"Grace Moore was a figure out of another era, almost
a geological
age's distance, in popular entertainment - an opera singer who found
success on the silver screen and even charted some hit records. Her
story is also one of the most compelling tales of success, defeat,
redemption, and tragedy in the history of American entertainment.
Born to the family of a travelling salesman (and later department
store owner) in Tennessee, she developed a love of music, and,
fueled by a magnificent voice, bluffed her way onto the Broadway
stage. From an eventual star's berth at the Met, she jumped to
motion pictures with the advent of talkies, was destroyed at one
studio by the pressures and then rescued, and given a whole second
career on screen and the concert stage by the politics at another
studio, only to die in an air crash a decade later.
Moore was born in Slabtown, Tennessee, and her strict
Baptist
upbringing hardly made her a likely candidate for a career in
entertainment, and she did intend, early in life, to become a missionary.
By age 16, however, the 'skinny, long-legged ugly girl' (as she described
herself) had discovered music, and that she had a voice that was worth
spending some time developing.
She studied singing and music theory at Ward-Belmont
College in
Nashville, and then extended her music training in Washington, D.C.,
in the process making contact with the likes of Alma Gluck (1884 - 1938)
and Mary Garden (1874 - 1967), and at 17 was a participant in a
Washington, D. C. recital given by Giovanni Martinelli, the celebrated
Metropolitan tenor, which got Moore her first mention in a review.
She moved to New York and bluffed her way into the
cast of a 1920
Jerome Kern-scored revue called Hitchy Koo. She continued to develop
her singing and earned (and failed) a couple of Metropolitan Opera
auditions in the early 1920's. After a couple of years living in Paris,
she
returned to New York to play in two of Irving Berlins Music Box
revues. Her appearance in the 1924 show 'Tell Her In The Springtime'
led to a pair of recordings for Victor (later RCA-Victor), 'My Rock-A-
Bye Baby' and 'Listening,' of which the latter was a No. 5 U. S.
hit.
By 1928, Moore was at the Metropolitan Opera, making
her debut that
year as Mimi in La Boheme. She came to specialize in French and
Italian lyric soprano roles, often played opposite the legendary Gigli in
New York, and her career took her to opera houses in Paris, Cannes,
and Monte Carlo, among other European cities. Moore's popularity was
unusual, in that critics and audiences were divided on just how good she
was in any of her roles - she lacked some conviction in her performances,
and may have had some technical limitations.
Audiences, however, especially men, adored Moore,
because of her
appearance and physique. She was no contemporary super-model, but in
an era in which the typical opera diva tipped the scales at anywhere up to
200 pounds, Moore's relatively svelte 130 - 140 pounds made her as
visually alluring as any woman on any operatic stage. This helped
very
seriously in compensating for any shortcoming in her vocalizing and
acting.
One of those who came to admire Moore was Louis B.
Mayer, the Vice
President and chief operating officer of M-G-M. Then the biggest
studio
in Hollywood, M-G-M was making the leap to sound films in 1929-30
with an emphasis on musical entertainment, and Mayer signed Moore to
portray opera singer Jenny Lind in a 1930 movie called 'A Lady's Morals.'
The movie was less than a sterling success, but M-G-M tried again with
Moore, this time with an adaptation of Signmund Romberg's operetta
'New Moon', in which she co-starred with Met alumnus Lawrence
Tibbett.
Moore's career was vexed, however, by the stresses
of screen work and
the need to succeed. Following the box-office failure of 'A Lady's
Morals',
she began eating in earnest, and by the time of her second movie, she was
no longer the relatively svelte creature that Mayer had signed a year
earlier. Moore had literally eaten herself out of a Hollywood
contract.
Dropped by the studio in 1931, and soon discovered that the Great
Depression had wiped out a lot of operatic and concert possibilities for
her - she was back on the Broadway stage in 1932, and it was there that
she walked into her biggest success to date, a fresh adaptation of Karl
Millocker's operetta 'Grafin Dubarry', called The Dubarry.
It was while performing in The Dubarry that Moore
was spotted by Harry
Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures. At that time, Columbia was
barely one of the major Hollywood studios - apart from Frank Capra's
movies, its output was distinctly low-budget, low-rent, and low-ambition
in
comparison to such rivals as M-G-M, Paramount, Fox, RKO, United
Artists, and Universal. Cohn liked what he heard of Moore's singing,
however, and even more of what he saw, for she had slimmed down
again.
Cohn liked what he heard and saw, but he saw more
than just Grace Moore
in front of him. He saw an opportunity, knowing of her previous failure
at
M-G-M, to take an actress that Louis B. Mayer had failed with and
dropped, and make her into a star - a chance for Harry Cohn at tiny
Columbia Pictures to show up the biggest mogul at the biggest studio of
them all.
Essentially, Grace Moore became the beneficiary of
the inherent rivalry
between the studio owners and chiefs. The Hollywood moguls, like the
bluesmen transplanted out of the Mississippi delta and into Chicago, had
almost all known, or at least known of each other coming up; they
competed for the same theaters, stars, and audiences,usually hadn't liked
each other, and never missed a chance to show up their rivals whenever
one came along.
Grace Moore was Harry Cohn's chance. Cohn decided
to build a serious
musical around her - and Columbia was not known for making musicals at
all at the time - called 'One Night Of Love.'
For this film, Columbia commissioned an excellent
score by Louis Silvers,
and recruited one of the unsung talents in the world of film musicals,
Victor
Schertzinger (a composer, violinist, and songwriter), to direct. The
result
was one of Columbia's most prestigious films of the mid 1930's, a rich,
artistically sophisticated, and nicely realized drama that made Moore
a star.
Harry Cohn had his hit, as good a musical as M-G-M
made in 1934, and a
female musical star as alluring as Jeanette McDonald. And Grace Moore
had her career back.
Her recording of 'One Night Of Love' rode the top
of the American
charts for four weeks, and followed it all up with the successful 'Love Me
Forever' in 1935. Her subsequently Columbia films weren't as well
received, although 'The King Steps Out" (1936), directed by Josef Von
Sternberg and scored to the music of Fritz Kreisler, remains well worth
seeing. In 1938, Moore starred in her final film, 'Louise', based on
a work
by Charpentier - the director was Abel Gance, the famed director of
'Napoleon', and it was filmed outside of Paris.
Moore resumed her stage career exclusively beginning
that year, touring
Europe extensively and even returning to the United States for
appearances at the Metropolitan Opera. During World War II, she made
extensive appearances on behalf of the Allied war effort, and she was later
awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government. She was as busy
as ever after the war, and it was while on a concert tour...that she died
in a plane crash."
~An AMG Biography by Bruce Eder,
All Music Guide
Internet
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