Overture of Hope, page 6
In Salzburg, Ursuleac remembered the Cook sisters right away and in her broken, German-accented English she recalled that they wanted her husband to autograph their picture. “I know! You want Mr. Krauss to write!” she said. The sisters were received “smilingly but a trifle absently” by the soprano. As Ida noted years later, the sisters could tell even then that she had her problems “in a troubled and unstable world.” Nevertheless Ida produced the photograph that she carried in her handbag and gave it to Ursuleac who promised to get his signature. She told them to collect the photograph in a few days’ time at the festival box office.17
In the meantime, the sisters enjoyed “a glorious feast of music,” including the performance by Pinza in the title role of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Louise was desperately in love with Pinza, and friends recalled that she blushed whenever anyone mentioned his name in her presence. If she was timid at the best of times, she was positively tongue-tied in the company of the suave Italian with his slicked-back dark, curly hair, handsome in his signature fedora and perfectly tied bowtie, an ebony cigarette holder clutched between white teeth. But the Cooks knew too much about his scandalous reputation with women. He had dined at the Cooks’ modest family home in London along with Elisabeth Rethberg, the beautiful German soprano who starred with him on stage. They seemed constantly together, and often signed joint letters to the sisters. It was clear to the Cooks that they were having an affair.
Pinza had an eye for beautiful women. And although he was married to his first wife when he was involved with Rethberg, he still made an effort to seduce as many women as possible. His womanizing would turn tragic when, following an affair with the German conductor Bruno Walter’s married daughter Gretel, Gretel’s husband murdered her in revenge and then turned the gun on himself.
The sisters were pretty clear-eyed about Pinza’s amorous proclivities, but they seemed to excuse him because he was such a remarkable performer. They considered him an exalted being—“sensational” in the unforgettable production of Don Giovanni at Salzburg. After all, they reasoned, their “operatic charmer” was stuck in a hapless marriage to his first wife, Augusta Cassinelli. “There is no use pretending that the domestic situation was a happy one, for the first Mrs. Pinza was, to put it mildly, a difficult person.”18 When she found out about the relationship between her husband and Rethberg, Cassinelli sued the dramatic soprano for $250,000 in 1935, blaming Rethberg for the “alienation” of her husband’s affections. The lawsuit was filed just as Pinza was preparing to star in the Metropolitan Opera production of Faust as Mephistopheles alongside Rethberg, who played the role of the maiden, Marguerite. The suit was eventually dropped.
On their last day in Salzburg, the Cooks collected the photograph that Ida had left with Ursuleac and again bumped into her walking near the river. When they asked where they could hear Ursuleac sing in opera again, she told them to come and see her in Vienna. But before they could plan a trip to Vienna, the sisters traveled to Amsterdam at the end of 1934 on the advice of Rethberg, who suggested that they attend a Strauss Festival Week in the Dutch city at the end of the year. Not only would Strauss himself be conducting some of his most famous works, but Ursuleac would be performing solos from Arabella, which had become her most important Strauss role to date.
Ida and Louise were becoming fast friends with Ursuleac. Although she could barely speak English at the time, Ida wrote to her often. Ursuleac wrote back in her halting English, thanking the sisters for prints of the photos Ida took and for a bouquet of flowers they sent before one of her performances in Amsterdam. “Send you many thanks for the wonderful flowers and wish you a happy new year,” wrote Ursuleac, whom the sisters often referred to by her initials VU or simply “Vee.”
