book review

University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis (1897–1941) “I’m from the South and I’ve Got Plenty of Rhythm” Chapter Author(s): MICHAEL B. DOUGAN

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.19

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis

(1897-1941)

"I'm from the South and I've Got Plenty of Rhythm"

M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis was an internationally known Broadway star, opera singer, and radio performer. During her short and tragic life during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, Lewis broke new ground for generations of classical music performers. Her legacy endures due to the extensive recordings she made from 1924 to 1937. Lewis's ties to Arkansas remained strong through- out her career. Sorting out the facts of her very complex life has not been easy, but she was and remains for Arkansans "our Mary."

The woman known to the world as Mary Lewis was certainly not the first ce- lebrity to create an artificial persona, but while she deliberately rewrote signifi- cant parts of her life, some elements were unknown even to her. One example is her birthday. Although Mary claimed to have been born in 1900 and later confessed to not knowing the real date of her birth, baptismal records at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas, give January 29,1897, as ner

birth date and August 29 of the same year for her christening.1

Mary's parents were Charles Kidd and Hattie Lewis. Charles reportedly moved to Hot Springs from Chicago. Hattie had possibly been born in Ken- tucky. Mary's middle name, Sybil, came from her maternal grandmother. Her brother, Joe, was born in 1899. Charles died that same year, and the family fell on hard times. Apparently Mary's mother worked as a domestic, moving her children first to Little Rock and then to Dallas, Texas. Hattie, who was likely unable to care for her children, sent them to an orphanage where Mary's golden curls were cut off and kerosene was rubbed into her head to kill lice. Both chil- dren ran away from the orphanage. Joe escaped first and apparently went to live in Chicago with some of his father's kin; Mary was rescued by her mother

275

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2/6 M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

but then was sent to a family that kept her as a servant and locked her in a rat-infested basement. Mary ran away again one Sunday morning and tempo- rarily reunited with her mother. By age six she was living on the streets of Dal- las, where she "danced to hurdy-gurdies" and sang songs. One of her jobs was fetching beer for a grocer's wife who thought that job unsuitable for her own children. Mary's reward for that task was a rotten banana. As a consequence, she developed a lifelong antipathy to bananas. At some point, Mary's mother married Ed Maynard, and Mary took her new stepfather's last name. It seems that Hattie was again unable to care for her daughter, leaving Mary to fend for herself.2 Destitute, Mary followed a childhood friend to the Settlement Sunday School, which was affiliated with the Hope Methodist Church in Dallas, but she was afraid to attend the service in her poorly dressed and malnourished state. One Sunday evening she fell asleep on the church steps only to be awakened when the preacher's wife, Anna Fitch, stepped on her. After hearing Mary's story, Anna offered her a clean dress in exchange for coming to church. Mary accepted, and that dress, which symbolized her first step out of the slums, be- came sacred to her. It is still in the Fitch family's possession.3

In 1905, Mary was permanently taken in by Anna and her sixty-year-old Methodist pastor husband, the Reverend William S. Fitch. There were no adop- tion papers or legal agreements. When Mary went to live with the Fitches their first task was to eradicate her head lice. The second was to treat her pernicious anemia. Mary was in such poor physical health that Anna, a former school- teacher, taught her at home; she began by erasing, as Mary put it, "the patois common to the slums." And she "taught me the wisdom of self-control and of curbing my impulsive temper." Anna was a strict disciplinarian, and Mary was prohibited from dancing and singing the "boisterous songs, heady with the beat of ragtime" that she knew from the streets. Mary recalled that Anna "took me into her household as her own daughter, a child without health, doomed to die before she was ten, without loveliness, without manners or training. In her tight-lipped, relentless way she loved me."4

The Fitches also gave Mary, who already had demonstrated musical talent, piano and violin lessons. Soon Mary was given a song, "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam," and was taught to pronounce it syllable by syllable and then word by word even before she could sing it. "I have never ceased to be grateful to her," Mary said later about Anna's rigorous vocal instruction.5

Methodist churches were notorious for moving their ministers, and in 1906 Fitch was sent to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a noted spa town in the Ozarks. There, Mary sang "The Banner and the Beauty of Glory" at a patriotic service and began singing a new song in church each Sunday. Soon Fitch was trans-

