THE HARMONY OF HER LEGACY Mary Louise Bok and the Founding of The Curtis Institute of Music By Richard Carreño

                                 THE HARMONY OF HER LEGACY

                              Mary Louise Bok and the Founding

                                 of The Curtis Institute of Music

                                                      By

                                           Richard Carreño

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 Author's Note

THIS IS AN abbreviated version of a biography of Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, founder of The Curtis Institute of Music. It is a work in progress. As such, many periods, passages, and personages in Mary Louise's life are plainly missing. Readers will be interested in learning how a spirited independence emerged in her widowhood. Life-shaping cultural interactions and friendships in later life, in Philadelphia, Maine, and in Florida need an introspective look. Mary Louise's affectionate, even romantic, bond with some female friends and figures of respect and admiration requires detail. As does her stewardship of The Curtis Institute after Edward Bok's death in death 1933. Her marriage to Efrem Zimbalist and its notional romance awaits a full rendition.

The author welcomes comments. He can be contacted at WritersClearinghouse@yahoo.com.

CONTENTS

(For identification purposes only)

INTRODUCTION: Overtones

COMPOSITION

CHAPTER I: Foreign Quarter

CHAPTER II: Empire

CHAPTER III: Invictus

CHAPTER IV: Louisa and Kate

CHAPTER V: Marriage

CHAPTER VI: Swastika

CHAPTER VII: Conservatory

OVERTURE

CHAPTER VIII: Castle

CHAPTER IX: Prince

CHAPTER X: Munificence

CHAPTER XI: Antheil

CHAPTER XII: Rittenhouse

CHAPTER XIII: Mid-Life

CHAPTER XIV: Introspection

CHAPTER XV: Début

CHAPTER XVI: Course Correction

INTERMEZZO

Illustrations (Photographs, Maps, Drawings)

CHAPTER XVII: Hofmann (In Progress)

CHAPTER XVIII: Widowhood

CHAPTER IXX: Contretemps (In Progress)

CHAPTER XX: Indiscreet

CHAPTER XXI: Separate Ways (In Progress)

CHAPTER XXII: Bok and Cyrus Deaths (In Progress)

CHAPTER XXIII: Curtis Arboretum (In Progress)

CHAPTER XXIV: Florida (In Progress)

CHAPTER XXV: Efrem Zimbalist (In Progress)

CHAPTER XXVI: Mary Louise’s Death (In Progress)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

ABBREVIATIONS

END NOTES

WORKS CONSULTED

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TO HAND DOWN

THROUGH CONTEMPORARY MASTERS

THE GREATEST TRADITIONS OF THE PAST

TO TEACH STUDENTS TO BUILD

ON THIS HERITAGE FOR THE FUTURE

—Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist

The Curtis Institute of Music

Statement of Purpose

                 

PER ARDUA FORTUNA

(            (Good Fortune Through Adversity)

            —Curtis Family Motto

                 Introduction

                 OVERTONES

MARY LOUISE CURTIS, born on August 6, 1876, in Boston, was a Centennial American. The “Athens of America,” as Boston was liked to be known, luxuriated in its refinement, culture, and virtue. It was the home of blue-blooded Brahmins and Mayflower descendants, First Families whose dignity defined the cerebral erudition of Beacon Hill and Harvard Yard.

Mary was not of that stock. She was the only child of Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis and Louisa Knapp Curtis. Both were sturdy Yankee New Englanders; he, despite his Germanic-sounding name, a hardscrabble Down-Easter, transplanted to Boston from Portland, Maine. Louisa had family roots in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a seafaring town just north of the Bay State capital. Both, to their lasting joy, found music to be their muse.

Mary was born in the crucible of the American Revolution. Only months later, her parents, beset by business misfortune, moved to Philadelphia, the cradle of the new nation. There, with luck, pluck, and perseverance, the Curtises found their destinies.

Though nominally “The City of Brotherly Love,” Philadelphia's population of 850,000 was in fact splintered into myriad factions: its patrician Establishment, known as “Proper Philadelphians;” [1] its European immigrant masses; and a growing middle class. Overseeing it all was a governmental hothouse of deep corruption.

Curtis harnessed the industrial vigor of Philadelphia, the country’s second largest metropolis after New York. His genius in publishing laid the cornerstone of the massive Curtis Publishing Company. At his death in 1933, during the height of the Depression, Curtis had amassed a $43.2-billion fortune, making him the country’s 29th richest American—ever, to this day. [2]

In a city where success and prosperity never assured social standing, the Curtises were outliers. They just surmounted the city’s entitled élitism. Louisa dashed Philadelphia's societal conventions. She became a pioneering, outspoken magazine editor, distilling a legacy of independence and norm-busting she passed on to her daughter. Both parents instilled in Mary a passion for music—the foundation of their daughter's understanding of classical orchestration as a bulwark of American nationhood.

Mary claimed leadership and influence on her own. Her ability to inspire flowered after she regenerated Settlement, a social and educational center in Philadelphia, as a vibrant incubator for young musicians. Her jewel in the crown was The Curtis Institute of Music. Since the school’s founding in 1924, it has become of the world's great music conservatories and arguably unmatched for its enduring rigor, excellence, and its contributions to America’s music culture. Mary's adoption of The Curtis' ground-breaking tuition-free policy remains a remarkable precedent to this day.

She knew her limitations. She surrounded herself with cosmopolitan virtuosi from the United States and from around the world.

She believed in the future and power of youth, envisioned in quiet moments, as “a kaleidoscope of pictures.” “[S]ome were grave, some gay, some funny, some very sweet, one or two momentous.” All in all, she said, “they have much to do with Youth.” [3]

In a time of widespread racial prejudice, Curtis' first class included two African Americans and a Native American. It’s curricula, then as now, made the institution stand alone among music conservatories for limiting instruction to orchestral instrumentation and operatic voice. Its own “voice” honored the classical; the traditional; Old World methodologies; and merit-driven open enrollment. No age restrictions applied to admission; then, as now, children and the aged are welcome to attend.

***

WEALTH EMPOWERED MARY Louise to shape Philadelphia’s cultural landscape. The city's cultural Great and Good had always embraced the arts gingerly. In mid-life, Mary Louise Curtis Bok took exception, emerging as a new force to be reckoned with. In her own right, she became Philadelphia’s most commanding female figure. She was the undisputed doyenne of Philadelphia's cultural life—and where it counted most: in music appreciation and performance.

Mary Louise married twice, both times to overachievers. Her first husband, Curtis Publishing editor Edward W. Bok, married the boss’s daughter. Her second, Curtis Institute violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Sr., married his widowed boss. Her union with Bok unfolded to a marital partnership. Her marriage to Zimbalist sought, but fell short of, a marital romance.

With the passing of time, even the evolution of her name to Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist became a beguiling metaphor for her life. Débuting as a teen-aged journalist as a “Curtis”, she emerged, as a “Bok” and “Zimbalist,” in the decades that followed, as a philanthropist, an educator, an arts patron, a champion of the immigrant poor, a benefactor to the unemployed and indigent, and a fiercely loyal friend. Her interests were eclectic, extending to theater, horticulture, and, of course, fine music. A lot of music. She adopted her father's favorite instrument, the organ, as her own.

Mary fielded her largess to friends and musicians in need. She rescued the Depression-era jobless in her adopted summer hometown, Rockport, Maine. She donated to the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Drexel University, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art), the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and dozens of other institutions.

For almost a century, until her death in 1970 at ninety-three, Mary was a disrupter—one who might be known today as a change agent. This, in an era in which women were in the shadows of patriarchal leadership and, until 1920, needless to say, without the right to vote.

Her father, a start-up publisher, exploited the synergy of rude capitalism, forging a magazine empire that bestowed his vision of benign virtue upon an otherwise crass middle class consumption. Mary Louise was heiress to her father’s accumulated wealth. But she bucked the received protocols of a destiny those riches might have produced.

She considered herself a steward of her family's wealth. For the better part of a century, Mary Louise Curtis presided over a life that invoked an educational vision that drew together an unlikely, supportive cast of principal players and rivals to create America’s Citadel of Music.

***

A Note on Nomenclature

For clarity, my references to Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist (MLCBZ) coincide with periods in her life. Because her father, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, and her two husbands, Edward W. Bok and Efrem Zimbalist, Sr., are also major figures in this work, confusion might arise if the customary use of surnames were uniformly applied. For the most part, I have referred to MLCBZ as “Mary Louise,” “Mary,” or “Mrs. Bok” and “Mrs. Zimbalist,” as the context—and the avoidance of monotony—warranted. In her personal and business lives, she herself was referred to and assumed these four designations. I have referred to Cyrus Curtis, Edward Bok, Efrem Zimbalist, and others, for the most part, by their surnames. After Edward Bok died, and before her marriage to Zimbalist, I alternatively referred to MLCBZ as “Mary Louise,” “Mary,” or as “Bok.”

***

A Note on Fine Art Values

Contemporary fine art values are hard to calculate. Inflation in the art world is notoriously higher than overall economic inflation rates. Moreover, prices for fine art are sometimes subject to subterfuge, manipulation, and hidden costs.

— Richard Carreño, Philadelphia

COMPOSITION

Chapter I

FOREIGN QUARTER

IN 1917, ON a cold January day, Settlement Music School in Philadelphia moved just a few yards north from its rented row house at 427 Christian Street into an updated, purpose-built home at 416 Queen Street. The new place was not far from the Delaware River, to the east, and was in the heart of the city’s south-eastern quadrant, known as South Philadelphia. The new 10,000 square-foot, three-story building was one of the biggest around, and included grounds that almost encompassed all sides of South Fourth Street, Christian, South Fifth Street, and Queen. It featured Palladian windows and an exterior clad in Philadelphia's vernacular red brick. A symbolic bas-relief of a lyre was embedded in a centered roof-top cornice. In all, the structure had the feeling of a mock Georgian. Very mock.

When the building was inaugurated some days later, on January 28, the ceremony marked a new beginning for Settlement—as well as for the two-hundred-and-fifty or so children drawn from the neighborhood and other parts of Philadelphia who relied on the school for music education and edification. (Fees were nominal, from two cents to ten cents a class.) Students studied piano and voice, but mostly the screech—something akin to scratching on a blackboard—of hearty beginner violinists emanated from studio spaces. By 1917, someone had begun instruction in mandolin. The Italian kids liked that.

First started in 1908 by two neighborhood women, Jeanette Selig Frank and Blanche Wolf Kohn, the school—then known as College Settlement House—was part of an early 20th century social movement in America that matched young urban poor with middle-class mentors. In the school's primary catchment area in densely-populated South Philadelphia, not far from immigrant arrival wharves on the Delaware River, urban poor meant the flooding masses of Ashkenazi Jews, southern-Italian Catholics, and an array of Poles, Russians, and other hopefuls from eastern Europe and beyond.

For Settlement workers, their brief was simple: the inculcation of the rites of citizenship, or, as a Philadelphia writer put it bluntly, the "Americanization" of the "foreign population of Philadelphia." [1]Another reporter, Claire P. Peeler, who visited the school for Musical America, a classical music newspaper based in New York, had a similar outlook. She praised the institution for utilizing "art as the handmaid of civics". [2]

Along the way, Settlement's charges would be uplifted by learning Western cultural, artistic, and humanistic values. And hygiene. A public bath was located in the new building's basement. (Most people—men and women—showed up once or twice a week for bathing.)[3]

***

FOR FOUNDERS FRANK and Kohn, understanding and studying instrumental music were paramount. More than thirty students over-ran the place when the music program was first announced, resulting in another expansion and relocation next door, from 429 Christian Street to No. 427. (Those buildings and other nearby tenements were later razed.)

To harness that school's re-energized agency, the founders appointed twenty-eight-year-old Johann Grolle, a former violinist with the world renown Philadelphia Orchestra, as the school's first Head Worker, or director. The serious-looking, bespectacled Grolle also had experience in volunteer service; he played the violin during Sunday services of the Philadelphia branch of Society of Ethical Culture. He was also vice president of the Symphony Club, a private organization that recognized the inchoate musical talents of young Philadelphians.[4] Grolle's wife, Elizabeth Darby, five years younger than her husband, was a social worker. (The Grolles were quartered in a fourth-level garret in the 416 Queen Street building.)

Settlement's expanding curricula and mission also got the formidable—and continuing—philanthropic backing of a powerful board. (The school was incorporated as a charity in 1914.) While Frank and Kohn and director Grolle were the public face of the school, behind the scenes Settlement had garnered the support of some of Philadelphia's rich and richer. Some, like Alexander Van Rensselaer, a celebrated tennis and cricket player and, significantly, also board chairman of the Philadelphia Orchestra; the socially connected writer Owen Wister, author of the immensely popular western tale The Virginian; and Oswald Chew, a descendant of a family with roots dug in the 1600s; were core members of the city's Proper Philadelphia élite. Others like executive board president Jennie May Fels, or Mrs. Samuel S. Fels, were just rich. (Mr. Fels was Philadelphia's soap king, the maker of a national cleansing brand; and a music connoisseur in his own right.)

Richer still—possessing wealth well beyond all others—was Settlement's board executive committeewoman Mary Louise Curtis Bok, wife of Edward W. Bok, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of America's fabulously popular monthly, TheLadies' Home Journal. She was also the only child of publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who at the time was the country's seventh richest man and, by far, Philadelphia's wealthiest. (At his death in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, his estimated wealth was $43 billion in current dollars.) [5]At forty-one, Mary Louise was also Philadelphia's richest daughter.

The public might have been aware that the new Settlement was taking shape. But few knew that its impetus and new building were really Mary Louise Bok's doing. That is, until an announcement (the first) and a sketch of the school's new quarters appeared in the January 27, 1916, edition of the Evening Public Ledger. (Her father, a Settlement honorary vice president, owned the newspaper.)

The facility's cost, $150,000 ($3.3 million today), was also revealed. In time, more details were to come to light. The new school would memorialize Mary Louise's mother Louisa (Knapp) Curtis, the first editor of The Ladies' Home Journal who died in 1910 at fifty-eight. A marble plaque noting that dedication was placed in an alcove. A first edition of The Journal, for December 1881, was placed in a cornerstone, laid in January 1916.

Settlement's construction had been fast-tracked; its completion was a just year later, almost to the day, of its first announcement. The school also bore an expanded designation, the "Mary Louise Curtis Branch." Mary Louise's married name was pointedly missing.

***

ON JANUARY 28, 1917, a Sunday, Mary Louise Curtis Bok was ensconced in the back seat of her family Pierce-Arrow, a maroon-colored phaeton that carried a sticker price, when bought new, of $8,000 (the modern equivalent of roughly $185,000). She wended her way to Settlement Music School from her house in Merion Station, a leafy suburban village on the Main Line west of Philadelphia. Before the advent of Interstate highways, her chauffeur, Patrick McAuley, at the helm of the Bok’s limousine, would have taken a circuitous route through Overbrook, across the Schuylkill River, heading east on South Street into South Philadelphia. Somewhere soon after, the driver, distinctively dressed in matching maroon-colored livery, turned east, entering a region of intertwining streets lined with forlorn, grim row houses. If Mary Louise had cared to look out, she would have drawn back gold-colored silk curtains that blocked prying eyes from the vehicle's rear side windows.

Depending on traffic, the journey could have taken up to an hour—and light-years— from her bucolic, care-free existence in Merion.[6]

The scene was a study in chiaroscuro: dark gray, or coffee-colored three-story brick tenements, offset by white linen, bed clothes, and laundry hung outdoors like billowing flags from window to window. Despite efforts by householders to wash and tidy outdoor entrances, litter still fluttered about. The rubbish-strewn streets formed a warren, weaved with public street cars, automobiles, and pedestrians. Overheard chatter was in Yiddish, patois Italian, and in a myriad of other languages and dialects.

