LEADING LADY
Eleanor Robson’s first taste of grand opera had been during her long run in New York in Merely Mary Ann. She had met the dramatic soprano Milka Ternina, who was singing Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung, and one night, after the curtain had run down on Mary Ann, the young Miss Robson hurried down to the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street to catch what she could of Mme. Ternina’s performance. When she arrived, the curtain was just going up for the final act, and so she did not have to buy a ticket. But, since there were no seats, she had to stand. She nonetheless got to see and hear one of the ripest and richest scenes in Wagner, the fiery immolation of Brünnhilde. It was theatre beyond theatre, and Eleanor Robson was an instant opera addict.
For all its gorgeousness, opera in the United States just a few years earlier, at the turn of the century, had been in serious trouble. The reason, though it was not immediately apparent to those involved, was simple: opera had become the exclusive domain of the upper crust. In New York, for example, two autumn events—the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Horse Show—marked the “official” beginning of the winter social season. One attended these events to demonstrate that one had successfully returned from Newport, to show off one’s new clothes and jewels, and to indicate that one was prepared to resume society’s demanding rituals. In the press, these occasions were treated more as fashion shows than as artistic or athletic performances, and the implication that opera was only for the carriage trade had an intimidating effect on ordinary mortals.
Merely attending the opera, furthermore, conveyed no social status. It mattered where you sat, and the only acceptable seats were the little, and fairly uncomfortable, gilt-and-red-plush chairs in the arc of private boxes that ringed the first balcony—the Diamond, Golden, or Dress Circle, as it was variously called. No other seating in the auditorium was socially acceptable. The opera boxes, each with its owner’s name engraved on a brass plaque at its entrance, provided a compendium of People Who Counted in New York society. There was not even a way for the ambitious parvenu or outsider to climb into this perfumed circle. The boxes were sold for as much as $30,000 each, but even so they rarely became available, and were passed on from one generation of a family to the next. Ownership of opera boxes was also strictly controlled by a board of directors, who saw to it that only the right people were admitted to the club. No Jews, of course.
Meanwhile, even within the Dress Circle there was stratification. Most of the boxes were owned outright by box holders, but a few less desirable ones could be leased. (Jacob Schiff, the banker, who was an opera lover and also happened to be Jewish, was made a box-holding exception, and was permitted to lease a box “for certain performances.”) There was no logic to it. Some of the “best” boxes, such as Mrs. Astor’s Number 7, had the poorest sight lines to the stage, and in all the boxes the acoustics were generally bad. It didn’t matter. By 1900, society’s rules had been laid down: if one didn’t own a box at the opera, one might as well do what Eleanor Robson had done, and stand.
Opera had become something one didn’t attend to hear and see music performed. One went to opera to be seen, and to see who else was there to be seen. It mattered little what was going on onstage, though there was a marked preference for Italian opera—perhaps because Italian was a language almost no one understood, and there was therefore no reason to take the trouble to follow the words. In the boxes, the behavior of the people who thought of themselves as setting the social standards had become notoriously rude. While sopranos onstage strained to reach high C, the box holders chatted and visited and waved to one another, or departed mid-aria to refresh themselves at the bar. Mrs. Astor had set the example of arriving late and leaving early, and others followed her lead. Since she had demonstrated her preference for Monday-night performances, that became the most fashionable night at the opera. During the rest of the week the boxes stood largely empty.
That the gentry should have established such an impregnable beachhead in “democratic” America on an art form which, in nineteenth-century Europe, had been popular with poor and rich alike, might seem peculiar. But the same thing was going on on the Continent as well, and opera-going was becoming an increasingly aristocratic pastime. As the kings took over the opera house, the commoners moved out. In New York, the gentrification of the Met had meant that opera performers and managers had grown more cynical. When no one was paying attention anyway, when opera was simply a high-society status symbol, why trouble to deliver a good performance? When no one cared, when the stars of the evening were the men and women in the boxes and not the poor souls struggling through the music onstage, what did it matter whom you booked or what opera you decided to put on?