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis 277

ferred to Little Rock and then to Judsonia in White County. The town s history book, That's Judsonia, described Mary as "the very plain little eight-year-old girl who had sung her solos so frequently in the local Methodist Church." The church sported an orchestra and a much higher quality of music than was com- mon in small towns. Residents later recalled that local audiences "did not re- ceive her efforts with as much appreciation as did those of later years." Fitch, himself a musician and composer, in his "desire for perfection" robbed Mary of musical expressiveness so that her singing "was sometimes almost mechanical." However, a traveling salesman recognized her talent and was heard to remark, "I tell you she's going places."6

Around 1908 Mary was invited to sing for pay at a benefit concert in Little Rock. For this occasion Anna taught her "The Holy City," a rather difficult piece for a child her age. This event was a turning point for Mary, who quickly lost her desire to become either a Methodist deaconess or a foreign missionary. This, according to Mary, was her "first touch of being a prima donna."7

Meanwhile, age had caught up with William Fitch, and he was moved to Little Rock to serve the mission church. Although the family had only William's small pension and no savings, an inheritance from Anna's father allowed them to build a house in the new Hillcrest addition to Pulaski Heights. The Pulaski Heights de- velopment was the work of H. F. (Henry Franklin) Auten, the Methodist, music- loving deacon who earlier had arranged for Mary's Little Rock debut. In addi- tion to being a real estate developer, Auten was also a high-ranking Republican and in 1898 had been the party's unsuccessful candidate for governor.8

Built in the Craftsman style common in Hillcrest, the house was Anna's home until her death in 1936. A newspaper account of a "house warming" called it their "first real home." Yet things were not going well. William became increas- ingly ill, and Mary, exposed again to an urban space, was intrigued by the popular culture that Anna was still determined to root or rather whip out of her. Like many children, she rebelled by running away.9

Mary got no farther than the home of H. F. and Carrie Auten, who had two sons near her age as well as an adopted son. For three years, 1912-1915, she lived with the Autens. Mary attended Little Rock High School (renamed Central in 1953), the first time she had ever sat in a classroom, and she took music lessons from Alice Henniger, a well-known figure in Little Rock's cultural life. Mary even started teaching, took lessons on the pipe organ, and became the organist at the Second Baptist Church. "All in all," she recalled, "there is no saying that my musical foundation was not a sound one!" Her public appearances were fre- quent and included singing for President Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Little Rock in 19O5.10

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2/8 M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

In 1915 Mary married her high school sweetheart, J. Keene Lewis, at the Second Baptist Church, and Auten gave the newlyweds a house in Pulaski Heights. Auten died on May 24, 1918, and William Fitch followed on Septem- ber 28. Perhaps these two losses prompted her to attempt to establish her own identity as an artist. On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Mary induced her husband to take her to Chicago where she hoped to find her long-lost brother. Then, just before Christmas, she departed with a traveling troupe. Keene for- mally divorced Mary in 1920 with her promise to keep his name out of her publicity.11

Little evidence exists to confirm Mary Lewis's account of her years on the road. However, she did work at Tait's at the Beach in San Francisco, a famous restaurant at that time. Her big break came when she met Fanchon and Marco Wolff, a nationally known brother and sister show business team. It was Fan- chon who solved Lewis's costuming problem; given her impoverished child- hood, her growth might have been stunted. However, Lewis was much taller than most of the other girls on stage. "I felt like an elephant among them," she admitted. Instead of the religious and classical material she previously had sung, Mary undertook the popular songs of the Jazz Age, belting them out until she lost her voice and had to "talk" them. "Manny o' Mine" was an audience favorite.12

Her next move involved signing with the famed comedy filmmaker Al Chris- tie. Lewis appeared in a number of now presumably lost films, including The Ugly Duckling. One film from this period that has been recovered is A Bashful Bigamist (1920). Mary saved her money and moved to New York in June 1920. From this point on her scrapbooks and national newspaper coverage provide documentation for her national and international career.13

Her first New York job was with the Greenwich Village Follies of 1920, which was directed by John Murray Anderson.14 At first, Mary thought she was being slighted and rounded up another job, which she used as leverage; she soon be- came the company's prima donna, the star with the leading role and the best songs. Co-star Frank Crumit, who had already launched his recording career, suggested that Mary study with vocal coach William Thorner. She switched from the Greenwich Village Follies to the far more prestigious Follies produced by Florenz Ziegfeld so that she could spend more time in New York.15 Ziegfeld reportedly considered her "the most beautiful prima donna he had ever en- gaged."16

The Follies of 1921 included stars such as Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, and come- dian Raymond Hitchcock with sets by Joseph Urban, who designed not only all the Ziegfeld shows but fifty-one productions for the Metropolitan Opera. Con-