[A] national publication for social workers judged living conditions in [Philadelphia's] slums, where most tenements still had outhouses servicing dozens of families, worse than on the Lower East Side of New York…. [T]he streets were notoriously filthy, especially in South Philadelphia—where the need was greatest, where everything but raw sewage, and sometimes even that, ran through the gutters.... [7]

Ghettoized South Philadelphia, east of Broad Street, summed up MusicalAmerica's Claire P. Peeler, was a "foreign quarter," where many still unassimilated denizens often spoke of their infrequent trips to Center City Philadelphia as "going to America."

Peeler specialized in stark reporting. In a narrow street, she went on, "played dirty, ragged children, calling each other with raucous voices and much laughter.... Across the street were small lodging houses with Hebrew signs; a Hebrew rabbi's name in English on one of them; a plumber's shop; on the outside of one house a disproportionately large, red, iron fire escape...." She mused that a tradesman was "probably sweating within.” Women, those not Orthodox Jews, at least, were mostly bareheaded, contrary to the then-popular middle-class style. "[A]t Fourth and Christian streets, Philadelphia, hats are negligible and hair dressing is sketchy, even though brightened occasionally by a great rhinestone comb," Peeler said. 

Settlement pupils were better attired. Photographs from the period show girls dressed in long, white smocks and boys in knickers, suit coats, and neckties. Often enough, they posed with their violins tucked under their arms.

***

PULLING INTO QUEEN Street, Mary Louise alighted from her limousine, swiveled her thin, willowy figure past two stone acorn-styled pedestals that adorned the school’s frontage. Arthur L. Tubbs, another Musical America reporter, based in Philadelphia, surveyed the scene. The building before her, he raved, “proved [to be] a revelation of spaciousness, convenience and attractiveness…."[8]

Contributing to that "spaciousness" was a two-story recital hall that occupied about half of the ground floor. The auditorium could seat more than three-hundred attendees, and featured a high-rise proscenium stage, backed by a made-to-order pipe organ from the Aeolian Company in New York, one of the country's largest and most prestigious manufacturers. The organ was a gift from Mary Louise, and came with a $10,000 (about $222,000 today) price tag.[9]

The place was packed; admission to this “soft” opening about six weeks prior to the school’s official inaugural—had been reserved for those holding a “card of invitation.” [10]

Mary Louise exchanged pleasantries with the day's principal speaker, Edwin Sydney Stuart, a mustachioed, rather grand-looking former Pennsylvania governor (1907-1911) and once a past Philadelphia mayor (1891-1895).

But eyes looked past Stuart to an attention-getting, small, dapper man, who was given to wearing spats and, in the chill of the January weather, his favorite Chesterfield coat.

The presence of Josef Hofmann, in a little-known music school in South Philadelphia, was an incongruity probably not appreciated by many. Born in Poland, he was a piano virtuoso, a noted composer, and a one-time child prodigy who had been exciting audiences since his début recital in Warsaw at five-years-old. His celebrity was such that only four years before he was awarded the keys to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Just the day before, on Saturday, he soared in a rare recital in New York. (The only one in the current season, according to The New York Times.) As Hofmann played before a “neighborhood concert” of three hundred in South Philadelphia, readers of a Page 16 review in the early Sunday editions of The Times learned of Hofmann’s appearance before a sell-out audience of 3,500 at Carnegie Hall in New York.[11]

At forty-one, Hofmann was only about six months older than Mary Louise Bok. When not touring in Europe, he found time to become her friend and confident and that of her husband Edward. Their association flowered after Bok hired Hofmann as a columnist for The Ladies' Home Journal, wherein he fielded reader questions about the ins-and-outs of piano technique. In due course, Mary Louise thought enough of Hofmann that he became part of "our intimate group."[12]

***

JOHANN GROLLE INTRODUCED Hofmann, who went on to play nearly an all-Polish program. Five pieces by Fédéric Chopin included Chant Polonais in G-major and Polonaise in A-flat major. Rounding out the program were La jongleuse by Polish-born Moritz Moszkowski, then living in Paris; and Minuet by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who, two years later in 1919, became independent Poland's first prime minister.

A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, in the audience, proclaimed the recital as “brilliant.” [13]

In this tribute to the ground-breaking incubator of music education, many were oblivious to darker times coming, as the winds of war—only a flutter at first—began to roar into world conflict. Another mysterious misfortune, a deadly plague, also lay ahead.

England had been at war with Germany for nearly three years, and Woodrow Wilson's efforts to sidestep American entry in the expanding conflagration were fading. Just months after the celebratory hoopla at Settlement, America was at war.

A year later the worldwide pandemic of influenza, better known by its misnomer, the "Spanish flu,' struck the United States. Of all the country's big cities, Philadelphia—particularly South Philadelphia—was among the hardest hit.

***

THE MARY LOUISE branch of Settlement Music Schoolwas officially dedicated and formally opened on March 8, 1917, with Cyrus Curtis as the principal speaker. Given the number of enrolled students and invited parents, the recital hall was again packed. The presentation rambled. Cyrus praised his late wife Louisa's musical abilities. Above all, though, he singled out a quality his own late mother, Salome Ann Curtis, had identified in Louisa—that she would make a “splendid mother....”[14]

Mary Louise did not take the podium.

Chapter II

EMPIRE

CYRUS H. K. CURTIS was twenty-six years-old when, on a hot summer’s day in 1876, he boarded a train at a rail-head in South Boston. A few hours later, his journey on the New York and New England Railroad terminated in New York, whereupon he switched trains to the Pennsylvania Railroad to continue to his destination in Philadelphia.

The young New England newspaper editor was beset by business vicissitudes, as he struggled unsuccessfully with one failed publishing venture after another. In South Boston—some think at a house on, or near Silver Street [1]—Curtis’ wife of one year, Louisa (Knapp) Curtis, and a year younger than Cyrus, awaited his return and word of a hopeful turnaround of his employment misfortune. This was made more acute since the Curtises were also new parents. Their daughter, Mary Louise, was just three months-old.

Curtis reasoned that publishing start-ups were cheaper to finance in Philadelphia. Moreover, like any optimist, he anticipated that serendipity, by way of a successful publishing endeavor, was just around the corner.

He was right—though his hard-won good fortune, was hardly immediate; rather decades in the making.

The early 1900s unleashed America’s burgeoning national growth, its emergence as a world power, its unbridled vulture capitalism, and the first fevered reveries of a misty American Dream. On the coattails of this new “American Century,” Cyrus Curtis steadily created one of the country’s most popular and enduring publishing empires. In turn, he became one of the country's wealthiest tycoons and, by far, the richest man in Philadelphia. His personal wealth billowed into billions of dollars, employing contemporary calculations.

***

CYRUS CURTIS WAS born on June 18, 1850 in a wooden frame saltbox at the corner of Brown and Cumberland streets in Portland, Maine. The two-story house was fronted by a white picket fence. It was roomy enough for the Curtis family of four. His parents bestowed him with exotic-sounding middle names “Herman Kotzschmar”—belatedly when he was eight years old.

The afterthought recognized a family friend, an eponymous German-born conductor, composer, and organist, then living in Portland. Cyrus’ father, also Cyrus—CyrusLibby Curtis— was an organ enthusiast.

Herman Kotzschmar went on to make his name in New England thanks in large part to the Curtis family, whom all revered the musician’s talents. Especially, his artistry at the organ. “[T]he little boy [Cyrus] so loved the organist and the organ that he spent hours sitting in…church listening to his friend practice,” the adult Mary Louise recounted years later. [2]

The musician inspired the younger Cyrus to a life-long devotion to playing the organ. Later, when Cyrus H. K. married, the majestic sound defined his new family’s culturally stolid middle-class domesticity.

Cyrus’ mother, Salome Ann (Cummings) Curtis, was a choir singer at Portland’s First Parish Congregationalist-Unitarian Church. Cyrus' sister, Florence Gertrude Curtis, five years younger than her brother, was also “musical in her tastes,”[3] but not saddled like Cyrus with a trophy middle name. The Curtises were generational New Englanders; their Yankee Maine roots, deep, and old.

The senior Curtis was a home furnishings maker, and, by outward appearances, gave his family stability and comfort. In reality, he often suffered financial setbacks, being at the mercy of volatility in lumber and textile markets. Making matters worse, the Curtises lost their house in the Great Fire of Portland in 1866.

Financial uncertainty had already led Cyrus H. K. to quit school after the ninth grade. The teenager began peddling local newspapers. He was probably as surprised as anyone that flogging newspapers could be a successful, money-making endeavor. Still only fifteen, Cyrus expanded this first brush with journalism—hawking newspapers—to publishing them, brazenly starting up, in 1865, a weekly called The Young America. Four years later, seeking greater opportunity in New England's “capital,” he moved to Boston, launching a business weekly called The People'sLedger.[4]

***

LOUISA KNAPP WAS born in Boston on October 24, 1851, the daughter of Mary (Faxon) Knapp and Humphrey Cook Knapp, a clerk, who had moved south from seaside Newburyport, Massachusetts. Way back, they were of German extraction, and they were still solid and stolid. Louisa was born and raised, with her six siblings, in a house on or near Silver Street in working-class South Boston. [5]

In an affectionate essay about her mother, published in 1942, Mary Louise noted that her grandfather and uncles were shipowners. “I remember the many paintings of their ships that hung on the walls of my grandfather's home, as well as fascinating oriental objects that filled his house, the result of voyages to India and China,” she recounted. [6]

Louisa was living at home when she met Cyrus, then the up-and-coming newspaper publisher. At the time, she had to admit, Cyrus was more “coming” than “up.”

Louisa met Cyrus' ultimate litmus test as a suitable mate—she was musically inclined. They were both vocalists, and they considered it good luck when they found themselves to be joint singers at the World's Peace Jubilee, an annual concert in Boston honoring the conclusion of the Civil War. They also sang together during services at their local Unitarian Church. By the time they later waltzed at a ball conducted by Johann Strauss, they were a couple.[7]

It was equally fortuitous that Louisa possessed editorial skills, honed as an amanuensis to Samuel Gridley Howe, a respected physician and husband of women's suffrage champion Julia Ward Howe. Commuting from Silver Street to the Howe's residence, at 13 Chestnut Street, meant a grueling trolley trip and a fifteen-minute uphill walk from Boston Common. Howe's house was perched on Beacon Hill, in a residential area of Brahman gentry.

She was a professional boon to Dr. Howe, though, as Mary Louise remembered, Louisa also sewed “many a button” “on his coats when his illustrious wife was lecturing!” [8]

Louisa was thus embedded in the upper crust, a helpful background as she navigated upward mobility later in life.

Cyrus and Louisa wed on March 10, 1875. Mary Louise, their only child, was born a year later, on August 6.

***

THE CURTIS FAMILY’S move to Philadelphia was not without travail. They left Boston on Thursday, November 23, 1876—Thanksgiving Day. By the time they arrived in Philadelphia, with three-month-old Mary Louise in tow, Cyrus was “a bundle of nerves and far from strong,” following “an obstinate throat infection” he had developed in Boston.[9]

Despite his failed health, Curtis quickly established his presence in his adopted city. Almost immediately, he launched a revamped Philadelphia version of his Boston-founded weekly The People's Ledger, and, as he had predicted, at lower printing costs. They were substantial, about $1,500 yearly (the equivalent of about $41,000 today). This sum was enough, he told Edward Bok, that “I figured that I could live on this saving.” Meantime, Louisa “devoted herself primarily to [Cyrus] making his health and comfort her first care,” Mary Louise recounted. [10]

Curtis' reinvention of himself in Philadelphia was a second act—with several crucial scenes in between. Most significant of these—almost fifteen years from his arrival in Philadelphia—was the laying of the cornerstone of his publishing conglomerate, incorporated on June 25, 1891 as The Curtis Publishing Company,

***

WHILE STILL UNDER thirty, Curtisenvisioned a role in nurturing what he believed to be the greatness and the power of American journalism. Its talisman, he believed, wasthe massive, Georgian revival-styled Pubic Ledger Building, the first edifice in America devoted to housing a single newspaper. The building, home to the daily Public Ledger, and, later, also the Evening Public Ledger, occupied a rock-solid square block across from Independence Hall. A larger-than-life marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, depicted in middle age, was out front. [11]The newspapers and the surrounding Old City neighborhood would loom large in the twenty-six-year-old's empire building.

The newcomer fell under the spell ofprevailing Franklin mythology, the pervasive urban legends of the founder embedded in Philadelphia's DNA. Predominantly the “Barefoot Boy with Cheek” narrative of callow Ben, the Boston-born apprentice who had come to Philadelphia to stake his future.

Edward Bok once asked Curtis why he moved to Philadelphia, as opposed to New York, perhaps a more fecund locale for publishing growth. “I didn't care to live in New York: I didn't like it, and I did like Philadelphia,” Curtis replied. “I wanted to be nearer New York than Boston, but not of it.” [12]

Curtis twisted himself into knots to identify with Franklin. He even saw himself as the Great Man’s reincarnation—at least, as a publisher—when his stable of periodicals expanded to include The Saturday Evening Post. Curtis insisted that the magazine, in a weekly version he reconstituted, was directly descended from Franklin’s publication, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Maybe. Nonetheless, Curtis eagerly bought The Post at a fire-sale price in 1897, and went on to brand the magazine: “An Illustrated Weekly Magazine Founded An. Di. 1728 by Benj. Franklin.”

Edward Bok: “Mr. Curtis did exactly what Benjamin Franklin, whose successor he was destined to be in the publication of The Saturday Evening Post, had done years before: he had come from Boston, not to New York, as so many young men would naturally have done without thinking, but to Philadelphia.”[13]

Curtis’ infatuation with Franklin never ebbed. In 1918, he created a librarydedicated to the preservation of all ofFranklin’s voluminous imprints. Curtis tapped a prominent historian, William J. Campbell, president of the City History Society of Philadelphia, to curate the thousands of pamphlets, newspapers, and books that had been accumulated. Everything was finally moved into a space in the Curtis Building called the Curtis’ “museum.” (The Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania now houses the collection.)

***

IN ONE WAY, Curtis deviated from following in Franklin's footsteps—literally. After initially taking digs in the city, Cyrus, Louisa, and Mary Louise decamped to across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey—far from Franklin turf. At first, Curtis might have found Camden’s cheaper living costs appealing, especially in that The People's Ledger was slipping into red ink. To stabilize his income, he sold the newspaper two years later and signed on with The Philadelphia Press as advertising manager.

The Curtises were never impecunious. But as aspirants to middle class security, steady income from ThePhiladelphia Press brought the prosperity and status they sought. While still in Philadelphia, according a June 5, 1880 city census, the Curtis household was even able to expand to include a servant, Welsh-born Johnny Jones.[14]

Camden might have also reminded Curtis of his boyhood Portland, both port towns with populations varying between 63,000 (Camden) and 46,000 (Portland). In contrast, Philadelphia was a megalopolis at 850,000.

The Curtisescontinued their upward mobility in Camden. The family (and, presumably, Johnny Jones) moved to better circumstances three times, from Second Street near Penn Street; to Fifth and Linden streets; and finally, to Cooper Street, near Seventh Street. These downtown properties were home for about fifteen years while Curtis “was building the foundations of his enterprises”.[15]

Getting to work involved a daily grind, commuting by ferry from Camden to slips on the Philadelphia river bank. Curtis lived close enough to the Camden docks that he could walk to the ferry, and his office in Philadelphia was also just few minutes away by foot. The ferries were operated by several independent companies, and were the principal means of transportation to Center City until the Benjamin Franklin Bridge opened in 1926. By and large, the ships were reliable and, as Walt Whitman, also a Camden resident, waxed, “as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along.…”

***

ACROSS THE RIVER, Curtis saw his publishing domain skyrocket. Just more than ten years after the creation of The Curtis Publishing Company, the embryonic corporation evolved into a publishing dynamo with ownership of not only of The Ladies’ Home Journal andTheSaturday Evening Post but, at different times,a slew of other magazines and newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer; and the NewYork Evening Post (later, as today, the New York Post).And, finally, the Public Ledger, the very newspaper that was housed in the massive rock-solid Public Ledger Building that Curtis had eyed with esteem years before.

