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Ready or Not. Manager Hurok's reaction to the bad news was to raise her fee from $2,000 a concert to $2,500. And in the fall, after a summer concert tour, Patrice was back at the Met. She sang Lucia, and Rosina in Barber of Seville. After their first broadside, the critics paid little attention to her. Thanks to public demand, which Manager Hurok did nothing to discourage, Patrice was kept gainfully busy.
But the Met audience was her true love, and it began to look as if this too-young bridesmaid of the Met was never to be a bride. The next two seasons, she sang Juliette in a voice that glittered in the coloratura passages but was thin and forced in the big dramatic moments. Her first Lakmé, the classic role for coloraturas, was capable but uninspired, and left most listeners wishing for Lily Pons.
This critical chill, and the toll that radio and concerts took from her, began to sap Patrice's morale. She almost began to doubt whether she had picked the right career. Perhaps she should have stayed in Spokane and married her old sweetheart, after all. Teacher Herman's first hard words came back: "Even if you do get anywhere, a career is often a heartbreaking thing . . ." At the age of 21, the prodigy was a veteran who was beginning to feel perilously like a failure.
She took to breaking training—"picking up my bobby pins, running to Grand Central and getting on a train." Most often she went to New Haven, where she had a boy friend named Johnny Johnson. He and his three roommates sometimes sneaked Patrice into their dormitory room, where she 'would study with them. Johnson thought she had "one of the keenest uneducated minds I know."
In Manhattan, she went dancing until 3 a.m. She became a fight fan, and yelled with the crowd (particularly for Rocky Graziano) in smoky Madison Square Garden. Her career slipped from bad to worse. RCA Victor said nothing about renewing her recording contract; the radio demand for her voice began to fade. The wise guys of the music business shook their heads. Patrice, was just one more prodigy who couldn't grow up.
First Laugh. Pat has made them all eat their words. She decided that, though "growing up in public was no fun," she would have to do it. And she did.
The upswing began when she was talked into singing Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1949. Something happened there that changed her career overnight: she got her first laugh. And, says she: "The first time you step out onstage and get a big yak, you're lost for the rest of your life."
A summer week of laughs gave her enough confidence that fall to try a role at the Met that Edward Johnson, whose faith in Patrice never wavered, always thought she could do: the country maid Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Pretty as a picture, and gaily outmaneuvering the lecherous Don, she made the critics and audiences sit up. Having discovered what was good for her, the next summer she talked herself into the cast of a West Coast Rose Marie, and worked hard on her comedy timing and spoken lines. By then she had discovered that she was "an incurable ham." In the winter, she was ready to run away with Fledermaus ("You wouldn't think you could have that much fun at the Met").