FOUR WAYS TO FAME

by Albert H. Morehead
(Redbook August 1947)

It hasn't been true, for some time, that a prima donna must be fat and foreign, swathed in ostrich feathers, and given to hysterical outburst. It isn't right, anymore, to call an athlete a "prima donna" when he acts spoiled and temperamental. There's a new style in prima donnas.

Of the new style, is Risë Stevens. She's a prima donna, for the term means “first lady” in opera, and that's Risë's job with the Metropolitan Opera Company. But she isn't fat, having in fact a pin-up figure. She isn't foreign; she was born in New York City and even changed her Norwegian-sounding name to make it more American. She's bright as she's beautiful, but she strictly denies she's glamorous. And she's no more temperamental than the average American housewife. (Anyone who desires to know precisely what that means can ask the average American husband.)

Considering Risë Stevens' standing in opera, in radio and in the movies, and the fact that she co-starred with Bing Crosby in an Academy Award picture, her personality is not as well known as one would think. People know her name, but they don't know much about her.

Of course, some publicity comes of being brazen or bombastic or eccentric, which Risë isn't. She doesn't indulge in divorces or squabbles. She lives unostentatiously, in a Hollywood house without a swimming-pool, with her husband and three-year old son Nicky. She goes about her business.

Being untemperamental is not without its rewards. Back in 1942 Risë appeared with Bing Crosby in a war-bond show. Bing was much impressed, and not only with her famous voice. “There's a woman,” said Bing, “that you can sing with without going nuts.”  So he decided she should be in his next picture. It was a tough job, because there was no part for her, and of course it had to be a star's part; but they managed to write it in. Risë liked it and accepted it, and the critics praised the part as well as Risë. The picture was “going my way,” which won the Redbook as well as the Academy Award.

She can act, and loves to act—“better than anything else.” Better than singing? Well, it's different. Singing is hard work, but singing is in her nature; “I couldn't live without it.” It's like eating and breathing. People say they love to eat, but it would never occur to them to say they love to breathe.

Risë always had to sing. Her debut was in 1923, when Milton Cross, an ex-singer who had taken up with the newfangled radio business, started a children's hour on Sunday mornings. Risë, aged 10, was one of the children who appeared on it. Fifteen years later, when Risë blossomed forth as a celebrity, Cross had forgotten her name, but he remembered the girl. She was cute.

Music continued to sing, at home and in choirs, taking desultory singing lessons; but the real start came when she entered Newtown High School. This was the first high school in New York City to have a full-fledged music course. Risë started in the straight academic course, but all the students sang in assembly, and one morning Mr. Valentine, who founded and directed the music course, was standing with the Superintendent listening to them. The Superintendent detected what seemed to him a false note.

“Who has that coarse voice?” he asked. It was Risë, singing an octave lower than all the rest in her true contralto voice. Mr. Valentine picked her out and persuaded her to leave the academic and take up the music curriculum. He trained her in sight-reading, using “flash cards” — she would have to glance at the card, then sing what she had seen. He taught her to “think tones,” and to follow hand direction in part-singing. She was taking private lessons at the same time, and she progressed very rapidly.

From time to time the Newtown High School boys and girls would be entered in competitions. Risë was a sensation from the start. She always won, and she was always offered a scholarship. For a while, she was persuaded to refuse them and finish high school, but finally she succumbed to an opportunity too good to resist. She had an offer from the Opera Comique company, supported the Heckscher Foundation in New York, and it gave her an opportunity to learn, in actual presentations, acting and singing on the stage before live audiences. Reason was seventeen , she had had three years in high school, and her professional career had begun.

Risë was a typical popular high school girl. She belonged to clubs, had dates, carried her pennant to the football games and rooted for her team. When offered a choice of prizes after winning a competition, she chose to have dinner on Broadway and go to “Whoopee,” a musical comedy in which Eddie Cantor was starring. She met the stars and got their autographs, and she said, “I wonder if someday I'll be autographing things for people.”

Risë the operatic diva has retained one striking attribute of Risë the high school girl: unfailing cheerfulness. She hasn't always obtained what she wanted, and she has often had trouble in learning or in overcoming faults, but these things never make her disconsolate. She tries again, and acts quite happy about it, and eventually she achieves the results she set out for.