At first Curtis Publishing was nothing more than a single entity, a four-page weekly with an anemic circulation and a yearly subscription price of fifty cents (about $15 today). In big city Philadelphia, it had a bucolic title, The Tribune and Farmer.

Walter D. Fuller, who joined Curtis Publishing in 1908, later rising to be its third president, narrated the company's beginnings in a privately-printed biographical sketch, The Life and Times of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, published in 1948. [16]

The Tribune and Farmer was into its fourth year when young Curtis hastened home one night with a copy of the paper fresh off the press. He was eager to impress Louisawith a new women's department he had created in the magazine. Curtis had reckoned that there was too littlenews in American publications addressing women specifically, and seized on the expansion of female-oriented content as a new profit center. If Curtis had expected to be praised for his new creation—two columns of clippings recycled from other publications—he was in for a shock. Mrs. Curtis looked at the new “women's department” and just laughed.[17]

Thus, thanks to this derisive mirth,The Ladies' Home Journal was born.

Curtis had not taken his wife’s jovial critique lightly. So persuasive was Louisa’s subsequent recommendations thatCurtis, in 1884, deputized Louisa to do her will in transforming the The Tribune and Farmer—with the adoption of a new banner name—as the soapbox for America's bourgeois womanhood. Louisa’s creation, The Ladies’ Home Journal, soon enough became the premier magazine of its kind.

Louisa reverted to her maiden name, “Mrs. Louisa Knapp,” in asserting her editorship. Shealso made her tenure into a family affair, enlisting her teen-aged daughter Mary Louise as a columnist. (She was one of a staff of sixteen.)

Mary Louise was fourteen. Some say she was thirteen. Everyone agreed she was precocious. Like her mother, Mary Louise dropped her Curtis surname, and also opted for “Knapp” as a pen name.

“[It] was not a name she [Mary Louise] used otherwise,” Helen Damon-Moore, an historian of American magazines, has noted. “She thereby identified with her mother rather than…her father in this professional setting.” [18]

Hearty fare in the magazine were articles like” English Home Life,” “The First Weeks of Infancy,” and “A Mother's Influence.” Mary Louise, writing as Mary L. Knapp or, alternatively, “Mary F. Knapp” (her maternal grandmother's maiden name was Faxon) wrote “Fancy Work Patterns” and edited a column titled “Artistic Needlework,” about the intricacies of knitting, crocheting, and lace-making.

In 1889, the new Ladies' Home Journal moved to two six-story, purpose-built buildings at 433-435 Arch Street. The magazine’s eighteen state-of-the-art printing presses produced the magazine in record speed and quality—and at a reduced cost. Circulation boomed from 25,000 to more than 500,000 monthly subscribers. TheJournal's staff box announced the periodical as “An Illustrated Family Journal with the Largest Circulation of any Magazine in the World.”

The magazine’s editorial and printing plant was across the street from Christ Church Cemetery at 5th Street at Arch. Looking down from the buildings, Benjamin Franklin's grave was in sight.

Chapter III

INVICTUS

BESIDES HIS ENDURING belief in Benjamin Franklin’s virtue, Cyrus Curtis held to another article of faith—the force of advertising for commercial self-aggrandizement, bigger profits, and, ironically, for the greater public good.

The purchasing power and spending habits of America's growing middle class emerged in one demographic study after another, studded with metrics that purported to show what Americans needed to buy, wanted to buy, and could afford to buy. Understanding market muscle even evolved into an ur science, promoted by a new breed of advertising agencies aiming to connect sellersof goods and services to a publishing industry eager to bring those products to their readers' attention. For a price.

With his own inchoate marketing sense and with the help of N. W. Ayer & Son, a Philadelphia-based advertising agency, the nation's oldest, Curtis came up with the price. It made him rich—and his primary publications, TheSaturday Evening Post andThe Ladies' Home Journalimmensely successful and influential. Curtis himself concentrated on The Post. He leftThe Journal in the good hands of editors. [1]

Curtis created a world of consumerism. In The Journal, readers could learn about the newest products “to make even ordinary cotton goods look and feel like linen,” as well asthe worldwide popularity of Quaker Oats—all the while pictorially showcasing domestic servants serving their matronly employers. [2]

The future Curtis Publishing president Fuller had watched Curtis's fine-tuning in action, “vigorously driving circulation and advertising volume upwards.” “Subscriptions flowed in regularly, and Curtis was able to turn his attention to the subject that interested him most: the sale of advertising space.”

Establishing an early version of a Code of Ethics, Curtis refused advertisements that peddled then-popular patent medicines, fraudulent cure-all potions, and wildcat investment schemes. He also did not much care for smoking and spirits, either.

The result, according to Fuller, was “a costly decision, but he clung tenaciously to the policy and undoubtedly his discrimination against this questionable advertising reacted eventually to his advantage. Sensing the publisher's intention to protect them, readers...displayed their gratitude through renewals….. [3]He helped to teach Advertising to be truthful and reliable.” [4]

By the turn of the 20th century, The Ladies' Home Journal reached more than one-million subscribers, the first American magazine to do so.

A few years later, Curtis was lunching with a colleague, who knew a thing or two about circulation matters, and Curtis asked, “What is the circulation now of The Journal?”

“Now? I really don't know,” his associate quipped. “This morning it was two million.” [5]

With such professional and monetary success, he could rightfully take his seat at the table of peers. He joined the Poor Richard Club, which took its name from an annual published by Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack.. Its members, meeting in a townhouse on Locust Street near Broad Street, and at a branch in New York, were mostly drawn from major advertising companies. He also found company at the Franklin Inn Club, a Philadelphia literary group. His only concession to stepping on the first rungs of the Philadelphia social ladder was a membership at the Union League, a Republican Party redoubt.

***

IN OCTOBER 1889, Louisa, to everyone's surprise, retired after five years as The Journal'sfounding editor. Her reasoning, as it came down in Edward Bok's retelling, seemed cut and dried. It was not. Nor did Bok’s stilted and, no doubt, fabricated dialog help in offering verisimilitude.

“I will have to give up this editorial work,” she told her husband. “Daughter said to this morning: 'Mother, whenever I see you, or want you, you have a pen in your hand. You are always busy writing.'”

“That settles it,” Cyrus said, closing the book on the matter.

Bok allowed there was more to Louisa’s decision: the increasing demands of editing The Journal were weighing on her, “especially in view of her husband's decision to double the size of the magazine.” Faced with this prospect, her resignation came after “[s]he pondered over the pros and cons of the situation.” [6]

Left unsaid was the uneven state of Louisa's health. A cryptic thirty-four-word squib popped up in The Philadelphia Inquirer, noting that Louisa, then just thirty-eight, had spent two months at the seaside in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “for the benefit of her health.” Though not mentioning specifics, it was reported that Mrs. Curtis was “improving,” had returned to Camden, but then had a change of heart, “contemplating” further recuperation in another New Jersey ocean resort in Lakewood. [7]

Louisa had Raynaud's disease, an often serious, progressive disease afflicting the flow of blood in small arteries. The malady can lead to a shortened life. [8]

Apart from work, it was also becoming noticeable—even to outsiders—that Louisa's and Mary Louise's relationship was curiously co-dependent. Home schooling was the norm, especially for girls. Mary Louise was precocious, and raised in an adult setting. Author Florine Thayer McCray, in meeting the mother and daughter for first time, thought their bond not quite right. McCray, a biographer of the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, had come to Camden to interview Louisa, and found the mother's attachment to her daughter hardly typical. She was the instructor. Her daughter was her devoted tutee and, as McCray wrote later, a confidante, friend, and even “sister.”

“Mrs. Knapp's [Mrs. Curtis’] controlling idea is to make a companion of her child. No assumption of maternal authority appears. It is tender friendship between sisters, the elder guiding the education of heart and mind of the younger,” McCray observed. Mary Louise might have thought otherwise of the relationship; maybe,restrictive and stifling.

Edward Bok framed the byplay differently: “[F]reed from the details of incessant editing,” he wrote, “she was glad to turn to a closer relation with her child.”[9]

Mary Louise was thirteen-years-old, and deceptively mature for her age. She was slender and taller than most. She had reached her adult height, about five feet-six inches, [10], about two inches taller than most adult women at the time. Despite physical signs of womanhood, her lifestyle was that of an age-appropriate child. She was sheltered at home. Louisa put her bed each night by eight o'clock. [11]

Like any adolescent, Mary Louise could be shattered by a mother’s public deportment.

Mary Louise recalled:

My parents were devoted to their church and were regulars in attendance. Father was always interested in church music.... I remember so well, sitting in a pew as a little girl during the singing of hymns, hearing my father sing the baritone part, always correctly in a pleasing voice, and my mother in her rich contralto singing with evident joy and extremely well—so well, in fact, that always many of the congregation turned around to locate her voice, while (shame on me!) shiveringly wavered between a feeling of deep mortification that Mother would anything to call such attention to herself and an intense pride in the performance! [12]

Shortly after departing The Journal, Louisa and Mary Louise embarked for Europe; England claiming most of their time.[13]

Louisa's devotion to her teen-aged daughter ran deep, and continued unabated. “Since resigning from the active work of the editorial chair Mrs. Curtis had done nothing in connection with any of the Curtis publications,” a New York newspaper noted. [14]

***

EDWARD BOK WAS not on everyone's short list to be The Ladies' HomeJournal's new editor. He was blunt, beefy, buff, and bore the appearance of someone who could easily go nine rounds in a neighborhood boxing ring. He also had over-sized ears.

Louisa possessed an instinctive sensibility for the magazine's female readership. It seemed dubious that Bok could transcend his immigrant roots and Brooklyn boyhood to create an audience magnetism that could propel The Journal to further stellar heights. Even on paper, Bok's career credentials in his early years were thin, the stuff more of an earnest striver than an editorial prodigy. English was his second language, after his native Dutch; his birth name, Eduard Willem Bok. He never used it again. Early on, he was known as Edward William Bok, but most references during his professional life pegged him just as “Edward Bok.” Still later, he preferred “Edward W. Bok,” meant, he would say, to represent a late-life transformation.[15]

As for ingratiating himself with his future boss, it was unlikely that the former office boy and stenographer had even the foggiest notion of the differences between a pipe organ and its reed counterpart. Nor that Cyrus Curtis was an organ aficionado extraordinaire. (He preferred the pipe instrument.)

Cyrus Curtis seemed to “divine” that Bok was the right prospect. [16]In truth, the dapper Curtis did not always project as someone with such a super power—nor, in fact, the plumb and resolve that were hallmarks in his business dealings. Because of his trim, slight stature, many had a first impression that he was short. They were wrong. His physique just minimized his size. He was of medium height (five-feet, eight-inches, someone estimated). He enjoyed long-distance walking and golf.

Edward Bok was born on October 9, 1863, in Den Helder, a small North Sea port town near Amsterdam. At seven, he and his family emigrated to Brooklyn, then still an independent city from New York. Other than being a place with Dutch antecedents, Brooklyn was a galaxy away from quaint Den Helder. Bok fit in. He started collecting autographs of famous Americans, a life-long hobby.

Curtis saw Bok's ambition, his willingness to face risk, and an amalgam of raw talent. In less than ten years, Bok had climbed from a position with job security as a publishing house stenographer; to editor of The Brooklyn Magazine, a struggling enterprise; to become in 1886 the founder and editor of The Bok Syndicate, a venture that distributed feature articles to regional newspapers. The idea—aggregation and re-publication—was canny, cagey, and new. And inexpensive. The syndicated features had already appeared in The Brooklyn Magazine. The syndicate was on the road to success.

Curtis was coy in offering The Journal position. Bok remembered the occasion. The publisher asked him “if he knew the [a] man for the place.”

“'Are you talking at me or through me?'

“'Both,' replied Mr. Curtis.” [17]

He accepted the post on October 20, 1889. He was twenty-six years old.

Almost immediately, critics publicly lambasted Bok for being the wrong choice—especially for being the wrong gender to channel the inner woman. The new editor was defiant, claiming that the administrative complexity of the position required a man at the helm. Not for the first time, Bok showed his true colors—his intolerance of women in charge and outside their accepted gender roles. In his biography, he wrote:

... [W]e may well ponder whether the full editorial authority and direction of a modern magazine, whether essentially feminine in its appeal or not, can be safely entrusted to a woman when one considers how largely executive is the nature of such a position.… [18]

Historian Helen Damon-Moore posited another reason why Bok was an attractive candidate: he was marital bait. Aside from his qualifications, of course, Damon-Moore wrote in Magazines for the Millions, “there is some evidence that the Curtises hired [him] with the hope that someday he would become their daughter's suitor....”[19]

***

IN 1891, CURTIS bought property in Wyncote, a Cheltenham Township community bordering Philadelphia to the north. The holding was the former estate of abanker Abraham Barker. After razing the Barker house four years later, the Curtises repurposed the property (eventually totaling about one-hundred-fifty acres) into their own version of country living. Barker had called his residence “Lyndon,” named after an ancestral property in England. Cyrus kept the name, meaning “linden tree hill.”[20]

Louisa became the lady of the house of her husband's dream manor, As for Mary Louise, she had never known before any kind of urban living. From small-town Camden County, New Jersey, to the countryside of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Mary Louise had always skirted life in Philadelphia's Center City. Unknowingly, she and her family had become defined by a new neologism, “suburbanite.”

Curtis had his own idea of his status, envisioning a life as a country squire; never, like some of his fellow Philadelphia's plutocrats who saw themselves as a town toffs. His concept was English. As in, in a latter day Evelyn Waugh English.

Curtis' Lyndon, built at a cost $2-million ($64-million today), was reallyan American pastiche. Philadelphia architect William Lloyd Bailey just designed large and larger, never mindconflicting elements such as dueling roof lines, hipped and gabled; two baronial turrets (one shaped by a cornet and the other like a pyramid); a de rigueur porte cochère, and a wrap-around balcony. Frederick Law Olmsted, the country's leading celebrity landscaper, laid out the grounds. In 1903, a music room was added. [21]

As landed gentry would do, he decked the place with fine art. In 1922, he bought a stunning group of three 18th-century English portraits from Fearon Galleries in New York. Exact prices for the pictures, Master Paget by John Hoppner (1758-1810) and The Pilgrim by George Henry Harlow (1787-1819) were not revealed. But a provenance index for the third picture, Miss Frances Lee by Francis Cotes (1726-1770), noted that Fearon paid $7,000 (about $122,000 today), and it can be assumed that Curtis was on the hook for a lot more. [22]

Based on what other American collectors were paying for similar portraits by these artists, the collective value of the trio of paintings was easily in the millions, in contemporary monetary calculations.

Four years later, Curtis added to his collection, buying from Fearon two unnamed pictures, one by Hoppner and another by Sir William Beechey (1753-1839). His collection in time had also expanded to include an oil by George Romney (1734-1802). In 1935, two years after Curtis' death, The New York Times reported that the unnamed works by Hoppner and Beechey had been valued at about $100,000 (about $1.7-million today). [23]

***

ROSE C. FELD was one of the few able to capture the feeling of the place, with the Man of Property himself as tour guide. Curtis was notoriously reticent, sparing with interviews, and confounding his interlocutors with one-or-two-word answers. At twenty-seven, then a reporter for The New York Times,Feld cracked Curtis' armor. She combined cheek and charm, and produced a massive 4,000-word personality profile, headlined:

THE MAN: MUSICIAN, EDITOR,

PUBLISHER AND CAPITALIST.

Feld met Curtis in town. Never short of hubris, she hopped into the backseat of a chauffeured limousine, next to the publisher, and took in the scenery and Curtis' garrulous asides as they drove from Center City to Wyncote.