“Your letter I have read it before the performance and I was very happy to go on the stage with the thoughts from kindest friends. Could you understand my English?”19
They were becoming so close that Ida and Louise were among the inner circle allowed to attend Ursuleac’s dress rehearsals as well as the performances during their week in Amsterdam. At the dress rehearsals they soon noticed “a distinguished-looking whitehaired lady in the audience whom we had seen once or twice with Krauss and Ursuleac in Salzburg.”20 Ursuleac introduced the sisters to her close friend Mitia Mayer-Lismann, the official lecturer of the Salzburg Festival, who gave daily talks in German and English at the Hotel Bristol the morning before each opera performance. Unwilling to share the Romanian soprano with a woman they described as an interloper, both sisters immediately dismissed the opera expert. “These people with double-barrelled names are never any good,” said Louise, who had yet to attend one of Mayer-Lismann’s lectures. “A lot of talk, when what one only wants is the performance.”21
But Mayer-Lismann seemed a constant presence. They bumped into her again when they went to the Amsterdam train station to see off Ursuleac on her return to Vienna. “And then a strange thing happened,” wrote Ida.22 As the four women stood talking on the platform, surrounded by travelers with suitcases and vendors hawking newspapers, Ursuleac suddenly grabbed both sisters by the arm, and “with an earnestness and gravity that we could not quite understand” explained that Mayer-Lismann would soon be going to England for the first time in her life, to deliver a series of lectures on music. The sisters stared at each other, not quite comprehending the sense of urgency. In her broken English, Ursuleac pleaded with them to please, please look after her when she arrived. Although struck by the rather odd request, the sisters heartily agreed to do so. They reassured Ursuleac that she needn’t worry about anything. They would take care of her friend. “I still see the scene on the platform of Amsterdam station as Ursuleac turned to her companion and said in a tone of somber satisfaction, ‘Now you will be all right.’ ”23
The sisters returned to London and prepared for a busy 1935. King George’s Silver Jubilee coincided with the first day of the Covent Garden season on May 6. Before the performance began, the King’s Jubilee Message to the Empire was broadcast live from Saint Paul’s Cathedral over the loudspeakers of the Royal Opera House. After thanking the British people and the empire’s subjects in far-flung colonies for their good wishes on his twenty-fifth anniversary on the throne, the King seemed to allude to troubled times ahead. “Other anxieties may be in store, but I am persuaded with God’s help they may all be overcome, if we meet them with confidence, courage, and unity,” he said, carefully enunciating each word.24
Overwhelmed by the solemnity of the occasion and the King’s hopeful words, Ida and Louise, happily ensconced in their gallery seats, could hardly have imagined that in a short time they would be called upon to test their own reserves of “confidence, courage, and unity.”
But before those dark moments arrived there was opera, and the first of what would be their annual “gramophone parties”—the musical soirées they organized with canapés and champagne but also tea and scones, smothered in Devon cream—in their Morella Road living room. That year, the Cooks invited their gallery queue habitués who were honored with the presence of live opera stars Pinza and Rethberg. Although Ida reported that Rethberg was rather shy during the festivities, Pinza was in full charming form, regaling his listeners with backstage gossip and singing snatches of their favorite arias.
It was also during that momentous Jubilee Year that Florence Taft at Mabs Fashions asked Ida—her fiction sub-editress—to try her hand at a romantic serial, a suspense-laden romance that could run over several issues of the magazine. Although she was skeptical, Ida was game to give it a try, and she locked herself up in the family’s attic to begin work on Wife to Christopher. Unwilling to publish under her real name, Ida invented a pseudonym by combining her mother’s first name with her paternal grandmother’s maiden name. And so the romance writer Mary Burchell was born.
Ida could easily have borrowed the plot of Wife to Christopher from one her favorite operas: a breathless page-turner, marked by suspense and melodrama. Vicki Unwin, with her beauty, purity, and sense of utter devotion, became Ida’s first ingénue, and resembled a misunderstood Desdemona. But it was also a story about secrets shared by sisters. When Vicki and her sister Margery are faced with mounting bills for caring for their beloved dying father, Margery boldly suggests that Vicki trick a wealthy man into marrying her. Vicki spots her opportunity in Christopher Kentone, the heir to a huge fortune, who is involved with a married opera singer named Marie Renard. Vicki, who works for Christopher’s father, Joseph, devises a plot that results in her becoming locked in Christopher’s bedroom at night. When Christopher wakes to find the seemingly helpless Vicky in his room, he decides that he must marry her to save the young woman’s reputation. But when he finds out about her betrayal, he becomes bent on revenge.
Wife to Christopher proved so successful that the fiction editor at Mabs suggested that Ida offer it to a publisher as a novel. She gave her the names of three publishers and Ida chose Mills & Boon, sending the serial marked for the attention of Charles Boon. The publisher responded right away, and a week later she met Boon himself in his office. The company, which had started out as a general-interest publishing firm, producing travel guides, school textbooks, and Shakespearean plays, was now focusing on romantic fiction, and Boon obviously saw raw talent in the thirty-year-old Mabs writer and sub-editress.
