MRS. McCORMICK DEPARTS
In a way, the tragedy of the McCormick marriage was that both Edith and Harold McCormick had too much money. The legendary “joining of two great American fortunes” has not happened all that often in American history, but it had happened in the McCormicks’ case, and the result was that there was no way one partner in the union could bring financial pressure to bear upon the other to bring the other into line. Edith, enormously rich, could do what she wanted to. Harold, enormously rich, could do the same. Edith was nowhere near as pious a person as her churchgoing, Bible-spouting father, but she did, she often said, see marriage as a sacred commitment, and the idea of divorce appalled her. At the same time, though she was too much of a grande dame ever to speak of it, the awareness of her husband’s increasing infidelities must have been both painful and embarrassing for her.
Edith, furthermore, was not the kind of woman who could easily confide her troubles to another. Even the women in Chicago whom she considered her friends were hardly intimates. The friendships were always very formal and polite, and the ladies addressed each other as “Mrs. Pullman,” “Mrs. Armour,” and “Mrs. Swift,” hardly ever relaxing to the point of first names. For one of these dowagers to have touched a luncheon companion’s arm and said, “My husband is having an affair—what should I do?” would have been an unheard-of breach of etiquette, a shocking lapse of taste.
In Europe, however, two men were beginning to be talked about in the United States for the new kind of help they were trying to offer people. They were Sigmund Freud and his sometime colleague Carl Jung, and what they were practicing and theorizing about was psychoanalysis, or, as it was called at the time, “synthetic psychology.” Freud’s special bailiwick seemed to be sexual psychotherapy, and some of his theories about Oedipus and Electra complexes—and phrases such as “penis envy”—were regarded as very startling. Dr. Jung seemed less sexually oriented, more focused on problems above the waist, on the entire individual. Jung seemed to many people more rational, less revolutionary, more liberal and practical in his approach. It was to Carl Jung in Switzerland that Edith McCormick—unhappy in her marriage, no doubt bored and depressed by her surroundings—decided to commit herself. When she departed from Chicago, it was assumed that she would be gone only a few months. Her stay under Dr. Jung’s auspices would last eight years.
Before leaving, Edith assured Chicago that her husband would be “in charge” of the Chicago Opera Company in her absence. Unfortunately, he quickly turned out to be a poor choice as her deputy. Whether Harold McCormick actually had an affair with Mary Garden is unknown, but one of the things he did was to install Miss Garden as director of the Chicago Opera Company, which she agreed to be provided her title on the program be listed as “directa,” the proper feminine form of director, as she saw it. McCormick had said something to her about this being his last season connected with the opera, and had indicated to his new directa that he wished to depart in “a blaze of glory.” Miss Garden decided to take him at his word, and in the process she very nearly succeeded in scuttling the entire company. She engaged more artists than there were evenings for them to perform, and ran up enormous bills for elaborate costumes, props, and scenery. When Miss Garden had completed her year of directaship, the Chicago Opera Company was a million dollars in the red, but this fazed the glamorous directa not at all. In her book, Mary Garden’s Story, she wrote of the whole experience: “The newspapers said that the company lost one million dollars during the season I was director. I don’t know because I had nothing to do with the business end of it. It was news to me. I do know we finished the way Mr. McCormick wanted us to finish—in a blaze of glory. That’s what he asked for and that’s what he got. If it cost a million dollars, I’m sure it was worth it.”
Harold McCormick, meanwhile, was busily pursuing other interests. He was nothing if not fun loving. He was also very much a dandy, fond of jeweled cuff links and stickpins and rings, bright striped shirts with contrasting collars, embroidered waistcoats and gray mohair spats. The newspapers usually referred to Harold McCormick as “the rich playboy,” a term he rather resented. After all, he pointed out, hadn’t he done all the right things? He had graduated from Princeton, married John D. Rockefeller’s daughter, fathered children, gone to work for his father’s company, toiled in behalf of such respectable causes as the Chicago Opera. Still, he admitted that he was justly regarded as something of a nonpareil with the ladies, and when he spoke of himself it was often in the innocent manner of Shall-I-compare-me-to-a-summer’s-day?*
When his brothers and sisters complained to Harold about his extramarital dalliances, he was also resentful. After all, he reminded them, when a man’s wife had departed his bed and company for an indefinite stay with a Swiss analyst, was the red-blooded husband expected to live like a monk until such time as the strong-willed wife saw fit to return? Of course, it was an argument that put the cart before the horse, since it was Harold’s dalliances that had sent Edith abroad to seek counseling in the first place.
In any case, long before Mary Garden had completed her term as directa of the Chicago Opera, Harold McCormick had become heavily involved with a Polish soprano named Ganna Walska, a flamboyant, full-bodied creature whose singing talent was regarded as inconsiderable, but who did have a knack for attracting rich older men who then had the sense to die and leave her their money. Her first husband, Baron Arcadie d’Engor, was killed in the First World War. She next married Dr. Joseph Fraenkel, a wealthy New York throat specialist she had consulted about a throat problem. Much older than she, he had been so smitten by her that he proposed during their second appointment. When he died, Dr. Fraenkel left her half a million dollars.