No doubt the best known item in Risë Stevens early history is that she was offered a contract with the Metropolitan Opera Company when she was twenty, and she turned it down — the first time in 50 years that such a thing had happened. Risë had served a good apprenticeship. The Opera Comique had given her experience in productions ranging from light to semi-grand opera. She had completed a three-year course at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where she learned that she had greater aptitude at the practical art of singing than in the mysterious complexities of musical science, but struggled through anyway. The Met thought she was ready, but Risë didn't. She went to Europe to learn more, and to mature her voice.

Only after five years of opera in Europe, in Cairo and in South America did she return amid much fanfare to the contract that was still waiting for her at the Met.

The Metropolitan debut of Miss Risë Stevens was attended by all the trimmings of triumph, curtain calls and adulation, but her beauty, her figure and her histrionic talent shared the plaudits with her voice. She could play boys' parts or romantic girls with equal grace. In the role of Octavian, the young Viennese nobleman in “Der Rosenkavalier,” she is costumed in the knee pants and silk stockings of his era; and backstage at the Met they called her “Legs” Stevens and wouldn't have hesitated to put her in competition with anyone.

But her big part, of course, is as Carmen; she is destined to be the most famous Carmen to date. It is the most popular of operas, and the part is the most alluring that opera has to offer. It requires beauty, femininity and passion as well as musicianship; Risë has them all. Although she had sung the part abroad, she waited to take it at the Metropolitan until she was sure she was ready; this came at the end of 1945, seven full years after her return to America and her Metropolitan debut. “For once,” observed the staid New York Times through its critic, Olin Downes, a man slow to praise, “we saw a Carmen who made her effects —and missed none of them — with genuine intelligence and feeling and without exaggeration.” The Carmen role gives Risë a further opportunity, for Carmen dances, “and I love to dance,” Risë says.

Risë Stevens is five feet seven inches tall. She is far from slight in build, but she is not fat, and her ideal weight is 135 pounds. Ideal for everything but singing that is. For opera, she manages to put on an extra ten or fifteen pounds by a systematic stuffing. “It does everything in the world for the voice,” she explains. Obviously, a voice that Lloyds of London insures for a million dollars is worth a few pounds extra weight. But in off season she gladly lets her weight go down again.

She is her own hairdresser and manicurist. Her hair, a rich brown colour and a good match for her eyes, is cut to a moderate length — easy to tuck back for male roles, thoroughly feminine when down.

She dresses simply. Nevertheless, this year she was named both the most attractively coiffured and the best dressed opera star, by the associations of hairdressers and of couturiers.

One of Risë's several sentimental traditions involves rabbits' feet for good luck, and this one is tied up with her romance and marriage. Risë Stevens is — has been since January, 1939 — Mrs. Walter Szurovy. This brings up the subject of pronunciations. Whoever writes about Miss Stevens must give some attention to the pronunciations.

To begin with, Risë, a Norwegian name (after her grandmother), is properly pronounced "ree-suh,” except that her husband and your concert manager both call it “ree-zay.” “Europeans always do,” says Risë.

Then, her maiden name. It was Steenberg, also a Norwegian name and pronounced “steen-byorg." Her father, Christian Steenberg, was brought from Norway to the United States when he was three years old. His two children, Risë and her brother Lewis, who was killed in the invasion of Normandy in 1944, changed to “Stevens” while Risë was in high school. Mr. and Mrs. Steenberg, who still live in New York, didn't change.

Finally, her legally married name, Szurovy, a Hungarian name: “suh-ro-vuh.” And so back to the rabbits' feet. Risë was to appear in “Mignon,” in her debut at the Prague Opera House. As she stood in the wings, waiting for her cue, a young man stepped up to her, bowed, and presented a bunny stuffed in red-and-white checked gingham. Americans, he knew, thought that rabbits' feet bring good luck, and this bunny's four feet were the only rabbits' feet he could find in Prague. Whether or not the bunny deserves the credit, Risë had a most successful debut; and as for the young Hungarian actor, Walters Szurovy, she married him in New York five years later. The gingham rabbit she still has; it is the dean of a family of stuffed dolls that includes most of Walt Disney's characters and that Risë often takes with her when she is on tour.

It goes without saying that Risë's life is a busy one. Any successful performer has more things to do than would seem possible for one person. All this Risë must fit in with her schedule for sleep and rest, and she is a most accomplished sleeper. She can sleep ten hours a day without half trying, and twelve or thirteen if she gets the chance.