Boon, the son of a London brewer, had met his cofounder, the very proper and wealthy Gerald Rusgrove Mills, the son of a Midlands solicitor, while the two men worked at Methuen, a more established publisher. Boon, an expert in marketing and advertising, and Mills, the main investor and Methuen’s former head of educational publications, set up the new publishing venture together in 1908. Among their most popular writers were Jack London, Hugh Walpole, and P. G. Wodehouse. On the eve of the First World War, they were among the first publishers in the United Kingdom to seek out talented women writers. “Men are not writing so much fiction as in past years, while the woman writer is immensely on the increase,” Boon told a meeting of the Associated Booksellers in 1913.
But the company’s fortunes suddenly changed in 1916. Jack London, one of their highest-grossing authors, died that year, and both principals joined the war effort, leaving the company to drift for three critical years under the stewardship of Boon’s sister, Margaret. Although the firm managed to recover once Mills and Boon returned, the company searched for ways to strengthen its bottom line with a string of bestsellers. The partners began to answer the demand for romantic and escapist fiction for women and became pioneers in the genre. After Mills died in 1928, Boon continued courting prolific women writers, largely to compete with the glamorous Barbara Cartland, who began her career in 1925 and would go on to write more than seven hundred books.
By the time Charles Boon signed Ida Cook in 1935, the firm was publishing around sixty-seven romance novels a year.25 Ida, who had been interested in writing love stories since she had penned “A Romance of the 14th Century” as a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in Alnwick, was overjoyed with this new opportunity, although she seemed the very antithesis of Cartland, a seductive presence who had several lovers and bore little resemblance to her virginal protagonists. Cartland was fond of wearing chiffon and throwing elaborate society parties to promote her breathless bestsellers, while Ida remained plain and no-nonsense, doing little to adopt an alluring public persona as a writer of romances.
“I am I think by nature a tale-spinner, and passionately interested in people,” Ida recalled years later.26 But Ida was never alone in her tale-spinning. From the beginning, Louise was very much a partner—albeit a silent one—in the writing. The sisters would consult on plot and characters, and Louise would proofread and help her sister type the manuscripts. A family friend recalled that, once Ida had signed her contract with Mills & Boon, Louise helped her sister “rattle off” two books a year.27
Eager to head back to her attic room on Morella Road and begin her next book, Ida agreed on the spot to signing a three-book contract, which included Wife to Christopher. “ ‘No, no,’ [Charles Boone] said firmly. ‘You must never sign anything like that. You take that contract home and show it to your father, and if he says you can sign it, you can.’ How’s that for the wicked old world of publishing? No wonder I knew from that moment I was in safe hands.”28 Wife to Christopher, for which Ida earned an advance of £40 and 10 percent in royalties, turned into a bestseller for Mills & Boon. After her initial success, Ida began to mine her opera-world adventures for material for future books.
Romance in the Mills & Boon universe of the 1930s was based on what Boon called “wholesomeness.” Authors were encouraged “within the limits implied by ‘wholesomeness,’ to make their storylines as erotic as possible. A common scene, usually at the beginning of the novel, was the moment when the heroine senses an unmistakable attraction to the hero. ‘Electricity’ was often in the air.”29 Ida never veered from that chaste line: “I truly don’t think I have ever let a girl of mine do anything that I wouldn’t like to see a girl of that age do, or if she does, she’s punished.”30
In later years, John Boon, one of the sons of the cofounder of the publishing house, said that the key to the company’s success was never looking down on the books they produced. “We never despised our product. I think this was highly important. A lot of people who publish romantic novels call them ‘funny little books’ that make a bit of profit. We never did that. We never said this was the greatest form of literature, but we did say that of this form of literature, we were going to publish the best.”31
Mills & Boon released Wife to Christopher with a pink-and-grey cover featuring a drawing of a frightened blonde woman in an alluring, sleeveless, satin nightdress with a tall, square-jawed, and menacing man in a robe glaring down at her. Ida dedicated the book to her new friend Viorica Ursuleac. “To my Dear V. U. who lent me her initials to bring me luck, and to whom I now offer my first book as a very small tribute to a very great artist.” In addition to Ursuleac’s initials, Ida drew on Clemens Krauss for the character of Christopher Kentone, who shared the conductor’s overbearing personality and, of course, his initials.
