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At Valentino's fantastically elaborate funeral someone regretted that the voice of the dead sheik was stilled forever. "But no," declared another mourner, "he made a record! I heard. . . ." But memory failed as to where or when, and alert Walter King, president of Celebrity Recording Co. (Hollywood) who had overheard the remark, could learn no more.
Then began a search that took President King from Atlantic to Pacific. But no Valentino record did he find. By pure, accident the master record was unearthed in a dusty corner of a storeroom at Brunswick's factory in Muskegon, Mich. President King bought the rights for his company—but last week the Valentino "scoop" awaited a public that seemed not to care. What Brunswick had rejected and forgotten as unworthy of its standard. Wanamaker's vended not very successfully. In the first three days less than 1,000 records were sold. Valentino singing as with a mouthful of spaghetti seemed not to have the appeal of the sleek silent Sheik of the oldtime cinema.*
Opera Into Golf
The ninth hole will be in the orchestra pit where Campanini and Polacco once called to life again Wagner, Mozart, Mendelssohn. On the same stage where Chaliapin, Muzio, Garden once swayed Chicago with great singing, will be a hotdog stand and a faked country club done in stucco. There will be two links: one of nine holes in the foyer where Chicago's first families once paraded to be seen, one of 18 on the main floor beneath the names of Gluck, Handel. Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Verdi. Such, Chicagoans learned last week, is to be the fate of the old Auditorium Theatre, scene since 1889 of the Midwest's best opera, abandoned last year for the new Civic Opera House.
Jeritza's Salome
"Am I to sing to a cocoanut? To dance to a watermelon concealed beneath a bit of cloth? Mein Gott! Am I to kiss a cabbage under a sheet, pretending that I embrace the red lips of the prophet? Imagine me singing the words of that apostrophe to a turnip or a cabbage under a bit of rag."
Thus stormed blonde & beauteous Maria Jeritza (Baroness von Popper) last week on the eve of the second night of San Francisco's autumn opera season and her U. S. debut in the title role of Strauss's Salome. (Massenet's Motion was the opener on the preceding evening.) She had learned that the head of Jochanaan would not be the usual papier-mache replica but a makeshift carefully concealed under a cloth from the gaze of moral San Franciscans.