In Cambridge, Mass, this week. Composer John Alden Carpenter, 56, and Ellen Waller Borden, 47, were married. Composer Carpenter's first wife, Decorator Rue Winterbotham Carpenter, died less than two years ago. Mrs. Borden, whose Cambridge aunt gave her her wedding, was divorced from Oilman-Stockbroker-Sportsman John Borden. The wedding was a quiet affair but in Chicago, where both composer and his new wife live, it was loudly publicized, set several events in motion.
When Mrs. Borden announced her engagement she said that the wedding must wait until $100,000 had been raised by Chicago's newly-organized Friends of Music who intend to build an outdoor Temple of Music for the World's Fair (TIME, Dec. 26). Donations came in so slowly that she asked her friends to give her wedding presents in cash, which she would use to hire a professional money-campaigner. Campaigner John McKeown, advised by his brother Mitchell McKeown, managing director of Chicago's Unemployment Fund, was hard at work for the Friends last week. At a big organization dinner at the Drake Hotel, Frederick Stock, who played the viola in the Chicago Symphony before he became its conductor, gravely tucked his instrument under his chin, played publicly for the first time in 20 years. Total of the Friends of Music's fund up to this week (unofficial) : $20,000.
Dark Horse Green
Word that typewriters, revolver shots and police sirens would concatenate in Carnegie Hall, last week drew a crowd unaccustomed to entering Manhattan's most formal music house. Theatre folk, songwriters and newspapermen flocked to hear tabloid Paul Whiteman (126 Ib. thinner than he used to be) play Tabloid. It had been written for him by his oldtime orchestrator, squat, baldish Ferde Grofé who now runs the Grofé Realty Co. in Teaneck, N. J.
Newspapermen knew that Grofé had been persuaded to write Tabloid by his friend George Clarke, restless, hard-driving city editor of the New York Daily Mirror. Grofé visited the Mirror offices, devised a scenario which called for typewriters to click out hectically the routine news of the day, for a harp to represent the society editor calling for a copyboy, for a big bass horn to bellow like the managing editor. A sob sister had her maudlin, banal bit. Piccolos and traps described the comic-strip antics of Mickey Mouse. Revolver shots expressed murder headlines. Drums drummed the roar of the presses getting out an extra. Grofé was so determined to give an accurate picture of the death house that he visited Sing Sing, pretending to be a lawyer's clerk. But in spite of his pains, in spite of instrumentation gaudy as the newssheet he was depicting, in many a critical opinion Grofé came in second at Paul Whiteman's concert.