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis 279

tributing composers included Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and Rudolf Friml. Meanwhile, Mary began lessons with Thorner, working on Puccini's La Boheme and studying Italian and French. The Follies of 1922 included Will Rogers and featured Mary Lewis in a costume spectacle, "Lace Land," created by Charles LeMaire, who later moved to Hollywood, costumed some three hundred films, and won four Academy Awards. However, his design for Lewis, a lace outfit painted weekly in radium that glowed in the dark when the lights were turned off, most likely cost Lewis her life. What she called "neuritis" and blamed on hard work was most likely the symptoms of radiation poisoning, a disease not formally recognized until 1945-17

Following the show's run, Lewis met Otto Hermann Kahn, a financier and a Metropolitan Opera patron, at a party.18 Kahn convinced her to sing "some snatches" from La Boheme and followed that up by attending one of her lessons with Thorner. Then he arranged what turned out to be a nervous audition with the Metropolitan Opera's general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who decided that she had the voice but needed two years abroad to learn a repertoire and stagecraft. Leaving behind her mother, who had mysteriously reappeared a year earlier, Mary intended to rest on the Riviera and then proceed to Italy. In Paris at a performance of Puccini's Tosca, she met Russian soprano Maria Nikolaevna Kuznetsova, who introduced Lewis to her manager, Alexander Kahn—perhaps at that time and certainly in 1930 the European representative of the Wolfson Musical Bureau, one of the largest artist representative groups in the United States. Lewis was given a contract following a successful audition. While study- ing in Paris, she was told that if she learned the role of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust in three weeks, she could make her debut in Vienna. Billed as a star of the Paris Opera, she trod the stage of the Vienna Volksoper for the first time on Oc- tober 19,1923, with an all-star cast directed by Felix Weingartner. While Traian Grozavescu, Emmanuel List, and Viorica Ursuleac sang in German, Mary Lewis sang in the original French. Lewis was wise in the ways of publicity, for while this was essentially a routine performance in Vienna, it became a headline story back in America.19

Following performances at Bratislava and Monte Carlo, Mary auditioned successfully for the British National Opera Company. Her unannounced debut came in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann when the famed English soprano Maggie Teyte became indisposed. Lewis's success in the role led to more per- formances. Of particular note was the world premiere of Ralph Vaughan Wil- liams's folk opera Hugh the Drover on July 14, 1924. The record company His Master's Voice recorded extended excerpts, and Mary Lewis appeared on eight of the ten tracks of "one of the great pioneering records of British music." Lewis

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280 M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

later recorded eleven arias for the company, but only four were published. Nei- ther the Hugh the Drover recordings nor any from the second session were ever issued in America.20

Franz Lehar, the operetta composer, had set his eyes on Mary, and she finally agreed to sing his most famous composition, to be performed in Paris as La Veuve Joyeuse (The Merry Widow). Following this run, she auditioned for the Chicago Civic Opera Company but also was offered the lead role in Sigmund Romberg's new musical, Princess Flavia (1925). Mary was caught up in a maze of conflicting offers and contracts until the Metropolitan Opera signed her on November 5, 1925. Her warm-up consisted of appearing in a variety of venues and on radio. Along the way, she picked up Elmer Zoller as her accompanist; he would remain with her throughout her career.21

The Mary Lewis story hit U.S. newspapers even before her Metropolitan Op- era debut. Part of the celebration of American exceptionalism was the argument that Americans could learn at home and sing grand opera as well as or better than imported Europeans. In January 1924, the Atlanta Constitution under the title "What She Won by Never Having Any Fun" had quoted extensively Mary's coach, William Thorner, who not only offered testimonials on Lewis's successes but also claimed that in America "hundreds of girls are neglecting their voices" who could shine on stage.22

Mary Lewis debuted as Mimi in La Boheme on January 26, 1926. The audi- ence loved her performance and afterward covered the stage with violets. It was, an unidentified newspaper reported, "the climax of a romantic career seldom paralleled in American musical history." New York at that time boasted a cadre of veteran music critics, and their reviews were mixed, with the great W. J. (Wil- liam James) Henderson finding her merely "credible." Nevertheless, the Victor Company had had Mary in the studio the month before, and she remained an active recording artist until 1928. Her studio recordings were divided between songs, including a highly regarded version of "Dixie," and arias, of which the "Te souvient-il du lumineux voyage" from Massenet's Thais, better known as The Meditation, became her best seller.23 Mary Lewis did not become an operatic workhorse, but the prestige associated with the opera house opened concert doors everywhere in the United States.

