MRS. McCORMICK RETURNS
While Harold McCormick was trying manfully to cope with his second wife, his first wife returned to Chicago, ready to pick up the sceptre of social leadership that she had laid down eight years earlier. There had been speculation that, after the divorce, Edith McCormick might abandon Chicago and move to New York, where most of her relatives lived, but she made it clear that this was not to be. The big house at 1000 Lake Shore Drive was reopened, its furniture uncovered, its chandeliers removed from their bags, the rugs rolled out, the paintings, silver, and china brought up from their vaults. The gold service would once more be brought out.
The years with Dr. Jung, however, had changed Edith in certain ways. For one thing, she appeared less interested in the welfare of the Chicago Opera, and less interested in displaying her furs and jewels, although she still turned out in them from time to time. Her new crusade, not surprisingly, was for psychoanalysis, and one of her notions was to turn her long-unused Villa Turicum into a psychoanalytic center, staffed with Jungians who would provide psychiatric care and counseling for the entire city of Chicago. She also had a new man—of sorts.
His name was Edwin Krenn, and Edith described him as an “architect,” though he did not appear to practice at his profession and had no visible means of support, and as “the son of a famous European painter,” though the painter was never identified. She had met Krenn at Dr. Jung’s clinic and, naturally, she described him as brilliant. She had selected him to help her reorient Chicago toward psychology and psychoanalysis. “It was pointed out to me,” she said on her arrival, “that psychologically Chicago will be the greatest center in the world. That is why I have come back here to live. That is why I have planted my roots in the soil, hoping they will grow deeper and deeper. I am vitally interested in psychology.” For psychology, she would be Chicago’s standard bearer. Krenn’s duties would be to help her carry her dreams to fruition.
Chicago did not care much for young Mr. Krenn. Short, plump, baby-faced and dandified, he seemed mainly interested in his collection of custom-tailored suits, which soon numbered more than two hundred. One Chicagoan described him as “small and blond, with pudgy, dimpled fingers,” and another was reminded of a “newly hatched duckling.” It was perfectly clear that Krenn was being kept by Mrs. McCormick, but it was also obvious to everyone that their relationship was entirely chaste.
Edith McCormick continued to be a woman of punctuality and ritual, but with Krenn she devised a somewhat new routine. He had been given a large suite of rooms at the Drake Hotel, just across the street from 1000 Lake Shore Drive, and at precisely 9:15 every morning Edith would telephone him there, and they would plan their day. At 1:00 P.M. on the dot, Krenn would arrive at Edith’s door bearing a small floral nosegay for his patroness. Then they would lunch. Usually they would lunch at home, but occasionally they would be driven to a nearby hotel or restaurant. Whenever they were observed together, it was noticed that their conversations were stiff and formal—even sedate—and that they never addressed each other by first names. If there were no other guests, they spoke in formal German. Their afternoons were devoted to language lessons, which they took in separate rooms, and then, around four, Krenn would reappear. The Rolls Royce would be waiting and, with the chauffeur and footman and at least one but sometimes two detectives, they would go to the movies. Sometimes they would manage to take in as many as four movies in an afternoon and evening, and the driver and footman always parked outside the theatre, even when the film happened to be showing in one of Chicago’s seedier neighborhoods. Then they would be driven home, where two butlers, stationed on either side of the front door, waited to usher Mrs. McCormick in. Unless it was an exceptionally early evening, Krenn did not enter Mrs. McCormick’s house. Everything was rigidly circumspect; that way, there could be no talk, no scandal. Edith explained why she had lost her taste for travel. She could see as much of the world as she wanted in the movies.
Usually, after her movie-going evenings, Edith went straight to bed. But sometimes she would summon her staff and spend an hour or so rearranging the furniture. This was definitely post-Jungian behavior, the sort of thing she had never done before.
Some people suggested that Edwin Krenn was an emotional substitute for Edith’s dead son. Certainly he was a more reliable person than any of her remaining three children, all of whom had gone on from structured childhood to lead variously disordered lives. Her son Fowler, who would later become president of International Harvester, had, in 1921, married Mrs. Anne “Fifi” Stillman. A considerable difference in their ages could not be ignored. In fact, Mrs. Stillman was the mother of Fowler’s Princeton roommate. Furthermore, Mrs. Stillman and her ex-husband had been principals in a well-publicized divorce fight, in which adultery had been charged on both sides. Fifi Stillman had claimed that her husband was keeping a Follies girl. Her husband countercharged that she had exchanged favors with an Indian guide in the backwoods of Canada.
Of the two girls, Mathilde—“the pretty one”—had run off at seventeen and married a Swiss riding instructor named Max Oser. He was forty-seven. Muriel—“the plain one”—had the strangest marital history of all. Her first marriage had been a “spiritual” one, to the ghost of Lieutenant G. Alexander McKinlock, Jr., a soldier who had been killed in World War I and whom she had never met. Then she “divorced” her ghost, went on the stage briefly under the name of Naranna Micor, tried her hand at singing, tried running a fashionable dress shop—none of these endeavors was successful—and then married a man named Elisha Dyer Hubbard who was also of her parents’ generation. A wounded First World War veteran, Hubbard was virtually bedridden, but he managed to survive five years of marriage to Muriel before expiring, during the course of which Muriel became a chronic alcoholic. She insisted on having her husband’s dog attend his funeral. Her brother Fowler tried unsuccessfully to have his sister declared insane.