Amid all this excitement over the publication of Ida’s first book, Mitia Mayer-Lismann finally arrived in London, and to safety. The Cooks, who had promised their new friend that they would “look after” Mayer-Lismann suddenly found themselves spending a great deal of time with her. She was, they both pronounced, quite charming. The sisters were also suitably impressed with her knowledge of German opera. Still, it wasn’t until they took her on a sightseeing tour of London’s great churches that they began to see why Ursuleac had entrusted her to their care. At Westminster Abbey, Mayer-Lismann asked if it was a Protestant or Catholic church. When she asked the same question under the dome of Saint Paul’s, Ida wondered where the conversation was going and boldly asked Mayer-Lismann a rather personal question.
“Are you Protestant or Catholic?”
“I?” said Mayer-Lismann, rather surprised. “Didn’t you know? I’m a Jewess.”32
CHAPTER 4 The Flat
Ida had spied the large construction site advertising London’s newest housing complex, Dolphin Square, from her seat on the bus as she made her way home from Fleet Street to Victoria Station, where she regularly caught the train to Wandsworth.1 She was determined to have an apartment at Dolphin Square, and one day she simply walked from Victoria Station to inquire in person, immediately putting down a £10 deposit on a large one-bedroom flat. Ida had convinced Louise that they needed their own place in central London—a pied-à-terre to entertain their opera friends, especially now that Ida was well on her way to becoming an established author, a woman of some means.
There was also something distinctly American about the well-ordered blocks of flats that must have resonated with both women after their sojourns in New York. Unlike most London bedsits that were dark and stuffy, the apartments at Dolphin Square were airy and light filled. Many overlooked the complex’s manicured gardens and the Thames. The developer also showed prospective tenants plans for ground-floor retail shops. The new residents at Dolphin Square wouldn’t have far to go for all their needs. Here was a modern development that lent itself to convenience and ease of living—a place of wide vistas that carried a sense of possibility in its architecture.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine the delightful parties they would throw in the apartment, big enough to cram in dozens of their friends. Perhaps now they could invite even more of their fellow opera aficionados who happily endured all sorts of weather to queue up with them for tickets, sitting on their canvas camp stools outside Covent Garden during the season. At Dolphin Square, everyone would be able to gather around the sisters’ beloved gramophone to listen to their growing collection of opera records. Maybe Pinza might again be persuaded to attend and tell his risqué stories. Ida and Louise were so enchanted by the social possibilities that the Dolphin Square flat held for them that they were among the first to sign up for a rental at the redbrick apartment blocks, which were still under construction.
They might not have known it when they signed the rental agreement, but the inspiration for Dolphin Square actually came from their beloved New York City. It was U.S. developer Frederick Fillmore French who bought the tract of land in Pimlico in 1933 that would become Dolphin Square. French envisioned a British version of his Tudor City and Knickerbocker Plaza, Manhattan rental-apartment complexes featuring hundreds of units that the Frederick French Company had built for middle-class New Yorkers in the 1920s and 1930s. French’s plans for a mid-rise housing complex in the City of Westminster—each apartment block was to be ten stories tall—was dubbed one of “the most ambitious schemes for London in years” by the New York Times.
But two years after he bought the leasehold on the property from the Duke of Westminster, French’s company found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, forcing the real-estate baron to sell the London parcel to a competing British developer. Richard Rylands Costain would go on to complete French’s vision—a housing development of 1,250 flats. Most of the units contained three rooms—a bedroom, reception room, and kitchen. Apartments ranged from the one-room Henley Suite to the seven-room Windsor Suite that also featured maids’ quarters. “London’s Residential Landmark of the Future,” invited prospective tenants to “a game of ‘squash,’ a plunge in the pool…a lift to your home!” according to a notice in The Times of London. Bureaucrats, lawmakers, and even spies lined up to rent the “highly desirable” apartments which were within walking distance of government offices, including the headquarters of the British security services MI5 and MI6.
