After attending the Mozart Festival at Glyndebourne, the phone rang. It was Paul. “I want you to join me in Rome, to meet Madame Sarah Cahier. She is a famous contralto and now teaches. Marian Anderson recommends her. I want Cahier to hear you sing, and give us her opinion as to the correct placement of your voice. Oh, and be sure to let me know the train, the date, and the hour of your departure from London. I’ll meet you. Bye, sweetheart.”
Within a fortnight, I left London with a promise to see Madame Marchesi when I returned. I notified Paul of the date and hour of my departure, the number of the train and of my compartment, and took off on the Simplon Express for Rome.
As the train roared into the station at Milan and came to a screaming stop, I looked out the window at the crowd on the platform and looked into the faces of those boarding the train, and those waiting to wave farewell. Faces! Some happy, some sad—all of them faces of strangers to me. Suddenly I felt so alone—and just as suddenly, I looked into the face of a man I knew. The man I loved. Paul!
Seconds later, he rushed into my compartment and in minutes (or so it seemed), the porter banged on the door and shouted, “Roma!”
Madame Cahier lived in an apartment on the second floor of a palazzo owned by Prince Massimo on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. A gracious, rather small and slender lady in her late sixties, with graying, reddish-brown hair, she met us at the head of the marble steps.
“Paul Getty, what a pleasure,” she said, as he took her outstretched hand. Looking at me, she smiled and said, “So you are Teddy . . . come in.”
We followed her into the immense drawing room, and within minutes were seated and served tall tumblers of cool lemonade by a young Italian girl no older than fourteen, dressed in white, who noiselessly made her way in and out of the large room, her bare feet almost dancing across the marble floor. She made me wish I were barefoot. I then presented Madame Cahier with a gift, a kit she had asked me to bring her from Harrods in London, which was supposed to stop a person from smoking cigarettes.
It wasn’t long before we learned Cahier was an American, born Sarah Walker in Nashville, Tennessee. Having married Charles Cahier, a Swede, I immediately nicknamed her Madame Notebook, the English translation of the French word cahier. She had studied with the great tenor Jean de Reszke in Berlin, and had sung leading roles in Dresden, Munich, Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen, as well as at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She told us she would be in Rome only for a few more months, as her desire to return to America was overwhelming, now that war seemed imminent.
“But, my dear Teddy, let me hear you sing now. You have come a long way for my opinion, and we are wasting precious time speaking of a war you and I can do so little about. Our business is to bring beautiful music to the world . . . so let us do a few exercises first to warm up the voice. We’ll be ready for a song or aria when my accompanist Hans arrives.”
Hans Hasl, a delightful and very handsome young Viennese who played the piano beautifully, arrived a few minutes later. I sang an early Italian song, then the aria “Bel raggio lusinghier” from Rossini’s opera Semiramide, which had originally been written for the contralto voice.
Paul and Madame Cahier sat at the far end of the room, facing the piano. When I finished singing, Cahier rushed over to me, took my hands in hers, and said, “Brava, Teddy, that was beautifully done. I’m astonished that you have the ability to sing the fioritura passages with such agility. This is a wonderful tribute to Marchesi. She has given you a fine foundation. Your voice is ‘even’ from the lowest notes to the top, but I cannot understand why she has classified you as a mezzo-soprano. Although your lower notes are rich and warm, I find your top register thrilling. Perhaps at this point in your development she did not want you to force the top, but I definitely think you are a soprano.”
In seconds Paul moved to the piano. “That’s just what I’ve always said about Teddy’s voice. A mezzo-soprano doesn’t have the thrilling high notes that she has, and that’s why I have always been convinced she is a soprano in the making.”
Cahier smiled a knowing smile. “Paul, you obviously sense a voice as well as you sense oil! If you both agree, I will work with Teddy until I leave for America, agreed?”
“Agreed!” we answered.
She then showed us through her apartment and said, “In the meantime, unless you prefer to stay in a hotel, Teddy, you may stay here with me in the other wing. Would you like to see it?”
My private quarters were exquisite. The bedroom was two stories high. My bed was an enormous, ornate piece of furniture covered in luscious white velvet, and the headboard, gilded pipes of what was once part of a church organ with two gilded cherubs holding white velvet drapes from ceiling to floor, which, of course, was of white marble. The bathroom, fit for a princess, boasted an enormous tub. Over it, at one end, knelt a lovely nude Venus statue, holding an alabaster jar from which poured the water. At the end of the hall, French doors opened onto a very private terrace with a little fountain, a round table, several chairs, an umbrella, and an inviting chaise longue. It was soon to become my perfect, quiet, open-air study hall. Below was the Piazza Navona, where ancient Romans had once held their chariot races.
An ancient fountain with a deep well stood in the center of the courtyard and doubled as our refrigerator, where two young little Italian girls, Silvia and Maria, kept our milk and butter cooling there from the heat. They lived below, with the portiera—the gatekeeper, or concierge. I was fortunate that the girls were very talkative when serving me breakfast each morning. Since they didn’t speak English, their conversations helped my Italian tremendously. I found it absolutely fascinating to have to ring a bell for the portiera to let me onto the grounds of the Palazzo Massimo after a certain hour. She’d have to open a little door within a door, right in the middle of the huge bronze main door facing the street. It was kept open all day, but meticulously closed and bolted after nightfall. It gave me the strangest feeling of living in the Middle Ages.