Unfortunately, the situation at the Met had begun to be noticed where it hurt, not in the boxes but at the box office. Ordinary New Yorkers, who might have enjoyed an evening of opera, were discouraged from it. Sitting in their plebeian orchestra seats, they disliked being scrutinized, through lorgnettes and opera glasses, by their betters in the Dress Circle above. There were pleasanter ways in which these people could entertain themselves. Others, who had no knowledge of opera, were usually too daunted by the experience of attending once ever to want to try it twice. The language of the singers was unintelligible, the complicated plots were difficult to follow, and no attempt was made to educate or enlighten this group of prospective customers in the skimpy program notes. And so the New York opera-going public had been reduced essentially to two groups: the “swells” in the boxes, and the Bohemians—actual opera buffs who took the cheap seats in the topmost gallery. To these, a third group was occasionally added: out-of-town tourists who bought orchestra seats in order to crane their necks upward and backward to stare at the swells.
All this began to change, however, in 1903. This was the year that Otto H. Kahn was offered a place on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. Kahn, also Jewish, was Jacob Schiff’s partner at the prestigious downtown banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and that a Jew should have been invited to join the Met’s board was certainly unusual. But then so were the circumstances. The Met was desperately in need of money, and Kuhn, Loeb was now doing business that was on a par with J. P. Morgan’s. Kahn seemed a likely source of cash, which he had plenty of, and he had access to even more Wall Street money from his partners and friends. Mrs. Astor might not approve of Kahn’s appointment to the board of “her” Met, but it was something close to an emergency measure. Besides, Caroline Astor was entering her twilight years, and her vise-like grip on New York society had begun to loosen. Times, at last, were changing.
But what no one suspected in 1903 was that, for the next twenty-five years, Otto H. Kahn not only would succeed in revitalizing the Met financially, but would also revolutionize the role of the opera in the city’s cultural life. The first thing he did was engage a new impresario, the talented Austrian-born Heinrich Conried, who announced that instead of sticking abjectly to Italian opera, the Met would begin offering works in German and French as well. Conried brought with him a young Italian tenor named Enrico Caruso. At first, both Conried’s offerings and Caruso’s performances were greeted with indifference by the critics. But in December of Conried’s first season, when he presented the first American performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, the critics went wild, and it dawned on New York that something exciting was at last happening at the stodgy old Met. Triumph began to follow critical triumph, and lines began to materialize at the box office.
When, four years later, Heinrich Conried was forced to step down because of poor health, Otto Kahn approached Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who for the preceding ten years had been the successful general manager of Milan’s La Scala. Gatti agreed to come to New York, but only on one condition: that he could bring with him La Scala’s celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini. Thus, in one fell swoop, were two giant talents brought to the Met.
Otto Kahn’s own great talent, however, was not simply in acquiring other talent. It lay more in the field of public relations. He was a natty, dapper little man with a bubbly, champagne-like personality, and he was a natural fund-raiser. For every gift of $50,000 to the Met, he announced, he would make a matching gift of his own. One of the first to take him up on this challenge was William K. Vanderbilt, and for several years the two millionaires were in lively competition over the size of their large checks. Also, unlike the box holders of old, Kahn did not stare balefully at his economic inferiors. He was a smiler and a hand-shaker, and he became the Met’s unofficial greeter—standing outside the marquee, urging people to come in, showing them to their seats, chatting with the audience during intermissions. No detail escaped his eye. He saw to it that the “story” of each opera, no matter how unlikely it might be, was outlined in the Met’s program, and that translations of the librettos were also available. When the décor of the ladies’ washroom displeased him, he had it done over. Most of all, he was a genius when it came to handling the press. Many of the music critics of the day, it had to be admitted, knew rather little about music, and some had been elevated to critics’ desks from writing obituary notices. Kahn nurtured a camaraderie with them. During long musical passages, or whenever he noticed a critic’s eyes beginning to glaze with boredom, he would gently nudge the critic and suggest that they repair across the street for a glass of whiskey, or perhaps catch part of a vaudeville show. The critics responded by giving the Met’s productions rave reviews.
While he was doing all this, Otto H. Kahn was also quite literally buying the Met. When he first went on the board, he had been given two hundred shares of Metropolitan Opera stock. As more shares became available, he bought them, and presently he owned 2,750 shares, or 84 percent of the company. Five blocks away, at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, stood the Manhattan Opera House, which was owned by Oscar Hammerstein I, the father of the lyricist. Kahn decided that two opera houses in the same neighborhood were too many, and so Kahn paid Hammerstein a reported $1,200,000 to dispose of this competition. Just how much of his personal money Kahn contributed to the Metropolitan Opera has never been known—Kahn did not believe in releasing too many figures about his philanthropies—but it is assumed to have been between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000.