On March 26, 1926, Mary returned home to Arkansas for a concert; "Mary Lewis Given Greatest Welcome State Ever Knew" was the headline in the Ar- kansas Democrat. She had already performed in Hot Springs, but the Little Rock concert was special. Welcomed by Governor Tom Terral and presented with a golden Key to the City by the mayor, she also visited her eighty-year-old fos- ter mother, Anna Fitch. The concert that evening was as much an emotional

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis 281

event as a musical one. After Lewis departed the next day, Terral sent a letter to banker and opera financier Otto Kahn praising Mary and observing, "God has been good to her in that she has been blessed with a voice that seemed was handed to her by an angel of God." Kahn replied by also praising Mary and expressing his "faith in young American talent" who could then "serve the cause of art in America."24 Despite these successes, things were about to head downhill.

Vitaphone, which had developed sound for motion pictures, quickly signed Mary Lewis along with Americans John Charles Thomas, Charles Hackett, and Rin Tin Tin, a well-known dog. In 1927, Lewis appeared in Stars of Vitaphone, singing a program entitled "Way Down South." The numbers included "Swing Along," "Dixie," and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." More ambitious was the filming of The Tales of Hoffmann in the old Manhattan Opera House. But ac- cording to Vitaphone, Mary got drunk, and her work was unusable. Vitaphone sued Lewis and the music director in a case that garnered national headlines. Henceforth, alcohol began to affect Lewis's work. Still, the company went ahead with a biographical film, The Story of Mary Lewis, in ipiS.25

Meanwhile, Mary had fallen in love. On April 15,1927, she married German baritone Michael Bohnen in a surprise wedding officiated by New York City mayor Jimmy Walker. Bohnen, who had sung in 21 roles at the Metropolitan Opera and racked up 174 performances, was temperamentally not the ideal husband. But as she walked out on her work engagements and sailed with him to Germany shortly after their marriage, Mary said she was "too much in love to be separated yet." In Berlin, she sang with Bohnen in Faust (Margarethe), along with Richard Tauber and Heinrich Schlusnus, both noted stars. When Lewis returned to America to make her Chicago debut, Bohnen canceled his engagements and joined her. In October she was again in Little Rock, singing at the new high school. She sang with Bohnen at the Metropolitan Opera in I Pagliacci on February 13,1928. That summer Lewis again canceled her engage- ments and headed back to Europe. Her managers, threatened with suits for breach of contract, began cutting their ties with the unreliable Mary. Back in the United States at the Metropolitan Opera in 1929 she sang only Marguerite in Faust, once with Bohnen and twice with the great Russian bass Feodor Chal- iapin. Meanwhile, Bohnen had transferred his attentions to the notorious young dancer La Jana, and Mary filed for a divorce. Both the marriage and the di- vorce were contentious; after Mary's death, Bohnen told his side of the events to Stern, a German tabloid, in 1953-1954. English musicologist James F. E. Dennis opined that Lewis's drinking problems were related to her disastrous marriage to Bohnen.26

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282 M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

Free of Bohnen, Mary Lewis recorded on film a verbal contract to make mov- ies in Hollywood with Pathe, a French production company There were to be two films, one of which would recount her life. As the Depression deepened and audiences thinned, the movie industry was in crisis due to too many musical "talkie" films. Lewis's films were canceled, and Mary sued for breach of contract. Pathe claimed she had violated the "morals clause" and cited some unspeci- fied incident. One known episode was when she collapsed or was hauled off the stage during a Sunday evening national radio show. There was a trip to Hot Springs where she had a tumor the size of a golf ball removed from her uterus. Lewis further suffered from the repercussions of her divorce. She told her mother she had only $180 left, having lost $40,000 when she ran off with Bohnen. Her marriage had been a "bad spell," but "I stick my chin out and say I will" Disasters, however, continued. Her last complete role at the Metro- politan Opera was Micaela in Bizet's Carmen, and one audience member re- called that she was "drunk as a lord, staggering all over the stage." Her opera career was over.27

Having burned her bridges in America, Lewis returned to Europe in hopes of finding work, but, she wrote, "I feel never sure of anything now."28 Luckily, she landed the soprano lead in a French-language version of Emmerich Kalman's Grdfin Mariza. But her European career soon ended, and in September 1931 it was announced that she had married Standard Oil executive Robert L. Hague. The manager of the marine division and a Broadway dandy, Hague had already been married three times.29