The car drove into a large park. This was the home of Mr. Curtis. It looked more like the grounds of an English estate than those of an American publisher who had started out selling newspapers when he was twelve. There seems to be something essentially English about the way all businessmen of Philadelphia live. They go to the 'city' to carry on the heavy work of the day. In the evening they retire to their estates in the suburbs, where they are free from business associations and telephone calls. [24]

Curtis escorted the reporter into the music room, “a deep, high-ceilinged salon” that accounted for “an entire wing of the house.”While Feld roamed the room admiring oil pictures that dotted the walls, the melodies of hymns filled the room. Curtis was playing a mighty instrument, a mammoth four-manual keyboard pipe organ with one hundred and fifty-eight stops. [25]

Feld felt the drama of the moment. It was easy to understand her rapture with the setting. Even today, the room—though shorn of its original furnishings—captures its intended dignity. Highlighted in the space is a plaster ceiling embedded with rosette medallions and wide crown moldings patterned in intricate swirls.

Above a stair well descending to the music room's basement someone installed a small bas relief of three frolicking putti. Surrounding the angels is a saying, possibility a Curtis family motto, “Per Ardua Fortuna,” or, loosely translated from the Latin, “Good Fortune through Adversity.”

***

“SUBURBAN” LIVING CHARMED Curtis. Fourteen years after relocating to Wyncote, in 1915, he decided to share the country life with his employees—creating the “Curtis Country Club,” near Lyndon in Wyncote. The one-hundred-sixteen-acre property was almost as spacious as Lyndon itself. Curtis Publishing employees and their families were eligible to join; their frolicking was chronicled in the company’s in-house publication, Curtis Folks.

Curtis’ experiment in rusticating his workforce did not last. He sold the country play-land just ten years later. Its lack financial sustainability might have been the cause—though the Great Depression was still four years away. The property became the Melrose Country Club, and has remained so since.

Chapter IV

LOUISA AND KATE

ENTERING HER EARLY teens, Mary Louise's formal education—previously deferred—became a concern. After tutoring at home, cocooned in Camden, the family's move to Lyndon made the selection of the then-popular Ogontz School for Young Ladies in nearby Abington an easy choice. The school was named for a Sandusky tribal chief, a quirky moniker adopted by Civil War financier, Jay Cooke, whose former two-hundred-acre estate had been converted to the school's grounds.

The boarding school boasted small class sizes—never more than twenty pupils—and catered to well-to-do girls from around the country. The line-up included marquee names such as Heinz, Gillette, Wrigley, and Amelia Earhart, the famed aviator, albeit she was of more modest means than many of her peers. Because of financial status, Mary Louise fit in, though as a day student, commuting by chauffeured limousine from Lyndon, she also stood out.

The school's stone Sutherland building, Jay Cooke's former house, still overlooks a view that Mary Louise saw in her comings and goings—heavily-wooded hillside terraces rolling away as far as the eye can see.

Because of its full name, the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, the place seemed to be less about academics than familiarizing demoiselles to the finer things in life. In fact, when the school opened in 1850 as the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Center City Philadelphia, it was largely a “'finishing school” for a few score of “the scions of families of influence and wealth.” [1]But by the early 1890s when Mary Louise attended, the school had adopted a more suitable academic curriculum, highlighting—surely to Mary Louise's delight—disciplines in music appreciation and practice.

Mary Louise was already proficient in playing the piano and organ. Under the direction of Jean-Paul Kürsteiner, a German-trained American composer, she studied piano and theory. [2]She learned to play the guitar. Heading the school's music department was Lucy A. Putnam, its superintendent. As a new student in 1891, Mary Louise undoubtedly heard Putnam's “well-received lecture on the development of musical instruments....” “[S]he told the students that music originated in an intense desire to give utterance to deep feeling that could not be expressed in words.”[3]

Ogontz offered inter-mural mixers. Princeton students, and boys from nearby schools, were permitted to visit between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. On Mondays only. Tradition called to the girls to pose for a photograph with their beaux. The girls and boys were interspersed in a single line, with each boy clasping the shoulders of the girl before him.

Whether Mary Louise ever participated in this date-night tradition has not been documented, though a photograph from 1894 suggests she had not. In that year, at least. [4]Given her sequestered background, in Camden and later at Lyndon, it was unlikely that Mary Louise had really any exposure to puppy love, crushes, or flirting. In the end, it was immaterial. She was already engaged. On June 17, 1893, Mary Louise accepted Edward Bok's proposal of marriage. She was sixteen, two months shy of her seventeenth birthday.[5]He was thirty.

Early cynics might have been right. Cyrus Curtis, in hiring Bok, might have eyed his new editor—despite his and Mary Louise’s palpable age differences—as a potential marital swain for his daughter.

***

IF EDWARD BOK bore the editorial mission of The Ladies' Home Journal, Louisa Knapp Curtis bore its soul. That spirit flickered out when the pioneering editor died after “a brief illness” [6] on February 25, 1910. She was fifty-eight, dying quietly,with little public recognition, at home in Wyncote.

There were no tributes. No full-length obituaries appeared in local newspapers, even though her husband owned two of them, The Public Ledgerand The Evening Public Ledger. Instead, the widower directed that a notice appear in the general obituary sections of ThePhiladelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Twenty-five words long. In small agate type. In The Times,the announcement read:

CURTIS—On Friday morning. Feb. 25, Louisa Knapp Curtis, wife of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, in the 58th year of her age. Funeral services at residence at 2 o'clock Sunday, Feb. 27. Kindly omit flowers. [7]

In The Inquirer's version of the same notice, Louisa's name was misspelled “Louise,” a likely transcription mix-up with her daughter's name. [8]

There was an exception to the hum of mum, the independent New-York Tribune.The newspaper recognized Louisa's embryonic rôle at The Journaland reported that she died “unexpectedly,” “due to heart disease.”[9] A heart attack was the likely, immediate cause.

Funeral services were held in Lyndon's music room, with the choir of All Hallows Episcopal Church of Wyncote intoning hymns. The event merited one paragraph on Page 3 in TheInquirer.[10] The newspaper referred to Louisa, once the editor of the largest and most influential women's magazine in the United States, as “a prominent society woman and writer.” [11]

A month later, Louisa's will was made public by the Office of the Registry of Wills in Norristown, Montgomery County. What was reported was vague, almost coy. Certainly incomplete. Among Louisa's gifts, Mary Louise was bequeathed $10,000 (about $312,000 today) “absolutely.” It was the largest bequest disclosed. [12]

The loss of her mother devastated Mary Louise. There was no reason to dispute Florine Thayer McCray's description of Mary Louise's deep attachment to Louisa as an advocate, companion, and friend, one bearing a sister-like quality.

Cyrus was probably less emotionally stricken. Edward Bok filtered Curtis' reaction to Louisa's death in his fanciful biography of the publisher, A Man from Maine, and created a saccharine version Curtis’ anguish.

He was destined now to pass through a deep personal sorrow.... [He] had become accustomed to learn more heavily, as time went by, on his wife and helpmate who had been at his side through all his struggles.... [T]he man found himself all alone. It was a bitter experience for him after thirty-five years of married life, and he bent perceptibly under the blow. He felt he had gained much, in a worldly sense, only to lose her who to him was nearly all he valued in life, save his daughter. [13]

Bok dedicated the 1923 biography to “Louisa Knapp Curtis in Affectionate Memory.”[14]

Louisa was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

***

AFTER ONE HUNDRED-fiftydays of mourning Louisa’s death, sixty-year-old Cyrus Curtis rediscovered a second cousin in faraway Wisconsin, courted her, proposed marriage, and tied the knot. Was it serendipity?Shall we suspend disbelief?

Kate Stanwood Cutter Pillsbury, a fifty-four-year-old widow of a rich Milwaukee lumber baron, took her vows with Curtis on September 2, 1910. She married up—to one of the country's top twenty wealthiest plutocrats. Edward and Mary Louise Bok were among the “relatives and the few intimate friends” who attended the “beautifully-decorated” ceremony in Milwaukee. [15]

Edward Bok said Kate eased his boss' melancholy. “She had a remarkable effect in restoring his interest in his business and in giving him that companionship in his home he was so long accustomed.”

Bok, an unabashed fabulist, added more: Louisa had once told her husband, “'If I pass away before you do, I hope you will marry your cousin Kate.'”

“This wish had come true, and, with new hope and fresh spirits, Mr. Curtis was mentally prepared for the battle that was before him.…”[16]

Such a tall tale of Louisa's premonition strains credulity. It could only have come from Curtis himself. In many ways, A Man from Maine is as much hagiography as biography. In relating Curtis' self-serving whitewash of his relationship with Kate, Bok was either disingenuously promoting the concoction, or swallowing it whole.

One way or another, the narrative attempted to short-circuit gossip about the newly-weds’ back story. Had Cyrus just married on the rebound? Or, had he had his eye on Kate all along? In the event, Cyrus' desire to remarry was not altogether surprising. He knew Kate was eager to cater to him, an intimacy that had slipped way in the latter years of his marriage to Louisa. Increasingly, Louisa doted on Mary Louise to his exclusion. Louisa's debilitating Raynaud's disease just made matters worse.

The Philadelphia Inquirer made the match sound as if it were a love-struck fairy tale come true, headlining its wedding report: “CHILDHOOD FRIENDS MARRIED AT LAST.”[17]The New York Times’billboard headlinewas more straight laced: “C. H K. CURTIS, BRIDEGROOM”. [18]

Without skipping a beat, Kate became Lyndon's new châtelaine. Though Mary Louise was already married to Bok, a mother herself, and living in Merion, she still considered Lyndon as her family home—as some children closely bonded to their parents, even married ones, often do. If she felt displaced from Lyndon, it was understandable.

Given this upheaval in her father's life, it would be natural for Mary Louise to wonder how she now fit in within this reconfigured constellation of her family's hierarchy. This reality struck hard when her father blended Kate's two adult daughters, Alice Wedgewood Pillsbury Martin and Helen Cutter Pillsbury, into the family fold.

In 1913, Cyrus offered a lagniappe to Alice's husband, John Charles Martin, who had with his family moved down the street from Lyndon to be closer to the seat of power. What Curtis created was Curtis-Martin Newspapers, Inc., a holding company for Curtis-owned newspapers, eventually including the New York Evening Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Though he had no experience in the field, Martin got to run the new company.

Though Mary Louise always remained outwardly loyal to her father, their relationship after his remarriage was never the same.

Curtis tried to scotch Mary Louise’s discontent. In the spring of 1914. He, Kate, and Mary Louise (Edward was left at home) spent more than month in Europe, arriving in Paris mid-April. They stayed at the Hôtel Majestic on the Champs Elysées, eyeing the view of the Arc de Triomphe. It was all tourism, all the time. Curtis attempted further reconciliation with a swing through London. It was home after that. [19]

Mary Louise loved her father. She adored her mother. She was undoubtedly pained by how little reverence and respect were accorded to her in death. In time, Mary Louise would scour her memories. Lyndon, representing a tangible bit of unhappiness and embitterment, would fall victim to her anguish many years later.

***

ROSE FELD, THE New York Times reporter, was right about Curtis' workaholic habits. He had always adhered to an undeviating commute from the publishing company's head office, first located at Arch Street; later, from the Public Ledger Building. But in 1910, the route to Lyndon changed,taking into account the company's new purpose-built headquarters. The colonnaded, square block of brick and granite claimed pride of place on Independence Park, next to the Public Ledger Building. Designed by the French-trained Philadelphia architect Edgar Viguers Seeler (1867-1929), the new Curtis Building flanked Sixth Street, Walnut, Seventh Street, and Sansom Street and rose to twelve stories. (Some bottom and top floors differed in height.) In all, the building was supposed to exude a Beaux Arts sensibility. It cost $1,175,000 (more than $36-million today).

Curtis positioned himself in a fourth-floor corner office overlooking both Independence Park and Washington Square. A seventh-floor lair went to Edward Bok, who contributed to the building's temple-like feeling with his own aesthetic. In 1916, The Journal's editor commissioned the Philadelphia-born artist Maxfield Parrish to create a portrait of a “dream garden,” to be transformed by Louis Tiffany and his New York studio into a mammoth glass mosaic. The resulting Dream Garden was a prodigious work of 100,000 interlocking glass pieces in shades of two-hundred-sixty colors. Bok placed the artwork in the building's Sixth Street lobby.

Whatever the building's design style, Cyrus Curtis knew, and wanted the world to know, that the imposing new Curtis Building was not only the largest “athenaeum”of journalism in the United States, but also a monument to his success as editor, publisher, and capitalist. And that it was built for the ages.

***

THE CURTIS BUILDING was a showcase. But its creator was frequently not there to show it off. For month-long periods, Curtis was absent from his fourth-floor office. He was cruising at sea. Though his schedule away was not well known to those outside his immediate circle, Curtis had spent much of his time during the previous ten years sailing. His first ocean-going yacht came from Camden, Maine, where he was a founding member of of Camden Yacht Club. Later, he was its commodore. The Maine-born Curtis had also established his family's summer home in Camden, creating an attachment there that Mary Louise never forgot.

Curtis acquired his latest ship in 1920. From bow to stern, it was two-hundred-twenty-eight-feet-long, about two-thirds the length of a football field. It was dubbed, like his other cruisers, “Lyndonia,” a sub-variant of his estate's name.

Curtis maritime life was neither entirely recreational, nor nautical. He found the sea air nostalgic, a natural association for someone who first newborn breaths were laced with salty brine from Portland Bay. For him now, he explained, sea breezes were bracing, an invigorating tonic for his work.

His life at sea was regimented. From April to October each year, he spent three days a week on average on the two-hundred-twenty-eight-feet-long steam ship. From February to March, he was on it just “continually.” [20]His itinerary for the most part was uninterrupted, sailing from Portland, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and back again. In New York, he passed time with fellow yachtsmen at the Columbia Yacht Club, uptown on the Hudson River. Each winter the Curtises were in Florida. Each summer, Camden. Occasionally, they would sail to Europe.

“Yachting is not a hobby with me. It is a necessity,” Curtis said.[21]

Chapter V

MARRIAGE

THEIR UNION WAS fraught with potential woe. Edward and Mary Louise’s marriage was unlike what Philadelphia's plutocratic social stratum was used to. Proper Philadelphia cherished its endogamous bonds within its closely-knit tribe. All, seemingly, “cousins.” Even apart from that familiar ritualism, Edward's and Mary Louise's romance—more January-December than even May-December—was enough to raise the most jaded eyebrows. She was a teenager; he, thirteen years her senior. When the newly-hired editor of TheLadies' Home Journal first met the boss' daughter, she was wearing pig-tails. He wore a three-piece suit.

The age imbalanceinferred the groom’s evident craving for dominance and control; and, more damning by today's standards, aquestionable, inordinateexertion of power over an uninitiated child. A more age-appropriate mate presented an immediate challenge that Bok feared—assertion of female agency, sexual and otherwise.

Bok seesawed between dueling obsessions:a debilitating maternal devotion combined with afrustrated search in womanhood for elusive virtue and chastity. Other than his mother, Sieke Bok, no woman—not even Mary Louise—could ever measure up.If Bok were assigning an article, the complexity of his intertwined Oedipus and Madonna complexeswas a made-to-order subject forTheLadies’ Home Journal, in a piece, no doubt,summoned up by Sigmund Freud. A lesser savant just might surmise that Bok was simply a repressed, closeted homosexual.

***

AFTER THE WEDDING, Sieke was nearly always by her son’s side; in fact, a permanent fixture in the Edward and Mary Louise Bok household until her death. She was sustenance. In his bride, Bok sought something more ethereal, purity and naïveté.

If a social scientist were designing a test-tube version of a typical Journalreader, no fictional, demographic model could have not done better than a fused form of Sieke and Mary Louise.

Edward, at thirty, started courting Mary Louise by at least early 1893, when she was sixteen and still a pupil at the Ogontz School for Young Ladies. He was less than candid in divulging his growing feelings for his employer's daughter.