It was not until 1917, however, that the Met’s board offered Box 14 in the Diamond Horseshoe to Opera House Kahn. At the time, the press called the event “notable,” and remarked that only twelve boxes had changed hands in the last eighteen years. With typical aplomb, Kahn accepted the gift. But he never used the box. It was reserved for visiting dignitaries, such as President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. When the dignitaries came, Kahn saw to it that the box was filled with fresh flowers.
By 1929, Kahn himself was getting on. He was sixty-two, and he and Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini had been at the Met for more than a quarter of a century. The Met’s coffers were now filled with enough money to ensure funding for lavish productions long into the foreseeable future, or at least as long as any future could be foreseen. Other thoughts began to occupy him. He was toying with the idea of returning to his native Germany. He was also flirting with the notion of conversion to Roman Catholicism. That was the year he decided to retire from the Met’s board, to devote himself to rest, travel, and reflection. Another, younger person could assume his mantle. Four years later, he would die.
By 1933, of course, the foreseeable future had not come to pass. Instead had come the Great Crash. The Metropolitan Opera, like the rest of the country, was again in serious trouble. The huge reserve funds, which had seemed more than ample in 1929, had collapsed with the stock market. Wealthy individual patrons, who had once thought nothing of writing out large checks in return for the status that came with supporting grand opera, were now exceedingly scarce. Gone was the well-dressed scramble to buy $30,000 boxes; boxes were up for grabs at clearance-sale prices. At the general-admission box office, business was dismal. In a depression, it seemed, the last thing New Yorkers wanted to spend money on was opera tickets. The Met seemed likely to close its doors unless desperate and original measures were taken. That was the year the board of directors decided to invite its first woman to join. Eleanor Belmont’s devotion to the opera was by now well known. She was the obvious choice.
There were certain subtle ironies here. Having lost a prominent Jewish patron, the board had chosen a new one who was “sort of,” but not really Jewish. Also, just as Eleanor’s in-laws had been successful in getting society in both New York and Newport to overlook, if not entirely forget, the fact that the first August Belmont had been Jewish, so had Eleanor—always the trained performer—with her mastery of society’s rituals, customs, and manners, not to mention her attention to society’s pet art, the opera, succeeded in getting society to overlook the fact that she had once been that less-than-proper thing, an actress on the stage.
August Belmont, Jr., had died in 1924, leaving Eleanor Belmont a still-beautiful widow of forty-five. As a youngish widow her performance had been impeccable. Not a breath of scandal had surrounded her name—no lovers, no escapades, no indulgences. Now, ten years later, she had settled firmly into the role of grande dame. It was as though she had accepted the chapters of her life as a series of theatrical assignments to be carried out with the same poise and grace and born-to-the-role aplomb she had applied to her work in the theatre, but the ingenue had matured into a leading lady. She had let her full mane of fine hair, which had begun to grow prematurely gray in her early twenties, go snowy white. She wore it in a simple but attractive style, pulled into a loose bun at the back of her head, with soft waves framing her face. It was a style that suited itself to hats, which Eleanor Belmont liked to wear, even in her own house. It befitted a woman who, in her own house, carried a reticule on her wrist as she moved from room to room.
She had retained her creamy Englishwoman’s complexion, which, framed by the white hair, made her appearance striking. She had allowed her girlish figure to become a bit matronly, but this again was appropriate. When, in the 1920s, American women raised their hemlines, Eleanor Belmont did not. At her age it would not have been seemly. Her mature figure seemed designed for long dresses, just as her pale arms seemed designed for white opera-length gloves which were always a part of the grande dame’s royal wardrobe.
She had never been known to lose her temper, and yet, when asked for an opinion, she was always firm. A favorite Belmont opening was, “If you will permit me, I will be absolutely frank.” If she disagreed with a suggestion, she would say, “No, I’m afraid I cannot go along with that.” And so, cool, self-confident, elegant and obviously enormously self-controlled, Eleanor Belmont moved through her daily schedule of philanthropic and artistic duties. If, in the first generation, the Belmont name had been slightly tainted in society, the regal first lady of the second generation had redeemed it.
