publicity surrounding her disability guaranteed full houses, but if patrons expected a freak show they were disappointed. Marjorie gave performance after performance of the highest artistic standard and musical snobs could hardly complain when she sang ‘Annie Laurie’ or ‘Danny Boy’ as an encore after she just sung magnificent performances of the Immolation Scene or Isolde’s Liebestod.
Marjorie’s standard fee for a concert appearance was now $1500 and for a solo recital $2000. Few artists got larger fees and few got so many engagements. To facilitate ease of travel, Tom acquired a folding wheelchair for her, designed by the part-time inventor Aaron Stein, better known to readers of crime fiction as the author, George Bagby. This chair had removable wheels and armrests, a leather sling seat and folding footrests and could be easily carried on the aeroplanes Marjorie now favoured for long-distance travel.
A return to financial stability and the discharge of their debts allowed Marjorie and Tom to invest some money in their personal comfort. They rented out the 73rd Street apartment again and took a lease on a penthouse on top of 310 West 106th Street. The building had a high-speed elevator and no steps, and the glass-lined apartment had magnificent views over Riverside Park and the Hudson. Marjorie and Tom adored their new home, but the cook–housekeeper they had employed while at 73rd Street was less enthusiastic. Clara Weekes was her name and she was a generously proportioned African-American woman whose demeanour and manners suggested she might have stepped straight out of Gone With the Wind. She was completely devoted to Tom and Marjorie and there was no question of her abandoning them, but when she first entered the penthouse she exclaimed ‘Glory be, Mrs King, are you sure there’s gonna be enough oxygen for us all up here?’
Just a month after they moved to the penthouse, an even bigger change to their domestic arrangements unexpectedly materialised. A letter arrived from Mary Hedrick at Hot Springs. She was no longer able to maintain Villa Rustica and was now forced to put it on the market and, in accordance with the promise made to them, was offering Marjorie and Tom first option on its purchase. The market value of the property was somewhere in the vicinity of $40,000, but Mrs Hedrick was as keen for it to pass to Marjorie and Tom as they were to secure it, so she made it clear that she was prepared to strike a deal which suited them as well as her.
Marjorie and Tom now had a dilemma of their own. They both yearned to own the Arkansas property and establish a permanent base there that would serve them for the rest of their lives and they recognised if they failed to secure it at that point, the opportunity would likely never come again. On the other hand, they were still smarting from being flat broke and in debt just a few months earlier and were acutely aware of the risks involved in raising such a large sum. Having seen how quickly bubbles burst and lives shatter, reason told them to go cautiously, but their hearts were set on owning what Marjorie later called ‘our bit of Paradise’.
Tom drove down to Hot Springs to explore options with Mary Hedrick. Both put their cards on the table and approached the negotiations in a spirit of friendship and trust. The result was a deal that suited everyone. Mrs Hedrick agreed to accept $25,000 for the property in easy instalments over the next ten years on the condition that she could continue to live in her part of the house rent-free for as long as she wished. Tom agreed to invest some borrowed capital in turning the property back into a profitable working farm, reasoning that the income from the farm would cover the repayments to Mrs Hedrick. She agreed to manage the property, under Tom and Marjorie’s instructions for a small remuneration, giving her a modest income. On 17 April 1943, Marjorie and Tom made their first payment of $2000 and the property passed into their hands, along with six horses, fifty-one head of cattle, 500 chickens and a flock of ducks. On 1 June, Villa Rustica was renamed ‘Harmony Hills Ranch’.
At the first opportunity Marjorie and Tom moved base to Harmony Hills, retaining the West 106th Street penthouse as their New York pied à terre. Hot Springs was abuzz to have a new celebrity resident and every time Marjorie and Tom drove into town in the big Cadillac to shop or for Marjorie to use the thermal baths, it caused interest and excitement. One of Tom’s first jobs at Harmony Hills was to have two parallel bars constructed in the garden to enable Marjorie to ‘walk’ holding onto them. At first she could manage only one or two steps but later would spend half an hour each morning, laboriously pushing her still leaden limbs back and forth along the full length of the bars.
Marjorie was also fitted with leg braces at this time; a full brace on her weaker right leg and a half brace on her left. She also experimented with walking on crutches, but neither braces not crutches appealed to her vanity and she was never seen in public with either if she could avoid it. Marjorie also returned to Doctors Harreveld and Billig for a second operation, showing remarkable pragmatism considering the pair’s actions had probably caused the death of her unborn baby. The second procedure was similar to the first and equally fruitless. Marjorie had not yet given up hope of walking one day, but for the time being had exhausted all the options available to help her achieve that goal.