If Edith McCormick had perhaps not been the perfect mother, she certainly found the perfect pet in Edwin Krenn. He doted on her, and except at bedtime they were inseparable. She would make no move without Krenn’s advice. This, alas, would be her downfall, because, if Edith had one fatal flaw, it was her belief that she possessed a financial genius equal to her famous father’s. Though she had all the money she could possibly need, she began to be obsessed with the idea of creating an entire new fortune of her own. It may have been a notion Dr. Jung had instilled in her—that she needed an “independence” of her Rockefeller inheritance.
Though nothing much had come of the idea to turn Villa Turicum into a psychological center—the house remained empty and unused—her interest in Jungian analysis remained strong. She boasted that, through analysis, she had cured herself of tuberculosis on three separate occasions. Soon she began taking on patients of her own—one of whom, she said proudly, was herself, and many of whom no doubt consulted her out of curiosity to meet the celebrated Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Soon their number reached a hundred. Still, she was choosy about those she would treat. One Chicago woman had come bubbling up to her, saying, “Oh, Mrs. McCormick, I would adore having you give me some lessons in psychoanalysis!” Edith’s icy reply was, “I could do nothing for you, and you could do nothing for me.” At the same time, other plans—which had nothing to do with treating the mentally or emotionally disoriented—were brewing in her mind and that of Edwin Krenn.
She wanted to build a city. Not a city for the poor, the ill, or the deranged, but a city for the grandly affluent. This was, after all, still the 1920s; affluence seemed everywhere, and limitlessly on the rise. Her city would be built along the luxurious lines of Palm Beach or Beverly Hills, but it would be built on the shore of Lake Michigan. She would call her city Edithton and, naturally, her architect would be Edwin Krenn.
To carry out this project, she formed the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust, initially financed with $5,000,000 worth of her Standard Oil stocks. In charge of the trust she place Krenn and a boarding-school classmate of his named Edward Dato, who had followed Krenn to Chicago. Edith proudly sent a copy of the trust prospectus to her aging father in New York, along with a detailed description of the Edithton development. John D. Rockefeller was less than sanguine about the project. He wrote to his daughter, “While you are a brilliant and mature woman of great mental capacity, I cannot forget you are my own flesh and blood. Therefore, it seems to be my duty to warn you of the pitfalls and vagaries of life. I would urge you to select an honest, courageous and capable man to advise you in these affairs.”
Obviously Edith believed that she had found two such men in Krenn and Dato, and plans for Edithton continued. Offices were established in downtown Chicago. Over fifteen hundred acres of lakeshore property south of Kenosha, Wisconsin, were purchased for more than $1,000 an acre. Naturally, when sellers learned that the person buying all this land was Edith McCormick, prices went up. Four million dollars was spent in dredging and landscaping a marina capable of berthing large yachts. Krenn had been much impressed by the Spanish-style architecture of such cities as Palm Beach, Coral Gables, and Santa Barbara, and had decreed that the castles which would be built for this millionaires’ paradise must follow that example. Red-tiled roofs, bell towers, courtyards, and Moorish arches abounded—at least on the drawing boards—and every mansion’s design had to have Krenn’s approval.
As the building of Edithton began to consume more and more of her time—not to mention her money—there were fewer of her grand entertainments, but Edith had not forgotten how to give them. One such was her seated luncheon for eighty honoring the visit to Chicago of Queen Marie of Rumania. For one New Year’s Eve, she shifted the venue of her party across the street to Krenn’s hotel, the Drake, and in Chicago with Love Arthur Meeker recalled, “The room was full of balloons. There was Edith, stiff as a poker, gravely batting them back and forth across our table, because that was expected of her.”
That there is no glittering city of Edithton on the Michigan shore today is to a large extent Edith’s own fault. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Krenn or Dato was cheating her, but Edith’s approach to the project was so unbusinesslike that the young men’s business methods suffered as a result. She refused, for example, to leave Chicago to visit the building site. (In fact, from the time of her return from Switzerland until her death, she never set foot outside the city limits.) She would not look at the company’s books. She rarely even visited the downtown offices, and on one of these occasions her only instruction was to tell Krenn to tell one of the employees to stop smoking. When Krenn tried to give her a receipt for several million dollars’ worth of bonds she was turning over to him, she waved him away. Everything, she said, should be based on mutual respect and trust; she did not believe in legal documentation. As a result, enormous sums of money passed into and out of the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust unrecorded.
Then came the shattering events on Wall Street in the autumn of 1929, and the death knell of Edithton was struck. Incredible as it seemed, Edith had lost everything—everything, that is, except some unwieldy and unsalable pieces of real estate, for which the tax collector wanted taxes. Everyone had assumed that Edith’s fortune was locked in iron-clad family trusts, but everyone had been wrong. The fortune, quite simply, was gone.
