Word: cobina
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...voice "from I knew not where spoke to me. 'You are God's child . . . Nothing is more powerful than God's child. You were given dominion.' " What did it all mean? Cobina left the mystery for the mystics to explain, and hurried home to fasten her dominion on New York City. In a short time the young singer was surrounded by famous admirers (T.R. himself, she says, called her voice "Deelight-ful!"), won the patronage of the famed operatic soprano, Mme. Frances Alda, and married bestselling Novelist Owen (Stover at Yale) Johnson...
...Within two weeks of my divorce," says Cobina, "America entered the war." President Wilson could scarcely have timed it better, for when the first Yanks arrived in Paris they found Cobina there to entertain them. She buddied around with General "Jack" Pershing, Barney Baruch, Jesse Jones and the Aga Khan. The spiritual ruler of millions of Ismailian Moslems was famous in those days, Cobina remembers, for his vast appetite at table and a fabulous bed, large enough for 24 people...
...Front Page. Cobina fought clear of foreign entanglements in 1919, and went home to Manhattan. Soon after her return she met Millionaire Bill Wright, "the best man on the floor" of the New York Stock Exchange. "The first moment we danced together . . . I knew that at last I was honestly, deeply in love." They were married, and fortified by the Wright millions, Cobina threw a succession of parties that made her the busiest hostess on the Sands Point-Palm Beach-Café Society circuit. At the same time, she dazzled Manhattan concert audiences with a recital mixture of popular soprano...
Then came the 1929 crash. Cobina blames herself now for being so heedless of business affairs; while the bottom was falling out of the stock market she was busy with cross-country concerts and social life. She had also lost touch with her husband. A few years after the Wright millions went down the drain, the marriage broke up. Bill went off with another woman. They were divorced, not without a scandal "spicy enough," she notes, "to share front-page space with the trial of the Lindbergh kidnaper...
...After Materialism, What?" Cobina called on her courage-"always," she admits, "immense"-and went back to work, first as the proprietor of a supper club that failed, later as a nightclub singer at $500 a week. When daughter Cobina was 16, mother stood her in the public gaze, named her "Jr.," tacked "Sr." to her own name and retired to the wings. She coached the young beauty into a quick, bright career as the Glamour Girl of 1939, but all ended in confusion when Cobina Jr. threw up her Hollywood contracts and married wealthy young Palmer Beaudette...