As the Depression deepened under President Herbert Hoover, Hague and his wife seem to have lived quietly in their penthouse at the Ritz Hotel when not in Europe. Lewis's next public appearance was not until June 7,1933, on the radio, and at its conclusion she was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. In August, when she was asked about her new pink chiffon gar- den party hat, Mary pointed out that it was designed and made in the United States: "Surely that is good for American business." She was quite likely referring to purchasing American-made products to stimulate the economy during the difficult Depression years.30

Although her opera career had ended, Mary was not through singing. In the fall of 1933 she and Irish tenor John McCormack sang at a fundraiser for an African American mission church, St. Benedict the Moor in New York City.31

On May 18, 1934, she gave a recital at Town Hall that critic F. D. Perkins of the Herald Tribune called "a virtual re-debut," for instead of an opera singer's temporary, money-making foray, she "entered auspiciously a new phase which

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis 283

could lead to artistic attainments beyond those of her Metropolitan days." Her recital included German lieder by Brahms, Strauss, Wolf, and Schreker; French chansons by Satie, Duparc, Saint-Saens, and Debussy; and songs by Chopin and American John Alden Carpenter.32

Yet little work followed except a few brief appearances. At one point she was reported to have "a violent dislike to the publicity spotlight," and in 1935 there was a rumor that she had been given "permission" by her husband to resume her work. Instead, more benefit performances followed. On November 17,1935, for example, she sang "Eili, Eili," the famous Yiddish lament, for the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities. Her subsequent recording, possibly the only one by a non-Jew, is uniquely moving and ranks as one of the outstanding perfor- mances of the century. Another piece in her repertoire was "My Man's Gone Now," first sung with Porgy and Bess composer George Gershwin at the piano. She and her husband were on the first commercial flight of the German dirigible the Hindenburg on its maiden voyage from New York to Germany one year before the blimp burned up at the Lakehurst Air Station.33

Apparently, these years also included continued bouts of ill health. Hoping to break this pattern, Lewis returned to Arkansas in 1936 for the state's centennial: "It's after all, home, you know." She stopped in Benton (Saline County), Hot Springs, and Little Rock, where she visited her ailing foster mother.34

Her final work consisted of contributing to the National Broadcasting Com- pany's Thesaurus set. These sixteen-inch transcription discs were made for ra- dio station distribution and were not for sale. According to producer Robert B. Stone, Lewis's voice was "badly worn at the top" but still good in the middle register. Three sessions were scheduled, but at the third she arrived intoxicated and walked out of the studio.35

Mary's marriage to Hague also collapsed during this time, and she went to Europe to recover. After concerts in Germany and France, she sang in Queen's Hall in London with Gerald Moore, the best-known accompanist of the twen- tieth century, at the piano. Back in the United States, Robert Hague died from cirrhosis of the liver on March 8,1939; his affairs were tangled, but he was still legally married to Mary. Unable to collect from the estate, Mary Lewis under- took one last tour to Puerto Rico but was stricken with a throat so swollen that she had to have a silver tube inserted to allow her to breathe. She never recovered. Her mother died on March 11, 1940, and Mary Lewis died on New Year's Day 1941. The press blamed a gallbladder ailment, but a more probable explanation is radiation poisoning. It was typical of the confusion of Mary's worlds that the first funeral service, a public one, was held in New York at St.

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284 M I C H A E L B. D O U G A N

Matthew's Catholic Church, while the one at Second Baptist Church in Little Rock was for relatives and close friends. She was interred next to the mother who had so often abandoned her.36

Although United Press referred to Mary Lewis as one of the most publicized singers during her lifetime, following her death she was almost forgotten except for a few scholarly articles. Then Alice Fitch Zeman, who found among her

great-grandmother's mementos the little dress that had propelled Mary Lewis from the slums to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, wrote a biogra- phy, Mary Lewis: The Golden Haired Beauty with the Golden Voice, which was

published in 2001. Zeman had access to the Fitch family's scrapbooks as well as those kept by Lewis herself. In 2005 Marston Records, the premier classical music archival firm, received financial assistance from the Arkansas Arts Coun-

cil and the National Endowment for the Arts to release a two-compact disc set containing forty-eight of her recordings, thus forever ensuring her place in musical history.