She allowed herself a few extravagances. Her attendance at performances of the opera were regular and faithful, and she would make her appearances even when ill. At these times, instead of sitting in a gilt chair, she would recline on a low chaise longue which had been especially placed in Box Number 4 for the purpose. When that happened, people said, “How devoted to the opera Mrs. Belmont is!” And “What great courage Mrs. Belmont has!” If these were the reactions Eleanor expected from her audience, then so be it. She was not only the opera’s great patroness. She was also its star.
As the first woman on the Met’s board, Eleanor Belmont later described her first meeting with the formerly all-male body as an event she approached with trepidation. “My first meeting in May, 1933, was almost as difficult as an opening night in the theatre,” she wrote in her memoir:
It is not possible to say who was more perturbed, I or these formal gentlemen, several of whom were friends or had been cordial dinner partners. But mixed company on boards was far from a familiar sight at the time, and when I slipped into a chair, several of the directors looked solemnly uncomfortable. Missouri might have been their home state. As for me, I felt like misplaced matter.
Still, despite this self-effacing disclaimer, there is no reason to suppose she had any real doubts that she could carry it off. As a woman, she was already a veteran of several other firsts in New York. In 1924, for example, she had been the first woman to deliver a commencement address at New York University.
If Otto Kahn’s contribution to the Metropolitan Opera had been essentially financial, Eleanor Belmont’s was essentially creative. It was also surprisingly down-to-earth. To a board that was wringing its collective hands about the tragedy of New York City losing a great showplace for a great and classic art, Eleanor Belmont quickly pointed out that her concern was less lofty-minded. She noted that the Met employed six hundred people regularly, plus occasional additional specialists. If the Met closed, a much greater tragedy than an artistic loss would be six hundred more New Yorkers on the relief rolls or in the bread lines. This fact had not occurred to the gentlemen on the board. She, however, knew what it was like to be an out-of-work actress.
As she usually did in any circumstance, she got briskly to work. Soliciting large gifts from donors in the private sector she immediately ruled out. Such giving was too sporadic, too uncertain, and too unreliable. Furthermore, the New York rich—including herself—no longer had the money they once had. To finance President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social-welfare programs, the rich were being taxed as they had never been before, and so other sources had to be found. One of her ideas was as simple as it was brilliant. Why not, she suggested, make use of the fairly new and enormously popular medium of radio? Saturday matinees of the Metropolitan Opera could, she proposed, be recorded and then sold to radio stations all over the United States. This would accomplish three things. It would provide soothing, and free, performances of opera to frightened Americans across the country. It would also provide immediate revenue. Finally, it would have a public-relations function, and establish the primacy of the New York Metropolitan Opera in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Anyone who remembers the 1930s, or even the 1940s and 1950s, will recall the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. In some cities certain radio stations still broadcast the opera to this day.
Eleanor Belmont had noticed also that a large portion of the American public was addicted to contests and give-aways. In hard economic times, obviously, give-aways were more popular than ever, and the media were full of them. Newspapers gave away silver teaspoons to new subscribers, and movie theatres gave away Fiesta Ware dishes and Shirley Temple glasses to ticket buyers. The magazines were full of contests in which the contestant was asked to describe, “in twenty-five words or less,” why he or she liked a certain product, with the winners to receive prizes ranging from small appliances to large amounts of cash. With the opera established on the radio, Eleanor next proposed a contest. Listeners were invited to describe, in a hundred words or less, “What the Opera Means to Me.” As a prize, the writer of the winning letter would receive a week end in New York, including tickets to a live performance at the Met. While the opera contests would not generate direct income, they would serve the Met in other ways. For one thing, they would provide an informal audience-rating system. For another, they would increase radio listenership, which would please the subscribing stations.
The opera contests were an immediate hit, and thousands of letters a day poured in, in competition for the weekly prizes. A separate agency had to be engaged to read and evaluate the letters and award the prize. Otto Kahn might have democratized the opera in New York City, but Eleanor Belmont was democratizing it on a national scale.
Inevitably, there were critics who carped and complained that Mrs. Belmont was “cheapening” the opera, as, in a sense, she was. The times demanded a more egalitarian approach. Among her innovations were group discounts for children and students. Working through the music departments of New York’s high schools, she established programs whereby students could attend the opera for as little as 75 cents apiece. Members of the Old Guard elite who still sat on the Met’s board were appalled by reports of wads of chewing gum stuck to the red plush seats, but Eleanor Belmont countered that what she was doing was trying to encourage a new generation to be opera lovers. If the students learned to love the opera, she argued, they would also learn to respect the opera house. And, as she had predicted, as the number of student programs increased, the cases of chewing-gum despoliation declined.