Based on an exchange between Bok and Curtis, disclosed in A Man from Maine, Bok had, in fact, purposefully concealed his romantic fancy. The two men were traveling by train on business from Calais to Paris when Curtis noted the contents of a letter he had recently received from Louisa:

“My wife says that daughter is showing evidences of being interested in some young man—she is quiet, very thoughtful, and all that. Of course, my wife is wrong.” He paused. “Daughter is too young for that sort of thing.”

Bok mused that “certain signals had already passed between [Mary Louise] and myself to lead to mutual thoughts.” “...[I]t had never for a moment occurred to [Curtis] that anything save the most casual acquaintance existed between the editor and his daughter.”

Curtis added, “Oh, yes, of course, some day [she will marry], but not for a long time yet.... Well, I hope the fellow will be a decent chap: not one of those that I see standing on the steps of the hotels sucking cigarettes.” [1]

Bok smoked cigarettes.

Mary Louise told of her increasing affection for Edward in her diary. On March 4, 1893, she wrote: “Mr. Bok came to tea.... Mr. B. was nice tonight. I liked him.” [2]

Assuming Curtis had, in fact, simultaneously vetted Bok, during his 1889 hiring process, forThe Journal's editorship and, unbeknownst to the Brooklynite, as a potential beau for Mary Louise, the matchmaking worked. Mary Louise noted in her diary that she and Edward spent more and more time together, going to the theater and dancing. Otherwise known today as “dates.“ “Mr. Bok is splendid,” she declared.

According to the etiquette of the day, formality prevailed. Her heartthrob was always “Mr. Bok,” never “Edward.” She was miffed if Mr. Bok received the attention of other women. She got over her jealousy quickly, paving it over by giving him roses. She was over the moon when he bestowed her with a pet name, “Mary-Quizy.”

Mary Louise claimed her parents tried to keep them apart. She saw Edward’smore frequent, nebulous trips to Europe, concocted by her father, as evidence.[3]

***

EDWARD BOK COULD not have been more pleased—as his self-imposed matrimonial time-clock was already running out. He believed that a man should marry between twenty-five and thirty, when he had achieved enough maturity and experience to form a life-long matrimonial bond. [4] Lagging by a year, he had to make up for lost time.

Later in the summer of 1893, Bok asked Curtis for his daughter's hand. He told him that he was willing to be investigated by a private detective and by Bradstreet, a financial analysis firm. The sweeteners were presumably unnecessary. The couple's engagement came on June 22, 1893, and was announced with little ado.

An unlikely exception came from Eugene Field, a Chicago Morning News columnist who managed side job as a poet. A notice in the October 15, 1893 edition of Profitable Advertising, a Boston-based trade publication, reported that “Eugene Field gave a delightful informal luncheon at the Union League Club, Chicago, in honor of Miss May [sic] Louise Curtis of Philadelphia, the fiancée of Edward Bok, of the Ladies' Home Journal.” [5]

Bok had been pranked. The “luncheon” was announced by the same Eugene Field who had earlier romantically linked Bok to Lavinia Pinkham, the maiden granddaughter of Lydia Estes Pinkham, a patent-medicine huckster. [6]The bogus claim jabbed Bok, givenThe Journal's well-known aversion to patent-medicine advertising.[7]

Nowhere was couple's age difference mentioned. But Bok and the Curtises might have had that sticky issue in mind. The Bok-Curtis engagement lasted three years until Mary Louise was nineteen. Even then, their wedding on October 22, 1896 was modest by the standards and rituals of the day.

Philadelphia's Society churches, St. Mark's Church and the Church of the Holy Trinity, were not required. A reception at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, Proper Philadelphia's go-to venue for wedding receptions, was not booked. Guests in the hundreds—morning dress required, of course—were not invited.

Instead, bypassing a church service, Mary Louise and Edward had the Rev. Alfred J. P. McClure, rector of the All Hallows Episcopal Church in Wyncote, intone the sacred vows at the Curtis “country seat”[8]at Lyndon. A dozen relatives and friends—four of whom included Louisa and Cyrus; Mary Louise's soon-to-be mother-in-law, Sieke Bok; and Bok's best man, his brother Willem J. Bok—witnessed the noon ceremony. There were no ushers, nor bridesmaids. [9]

The wedding received greater attention than the engagement. Scores of newspapers got around to mentioning it. Some more than others. The Philadelphia Times did so in one paragraph. [10]Cyrus Curtis' hometown newspaper, the Daily Press in Portland, Maine's largest newspaper in Maine's largest city, consigned the news to a squib in the “Marriages” column, and printed it six days after the event.[11]

The New York Times provided two paragraphs, seemingly devoting the most ink to the event.[12]

Depending on what you read, the newlyweds departed soon after the wedding ceremony on a honeymoon by steamer from New York to “Mediterranean ports,” on “an extended European trip,” or simply on a tour of New England. They likely visited all three regions. “Mr. Bok will probably be absent from his desk at the Journal office for several months,” The Times reported.

Mary Louise's wedding night was surelyher first encounter with marital intimacy. For that matter, it might have been Bok's, as well, given how little prior interaction—even as an adult bachelor—he had had with females. His detachment continued, even as a married man. There was never any hint of impropriety. His “contact” with the opposite sex was largely confined to The Journal's faceless readership. “Edward Bok's instinctive attitude toward women was that of avoidance,” the women's editor wrote with no sense of irony. “He did not dislike women, but it could not be said that he liked them. They had never interested him.” [13]

***

THE BOKS’ MODEST wedding—with no formal reception—adhered to both Bok's and Curtis' attitudes about avoiding the niceties of Philadelphia Society. Both men had always rejected the standard prejudices of Proper Philadelphia—racism, antisemitism, and ethnic bigotry. Mary Louise shared their free thinking.

For many American pashas, wealth, power, and social status, accumulated by “marrying up” or “hypergamy,” moved mountains. The Boks and the Curtises—despite their financial and professional might—did not reap any of this benefit. In fact, they probably did not care to. Bok, in particular, was a champion of a growing American middle class, a demographic he catered to in The Journal.He sneered at snobbery.

His club memberships never formalized an imprimatur of caste. The 1906 edition of Boyds Blue Book, a Society register, noted that Bok, like his father-in-law, was a member of the Franklin Inn Club, a literary group. He was a member of Merion Cricket Club, and he nailed his community spirit bona fides as a co-founder of the Merion Civic Association. [14]

The Union League also counted Cyrus Curtis as a member. But neither Bok, nor Curtis were members of the Philadelphia Club, the pinnacle of Philadelphia Society’s male-bonding.Nor was Mary Louise a member of the women's equivalent, the Acorn Club.

In addition, Bok went missing in Philadelphia editions of Who’s Who, admittedly, for most local blue-bloods, a modest achievement at best. He did capture a berth in the 1920 edition of Who’s Who in Philadelphia in Wartime. The notation, probably crafted by Bok himself, was significant for what went unstated. It allowed that he was married. But Mary Louise rated no mention by name. Curtis and Cary were simply cited as sons. [15]

Chapter VI

SWASTIKA

SOON AFTER THEIR honeymoon, the Boks’ marriage soon took an almost predictable wrong turn. The signs were quickly evident. Moving in with their in-laws did not help. Their cohabitation with Cyrus and Louisa at Lyndon lasted on and off for five years. For Edward, it felt like a lifetime. [1]

Like some new husbands in similar circumstances, Edward felt claustrophobic in his in-laws’ house, unable to assert an imprint of his own. Bok looked forward to sharing domesticity with his new bride elsewhere. Unknown to Mary Louise, however, he also planned an in-law swap in the new ménage, cohabitation with his own mother, Sieke.

Mary Louise, on the other hand, even as a newly married, found Lyndon just fine. She picked up where she had left off. Louisa was no doubt equally delighted.

Edward found respite from the confines of Lyndon, with Mary Louise at his side, by occasionally residing with friends as guests, or taking short-stay breaks at Center City hotels. [2]

There was never any to reason to doubt Bok’s financial ability to finance an alternative living arrangement. His first paycheck from his father-in-law, when taken on as The Journal's editor seven years before, was a remarkable $25,000 (about $880,000 today). With subsequent salary increases, stock options in Curtis Publishing, and his own investments, Bok had probably already surpassed millionaire status.

***

EDWARD’S SOUGHT-AFTER house was planned fora vacant, four-acre property in Merion Station, a suburb still largely undeveloped. He purchased the site in 1898, [3]and he took immediate charge in construction details;Mary Louise, in the back seat.Building spanned two years.

If Edward wanted an alternative to Cyrus Curtis' “lord of the manor” lifestyle at Lyndon, Bok found it in “suburban” Merion—a locale just then part of a burgeoning westward expansion from Philadelphia. The path west was known as the “Main Line,” a bow to the Philadelphia Railroad which had pioneered development to the area, brightening the lives of an increasing number of affluent Philadelphians disaffected from city life. The Boks three-floor house at 443 North Highland Avenue was less than a fifteen-minute walk to Pennsy’s Merion Station rail stop.

The house’s appearance was stylishly modern. Lower Merion Township real estate records cite a “mansion” in the Tudor manner. [4]Actually, the design was more in keeping with the then-wildly-popular Arts and Crafts movement, known for throw-back features such as gables, hexagonal bays, and stone chimneys. The Boks installed seven. Edward's final touch were hundreds of tulips—the national flower of the Netherlands—planted in front.

To their regret, the Boks also gave the place an unfortunate name, “Swastika.” That designation came from an unlikely source, Rudyard Kipling, an occasional Journalcontributor, and in due order, a more than occasional drop-in guest.

Well before its evil connection with Nazism, Kipling had suggested the bold name and cross design, rooted in Sanskrit meaning “fortunate” or “well-being.” As “another” house-warming gift, the English author also gave the new homeowners a door knocker featuring the right-angled cross. [5] In time, during Adolph Hitler’s rise in the 1930s, a more sobering interpretation sunk in, and the Boks soon retired the menacing signature and anything associated with it.[6]

For the most part. The door knocker emblazoned with its Nazi symbol came down. The name, not so much. As late as 1935, the then-widowed Mrs. Bok still retained the name. [7] Otherwise, theBoks downplayed the house naming ritual.

A first-time visitor would be struck by the house's immense size, especially for its siting on arelatively small four-acre plot. A large entrance hall divided the house in two. On the left was a living room. A dining room was to the right. The Boks slept in separate bedroom suites on the second floor. (It was a custom that they carried over in the future to other houses they purchased.) The third floor was reserved for children's bedrooms; spare rooms for guests; and servant quarters. In all, the house featured twenty rooms and eight bathrooms. [8]The Boks' family pet, a standard-sized Airedale terrier, had the run of the place, though it mostly kept company with Mary Louise.

Outside were two paved patios. Other servants were housed in an adjacent carriage house. In a garage were the Boks' vehicles. At first, a 1917 Pierce Arrow. Ten years later, they moved up to a five-passenger 1927 Rolls Royce sedan. Charged with maintaining and driving the vehicles was the Boks’ longtime chauffeur Patrick McAuley.

McAuley lived in a floor above the garage. As did Edward’s Japanese-born personal aideTsuda—officially a valet, but really a household factotum—who was assigned three rooms. They were decorated in a Japanese style, presumably with tatami floor mats and sliding doors. Tsuda was on official call for two hours per day, and was paid $100 per month (about $2,300 today). Such largess was not unusual. Mary Louise supervised and covered the costs of weddings of maids. If they were sick, she supported them in their time of need.[9]

***

A SON, WILLIAM Curtis Bok (they called him “Curtis”), was born at Lyndon on September 7, 1897, a year into their marriage. He was sickly from birth. As a ten-year-old, a time still a decade away from the development of life-saving antibiotics, his health took a serious turn for the worse. Curtis suffered “a vicious attack” of double pneumonia, leaving his heart “very weak,” Edward said.[10] Meaning, his heart was probably permanently damaged.

Cary William Bok, shortened to Cary Bok, was born on January 25, 1905 at home at Merion.

The boys’ names were drawn from a stock of family monikers. The outlier, “Cary,” was decisively Edward's choice, recognizing Clarence Cary, an early mentor when Bok was a young-blood, living in Brooklyn.

Edward was a stern father. He was intolerant, even of juvenile hi-jinks. He believed in corporal punishment, striking his sons' rears with a cane or belt to “remedy” aberrant behavior. Once, during a snowball volley between Cary and Curtis, Curtis accidentally landed one on his mother. Bok spanked him “so severely” that Curtis “could not sit for two days....”[11]Few mothers would abide such ferocity. Mary Louise apparently did not have much say.

There also seems little to indicate that Mary Louise exercised much influence in educating the children. Edward wanted them to be fit in body and agile in mind. Somehow, he managed daily readings of Shakespeare when the boys were around. Otherwise, he sounded like the audio version of TheLadies' Home Journal—a lot of edifying superlatives and trite advice.[12]

From an early age, character traits evident in Curtis and Cary directed their parental affections. These divisions gripped Curtis in particular, and played out later in life in a near-estrangement between son and father. By temperament, Curtis gravitated toward his mother. Cary, to his father. Both boys called Mary Louise “mumvie,” a neologism coined from a diminutive of the British-ism “mum.” Their father was “Lambie,” what Mary Louisecalled herfather. It probably got confusing.

Not for the first time, Bok reality came up short to Bok myth. As editor and in his public persona, Edward crafted an image of an engaged, nurturing father. He was anything but, according Margaret Plummer Bok, a future wife of Curtis Bok.[13]

Bokadvocated to his Journal readers on behalf of a nuclear family—father, mother, and children all being tightly knit. Instead, contradicting his publicized dictum favoring public education, Edward enrolled Curtis and Cary in the private Chestnut Hill Academy, later sending them, also as day students, to the Haverford School in a nearby eponymous suburb. Without skipping a beat, they boys then segued to secondary education as boarders at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Curtis graduated in 1915. Cary did in 1922. He won a top prize for photographic achievement.

The Hill School, too, was Edward’s way of thumbing his nose at Proper Philadelphia. It was always assumed that the scions of Philadelphia’s wealth attended the “Holy Trinity” of New England boarding schools, St. Mark’s in Massachusetts, St. George’s in Rhode Island, and, most frequently, St. Paul’s in New Hampshire. Pottstown, Pennsylvania, would do for the Curtises.

***

THE RAMBLING BOK house contributed to the erosion ofdomestic harmony within.Extra space allowed Edward to pack the place with a revolving parade of family, friends, and business associates on short- and long-stays.. Almost from the start—even with the boys underfoot and throwing snowballs willy nilly—Edward had invited his elderly mother Sieke to join the household. Until her death in 1907, Sieke was just a bother. At least, so thought Mary Louise. As living with his in-laws had rubbed Edward the wrong way, Mary Louise saw Sieke's full-time presence as an irritant. On all accounts, it markeda rocky beginning—to her and Edward’shousehold and intimacy. Especially in a first home.

If Mary Louise thought she would be the mistress of Swastika, she had not counted on the other Mrs. Bok. Sieke was brooding, bitter, controlling, and co-dependent on Edward. [14]He let her have her way, even if meant conflict with Mary Louise. Philadelphia newspaper publisher George W. Childs, an acquaintance, observed, “He treats her [Sieke] like a princess.” [15]It was an eccentric reference to “royal” status, even, maybe, an errant word choice given the mother-son relationship.

A year before her death, Sieke was diagnosed as suffering “delusional insanity.” For his part, Edward was stricken with his own near-clinical—though undiagnosed—nexus of maternal devotion and preoccupation. Edward found Sieke's death gut-wrenching. Mary Louise, presumably, less so.

The in-law “problem” became more like a “merry-go-around” when Edward's elder brother Willem also moved to Merion from Brooklyn, after Wilhem’s marriage had been annulled.[16]The Boks squirreled him away in the carriage house, where they lodged servants.

Willy lived with the Boks more or less—more “more” than “less”—until his death in 1928. For six of those of years, he was married to a household seamstress, a large buxom woman named Flora Abbott. Mary Louise had arranged the union hoping that a wife would engage him enough to free her from Willem's constant intrusion.

