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In New York Lotte Lehmann lives simply at the Essex House facing Central Park. She keeps no maid, shops at Macy's. There last week she bought coffee and stockings to take home to her friends. Two New York friendships of which she is particularly proud are with Arturo Toscanini and Geraldine Farrar. Toscanini, who has small patience with most singers, goes to all her performances. She did not recognize Farrar when first she saw her in the front row at her last year's concert. The oldtime singer was listening so intently, so sympathetically that Lehmann found herself addressing every song to her.
Because she does not go in for backstage tantrums or lug around pet jaguars (see p. 32) Lotte Lehmann rarely makes the news columns. She does not advertise her diet which consists mostly of fruit and vegetables, a glass of sherry before she goes on stage. She keeps dogs and cats in her Vienna home but not in her dressing-room. To every performance she takes photographs of her father, mother, grandmother, brother, husband, kisses them all for luck.
Because her singing has such abundant feeling New Yorkers have wondered if she would not make an ideal Isolde, but Lotte Lehmann knows her limitations, says she would be exhausted before the first act was over. She is more conceited about her horseback riding and her writing than about her singing. Traveling from Buffalo to Havana lately she wrote 3,000 words describing her reaction to the country, the Cuban excitement over new President Carlos Mendieta. Her piece was published in the New York Staats-Zeitung.
One of her books. Verse und Prose, has been published in Vienna. Berlin publishers have the first installments of her autobiography but she doubts if it will ever be released. They want her to add chapters on her U. S. triumphs. Says Mme Lehmann: "I would not feel very intelligent to sit down and write over and over again T am success, I am success. I am success.' '