Her contemporary, soprano Jessica Dragonette, called Mary "a touching enigma, evidently bent on destroying herself, in spite of excelling gifts." Such an

assessment, valid in its way, fails to take into account her undiagnosed medical

condition. The last word came from an unknown Arkansas poet at the time of her interment:

She has come home like a bird to its nest, Home, at last, for a long, long rest.37

Born in poverty, Mary Lewis left Arkansas as a young woman and became

an international star. Throughout her career, however, Arkansas was never far from her thoughts. She returned to the state on several occasions, but she lived her life on a multinational stage. Lewis's complicated childhood and upbring-

ing informed her experiences as a singer and an actor. She was the essence of a prima donna. Despite her disabilities, Lewis was always a larger-than-life per- sona. She was the first of her kind from Arkansas.

NOTES

1. The standard biography is Alice Fitch Zeman, Mary Lewis: The Golden Haired Beauty with the Golden Voice (Little Rock, Ark.: Rose Publishing, 2001), i. See also Mary Lewis, "From the Slums, to the Follies, to Grand Opera," Ladies' Home Journal, May and July 1927.

2. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 4. 3. Ibid., 5. On page 9 there is a picture of a child modeling Mary Lewis's dress, which her foster

mother preserved.

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Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard Lewis 285

4. Ibid., 21-23. Mary loved the woman but hated the restrictive environment. She remained close to her foster mother, but Anna was offended by the newspaper suggestions that she treated Mary cruelly. In the broadest sense, this gap between an elderly Victorian and a young person of the twentieth century was not unique.

5. Ibid., 5-6. 6. Ibid., 24-25; W. E. Orr, That's Judsonia (Judsonia, Ark.: White Company Printing, 1957), 290. 7. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 26. 8. Tom Dillard, "H. F. Auten: A Man Who Could Not Stand Still," Pulaski County Historical

Review 60, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 108-15. 9. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 28-32. 10. Ibid., 39; "President Guest of Arkansas," Nashville News (Nashville, Ark.), October 28,1905, i. 11. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 40-45. Although she left Little Rock and her husband, she nevertheless

kept the surname Lewis, explaining that she had a grandmother with that name. In Michael B. Dougan, "An Arkansas Aria," Arkansas Times 21, no. 50 (August 2005): 10-12,1 recount how in 1975 just prior to giving a scholarly paper on Mary Lewis I learned about this marriage, which Mary had successfully hid from the public.

12. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 47-52. There is an extensive website devoted to Fanchon and Marco: http://www.fanchonandmarco.com (accessed August 23, 2016).

13. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 52-54; http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-fllms/screening -room/a-bashful-bigamist-i92i (accessed July 10, 2013).

14. "Mary Lewis in the Greenwich Village Follies, 1920," New York Times, September 12,1920,76. 15. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 55-61. 16. Michael B. Dougan, "'A Touching Enigma: The Opera Career of Mary Lewis," Arkansas

Historical Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 265. 17. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 67-76. 18. Ibid., 77-78. 19. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 77-81. Technically, in homage to Goethe, the opera was billed as Marga-

rethe rather than Faust. See also "To Make Herself Mary Garden s Perfect Double," Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky), October 25,1925, 89.

20. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 82-86. His Master's Voice was the English component of Victor in the United States, Deutsche Grammophon in Germany, Voce del Padrone in Italy, and so on—even extending to Japan Victor.

21. Ibid., 87-93. 22. Atlanta Constitution, January 27, 1924, E6, 10. Thorner was quoted as saying he had been

backstage at Lewis's Vienna debut, and the audience "nearly took the roof down." 23. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 87-104. 24. Ibid., 105-15. 25. Ibid., 112. Apparently none of these works have survived. 26. Ibid., 121-38. 27. Ibid., 139-41. 28. Ibid., 142-45. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 156. 31. Ibid., 149-57. 32. Ibid., 157-58.

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2 8 6 M I C H A E L B . D O U G A N

33. Ibid., 175-80.

34. Ibid., 209-11. Photographs from the mid-i93os show that Lewis had gained weight.

35. Michael Quinn, "The Radio Transcription Discs of Mary Lewis," Record Collector 42 (Septem-

ber 1997): 188-94, reprinted in Zeman, Mary Lewis, 212-16. The contents ranged from opera arias

to popular songs. Most of the pieces as well as unpublished material from her Victor recordings can

be found on Mary Lewis: The Golden Haired Soprano, Marston Records, 52047-2 (2005). See also

"The Mary Lewis Records: An Appreciation," in Zeman, Mary Lewis, 209-11.

36. Zeman, Mary Lewis, 194-200.

37. Ibid., 201-3; Jessica Dragonette, Faith Is a Song: The Odyssey of an American Artist (New York:

David McKay, 1951), 78; Mary Lewis: The Golden Haired Soprano.

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