Willem was not an easy presence. He was mostly unemployed, and Edward paid his bills. To pass time, his brother studied and cataloged the burial sites of prominent Americans. There was no money in it. He was also deaf, and his speech was garbled and often unintelligible. Like Edward, Willem had protruding ears. Curtis and Cary called him “Silly Willy.” Maybe others did too. In the long-term, Willem “caused” Mary Louise to harbor “feelings of irritation and embarrassment.”[17]

***

THE BOK RESIDENCE was a full house. In addition to her husband; her sons; her mother-in-law; her brother-in-law and his wife; Tsuda and a legion of other servants, Mary Louise also endured the comings and goings of all sorts of visitors. They were sometimes accompanied by their wives. The Boks' good friend, pianist-composer Josef Hofmann, the Polish-born virtuoso, was a frequent guest. Maybe too frequent.

Edward first met Hofmann in 1898. Impressed by Hofmann’s ability to articulate the nuances of fine music that he had come to appreciate, Bok in 1907 offered Hofmann a monthly column on music. Afriendship—and, tangentially, one also with Mary Louise—took off. Ten years later, at the time he was playing, at Mary Louise's request, at Settlement Music School's inauguration of its new premises, Hofmann and his wife, Marie, were spending less time in New York and more of it in Philadelphia. Or, more likely, in Merion.

Hofmann joined Mary Louise and Edward in eagerly brainstorming ideas for a new Philadelphia music conservatory. They formed a group, later expanded to include another frequent overnight house guest, Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The foursome liked to burn the midnight oil, bandying concepts for the conservatory—thisan embryonic vision of the future Curtis Institute of Music. When they called it a night, they all retired to their bedrooms—four separate ones.

In latter years, one “house guest” in particular, son Cary, was alwaysespecially welcome. Mary Louise remembered how Cary comforted her when, following Edward’s death, he moved in temporarily between divorcing a first wife and relocating permanently to Maine.

***

EDWARD BOK WAS not a romantic, nor, given his sexual proclivities and temperament, inclined to romantic love with a woman. Mary Louise’s and Edward’slimited intimacy (separate bedrooms underscored the fact)was just part of it. Whether he was a closeted homosexual, an unproven assertion, he was always neverthelessremote and impersonal.Mary Louise drifted away. The Curtis family's adherence to New England orthodoxy, the bedrock of their Yankee morals, assured that divorce was never an option. Rather, the Bok relationship, as it was, lay fallow in quiet estrangement. Those who knew her sometimes wondered whether she even liked him. [18]

In more than three-hundred pages, his autobiography, The Americanizationof Edward Bok,[19]cites nothing that could resemble a love affair with Mary Louise. In fact, in describing his marriage, Bok expends forty-five words to it. Mentioning his bride by name (only once) counts for two of them. [20]In chronologically cataloging important dates in his life, he noted curtly, “1896: October 22: Married Mary Louise Curtis.” [21]

Bok dedicated Americanization to both Sieke and Mary Louise (“My Mother and My Wife”)—hardly a combination that any wife wants to hear and, moreover, as a second fiddle to a mother. The inscription was sappy: “.... I dedicate this account of the boy to whom one gave birth and brought manhood and the other blessed with all a home and family may mean.” It was vintage Bok.

Mary Louise could not have missed the paragraph preceding her assigned forty-five words. Edward swooned in describing his relationship with his mother. She got one-hundred words.

[Bok] was now realizing the dream of his life for which he had worked: his means were sufficient to give his mother every comfort; to install her in the most comfortable surroundings wherever she chose to live.... He had for years toiled unceasingly to reach this point: he felt he had now achieved at least one goal. [22]

Mary Louise's and Edward's marriage was not loveless. It was just inhabited by Edward Bok's peculiar notion of the pairing. Edward was running a modern magazine. But he wanted an old-fashioned wife.

Chapter VII

CONSERVATORY

SETTLEMENT MUSIC SCHOOL was a victim of its own success—or so it would appear. It became a tale of unchecked growth, the striking development in its ranks of nascent talent—even approaching virtuoso ability—and, conversely, no funds to underwrite any professionally-oriented study for these students.

"The level of musical performance of the Settlement Music School students grew considerably, making it apparent that advanced students required a separate professional training facility," offered one accounting. [1] A school history noted that from the late teens to the early 1920s "Settlement Music School had come a long way in relatively short period...." Vocal and cello instruction was instituted. "By 1918, teachers gave lessons in viola and the school added a second orchestra."[2]

The Welfare Federation of Philadelphia, a private, fundraising organization (something like today's United Way), charted statistical growth in the stark terms. In 1921, the Settlement School offered four-hundred-fifty pupils weekly lessons, while three hundred others “enjoyed” concerts. [3]The following year, the total taught weekly dramatically jumped to 2,100, including 1,300 children, while four-hundred served in “various” clubs and classes. The school, the federation reported, was also sponsoring weekly concerts and open-air gatherings, attracting crowds between three-hundred and seven-hundred. [4]In other words, conditions were “cramped.”[5]

***

SINCE THE OPENING of Settlement's Mary Louise Curtis Branch in 1917, through the early 1920s, Mrs. Bok was shedding the yoke of her child-rearing years, the hand-me-down dutifulness of familial obligations, and the rectitude of her social standing. By 1923, a pivotal year in her ruminations about Settlement's future, her sons, William Curtis, known as “Curtis”; and Cary William, or “Cary,” were managing well enough on their own. Curtis, at twenty-six, after graduation from law school at the University of Virginia, had entered private law practice in Philadelphia. Cary, eighteen, was a sophomore at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Twenty seven years of marriage to Edward W. Bok, fourteen years her senior, had matured to a supportive, collaborative plateau. They “grew apart.” [6]Edward was accustomed to “protecting” his wife from “the public eye.” [7] She would have none of it. Her role at Settlement was assertive and, indeed, public, cast in a limelight that Bok liked to claim, paternally, for himself.

Mary Louise Curtis Bok had become a grande dame, but with few of the trappings and totemic signifiers of Philadelphia's Society and financial élite—Proper Philadelphians known for their reserve and formal manner. She did not "receive" at home, or exchange cartes de visite, as some matrons of that ilk were wont to do. [8]

She did not idle way time by micro-managing the work habits of newly-hired Irish servants. Club life did not interest her, nor did women's cultural committees—really the business end of club-dom. (She did belong to the Cosmopolitan Club, a local women's hide-away in Center City founded by a friend, Edith Braun.) As a youth, already betrothed to Edward, she had no life as a débutante, a rite of passage customary to the teen-aged daughters of patrician Philadelphia. Organizations that she awarded her blessing and financial support were those bearing civic gravitas. [9]She was a “patroness” of Women's Overseas Service League. [10] She served as a director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and she did so from 1912 to 1941.

She sponsored fund-raising drives in 1917 for the Merion branch of the American Red Cross. Two years later, she marshaled funds to build a new $300,000 (almost $7-million today) maternity wing at Bryn Mawr Hospital. In 1921, she was involved in supporting a European food relief campaign led by U.S. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Almost all of these activities preceded the year 1923.

So striking, in fact, were her eleemosynary pursuits that in later life Who’s Who saw fit—in an egregious display of editorial malpractice—to assign her top billing only as a philanthropist and civic leader. No mention was given to her founding The Curtis Institute of Music, nor her funding of Settlement. [11]

Proper Philadelphians, cocooned in precincts surrounding Rittenhouse Square, their epicenter, could have easily dismissed Mary Louise as an interloper to local Society, a first generation parvenue in a city where its Establishment sprouted family trees rooted in the 18th century, if not before. On the other hand, the Boks indulged in a casual village life in Merion Station.

As Edward ventured elsewhere, it was there that Mary Louise groomed a devotion to classical music—in its creation, performance, and in its salubrious affects—as a way to bind the best of society's virtues. And bestow joy. She knew this first hand, immersed in music since childhood. She was a proficient, life-long musician, skilled at playing the organ, piano, and guitar.

Musical blessings came to her husband more slowly. Though Bok was surrounded in music (besides his spouse, sons Curtis and Cary also played instruments), a Bok acquaintance once quipped that the only “notes” he knew were “bank notes.” [12]

In practical, earnest moments, Mary Louise saw the appreciation of concert andchamber music and opera; their composition and performance—rooted in strict European classical history and traditions—as a means of transporting the often-gritty temporal to the spiritually soulful. Instilling this uplifting sensitivity to music's transformative superpower, whether to young immigrant newcomers or to the best and brightest from near and far, had become a compellingmission.

In time, Mary Louise Bok became a woman of ability, prestige—and substance.

***

THAT ACHIEVEMENT WAS not always easily attained. After her mother’s/his wife’s death in 1910, Cyrus Curtis perceived his daughter as "depressed" and "listless."[13] He sought guidance from Jennie Fels, president of Settlement Music School, a charity that Curtis reckoned would attract Mary Louise's interest—even fervor. It did. Soon after Mary Louise’s meeting with Mrs. Fels, "Settlement Music School proved to be the perfect antidote."[14]

Fels became Mary Louise’s mentor and a cherished friend. Just a few years into what would become a lifelong bond, Mary Louise memorialized their friendship when it came time in 1917 to lay the cornerstone to the new Settlement building, A memory box buried along side in the cornerstone included a “personal note” to Jennie from her new acolyte.[15]Itscontent is unknown. Thebox itself remains buried.

Curtis' turning to Mrs. Fels—that is, a powerful publishing potentate seeking advice from a female head of a niche South Philadelphia charity—was not as odd as it at first might appear. Fels was the wife of mega-rich Samuel S. Fels, president of the family-owned Fels & Co., makers of Fels Naptha laundry and toilet soaps. He was arguably the city's most philanthropic progressive. Samuel Fels backed then-unpopular minority civil rights, donated to the National Association of Colored People from 1912 onward, and, in 1916, supported a NACCP campaign against the racist film Birth of a Nation.

Interlocking social ties among the rich and influential in Philadelphia, especially between Proper Philadelphians and those they perceived to be social inferiors (Jews and Catholics, despiteany status assigned by wealth) did not exist. But a network of committees and charitable events did link the wealthy of all religions and ethnicity in cultural, philanthropic, and civic affairs. Jewish Fels and Christian Curtis were top donors to the city's Welfare Federation. [16]Sam Fels and Cyrus Curtis also served together on the Public Utilities committee of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and so on. [17]

In all, the same names turned up often enough on charitable and civic boards they might as well have been on a routine roster to draw from. Society matrons like Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson, Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, Mrs. Eli K. Price, and the Countess Santa Eulalia (the former Elizabeth Shindler of Indiana) often popped up as a quartet, especially if they were attending anything that had to do with the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, the forerunner to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[18]

The 1919 “Autumn Ball” on behalf of the Philadelphia Orchestra Endowment Fund, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Broad and Walnut streets, attracted Mrs. Alexander Van Rensselaer (her husband was the orchestra’s board president and a board director of Settlement Music School); Mrs. Fels; and as one of several other “patronesses,”Mary Louise. [19]

Like Mary Louise, Mrs. Fels supported a wide range of good works.The 1918 annual Rittenhouse Square Flower Show, a fundraiser for the square's private upkeep, was among charities that got her backing. Jennie served “ice cream and cakes.” [20]

***

THE NEED AT Settlement for advanced music study was well established. Mary Louise took the hint. By 1923, aged forty-seven, she was ready to expand her vision for music education. And spend millions.

Sustenance and guidance came from Jennie Fels, sixteen years her senior, and would do so for years to come until Fels' death at eighty-three in 1943.

Mary Louise also felt empowered by the enthusiasm, ability, and the frank cheer-leading of Johann Grolle, Settlement's long-time Head Worker, or de facto director. It was hard to find anything but universal praise for Grolle, then forty-three years old. In Music America, Grolle was extolled—even if the accolade bore evident, inherent contradictions—as an "enthusiast, idealist, practical man, lover of his kind—in a word, head worker."[21]

The New York Times praised Grolle for his "[m]odern methods of pedagogy, pursued with excellent results by Mr. Grolle and his staff of teachers at the Music Settlement School [sic].…” [22]

Grolle also enjoyed the confidence of Jennie Fels, both of whom were members of the Center City branch of the Society of Ethical Culture. Fels was its president.

A gimlet-eyed critique of Grolle noted that his "admirable, if rather lofty, aim was the redemption of society through art."[23]Grolle’s friend, the violinist Carl Flesch, called him a “Utopian.”[24]

***

BY 1923, MARY Louise believed the solution to Settlement's crowding and, particularly, the accommodation ofits high achievers, was an independent conservatory division. Several years later, she remembered:

[W]e were turning out some unusually promising pupils. So much so, that in time, I helped organize the Conservatory Branch of the Settlement, where more advanced instruction was given, and more emphasis laid on music for its own sake. [25]

Her plan really meant cleaving the school into two components. The scheme was ingenious. But, ultimately, flawed.

Its breaking point followed the bombshell news that Mary Louise, a private citizen, actually owned Settlement School—at least, its new branch building. Through oversight or intention, she had never turned over the building's deed to Settlement's board, an incorporated charity. Some sober heads feared that the school's new conservatory division—perceived asa non-welfare use, housed in a private building—would compromise the Settlement's standing as a charity. Crucial private funding could be threatened. As, too, would be the future of Settlement. [26]

OVERTURE

Chapter VIII

                   CASTLE

DIVIDING SETTLEMENT INTO a not-for-profit music school and a fee-based, profit-making conservatory was an almost Solomon-like solution. But that was before Philadelphia's Welfare Federation stepped in and before anyone realized that a bifurcated, Biblical-like remedy would not allow for long-term sustainability. Again, success was at the root.

“The conservatory began to make money,” The New York Times reported at the time, “because its education was so thorough that outsiders came and paid. Rich pupils applied. They were given the same opportunity with children of the poor to get the same instruction—in exchange for cash.” [1]

The Welfare Federation was not impressed. This, especially, since Settlement was now just only partially a charity. Moreover, the conservatory was housed in the Queen Street building owned by a private board member, Mary Louise Bok.[2] Settlement was thus violating the federation's tenets for not-for-profit charitable giving.

Though the federation was only formed in 1921, its funding was already the life blood of scores of Philadelphia's charities, including Settlement Music School. Of Settlement's proposed 1924 budget of $40,819 (about $647,000 today), more than fifty-percent, $22,664 (about $359,000 today) came from, federation coffers. [3]No charity, including those with deep pockets like Settlement, could afford to lose half its operating budget in one swoop.

Ironically, the federation-Settlement contretemps had all the outward appearance of a family feud. While Jennie Fels was a key Settlement board member, her husband, Samuel, was a founding federation vice president and a significant donor. Cyrus Curtis, local newspapers reported, was also a generous contributor with annual gifts from $15,000 (about $238,000 today) to $20,000 (about $317,000 today). Mary Louise herself was a founding federation trustee, and, in the group’s early days, would take to the hustings to promote its good works.

Changes, Mrs. Bok realized, had to be made: for the conservatory wing to survive, it would have to be resurrected as fully independent. At this critical moment, she comforted herself by what she called her “castle-in-Spain" solution. Whetheronly a hopeful daydream, [4]it nonetheless served up a glimmering Xanadu-like temple of perfection: a reverie of what the conservatory would be.

***

EARLY ON, SETTLEMENT laid out its vision in an unsigned “Statement of Principles”:

The aim and the activities of the School are based upon the proven fact that music is an active force in the development of the individual, the community, and the nation, and that art should be available to all, regardless of economic status....

As an influence in our national life, [music] promotes unity, mutual understanding through actual contacts, and the consequent development of good will. As an active factor in international relationships, music is one of the elements that help build world unity and the universal brotherhood of man....[5]

The statement's unequivocal idealism left little doubt it was penned by Settlement's director Johann Grolle, a well-known social justice activist. That was then.