Simply being at Harmony Hills and knowing that the property was theirs was a tonic to Marjorie. With the help of a couple of the farm hands, she was lifted onto the back of one of the horses and rode for the first time since her illness, trotting around the property looking at the livestock, the crops and the scenery and experiencing a freedom reminiscent of times that now seemed to belong to a different lifetime. She also spent a great deal of time in the garden, Tom wheeling her out to a flower bed, lifting her onto a rug on the ground, then leaving her to attack weeds with trowel and hand fork. Marjorie enjoyed this work in the garden and on one memorable afternoon when their local senator called unexpectedly, an immobilised Marjorie had to greet him from the rug, covered with soil and reeking of fertiliser.12
Tom also acquired a black and tan German Shepherd dog, whose name has been lost to history, and a pure white one, named ‘Snow King’. These were superseded in later years by another pair of white German Shepherds, appropriately named ‘Tristan’ and ‘Isolde’. These creatures were devoted to their owners, and especially to Marjorie, whom they protected ferociously. No one arriving at Harmony Hills could leave their car until either Tom or Marjorie called the dogs to heel.
The ‘other’ Tristan and Isolde was still a bone of contention. Marjorie was now singing Isolde’s Narrative and Curse and the Liebestod in concert regularly, and performances with the New York Philharmonic under Fritz Reiner, in Seattle with Beecham, and in Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago provoked widespread interest in hearing her perform the whole opera again. Karl Alwin, in charge of the Miami Symphony, offered Marjorie two complete performances in concert, but she had to decline, as the dates clashed with previous commitments. Marjorie also sang the Liebestod on radio twice during the summer and fall of 1943 and on both occasions there were calls asking why she was not singing the role at the Met. Beecham was also now vociferously advocating that Marjorie should take over the role at the Met, having suffered agonies (his words) in the pit while Traubel dodged Isolde’s top notes.
Edward Johnson finally found the solution. Traubel was contracted to sing the five scheduled performances of Tristan und Isolde during the 1943–44 season, while Marjorie had been allocated Venus in each of the eight performances of Tannhäuser—five in New York and one each in Milwaukee, Chicago and Cleveland. Between the third and fourth performances of Tannhäuser, Johnson rang and asked: ‘How would you like to sing Isolde for us on March fourteenth?’ Marjorie admitted that the question took her so much by surprise that she almost dropped the telephone and had difficulty containing her excitement as she answered, as calmly as she could, that she would be delighted to.
The performance on 14 March was a matinee and not part of the regular subscription season at the Met; it was one of the benefit performances the company gave most years for charity. On this occasion the charity involved was the Grenfell Missionary Association, the president of which was a great fan of Marjorie’s. He had suggested the opera and the singer, giving Johnson an excuse should Traubel or anyone else object. As it was for charity, Melchior had not objected when asked to sing Tristan and soon entered into the spirit of the event without any of the pettiness he had recently displayed. Kerstin Thorborg was delighted to sing Brangäne with her friend, Julius Huehn was again the strong-armed Kurvenal, Emanuel List sang King Marke and Beecham conducted. The mise en scène devised for Montreal was adapted to the Met stage and worked almost as well as it had there. The only mishap arose when Melchior found he did not have sufficient space in which to ‘die’ and had to move twice, after he had supposedly expired, to get into a comfortable enough position to last out the remainder of the opera. But nothing could detract from Marjorie’s triumph.
As had been the case with Marjorie’s first Venus, massive public interest had prompted the press to send along photographers to make a visual record of her first Isolde at the Met. The result is a series of candid photographs taken at rehearsal and during the performance. One of these in particular is, as the saying goes, a picture worth a thousand words. We see Isolde gesturing to Brangäne to prepare the goblet of poisoned wine, while Tristan stands self-consciously with his back turned to her. The essence of Marjorie’s Isolde is distilled into that gesture—nobility, pride, determination and scorn are reflected on her upturned face and are echoed by her imperiously stretched arm and the thrust of her fluttering fingers. So potent is the image that it is almost possible to hear Marjorie’s voice upbraiding her servant, and then coercing Tristan into drinking the poison.
