Word: gracing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nearest thing in modern opera to the lobster-supper diva of musical fable is exuberant, 42-year-old Grace Moore. Like the Farrars and Jeritzas of the past, she has managed to be both a voice and a glamor girl. She is perhaps the only opera singer in the U.S. who receives emerald necklaces as casual presents from admirers, and certainly the only one who has gone on tour in a Hispano-Suiza complete with French maid and chauffeur...
Last week Grace Moore summed up her three-ring career as diva, musical comedy star and cinemactress in an engagingly frank, somewhat bumptious autobiography (You're Only Human Once; Doubleday, Doran...
...book is as effusively natural as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as full of names as a column by the late O. O. Mclntyre. It tells how Grace wowed the opera public from San Francisco to Bucharest, how she romanced with Artist George Biddle, how Maurice Chevalier declared her his only love and Charles MacArthur locked her in a men's lavatory. Between its name studded lines is the real story: the tale of a shrewd, attractive, indomitably ambitious girl from Slabtown, Tenn., who set out to become a celebrity, played every card just right, and finally got there...
...Appeal. Daughter of a small-town dry-goods merchant (her mother was the belle of Cocke County, Tenn.), Grace Moore started her career at 17 by running away from a Washington music school where she had been studying singing. In Manhattan, like hundreds of other stage struck youngsters, she made the rounds of the casting offices. But she had a stronger will than most. When she crashed David Belasco's office and recited the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, he advised her to stick to music. The agent for the Aborn Opera Company was less kindly: "The voice...
...Grace Moore had looks and an electrifying personality that would have made her a smash in musical comedy. But to the little girl from Slabtown, opera was still the end in glamor. She saved her Broadway paychecks, worked on her voice, cultivated people. ". . . Never have I underestimated the importance of my rich friends," admits Grace, "because, they have given me the opportunity . . . to sit in the assembly lines of jeweled women who hold down the golden horseshoes of the concert halls of the world. . . . Economic determination is one thing, the mouth of a gift horse another...