At one point, it was decided that the famous old gold curtain which had graced the Met’s proscenium for more than fifty years was in such fragile condition that it would have to be replaced. The company’s business manager felt lucky to have found the owner of a movie house who was willing to buy the old curtain for $100. “I’m afraid I cannot go along with that,” said Eleanor. She had the curtain taken down—it weighed ten tons—had it cleaned, and, using her network of volunteers, had it cut up and sewn into such souvenir items as glasses cases and bookmarks. Sales of Gold Curtain Souvenirs netted $11,000.
In spite of these innovations, money remained a desperate problem for the Met, but there were occasional bright moments. One of the brightest occurred on the night of February 2, 1935, when the magnificent voice and figure of Kirsten Flagstad, the Wagnerian soprano, came bursting upon the scene singing Sieglinde in Die Walküre. The audience gave her a standing ovation at the end of the first act, and when the final curtain rang down, the audience was cheering and standing on the seats. The critics raved over the discovery of the new star, and for the next few years the news that Flagstad was singing in any role guaranteed a sold-out house. (Later, Signor Gatti-Casazza, who had negotiated her contract, would claim that her acquisition had amounted to a $25,000 annual legacy for the Met, and he was probably right.)
But Flagstad left the Met in 1941, amid criticism and controversy, to spend the war years with her husband in Nazi-occupied Norway. And long before Flagstad’s New York debut, Eleanor Belmont had been working on what would be her most important and lasting contribution to the opera, the formation of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Later, she would admit that she had no idea at the time whether the Guild would work, or quite how it would work. But, noting that “Cathedrals are built with the pennies of the faithful,” and knowing that large individual donations would not be forthcoming, she decided to concentrate on the pennies.
Again, the idea for the Opera Guild was simple. In return for an annual membership fee ranging from $100 down to $10, a person could join the Guild. The Guild member was then entitled to certain perquisites and privileges—first crack at hard-to-get tickets, for example; discounted prices for certain performances; a subscription to a periodic opera newsletter. Most attractive, perhaps, was that Guild members could attend opera rehearsals. These were often tempestuous affairs, with displays of fiery artistic temperament by divas and directors alike, and were often far more exciting to watch than the finished performances. Thus by joining the Metropolitan Opera Guild one could, for a small sum, enjoy all the special privileges that had theretofore been exclusively reserved for the wealthy box holders in the Diamond Horseshoe.
Early in 1935 the opera board, rather grudgingly, had given Eleanor Belmont a modest budget of $5,000 to organize her Guild. She began by assembling an imposing roster of names to decorate her Honorary Committee. At the head of the list were President and Mrs. Roosevelt. The governors of nine states lent their names to the letterhead, along with New York’s popular Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and some two hundred celebrated Americans—in the arts, business, and society—across the country. The psychological allure of the Metropolitan Opera Guild was therefore very powerful from the beginning. By joining, and for just a few cents a day, one could achieve, or feel one had achieved, the social status of a Vanderbilt … a Mrs. Astor … a Mrs. August Belmont.
The Honorary Committee contained her showcase names. For the slightly less illustrious members of her working committee, she was careful to include important people from the media—C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Time; book publisher John Farrar; David Sarnoff of RCA (Guild membership would of course be promoted on the opera broadcasts).
In its first year 2,000 people became Opera Guild members. Year by year membership climbed, and soon it topped 60,000. By 1957, over and above the hundreds of thousands of opera tickets that had been sold to Guild members, the Guild had turned over more than $2,000,000 to the Met. Furthermore, as Eleanor Belmont liked to point out with a little smile, the original $5,000 underwriting which the board had granted in 1935 had never been touched.
And throughout those years the annual highlight of the New York opera season had become the moment, at the very end, when the stately Eleanor Robson Belmont—“the woman who single-handedly saved the Met”—stepped out of the wings, walked slowly in front of the gold curtain to center stage, turned to face her audience and tilted her lovely chin upward to catch the key light, and then delivered her beautiful and moving speech in behalf of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. And, when it was over, to stand, eyes lowered, head bowed just slightly so that the light caught the glacier-white hair, to receive her standing ovation.