Dr. Fraenkel was still living, however, when Mme. Walska, as she called herself professionally, first met Harold McCormick. Her ambition was to sing with the Chicago Opera, and, learning that McCormick was in New York on business, she telephoned him in his suite at the Plaza and requested a meeting. McCormick tried to put her off, explaining that he was just on his way out the door to catch a train. With this information, Walska stationed herself in the lobby and waylaid him there. McCormick was evidently sufficiently impressed. Within a few months, Dr. Fraenkel had died and Ganna Walska and Harold McCormick were sailing to Europe together aboard the Aquitania.
The story at this point becomes as complicated as the most improbable opera plot. Also sailing on the Aquitania was one Alexander Smith Cochran, whom the newspapers of the day called “the world’s richest bachelor.” Cochran was said to be worth $80,000,000, and reportedly proposed marriage to Ganna the first night they met. Now Ganna obviously felt she could have her pick of millionaires. McCormick possessed a couple of advantages: he was probably richer than Cochran, and could also get Ganna on the Chicago Opera stage. The disadvantage, however, was that McCormick was already married and Cochran was not. Clearly, Ganna Walska spent the ocean crossing doing some heavy weighing of the odds.
The purpose of McCormick’s European trip, aside from the pleasure of Ganna’s company on shipboard, was to go to Switzerland and try to persuade Edith to give him a divorce. This took him several weeks of argument, and in the meantime Ganna languished in Paris. So did Mr. Cochran. Finally, reluctantly, Edith McCormick agreed to the divorce, and Harold hurried eagerly back to Paris to give Ganna the good news. He arrived only to learn that she had married Cochran the day before.
He immediately presented himself at the newlyweds’ suite and, as Ganna later wrote in her memoir, tellingly titled Always Room at the Top, “While Mr. Cochran was still sleeping in the next room in his first day of married life, I was pouring coffee for Mr. McCormick … After my sudden marriage I was more preoccupied with Mr. McCormick’s helpless state than with my own thoughts.” She was not too preoccupied, however, to embark upon the next phase of a remarkable double game in which she would successfully refute the theory that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Her career, she explained to McCormick, still came first, and her ambition was still to perform with the Chicago Opera. This Mr. McCormick assured her she could do. But meantime certain perquisites were required from Mr. Cochran—among them a house in Paris on the rue de Lübeck; a Rolls Royce; a sable coat that cost a million francs; a wedding gift, which was to pick out anything she wanted at Cartier’s; “eight or nine” bracelets from the same store; an annual allowance of $100,000 for pin money; and an immediate long holiday at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where she took an entire floor for herself and six servants. Still, she confessed that Cochran failed to satisfy her “inner being.”
Rested from her Riviera vacation, the new Mrs. Cochran now proclaimed herself ready to resume her operatic career and headed for Chicago, where, it was announced, she would sing the title role in Leoncavallo’s Zaza, a little-performed work that was not considered particularly demanding. The debut was scheduled for December 21, 1920, and, since the broad outlines of the Walska-Cochran-McCormick triangle were now a matter of public knowledge, the production promised to be a succès de scandale. Seats for the event quickly sold out. Then, just a few days before the performance, Ganna Walska suddenly departed for Europe again.
Publicly, the reason given for the opera’s cancellation was that it was “not ready.” But from behind the scenes came other stories. The temperamental star, it seemed, refused to take direction. The musical director complained that her singing voice could not achieve sufficient volume to be heard beyond the first row. The New York conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, a McCormick family friend and relative by marriage,* was called upon for assistance and advice. In view of the situation, Damrosch tried to be as tactful as possible. While conceding that Ganna was “very pretty,” he wrote that, unfortunately, from the “absolutely unanimous accounts of my musician friends who have heard her, her voice is absolutely devoid of charm … What a tragedy, if only she would leave art alone, she would be much happier.”
Ganna Walska herself blamed the opera’s cancellation on her husband. Mr. Cochran had objected, she said, to certain scanty costumes she would be required to wear, as well as to a couple of lengthy stage kisses which, being the great actress that she was, she had naturally tried to make realistic. Cochran, meanwhile, had hastily left Chicago just a few hours ahead of his wife, angered, it was said, because she had registered at her hotel as Mme. Ganna Walska, not Mrs. Alexander Cochran. Cochran promptly sued for divorce, and, after briefly considering a countersuit, Ganna decided to grant him one, in return for a cash settlement of $200,000.
Now, by the early spring of 1922, Mme. Ganna Walska and Mr. Harold McCormick were both legally rid of their respective spouses, and were free to marry each other. He was fifty and she about forty—Ganna was always a little vague about her birth date—but before the marriage could take place, McCormick had a bit of business which he felt required to undertake.
In Chicago there was an eminent surgeon named Victor Lespinasse, whose specialty was urology, and who had been hailed by the American Medical Association for his pioneering work on spermatogenesis and sterility. He had been described by The New York Times as the dean of gland transplantation and the “author of the saying that ‘a man is as old as his glands.’” Through Dr. Lespinasse’s technique, it was claimed, an aging man’s flagging sexuality could be restored to the full buoyancy of a teenager’s. On June 12, 1922, Harold McCormick entered a Chicago hospital to undergo one of Dr. Lespinasse’s rejuvenative gland transplants.