We also have a clutch of reviews, more detailed and more scholarly than those that were written in Montreal. Jerome Bohm in the New York Tribune reported:
One scarcely missed Miss Lawrence’s ability to move about, so strong was the lure of her personality and so apposite her gestures and her facial play. Her identification with the aggrieved Irish princess was complete. In the first act, her singing was profoundly stirring in its realization of the impassioned music, subtly coloured to suggest its shifting moods from the brooding, through the ironic to the tempestuous. It is many years since New York has heard so veracious an account of this portion of the score. The raging Isolde of the first act gave way to a meltingly tender and womanly impersonation in the second act.13
Bohm noted, as did most of the other critics, that Marjorie seemed a little tired by the end of the long love duet, understandable considering how much she had already given and the enormous stress the occasion must have inflicted upon her. But she rallied for the Liebestod. Oscar Thompson told readers of the New York Sun:
Miss Lawrence was Isolde, because she sang Isolde’s music as it should be sung, knowingly and with amplitude of tone. In the second act she sang the high Cs which we have not heard since Kirsten Flagstad began to ignore them in her last years here. These, with the climactic Bs in the first act were projected into the house with all the characteristic energy and power of this soprano before her illness.14
Thompson predicted that Marjorie’s Isolde would become a fixture at the Met like her Venus and would be heard for many seasons to come. He was wrong. Chicago demanded to hear Marjorie as Isolde during the spring tour and she gave her final performance of the role with the Met company in that city a month later.15 What may seem inexplicable is not really hard to explain. Traubel stood by her ultimatum and Johnson gave in. It was better to have a mediocre Isolde who could also appear as Brünnhilde, than no Ring Cycle at all—and Johnson was still being accused of mounting ‘freak shows’.
As with the Montreal performance, we have no recordings of either the New York or the Chicago Tristan und Isolde—their lack being all the more regrettable because of the superiority of the Met cast. We do, however, have a complete Tannhäuser taken from a broadcast of Marjorie’s third performance of the season, about a month before her Isolde. Melchior sings the title role, Astrid Varnay sings Elisabeth, Wolfram is sung by Huehn and Kipnis is the sonorous Landgrave, with Paul Breisach conducting. Wagner’s ‘goddess of love’ is a cardboard character and offers only a fraction of the vocal and dramatic opportunities of Isolde, but when we hear how Marjorie sings certain phrases in this broadcast we get an inkling of what her Isolde must have been like.
Sonically this is not one of the better Met broadcasts, but it is of enormous historical importance, preserving one of the most publicised assumptions of any role in the company’s history. Through the crackle and distortion we can hear the ‘sensuous, sustained song of Geliebter, komm!’ referred to by Downes in his review of the testimonial gala. The warmth of Marjorie’s middle voice, which had made her Salome so sexy, served Venus equally well. On this occasion the audience does not interrupt the performance when Venus curses Tannhäuser, but we can hear why this occurred elsewhere. It is also a pleasure to hear broad sensuous phrasing and top notes taken with ease, where most Venuses struggle and lose momentum. Listening to the young and vocally insecure Astrid Varnay doing her best as Elisabeth in the subsequent acts also highlights just how splendid Marjorie’s voice still was and how accomplished her singing remained.
This recorded performance was also not without its offstage drama. After the Venusberg scene the curtain was raised so Marjorie and Melchior could take a bow together. The applause continued after the curtain fell again, but before it was raised a second time, Désiré Defrère hurried Melchior off stage so Marjorie could take a solo bow. The applause doubled and Defrère ordered that the curtain remain up for almost five minutes. Melchior stood in the wings for a while, fuming, then stormed off to his dressing room. So angry was he that he refused to take a solo bow after the next act.16
While petty battles raged at the Met, much larger and deadlier were those being fought in the Pacific, South-East Asia, Europe and North Africa. Marjorie, like everyone else in the United States, had followed the course of the war through newspapers and was appalled at the wholesale slaughter of Allied troops, horrified at the treatment of civilian populations and the atrocities committed on prisoners of war by the Axis forces. In the spirit of ‘helping others’ Marjorie and Tom both longed to make a contribution in whatever way they could to the Allied war effort.
As soon as she had become established once again, Marjorie offered her services to the United Services Organisations (USO)—a branch of the United Sates military that presented camp shows at home and abroad. Marjorie was welcomed onto the USO’s huge roster of artists, which already included Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Lily Pons. Marjorie’s first assignment was a concert at Fort Hancock, which formed part of the key defences of New York Harbour. For this and any subsequent camp concerts, she was advised to sing ‘lighter’ music, but Marjorie rebelled at that and in the end was proven right.