Mrs. Bok now suggested that ground had shifted, broadeningSettlement’s “aims.” In a wide-ranging interview with New York music critic R. H. Wollstein, a frequent contributor to Music America, she explored how a conservatory education would differ from one at Settlement.

[T]he chief aim of the settlement work was to make better and more useful citizens; music was treated as one of the several means towards that end, but it wasn't especially stressed for its own sake. Nevertheless, it soon became evident that under the most elementary conditions, we were turning out some unusually promising pupils.... [T]he Conservatory branch [would offer] more advanced instruction...and more emphasis laid on music for its sake. [6]

***

ON JANUARY 1, 1921, understood to be the official date, Settlement separated from the conservatory, freeing the new latter body to claim DNA and destiny in the embryonic music school. The still-evolving Curtis Institute of Music began taking shape, But without an actual brick-and-mortar location to call home, instructional space remained at 416 Queen Street; itbecoming a problematic mixed-use venue. If Mary Louise was sensitized that conflict, she just ignored it.The Curtis’ first registration invitations were printed on stationery stating the South Philadelphia address. [7]

Olin Downes, The New York Times'influential music critic, claimed that the new school would adopt pedagogy from French conservatories, “where the elements of music are taught, perhaps, more systematically and effectively than in any other country in the world.” [8]

Another observer re-planted The Curtis’ roots from France to Russia, asserting that the school was guided by the “same principles” as those of the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Both contentions were not wholly convincing.

A late-comer to the debate was virtuoso pianist Gary Graffman, among The Curtis’ first students in 1924 and later a Curtis director. At the very least, Graffman allowed that the Philadelphia and St. Petersburg institutions differed in two significant ways. In contrast to the high-enrollment, impersonal Russian school, “[The Curtis] was a small school, and Mrs. Bok took a familial interest in all the students' well-being.” [9]

Nurturing was symbolized—outwardly, at least—by weekly community-wide teas. They were Mary Louise’s idea. Interest in students' extra-curricular welfare was American in concept and sensibility, and was a novelty in conservatory education unknown in France and Russia.

Mary Louise insisted on heeding students needs beyond a core curriculum of musicology. From the beginning, student study plans were integrated with lessons in the liberal arts, in history, psychology, English literature, science, and in an array of language study, in French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. Instructors were adjuncts drawn from the University of Pennsylvania and Haverford College.

In Mrs. Bok’s view, The Curtis “modern” and holistic, inhabited with the best of American educational values. Settlement's “Statement of Principles” [10] were seeds that would blossom in many different ways. Johann Grolle would cultivate one patch; she another. She was never the dreamy Utopian.

The Curtis' hybrid model allowed students to sidestep the worst of German-Russian-Polish pedagogy—though newcomers were not always sure. In early years, they often encountered an array of eastern European martinets whose teaching methods were Old World and old school.

Curtis instructor Isabelle Vengerova—“Madame” Vengerova in the formal parlance of the time—had little patience with general education, according to Gary Graffman. “...I think she'd have been just as happy, or happier, if I had been uninterested in academic work and spent all my waking hours at the piano.” [11] “Madame” was, not surprisingly, a St. Petersburg graduate.

Mary Louise, in “founder's statement,” had the last word:

It is my aim that earnest students shall acquire a thorough musical education, not learning only to sing or play, but also the history of music, the laws of its making, languages, ear-training and music appreciation.

They shall learn to think and to express their thoughts against a background of quiet culture, with the stimulus of personal contact with artist-teachers who represent the highest and the finest of their art.

The aim is for quality of the work rather than quick, showy results. [12]

Olin Downes observed that Mrs. Bok was not moved by any “new fad or a sudden impulse.”[13]

***

NOT EVERYONE ASSIGNED The Curtis’ origin to Mary Louise.

Violinist Carl Flesch and bassoonist Sol Schoenbach, both friends of Johann Grolle, believed that the Settlement's Head Worker had germinated the Curtis seed. In separate interviews, they argued that Grolle introduced the “idea”—they both regurgitated the same word—in Mary Louise's calculations. [14]Certainly, Grolle was a cheerleader.

Mary Louise’s thoughts about establishing The Curtis—notions she had called her ‘castle in Spain”—had actually intrigued her as early as 1910, when she was just then getting acquainted with Settlement. Over time, she shared her hopes with a kitchen cabinet—consisting offour advisors, her husband Edward and father Cyrus; close family friend Josef Hofmann, the Polish pianist; and Leopold Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s famed conductor, another confidant,

Brainstorming at the Bok house in Merion Station lasted through night. “We always had musical friends,” Mrs. Bok said. “Many a time our intimate group—my husband and I or Mr. Hofmann or Mr. Stokowski—would sit and indulge [and] talk of how splendid it would be someday, somehow to build here, in America, a conservatory that would assure talented young people really worthy instruction....” [15]

Nellie Lee Bok, the second wife of Mary Louise's son Curtis, elaborated on a decisive moment:

My mother-in-law and Edward Bok were very dear friends of Stokowski and Josef Hofmann. That was a quartet that really did things, those four.... And one time Josef Hofmann and Stokowski and Edward Bok and Granny were talking, and she said, 'I know that some of the other settlement houses are teaching music, Henry Street [in New York], and so on.... If Philadelphia is turning out what the Settlement Music School has, what about the talents of children in New Orleans? And St. Louis? Chicago? Are we sure that there's any Henry Street Settlement there? And they said, ‘Probably not as developed as Henry Street and Settlement Music School.’ ‘But,” she said, “What's to happen to these talented children?’ I do not remember whether it was Josef or Stokowski, but one or the other said, ‘Well, Mary, that's your job.’ Sounds a little bit like Edward Bok to say, ‘That was your job....’ [16]

Whomever was responsible for driving the final nail, the matter nevertheless was settled.

Chapter IX

PRINCE

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI TOOK Philadelphia by storm. In 1912, the thirty-year-old British-born wunderkind was named the third conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. [1] In musical circles in Philadelphia—indeed, worldwide—Stokowski had become a luminous celebrity, the likes of which the City of Brotherly Love had not experienced since Benjamin Franklin rallied admirers in Revolutionary times. “Stokie,” as he was affectionately nicknamed, was a showman. He was a fabulist. He exuded charismatic star power.

He was also a long-standing friend of Mary Louise and Edward Bok. They called him “Prince,” elevating his status among mere mortals. Edward was at first measured in embracing the young conductor. He feared Stokowski's reputation as a ladies' man might tarnish his standing as the editor of America's most popular bourgeois ladies’ journal.

Bok explained his hesitation in his autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, a curious (it was written in the third-person)narrative published in 1920, a year after he retired from TheLadies’ Home Journal.

“Bok had no desire to meet Stokowski. He mentally pictured the conductor: long hair; feet never touching the earth; temperament galore; he knew them! And he had no wish to introduce the type into his home life.”[2]

Bok was partially correct: Stokowski's blond hair was trimmed neatly over his ears.

Moreover, the conductor was married. Stokowski had wed the renown classical pianist Olga Samaroff, thirty-two, in 1911, after his stint as the musical director at the Cincinnati Symphony. A year later, Olga leveraged her fame to help Stokowski acquire the Philadelphia Orchestra's baton. Well, not exactly the baton. Stokowski preferred using his hands to bend his musicians to his will. In due course, this orchestration elicited a unique modulation and sonorousness that fans affectionately dubbed the “Philadelphia Sound.”

Leopold and Olga formed a relationship where imagination skirted reality. It was an era when an aura of eastern European allure bestowed cachet to a musician's pedigree. Though born on April 18, 1882 in England, raised in London, and Oxford educated, Stokowski exuded a vaguely eastern European air and cultivated a vaguely European accent—something from over there. He sometimes spelled his middle name Anthony as “Antoni,” rounding out a putative Polish identity. He declared Kraków as his birthplace, rather than Marylebone, London. Now and then, he would shave five years off his age. Such was his vanity.

Olga shared a creditably problem. No one seemed to mind. Despite her European-sounding name, she was thoroughly American, born Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas.

Despite their dissembling, Olga and Stokie were a golden couple. A daughter, Sonia, born in 1921 while Olga was on a European tour, expanded their ménage. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted:

“Few if any other musical artists have been taken up by fashionable society with the enthusiasm that has been shown for the Stokowskis. In Philadelphia they have been particularly lionized and given entree to the most exclusive homes.” [3]

Otherwise the Stokowskis lived plainly—at least at first. Their three-floor house at 2117 Locust Street was in the predictable nineteen century vernacular, red brick. It was nothing to look at. Soon after, Stokie and Olga moved to digs at 1716 Rittenhouse Square Street, more in keeping with glamorous personae. The Art Alliance was down the street; The Curtis, around the corner. The in-crowd attended frequentdomestic salons. The less exalted, in and around the neighborhood, just gawped.

***

IN 1923, TO the surprise of almost everyone, the couple divorced. The Inquirer helpfully unraveled the mystery, headlining an exhaustive article on their misfortune:

How Too Much Music Spoiled

the Musicians' Love Duet

Olga Samaroff's Piano Playing at All Hours Got on Leopold Stokowski's Nerves as Badly as His Eternal Baton Waving Got on Hers....[4]

The maestro’s outré ausländer manner was given to acheeky flippancy that the city's plutocracy, among themselves, would never dare,nor get away with. He molded a demeanor as enfant terrible.

In keeping, he even flirtedwith Mary Louise. In a two-page letter, addressed “Dear Mary,” dated February 26, 1924, [5]delivered while she was vacationing in Florida, Stokowski (then between wives) had enclosed a check for an undisclosed—surely, given the Bok wealth, a negligible—amount.

With tongue in cheek, he said the cash might be helpful “in case you should run short of money down South, and be starving or hatless, or any terrible thing like that. So please buy yourself something terribly nice with it.”

Stokowski's playful insinuation of Mary Louise’s penury, even in jest, was brazen. He was addressing, of course, a married woman, who was in her time the equivalent of a “one-per center.”

He signed, as was his custom in letters to her, “Always affectionately yours, Prince.”

Mary Louise fell for her flamboyant “Polish Prince.” She was plain. He was handsome—even beautiful. In his company, his radiant luminosity just reflected on her. If Edward thought Stokowski's behavior was fresh, he expressed no public thoughts on the matter.

Edward was equally captivated by the conductor. Josef Hofmann had once referred to Stokowski as “a prince of conductors,” unknowingly tagging him with what was then becoming a common sobriquet. Edward picked up the line and used it liberally—introducing Mary Louise to the thinly veiled endearment. [6]

Given his amour propre, Stokowski was quick to adopt the august name, even allowing it to take precedence over the more publicly recognized “Stokie.” “Prince” became a standard flourish when signing photograph stills and other publicity materials. Sylvan Levin, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s assistant conductor during part of Stokowski’s tenure, remembered that “Prince” was a staple “during the twenties and thirties.”[7]

***

JUST SHORT OF bullying, Stokowski liked getting his way: by fiat. He once decreed that the orchestra would no longer offer encores. At first, Bok had misgivings. But he was finally won over. “[T]he no-encore rule has prevailed at the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts from that day to this [1920], with the public entirely resigned to the idea and satisfied with the reason therefor [sic],” Bok wrote.[8]

Edward told Stokowski, “There’s nothing you want that I will not get for you.” [9]

***

IN 1920, STOKOWSKI decided that the venerable Academy of Music, the Philadelphia Orchestra's ancestral home for two decades, had to go, superannuated by location, size, and acoustics. He backed a proposal for a new “Temple of Music”—his term—to be sited on“Fairmount Parkway,” a Center City boulevard then under construction. (It was later named the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.)[10]

Schemes to abandon the academy, opened to glittering accolades in 1857 as the American Academy of Music, were not new. From as early as 1908, just eight years after the orchestra itself was founded, calls for a new venue were periodically sounded. Poor acoustical resonance was the usual whipping boy. For the most part, lacking sustainable financial plans,proposal after proposal went up in smoke.

Stokowski's latest gambit had been dormant for some years. As early as 1912, just as a new arrival in Philadelphia, he was threatening a relocation. While, publicly, he always argued for the need of something new, Stokowski was—privately—riled by orchestra's limited access for rehearsalsat the academy. He demanded more scheduled time. Under duress, the building's private owners capitulated, giving the orchestra all the rehearsal time it needed.[11]

Just a few years earlier, Edward begun expressing his own doubts about the orchestra—primarily its financial footing. Stokowski's predecessors, founding music director, Fritz Scheel; and, subsequently, Karl Pohlig, both had failed to energize a concert-going audience. Stokowski's protean introduction of new, updated repertoires; new orchestrations; a new seating plan for violinists, cellists, and violists; and, critically, what was fast becoming known as the conductor's distinct musical brand, the “Philadelphia Sound,” was revitalizing the Philadelphians on stage. The maestro also introduced an intangible—glitz.

Yet, in Edward’s view, more had to be done. By him.The orchestra's founding board president, Alexander Van Rensselaer, Mary Louise's co-board member at Settlement, was good window dressing but not, Bok reckoned, the individual to meet the need. Van Rensselaer, in an unguarded moment, had once uttered he knew little about concert music. “[H]e'd never heard a note of straight orchestral music in his life....” [12]

The Proper Philadelphian may have not been much of a symphony music lover. But he knew a good thing when he heard it. Bok told Van Rensselaer that he would “guarantee the deficit of the orchestra for five years, provided over that period an endowment fund should be raised, contributed by a large number of subscribers, and sufficient in amount to meet, from its interest, the annual deficit.” [13] In other words, for five years, the orchestra could tap into Bok’s fortune.

There was a catch. Bok demanded secrecy—that the arrangement would be described as coming from an “anonymous donor,” and that it must remain forever confidential.

The money came pouring in. Just three years later, in late 1919, the endowment was raised, thanks to the beneficence of 14,000 subscribers. The orchestra, Bok enthused, had become “a public institution in which 14,000 residents of Philadelphia feel a propriety interest. It has become in fact, as well as in name, 'our orchestra.'” [14]

Bok's “secret” was divulged for the first time in 1920 by the author himself, in The Americanization of Edward Bok. [15]

Of course, Bok wanted to “save” the orchestra as a municipal treasure. One might even think, if one were like Van Rensselaer, whose naïveté famously belied his years, that Bok’s scheme was altogether altruistic, or even an affectionate nod to Mary Louise—a loving bouquet tossed to her to recognize her devotion to the Orchestra and musical Philadelphia. One would be wrong. Bok had been financially finagling for years with the Orchestra, the Academy’s largest stock holder. In the end, he was just playing power broker, one of his favorite sand-lot past-times.

***

STOKOWSKI’S ENTHUSIASM FOR Mary Louise's “castle in Spain,” the still-gestating Curtis Institute of Music, was not fully altruistic. Stokowski realized that the conservatory could also redound to his benefit—in prestige and in a hefty paycheck.

He imagined himself as an instructor and consultant, funneling students to well-paying jobs as orchestra musicians. Novice talent that could be cycled through the orchestra as fully-molded musicians. The Curtis, particularly its own in-house orchestra, finally, could emerge as the Big Leaguer’s “farm team.”

Stokowski laid out this plan—and an offer of assistance—in a February 26, 1924 letter to Mary Louise, just several, crucial months away from the conservatory's opening in October.

I have been thinking a great deal of this School of Music lately, and I see how wonderfully it would fit in with the growth of the Orchestra by educating talented young men in all the instruments of a modern symphony orchestra, as that they could later enter the Philadelphia Orchestra. Such a Conservatory ought to have its own students' orchestra, and if you like I would be very happy to help you with that. [16]

To insinuate himself further, Stokowski tried to steer Mary Louise’s selection of the institute's first director to his own favorite.

In the same February letter, he recommended a new “friend,” Dr. Augustus Stephen Vogt, founder of the “famous”[17] Mendelssohn Choir and a piano and organ instructor at the Conservatory of the College of Music, in Toronto. Stokowski pulled out the stops:

“I do not believe there is another man in the world who is better equipped, has more experience, or is by his character better fitted for such work. Vogt has splendid judgment, and is very poised and well-balanced and quiet, but forceful,” he said.[18]

Mary Louise picked Johann Grolle—later, to her chagrin.

