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The Met offered her $85 a week. In addition to that, Hurok guaranteed her $40,000 a year from concerts and radio for three years. Some of his fellow concert managers thought the shrewd old boy must be cracking up. But a year later, Patrice grossed—from radio, records and concerts — $150,000.
Whistling Is an Art. Patrice Munsel is almost, but not quite, her real name. Patricia Beverly Munsil was the only child of a successful Spokane dentist and an accomplished pianist who wanted Pat to be musical too. "Up until the time I was five," says Patrice, "I suppose I led a perfectly normal life. But then I started to study whistling." Why? "I had a good pucker, I guess."
Pat studied whistling for seven years with a Spokane whistling teacher, Mrs. Marjorie Clark Kennedy, to whom whistling is an art, "not a parlor trick." Pat was a conscientious student. Says Mrs. Kennedy: she "could have had a real career in whistling if she'd kept on. She did beautiful bird work; her chirps were sure and fine. She was especially good on the meadow lark."
But Teacher Kennedy could not have loved whistling so much, loved she not music more. It was she herself who suggested turning the pucker towards Puccini. One day she said to Pat's mother: "Eunice, this child has a God-given voice. She should give up whistling and study voice." Twelve-year-old Pat was willing, provided she could keep up other activities that interested her. These included playing football (she once tackled a boy on the concrete sidewalk and broke his collarbone), baseball (two stitches in her forehead after being hit with a bat), and careening down Shoshone Place on her bike, no hands. But she settled down to her voice lessons. She wanted an audience. In a whistling recital, she had discovered her true love: "I enjoyed being onstage in front of all those people. I had a wonderful time."
15¢, Even Money. A small touring opera company came to Spokane that spring. Pat got a job in the chorus for the performances of Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and Carmen. The San Carlo Opera Company also came to town that year, and Pat and a friend named Mary Jo Williams heard Madame Butterfly. Pat solemnly bet her girl friend 15¢ she would some day sing at the Met (she has never collected).
By her second year in high school, her parents were beginning to wonder whether her singing was good enough to justify full-time study. Conductor Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, now musical adviser of the Pittsburgh Symphony, listened and said yes. So her mother took her to New York, and there they went to see a voice teacher named William Herman. Teacher Herman listened to Pat, looked her over once, then summed her up like a judge at a stock show: "Wide face, straight back, well-developed torso, flexible figure, great thoracic swing, long tongue, high-arched palate, proportion of vocal cords to resonators almost ideal." Then he sat her down for some hard words.
"He told me I had a wonderful voice, but then lots of young people did. The singing profession was a nasty business in many ways, and unless I wanted to put in years of hard work, I would get nowhere. If I did get anywhere, a career was often a heartbreaking thing."