It was all supposed to be a closely guarded secret, of course. But somehow the newspapers got hold of it, and Harold McCormick managed to make it all the worse by threatening to sue for libel a paper which reported that he had been implanted with the glands of a monkey. If it had not been a monkey, the papers speculated, then it had to have been a human, and a rumor began to spread that the donor of the glands in question had been a young blacksmith. A parody of Longfellow was soon circulating through the perfumed drawing rooms of the North Shore as well as the saloons of Rush Street:
Under the spreading chestnut tree,
The village smithy stands;
The smith a gloomy man is he;
McCormick has his glands.
Poor Harold. Edith Rockefeller McCormick would never have permitted herself to become a laughingstock. Now her former husband was one. From her Alpine retreat in Switzerland with Dr. Jung, Edith had no comment.
Harold, to celebrate his new-found youthfulness and his freedom from Edith, now ordered Ganna’s birthday present. It consisted of an example of every piece of farm equipment which International Harvester manufactured, and the lot was shipped to her château outside Versailles, where she woke on her birthday morning to find, as she later wrote, “to my great surprise … a whole regiment of robot soldiers.” Two months after the operation, Harold joined Ganna in France, and married her there. At the time, the newspapers suggested that the marriage was probably not legal, since Illinois law required a one-year waiting period between divorce and remarriage. But Harold’s lawyers assured him that the law stated merely that the couple could not be married in Illinois. (To tie up the legal loose ends, the couple were married a second time, in February 1923, at Harold’s mother’s house outside Chicago.) After this ceremony the bridegroom greeted reporters with “Hello boys, this seems like old times. You know, I’ve been in the newspaper so much, I feel like a newspaperman myself.”
Alas, the musical comedy was far from over. Not until a generation later, when Winthrop Rockefeller married “Bobo” Sears—or, still later, in 1959, when Steven Rockefeller married Anne Marie Rasmussen, a Norwegian maid who worked for his mother—would the press have such sport with a marital alliance of two persons from widely different backgrounds. Ganna’s parents, it was pointed out, were Polish peasants. She was described as an “aging diva,” and a “prima donna past her prime,” who had an “impossible voice,” and who had never sung in an important role.
Ganna, of course, was outraged. She still thirsted for—and intended to have—an operatic career, and viewed herself as the victim of sinister forces, cruel fate, a malevolent press, ignorant and jealous critics, and a hostile, uneducated and unappreciative public. “People made about me quite wrong impression,” she wrote to her new sister-in-law in her fractured English with its erratic spellings, “and they imagine that I am foolish, vane, consited personne who imagines that she can sing because she is pretty and through her husband’s money tried to push herself. As I a matter of fact I am entirely, not consited, but wrongly or rightly (to be seen some day!) quite sure that something is in me that I should deliver a message and leave something behind me as an example. I want other people to know that Harold did not marry a foolish woman, but a person who wants to give at cost of terrible suffering and undiscrable misery.”
Undaunted, she forged on. An American concert tour, sponsored by her husband, was an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. She was becoming a public embarrassment not only to her husband but to the entire McCormick family. The family did its best to keep stiff upper lips, but Harold was asked to step down from Harvester’s board. In Ganna’s bitterness at what she considered her unfair treatment, she began to say outrageous things. She stated publicly that she only tolerated Harold because of his money. He had promised her that his money could buy her success and fame, but he had let her down.
Then came the publication of her Always Room at the Top, the “message” she felt she had been put on earth to deliver. In it she revealed that if Harold had disappointed her, she had also disappointed him. Harold, with his freshly transplanted lustiness, had wanted a bed partner. She had expected a Platonic union, a marriage of the minds. Harold, she wrote, tended “to idolize the physical expression of love. Nature in her wisdom having fulfilled him by giving him four children had chosen for his second wife an idealist who was able to put so much value on the richness of his soul that she could not even imagine the possibility of his preferring to seek further for a gross and limited pleasure rather than being satisfied with the divine companionship of the spiritual love she was willing to share with him.” She added, unkindly, that Harold had become “insatiable in his search for the realization of the physical demands—insatiable because they were unattainable for him anymore.”* She hinted that there were other details of her husband’s sexual appetites which she might reveal if and when she so chose.
All this was too much for the McCormicks, including Harold. He and Ganna separated in 1931, and were divorced not long afterward. To be rid of her cost him $6,000,000, roughly one quarter of his Harvester holdings. But at least he silenced her.
“I have my life, he has his,” she told the press. “Every artist must have her rights.”
* Writing to his sister Anita from the Adirondacks in 1925, he marveled at how he had learned “so much about simple living … If you could have seen me washing the dishes after the meal … going to the market and ordering only what was needed … you would have said, ‘Can this be Harold?’—but it was him!”
* Harold McCormick’s older sister, Anita, had married Emmons Blaine, whose sister Margaret was married to Damrosch.
* Considering Ganna’s shaky command of English, it is clear that her “autobiography” was heavily ghostwritten.