Paul took a suite at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto. We spent each day together, after my lessons with Cahier. We walked through Rome, rode through it, danced through it, wined and dined in it. We shopped, visited the Vatican, stood in awe before the Apollo Belvedere, and strained our necks in the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo’s magnificent ceiling. We drove a little rented car down the Appian Way, stopping for fettuccine and wine at the tiny restaurant opposite the entrance to the catacombs. We then followed a flickering candle in the hand of our priestly guide, and made our way through the musty tunnels, where the early Christians hid. Whenever we came upon the skeleton of some martyr, I’d reach for Paul’s hand.
To me, one of Paul’s most attractive qualities was his delight and ability to surprise people. One day, as I walked into his suite at the Excelsior, he calmly announced, “We are about to be carved in marble by Pier Gabriele Vangelli, a great sculptor whom I have just met.”
“When?” I asked.
“Right now,” he replied.
“Where?”
“In here,” he said. “In the bedroom. It has the best light.”
We walked into the bedroom to find it had been already transformed into a sculptor’s studio. Sunlight from the open window shone on a huge chunk of gray clay resting on a movable tripod. The floor was covered with a tarp, and a vigorous man, undoubtedly Vangelli, dashed back and forth, muttering to himself as he watered down the clay and began molding it with his artistic hands.
“Darling, may I present Signor Vangelli,” Paul said.
With that, Vangelli excitedly took my hand in his wet one and kissed it. “Mademoiselle Teddy, I will capture your rare beauty for eternity.” Then in his broken English he said, “Donta move,” and slowly he walked around me as if to memorize every detail of my bone structure. Turning to Paul, he pointed to my face and with passion cried, “Il naso è perfetto. You are a fine patrician beauty, I will capture it.”
This made me laugh, but I managed to say “Grazie, signore.” After two weeks of us posing, he finished the first models of us in clay, the likenesses remarkable. Next he made plaster casts of our heads. Finally, we chose the Carrara marble out of which Vangelli would chisel his final work.
A month later, standing in an unheated, undecorated, shedlike workshop on a plank floor worn by time and usage, rain beating down on the skylight roof, Vangelli, with a great sweeping gesture, removed the canvas coverings from his completed work . . . and we stared at our faces in marble.
They were striking. “Paul, your likeness is fantastic,” I said.
“Well, yours is magnificent,” he replied. “Vangelli, you’ve truly captured her beauty.” Laughingly he turned to the sculptor and added, “Il naso è perfetto.”
More than seventy-four years later, Paul’s marble bust can be seen just inside the entrance to the Getty Museum in Brentwood, California, while mine sits on the floor of my living room—where I left it after the last earthquake—next to my piano in my home in Venice, California.
Dolly Mills de Mastrogianni, wife of a famous music critic in Argentina, came to hear me sing one afternoon. Being part of the social and musical circles of Rome and knowing Cahier was leaving for California, she insisted that I sing for Maestro Julio Moreschi. “Your voice is beautiful and he will continue to prepare your repertoire and roles for the opera.” Cahier agreed and, when she left, I moved to the Ambasciatori Hotel, across from the Excelsior and the American Embassy on the Via Veneto, then dashed over to No. 11 Lungotevere Anguillara in Trastevere to the studio of Julio Moreschi, which was next door to the house in which “The Immortal Dante” had lived.
Julio Moreschi was the son of one of the last great singers of the nineteenth century, a male soprano. He had sung as a member of the Cappella Sistina, and was a man devoted to pasta, the art of singing, and his love of people. Short in stature, with a sweet face and a huge smile, he greeted me at his doorway, dark-rimmed glasses hiding the gleam within his eyes. After hearing me sing, he pronounced me a soprano.
Soon after this, Paul, Vangelli, Moreschi, and I had dinner at Alfredo’s. The great maestro of the restaurant, Alfredo di Lelio himself, stood before us in his chef’s hat and starched white apron, and in his hand was the large fork needed to mix the pasta. Then, in tune with his musicians, Alfredo performed his magic and we feasted on his work of art, “fettuccine Alfredo.” After Vangelli left, Paul turned to Moreschi, whose white napkin was still tied about his neck, his hand on the last of the wine in his glass, and asked, “Quanto tempo chivolle?” (“How much time will she need?”)
Taking his napkin from his neck and applying it to his mouth, Moreschi answered, “Non piu di tre mese” (“No more than three months”). Then in French he went on, “I believe we can get her into an opera here to start her off. If she makes her debut in Italy, even in a small opera company to begin with, it would be good for her.” Between the two of them, they made the decision that I should study at least for three more months, do some concerts, and maybe an opera. When I was ready, Moreschi could arrange it. An hour later, we left Alfredo’s, Moreschi singing “Core ’ngrato” like no one since Caruso.