Her brother, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was summoned from New York to try to make some sense of Edith’s affairs. Her relatives chipped in, and Edith was moved from 1000 Lake Shore Drive to a suite at the Drake, where she was placed on a rigid, though quite generous, family allowance of $1,000 a day.
To make her situation more dolorous, she had discovered that she had cancer. Vainly, she tried to cure herself by psychology, but finally even she admitted that she had failed. Arthur Meeker recalls her toward the end: “Her eyes, my mother said—when the latter called to say good-bye before leaving for the summer, and they both knew it meant good-bye for good—were like a frightened child’s.”
She died in the summer of 1932. She was only sixty.
After her death, it was revealed that, in the years since their divorce, Harold McCormick had sent Edith a red rose every year on her birthday. It was also revealed that, during those same years, Edith had kept Harold’s room at 1000 Lake Shore Drive exactly as he had left it—not a stick of furniture changed or moved, his suits still hanging in the closets—in hopes that he might some day return.
Even Edith’s father survived her. So did Harold, who was the same age—they had been childhood friends first, sweethearts later—and of course her ungrateful children, who would now have to wait for their father’s death before receiving any significant inheritance. Harold McCormick took up whistling. He even went on the radio to offer a whistling program. In 1938, he took up marriage again. Recovering in southern California from a series of heart attacks, he married his nurse, Adah Wilson, who was thirty years younger than he. It was his only really tranquil marriage, unsettled only briefly by a breach-of-promise suit for $2,000,000 instituted by a Mrs. Olive Colby. She settled out of court for $12,500, and Adah Wilson McCormick nursed her husband through his final years until his death in 1941.
Later, Adah remarried, had a son, and died bizarrely in a fall from the lip of the Grand Canyon.
If there were any justice in the world, we would have to report that the faithless Ganna Walska squandered her ill-gotten gains on drugs and gigolos, took to the streets, died of a lingering and painful ailment, and is buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere outside Paris.
Actually, nothing of the sort happened. She invested her money very shrewdly, and bought, among other things, the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Here the frustrated performer could work off her histrionic energies as the proprietor of a successful and fashionable theatre. Her new Paris house in the rue du Bac became a sort of salon for visiting artists and intellectuals, and one wall of her drawing room was covered with the exquisite sketches of Erté, the famous theatrical costume designer, including a number of designs he had done for Ganna. She also maintained a handsome winter home in Santa Barbara, where she entertained visitors with fanciful tales of her operatic career, and how this career, of such great promise, had been blocked and sabotaged by mischievous others.
She laid the blame for most of her career misfortunes at the feet of the perfidious McCormicks.
Among the stories she liked to tell were these:
The producer of the Ravinia Summer Opera outside Chicago had pursued her for weeks, begging her to perform for him, offering her the then-unheard-of sum of $1,000 a performance. Finally, she agreed to accept his offer. But mysteriously the promised contract was never delivered. She learned later what had happened. Edith McCormick had heard about the offer, and had bribed the producer, offering him enough money for a whole season of operas, provided Ganna Walska never be permitted to set foot in Ravinia.
She had sung the lead soprano role in The Mikado one summer in Nice. (She actually had done this, at least for one performance.) Critics from all over the world had been ecstatic—all, that is, except the reviewer from the Chicago Tribune, a McCormick-owned paper. Later she found out why. Bribery again. The critic has been paid by a rival soprano to write an unfavorable review. (In the files of the Chicago Tribune is a cablegram dated February 22, 1925, saying that the mayor of Nice had banned Ganna Walska from giving another performance in his city; the audience’s reaction to the first performance had been so vociferously unfriendly that the mayor feared that any further appearances would erupt into a riot, in which the beautiful star might suffer bodily harm. The cable added: “M. Audier, the director of the opera, concurs with the Mayor’s opinion.”)
There had always been some question about Ganna Walska’s age. Most published accounts of her gave her birth date as “about 1893.” But in September of 1967, in an interview for Opera magazine, M. Erté, who knew her well, told the interviewer that she was then “about eighty-five,” which would place her actual birth date some ten years earlier.
In the spring of 1971 she appeared briefly in the news when some items from her jewelry collection—including one large diamond which she had named The Mogul—went on the block at Sotheby–Parke Bernet and fetched a tidy $916,185. It was not that she needed the money. It was just that she didn’t wear any of the big pieces any more.
Living quietly in the semitropic loveliness of her Santa Barbara estate, called Lotus Land, she became known as a gently dignified, sweet-faced little old lady, always interested in the arts. By the early 1980s, though age had slowed down her activities somewhat, she was still willing to open her beautiful home and spectacular gardens for charity benefits, particularly when the beneficiary had something to do with music or the theatre.
And, as this is written—in the early summer of 1981—that is where Ganna Walska is: alive and well at Lotus Land, every inch a grande dame.