What ridiculous impulse was it that made some people, and people in authority, too, think that because men had been put into uniforms their taste had suffered some strange metamorphosis enabling them to appreciate only the flippant and the trivial? Before I had finished my concerts in war areas, I had sung to hundreds of thousands of fighting men of all nationalities and it was a rare occurrence for me to give a concert without having many of the men come to me afterwards and thank me for having sung good music to them.17
Seated on a settee and wearing one of her most glamorous gowns, Marjorie sang ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ (by way of introduction); this was followed by Purcell, Brahms, Schubert and Wagner, with the evening rounded off by English, Scottish and American songs. A small chamber orchestra accompanied her, and the troops at Fort Hancock loved the concert. In her diary that night Marjorie wrote ‘Thank God, the boys like me. I’m so happy I could cry!’18
Marjorie returned for an annual concert at Fort Hancock for the remainder of the war, and for several years after she was adopted as part of the establishment’s honorary personnel. Her first appearance at Fort Hancock, which took place after her return to the Met, prompted the camp to produce a handbill with a drawing of a very nubile young woman reclining seductively on a couch, her nakedness barely disguised by a diaphanous drape. Beneath the drawing was the caption ‘Marjorie Lawrence as Venus, the Goddess of Love—A rare treat. Don’t miss it!’ Marjorie was amused and flattered by the drawing, but a few in the audience were probably disappointed when a fully robed Marjorie, carrying a few more pounds than she once had, appeared before them and opened her program with ‘The Lord’s Prayer’.
Between her regular engagements, Marjorie appeared at camps and military hospitals all over the United States. Her visits to hospitals (in her wheelchair) were an enormous morale booster for injured and sick men. She would sing for them and then mingle and chat with them about their experiences, their families and their hopes for the future. Many had no future, but Marjorie maintained her composure and her cheerfulness and a few minutes spent with her was often their last pleasant memory. At one of these hospital concerts, a spokesperson for the patients asked if they might adopt Marjorie as their ‘Chin-up Girl’. ‘We have plenty of pin-up girls’, he explained, ‘but we need a chin-up girl’. Marjorie was deeply touched and thereafter the USO billed her as ‘The US Army’s favourite chin-up girl’.
Marjorie also appeared at dozens of War Bonds rallies, was invited to launch a Liberty Ship19 and made recordings of some songs for Columbia which were packaged in an album with the title Marjorie Lawrence’s Records for Fighting Men.20 Making these generous efforts on the home front was satisfying, but Marjorie wanted to emulate other entertainers who were being sent by the USO to the battlefields of the Pacific and South-East Asia to entertain the troops.
I wanted to get nearer the thick of things. At first the army was very reluctant to send me and my wheelchair to the battlefronts, saying I could expect no special consideration if I did go abroad. And I was told very bluntly that the authorities were not prepared to accept responsibility for what might happen to me and my health. But I could not be fobbed off! Whenever I got close enough to anyone with influence—American, Australian, English—I submitted them to what Australians call an earbashing and begged them to pull whatever strings needed pulling to get me overseas.21
An invitation duly arrived from the Australian Government for Marjorie to tour army bases and military hospitals in northern Australia, singing for Australian, American, British, Indian and Dutch troops stationed there. Austin Wilder wrote to Sir Frank Tait (head of J. & N. Tait) suggesting that a public recital tour of the southern states of Australia under the Tait banner might be combined with the camp and hospital tour. Tait showed interest, but knowing how keen Marjorie was to sing for the troops in Australia, offered very paltry fees as an opening gambit. Austin Wilder took this up with Tait’s agent in New York, Dorothy Stewart, and a better deal was struck. Wilder also began negotiations with the ABC for Marjorie to sing with their orchestras in Australia—without telling them about the arrangements already made with Tait. This resulted in yet another clash between Marjorie and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Meanwhile Tom went into battle with the military authorities, trying desperately (and in the end unsuccessfully) to persuade them to lift the ban on civilians flying across the Pacific.
Between 15 and 19 May, Marjorie made a short propaganda film for the Australian Red Cross, to be shown during her forthcoming visit, before returning to Montreal for another performance of Tristan und Isolde. The following week the US military bestowed the honorary ranks of ‘major’ on Marjorie and ‘captain’ on Tom—to allow them entry to militarised zones and the use of officers’ messes on their tour. It was also, as the officer who delivered their uniforms put it, ‘Just a bit of insurance, ma’am, in case you should fall into enemy hands’. Marjorie doubted the Japanese would be overly intimidated by a major in a wheelchair or a captain who had been exempted from military service because of an old leg injury, but she was proud to wear the smart uniform and thought her oak leaf cluster looked rather nice pinned to her concert gowns. Fiorello la Guardia (who admitted he was envious of Marjorie for organising her way to the front) gave her and Tom a send-off at City Hall and they embarked from the airfield that now bears his name, on what would prove to be a trying, humbling and ultimately, deeply satisfying new adventure.