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The Front Page. Cobina fought clear of foreign entanglements in 1919, and went home to Manhattan. Soon after her return she met Millionaire Bill Wright, "the best man on the floor" of the New York Stock Exchange. "The first moment we danced together . . . I knew that at last I was honestly, deeply in love." They were married, and fortified by the Wright millions, Cobina threw a succession of parties that made her the busiest hostess on the Sands Point-Palm Beach-Café Society circuit. At the same time, she dazzled Manhattan concert audiences with a recital mixture of popular soprano numbers and lavish costumes.
Then came the 1929 crash. Cobina blames herself now for being so heedless of business affairs; while the bottom was falling out of the stock market she was busy with cross-country concerts and social life. She had also lost touch with her husband. A few years after the Wright millions went down the drain, the marriage broke up. Bill went off with another woman. They were divorced, not without a scandal "spicy enough," she notes, "to share front-page space with the trial of the Lindbergh kidnaper."
"After Materialism, What?" Cobina called on her courage—"always," she admits, "immense"—and went back to work, first as the proprietor of a supper club that failed, later as a nightclub singer at $500 a week. When daughter Cobina was 16, mother stood her in the public gaze, named her "Jr.," tacked "Sr." to her own name and retired to the wings. She coached the young beauty into a quick, bright career as the Glamour Girl of 1939, but all ended in confusion when Cobina Jr. threw up her Hollywood contracts and married wealthy young Palmer Beaudette, son of a Detroit manufacturer. It took Cobina Sr. a long time to adjust to the change in her plans. It was two years, she confesses, before she was "made whole," and reconciled to the marriage.
Since that time, Cobina Sr. has aired the linen of high society in a column for the Hearstpapers. She has also given much of her time to pondering such questions as "After materialism, what?" and to deciding what, after all, life adds up to. She finds that she agrees pretty much with English Writer Thomas Burke (1886-1945), when he said, "All living is hunger, without hunger we perish."
* Which George Bernard Shaw advanced, years before Cobina did, in the dictum: "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." * Who died last month (TIME, Feb. 4). Cobina was the second of his five wives.