“She was always the consummate actress,” says her long-time secretary Patricia Shaw, “and I mean that in the best, classic sense—in the sense that a great actress is happiest when she knows she is pleasing other people. Everything she did was orchestrated to give pleasure to others.” Throughout the 1930s, for example, another of Mrs. Belmont’s main interests was unemployment, and what to do about it, and the more she worked for Unemployment Relief in New York, the more she realized that private giving—though it was touted as “the American way”—was not the solution to the problem.
In 1933, invited to address a meeting of Jewish women for the Joint Distribution Committee, she stepped to the podium and began, “If you will permit me, I will be absolutely frank.” Three thousand women, including Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, hitched forward in their seats. Private charities, trying to keep 13,000,000 unemployed Americans alive, were wasteful and haphazard, she said. “The major portion of the relief program should be assigned to the city, State or Federal Government,” she said, “and the amount agreed upon … as necessary to carry out an adequate program, should be obtained by special taxation … I do not believe it is a wise policy to carry on the work of serious emergency relief with voluntary contributions. The system is as wrong as that of voluntary enlistment in times of war. It simply means that you penalize the generous.”
England, she pointed out, was suffering its own Great Depression, and yet it had an unemployment-insurance plan. In the United States this was sneeringly called “the dole,” though it provided “a definite, though modest, relief for all.” Furthermore, it “recognized government responsibility.”
It is ironic, perhaps, that the widow of a preeminent American capitalist should have at that point advocated the kind of government social-relief programs which Roosevelt did indeed adopt, and which became the models for many of the American welfare programs which Ronald Reagan, in the name of capitalism, would like to see abolished.
After her husband’s death Eleanor Belmont had gradually begun editing the number of her addresses. The Belmont mansion on Madison Avenue was sold, the building razed and replaced by an office building. By-the-Sea joined a number of unwieldly Newport “cottages” which are now open to the public and toured by curious visitors eager to see the grandeur of the trappings and paraphernalia of a social era that will probably never come again. Home for Eleanor Belmont became a large apartment at 1115 Fifth Avenue at Ninety-third Street, facing Central Park and the Reservoir and filled with heirlooms, photographs, and mementos of all the other Belmont houses and yachts and the private railroad car. For several years she also maintained a summer home called Ledge Rock Cottage in Northeast Harbor, Maine, but by the late 1950s she had given that up as well, and home was just the New York apartment.
As she entered her eighties she didn’t go out or travel or entertain as much as she once had. (In 1949, at seventy, she had paid a farewell visit to G.B.S. at his house in Ayot St. Lawrence, in England.) Still, she liked to give little lunches, famous for their sparkling conversation, in her apartment, and she kept her full-time secretary busy with correspondence. Whenever it was physically possible, she went to the opera—often in a wheelchair now, to be lifted from it and placed on the special chaise in her box.
Her final years were also spent collecting various awards and honors. She had been named chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, had held that position for seven years, and was then given a lifetime appointment as founder and president emeritus. She had received a gold medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences (to add to the one she had received from the Red Cross), and a medal for outstanding civic service from the Hundred Year Association, a New York philanthropic group. The Theodore Roosevelt Association also gave her its distinguished service medal. She had received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale and an honorary Doctor of Letters from Columbia.
In the winter of 1969 the New York Times writer Deirdre Carmody was about to leave her office for a vacation when she received an urgent summons from her editor. Eleanor Belmont, she was told, had just had her ninetieth birthday and was far from well. Before she could leave for her holiday, Miss Carmody was told, she would have to write Mrs. Belmont’s obituary, to which the Times was giving the unusual distinction of a full page. Miss Carmody spent most of the night marshaling the facts of Eleanor Belmont’s life and writing the long story. She filed her copy and then left for her vacation, fully expecting to see her story in the Times in the next few days or, at most, weeks.
But the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, and the Carmody obituary did not appear. Mrs. Belmont’s health, it seemed, had improved. The appearances at the Metropolitan Opera were becoming rarer, but they still occurred.
Deirdre Carmody, in fact, would have to wait nearly ten years—until October 26, 1979—before seeing her obituary of Eleanor Belmont in print. Eleanor Belmont had died in her sleep at 1115 Fifth Avenue. In less than two months she would have been a hundred.
She had never learned to play the trombone, but she had fulfilled George Bernard Shaw’s prediction that old players never die “until old age makes them incapable of working the slide.”