Risë's normal bed line is eleven, her normal rising time nine. On a working day — opera or concert — she spends the morning reading the score, has a light lunch, and goes back to bed at one-thirty. She falls asleep at once, and sleeps until four. Then she has a sandwich and goes to “the theater" (the Metropolitan Opera house) at six.

Is she nervous on these days? Yes, of course; Everybody is. “My fingers are icy-cold with nerves. If anybody disturbs me during the day, I feel irritated, and I guess I show it. But after the first notes come out, then no more nerves."

After "the show" Risë is ravenously hungry, since she has hardly eaten at all during the day., and the Szurovys, perhaps with some friends, go to a quiet restaurant and have dinner. They never go to a nightclub, partly because it is too tiring, after an evening of such strenuous exertion, to be recognized and have to stand up and shake hands and have spotlights thrown on you; partly because smoke-filled rooms are bad for the voice. In cities outside of New York, Risë has her favorite restaurants for such evenings. In New York, she goes back home and has a bite to eat, for in practically any good restaurant there would be recognition and commotion and the necessity to talk with a voice that is already tired.

The nervous feeling to which Risë admits is never apparent to others. Directors, officials, orchestra and chorus of her Sunday afternoon radio show insist that no one can match her for simplicity and calmness, whether in rehearsal or at zero hour. Rehearsals are on Thursday afternoons, and a record is made, which can be played back on Friday and Saturday for corrections and self-criticism. When the Met is on tour each spring, Risë can't be at the rehearsals, rushing back by train or plane for the broadcast, but no one can tell when her performance is unrehearsed.

She makes it a policy not to read the critics' reviews until the end of the season. Her husband keeps them all, while Risë keeps a copy of each program and marks it — “poor,” “fair” or “good.” Then, during the summer, she compares her appraisal with the critics'. She feels that reading the criticisms during the season can affect one's performances.

The Szurovys' home in New York is in an apartment hotel overlooking Central Park; their real home, however, is a house in Hollywood, bought three years ago when Nicky was due. The house is simple enough, quite modern in design, built on a plot of slightly less than an acre, and — as previously mentioned — it flies in the face of Hollywood tradition by having no swimming-pool.

Risë “takes the summer off.” So she says, at least. Taking the summer off means learning one or two new parts, some practicing with her coach, and maybe making a movie. Nevertheless, Risë is at home. She doesn't work more than three or four hours a day, and the rest of the time she can spend with Nicky, pottering around the garden, or in the kitchen (she can cook). Another companion is her black miniature poodle, whose name is L'Ami Noir (black friend, in French), but whom she calls “Lambie.” Her invariable costume is shirt and slacks, and she swears that no one could reconcile her summertime appearance with the usual conception of the operatic diva.

In this rest period the Surovys don't go out much. They play a bit of chess, some gin-rummy (“it's the patriotic Hollywood game,” says Risë. “We gave up bridge because you're too likely to become a fanatic. Why, some of my friends can't talk about anything else!”) and they listen to music. Another of their games is croquet, but they don't take that too seriously, either.

Risë likes to read, but nothing too heavy unless it's about the world of music. Her favorite reading is mystery stories, especially French ones, which she can read in the original, since, like most singers, she is very good at languages — fluent in German, almost as good in French, and fair in Italian. (But she doesn't know Norwegian. Her father, in his intense Americanism, didn't teach his children a word of it.) On tour, she reads mostly magazines.

Though Risë's first love is opera, there can be little doubt that with her beauty, her charm and her great ability she will become best known through the motion pictures. She has not been in many pictures as yet, but all have been successful: “The Chocolate Soldier,” her first, made with Nelson Eddy; then “Going My Way,” and, her latest, “Carnegie Hall.” She is now working in a picture about the Metropolitan Opera. Risë enjoys making movies, and takes them in her stride as she does all her other professional chores.

In the theatrical world, torn as it is by envies and jealousies, it is refreshing to meet someone as universally popular as Risë Stevens is. Because she has been so many places and done so many things, she has met many people, and they all speak of her as a friend —her childhood companions in New York, her costudents at Newtown High, the boys and girls, men and women with whom she has sung, those who made good like Risë and those who didn't. They go to hear her sing, and they go backstage and congratulate her and pat her on the back and think, and say, that Risë is a great girl. It never hurt anybody to have friends like these.