Chapter X

MUNIFICENCE

DURING THE SUMMER of 1921, Edward squeezed in a fact-finding mission to the Netherlands. He wanted to observe post-war conditions for himself. Mary Louise, then forty-five, and their son Cary, a tall, gangling sixteen-year-old on his first trip abroad, went along. The Boks were staying in a seaside resort near The Hague. Mary and Cary soaked up the sights. Edward brooded.

Bok was displeased with the new realities of political and civic affairs in his homeland. He was temperamentally an internationalist, and he was peeved that the Netherlands, a constitutional monarchy, had remained neutral during the Great War. He also feared creeping Socialism, despite its international allure. He resolved to do better—to do his part to deter a post-war funk from descending upon America. Even if that meant taking matters into his own hands.

Bok was in constant locomotion. He had retired from The Journal two years before, in 1919, and was a vigorous fifty-six-year-old. Still, the effects of living outside The Journal'secosystem soon surfaced. In March 1923, mostly to everyone's dismay, including Mary Louise’s, Bok announced to the world a rapturous self-unveiling—a psychological epiphany and make-over shaping what he called his new state of being. [1]

It was mystical, personally revelatory, very public—and very odd. In short, he toldThe New York Times, he realized he was moving into the other half of an emerging split personality. His retirement had bifurcated his life. From then on, he explained, he would no longer be publicly known as “Edward Bok” but rather as “Edward W. Bok.” It was not quite a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde transformation, but if two duelingpersonalities had suddenly shown up in a less celebrated individual, there might have been cause for alarm. Friends and family just fobbed off the dual Edwards as simply “Edward being Edward”—“W,” or not.

The newly-self-styled Edward W. Bok immersed himself in writing tracts about self-realization and, when time allowed, finding new platforms to advance good works. He immersed himself in recognition programs to advance educational and public service efforts. Drawing on his editorial experience, Bok's writing career in retirement came easy. His publishing encompassed more than a half-dozen books, mostly noted for being didactic, cautionary tales wherein Edward always seems to come out on top.

Bok's most heralded work was The Americanization of Edward Bok,[2]an autobiography narrated in the third-person. It was a full-dress parade of Bok's true, virtuous “self,” a figure who emerged as self-satisfied, self-confident, and self-righteous. A cognitive dissonance see-sawed between progressive and conservative views. The book, wondrously for a work of congratulatory self promotion, won a 1921 Pulitzer Award.

***

MARY LOUISE’S NOTIONAL good works, meanwhile, summoned the idylls of music. She sponsored recitals through 1923 to benefit her alma mater, the Ogontz School for Young Ladies. The musicales featured pianist Olga Samaroff, Leopold Stokowski's spouse; Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; and French pianist Alfred Cortot. In all, famed virtuosos more at home at Carnegie Hall than on stage at a little-known preparatory school. Such was Mary Louise’s pull. Rounding out her line-up was harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who two years later joined the faculty of the fledgling Curtis Institute of Music.

Earlier, during the war, Mary Louise. promoted concerts and fundraising for her local Red Cross chapter. A photograph, made in 1918, showed Mary, Cary, and Curtis in wartime regalia. Mary was head-to-toe in a Red Cross regalia, a white dress, a nurse's hairpiece, and a white smock, embellished with a chest-high depiction of the organization’s iconic red cross logo. Cary was in a white naval uniform, including rapier, the kind typically used in a ceremonial arch at naval weddings. Pint-sized Curtis was wearing Boy Scout brown, with puttees and a field hat to match. [3]

When nearby Bryn Mawr Hospital needed a new maternity wing, she pitched in to raise $300,000 (about $4.4-million today, adjusted for inflation). In the same year, 1921, when Edward was fretting about political and societal dysfunction in Europe, Mary was more hands-on—and going public. She became a leader in the Philadelphia effort to support Herbert Hoover, head of the U.S. European Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, to end European famine. [4]

***

EDWARD W. BOK’S dedication to his own eleemosynary pursuits was more complicated. Emerging in the early 1920s in his newly-fashioned beau idéal as Cultural Warrior, Bok had created a spate of civic-minded awards and prizes. He seemed to flit from one endeavor to another, hardly coming to rest on one before sallying forth to the next. He was a white-knight white-hot cauldron of big-hearted, though often wrong-headed, convictions. All were supposed to be edifying. Though none was selflessly altruistic. Some were transactional. Bok liked payback.

Some were anodyne: The Harvard Advertising Awards to be “bestowed by the Harvard University School of Business Administration for raising the standard of advertisements in American and Canadian periodicals....” The Philadelphia Commission, devoted to the city's “beautification.” His endowment of Woodrow Wilson Professorship of Literature at Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Cary's alma mater, Williams College. [5]

The annual Citizen Awards in Philadelphia gave $1,000 ($16,000 today) to a recipient picked from police officers, firefighters, and Fairmount Park Commission guards for “outstanding service.” The Philadelphia Forum sought public enlightenment, sponsoring lectures and “white papers” on civic and cultural topics.[6]He contributed generously to Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, and to the University of Illinois for it to establish the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award.[7]

Both Bok and Mary Louise were supporters of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art. At first, modestly. A 1924 PMA Annual Report of Members of the Corporation, issued in the year The Curtis Institute of Music opened, listed Edward as a “patron.” Higher up on the pecking order was Mary Louise, as a “benefactor.” [8]

Four years later, in 1928, the year the museum relaunched itself in a new building in Center City, Bok upped the ante, a gift aimed to underscore his Hollandophilism. No financial record is extant, but it would be safe to say the gift was in the hundreds of thousands in any contemporary cash accounting.

Bok’s donation coincided with a curatorial direction by the museum's legendary director Fiske Kimball. The PMA head was a pioneer in the development of so-called period rooms, re-imagined spaces of historical domesticity from around the world. He needed a “Dutch Room,” and thanks to Bok—a promoter of things Netherlandish—got one. But not without difficulty.

Bok never got to see to see his ode to Holland. Acquiring the interior of the Het Scheepje Room (its formal title), once in 17th-century house called “The Little Ship,” took all of Kimball's abundant skills. Still, he could not re-craft the room until several years later—after Bok's death in 1930. In October 1936, [9] Kimball finally celebrated the Dutch Room's début with a party in situ with Mrs. Bok as the guest of honor. [10]

The PMA got a gift from Mrs. Bok herself just six months after Edward's death. She had acquired from Samuel Yellin, a celebrated Philadelphia ironwork craftsman and a friend, one hundred twenty boxwood carvings from the 14th to the 18th centuries. She, in turn, passed them to Fiske Kimball for safekeeping at the museum. The collection was mostly French and Flemish; some fine-grained religious statues and domestic pieces from Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia were also included.[11]

***

BOK’S FANCIFUL ACCOLADE, the Philadelphia Award, was just short of portentous. The prize might could have been something that Nobel Prize-winner Sinclair Lewis might have recognized as the kind of civic cant that abounded in his satirical novel Babbitt. Created a year before Lewis' 1922 book, the annual Philadelphia Award honored “a citizen of the Philadelphia region who, during the preceding year, acted and served on behalf of the best interests of the community.” As was typical of Bok, he lavished the prize with seed money ($10,000, or about $161,000 today), celebrity, and bling—an 18-karat gold medallion.

The first medals weighed about three ounces and measured three inches in diameter, about a quarter-inch wider than an Olympic gold medal. They were not meant to be worn. Their designer was the renowned Philadelphia artist Violet Oakley, who in turn enlisted model Robert G. Harper, said to be of Native American ancestry, as the figure depicted on the medal. TheEveningPublic Ledger noted that Harper was “known in art circles of the country as 'the most typical American.'” [12]

Chamber of Commerce Philadelphia lauded the prize, which came to be known colloquially as the “Bok Award.” Laurels came from the likes of Governor Gifford Pinchot and one of the city's most eminent power brokers, Senator George Wharton Pepper. Pepper, a Bok friend, wasalso chairman of the award's board of trustees. [13]

The Philadelphia Award's first honorand, in 1921, was Edward's and Mary Louise’s confidant, Leopold Stokowski, in his third year as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In future years, some prize winners would turn over their monetary award to good causes. Stokowski was not responsible for starting that tradition.

The selection of another award winner, in 1925, the aforementioned Samuel Yellin, the master iron worker and metal designer, also smacked of conflict of interest. Both Boks had employed Yellin at various times for work at their Merion house, at The Curtis, and at other properties. (Yellin’s always recognizable works dotted mansions surrounding Rittenhouse Square.) Fiske Kimball got the award in 1950. He did not forget Bok's contribution of the Dutch Room. In a letter to Mary Louise, he praised her late husband as an important museum donor.[14]

***

FOR A TIME, Bok orchestrated his Empire of Munificence from an office in the Curtis Building and, later, in the Academy of Music, and still later from Suite 1312 in the Packard Building, at 15th and Chestnut streets. His seventh-floor office in the Curtis Building, at 6th and Walnut streets, reeked of power, elegance, and wealth. Its Italian walnut paneled walls were offset by fluted columns, a working fireplace, woven woolen rugs, fanlight doors, and, as appropriate for a busy man, two candlestick telephones. Bok's antique desk was situated so that his back was to the window overlooking Independence Square. Anyone facing the civic booster-in-chief would have a sight-line to Independence Hall and a bronze statue of the Revolutionary War hero Commodore John Barry, there since 1907.

Bok also showcased two paintings, both oil reproductions by Rembrandt (1606-1669), the Dutch Golden-Age master. One was the Portrait of Elizabeth Bas. The other, the massive Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, claimed most of a wall to the right of his desk.

Bok's haven was, according to a caption accompanying a period photograph, “one of the most successfully beautiful offices in America.”[15]Its conspicuous vainglory was also conclusive proof of the “Americanization” of Edward W. Bok.

With more than a dozen projects underway—all seemingly simultaneously—juggling them was performance art that any polymath would have found daunting. To manage the diverse activities, ranging from civic awards, educational support, and business and cultural efforts, Bok created a conduit called the American Foundation. The foundation was incorporated in 1924, the same year as was Mary Louise's Curtis Institute. Whether dreaming up the foundation was justcoincidenceor Bok’sversion of a tit-for-tat is up for grabs.

Like it or not, however, Mary Louise and Curtis Bok, a twenty-eight-year-old budding lawyer; were drawn into the foundation’s hierarchy. Edward insisted that they and other directors of the foundation's first board pledge—vowing just short of a blood oath—to serve “until death, or until infirmities rendered them unable to serve....” They did, on April 29, 1925. [16]

The American Foundation, Inc., in turn, became the crucible of one of the benefactor's most ambitious and deeply personal enterprises, the cash-rich American Peace Award. Its intent was captured in a Washington Post headline: “Bok Offers $100,000 [about $1.6-million today] for Best Peace Plan: Seeks Workable Method for International Cooperation Against War.”[17]

The Peace Award was, even for Bok, in a celestial category of its own. The solipsistic Bok was all in, harnessing his wealth, contacts, and power.

On its face, the Peace Award would seem to compete with the Nobel Peace Prize, founded in 1901 to recognize “outstanding contributions to peace.” The differences between twenty-three-year Nobel and newly-minted American Peace Award were nuanced. From his on-site experience encountering war horrors in France, the then-editor had become a fierce advocate for amity among nations and the Woodrow Wilson-backed League of Nations, then permanently stalled by insider politics. Still, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then between jobs as under-secretary of the Navy and New York governor, liked the idea. His wife, Eleanor, was a judge.

The Peace Award died a slow death, finally expiring in 1935, five years after its prime mover's own death. Of his other major initiatives, only two still exist in their original forms. One is the Philadelphia Award. The other, Bok Tower Gardens in Florida, a public horticultural preserve, bird sanctuary, and carillon founded in 1925. It was a monument to bucolic beauty—and, though never stated as such, also to its creator. Bok donated the gardens to the nation soon thereafter.

***

BOK ALSO MANAGED different interest—that in fine art. His attraction to collecting was limited and circumscribed. Being an avid Hollandophile, he preferred great works by Netherlandish masters, particularly those of the 17^th century. Even then, despite his wealth, his acquisitiveness never matched the lusty appetites of other contemporary Philadelphia mandarins, collectors extraordinaire like Peter A .B. Widener, William L. Elkins, John H. McFadden, and John G. Johnson.

Bok had no strong feeling for American art. Notwithstanding, he gave an artistic nod to his adopted country. In 1921, he established an academic scholarship at the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a museum limited to housing the works of American artists.

Bok found joy in buying Old Masters—though his buying acumen was dubious at best. During his 1921 visit to the Netherlands with Mary and Cary, he bought Rembrandt's Portrait of a Young Girlfrom an expert on the Golden-Age painter, Dr. Abraham Bredius. What version Bok was supposed to have purchased has not been determined. Rembrandt's catalog raisonée lists several like paintings in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and, as well, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At any rate, Bok's rendering was eventually determined to be a fake. [18]

Unlike serious collectors, Bok also knowingly bought reproductions, as was the case with Rembrandt's 1640 Portrait of Elizabeth Bas and the artist's 1662 masterpiece Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, the oils that graced Bok's Curtis Building office. Syndics, a portrait of six commercial burghers, was already well known to millions—that is, at least American smokers. The painting had been adopted in 1912 as the pictorial branding of mass-produced Dutch Masters cigars.[19]

Elizabeth Bas also faced scrutiny. In 1911, the same Abraham Bredius who sold Bok his mis-attributed Rembrandt, he re-credited Bas to Ferdinand Bol, a lesser-known Dutch period painter. The original Syndicsand Elizabeth Basare now safe at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The authenticity of Rembrandt's Head of a Young Girl, hung in the dining room of Boks' house in Merion Station, also raised doubts. The oil was listed in an appraisal of Mary Louise's and Edward's possessions after Edward's death in 1930. The appraisers, the respected Philadelphia auction house Samuel T. Freeman & Company, valued the picture at $30,000 (roughly $936,000 today). A search of two of the artist's catalogs raisonées sheds no light on its whereabouts.

Bok acquired two works by Frans Hals [1581/5-1666], Portrait of a Man, cited as another purchase made in the Netherlands [20],and Manin Cap. Freeman valued the latter painting at $4,500 (about $140,000 today). A provenance listing of Portrait of a Man, created by the Metropolitan where the painting is now housed, has turned up no mention of Bok.

Bok did better in 1923, two years after hisinitial 1921 art foray in the Netherlands, when he procured a Hals, Portrait of aPreacher. The picture was previously owned by a 19th-century Estonian nobleman, Baron Karl Eduard von Liphart, and almost surely fell in Bok’s possession by a circuitous route via Holland. Whether Dr. Bredius had anything to do with brokering the sale remains unknown. But Bok did receive a citation in Preacher’sofficial provenance, compiled by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where the painting now resides. (Based on current sales at auction, Preacher could fetch up to $10-million, or more.)[21]

Where the Syndics reproduction wound up after Bok’s death was not immediately certain. Mary Louise discovered that the painting was not listed among Freeman's appraisals.

The mini-mystery was solved when Mary Louise found that Loring A. Schuler, Edward's successor as editor of The Ladies' Home Journal,had moved it into his office.Needingundisputed title as its owner, Mary Louise asked to Schuler for “some acknowledgment” that the painting was part of Edward's estate.

“It meant as much so much to him [Edward] that I want the issue quite clear now, and in the future, in case either of my sons should ever wish its physical possession,” she wrote.[22]

Schuler responded, “It is, of course, very definitely understood that [Syndics]...is the property of the estate of Edward Bok, and is therefore at all times subject to your commands.”[23]

Chapter XI

GEORGE ANTHEIL

MARY LOUISE’S PATRONAGE of George Antheil, a young orchestral composer of cacophonous early-twentieth-century music, was whimsical. And out of the blue. Antheil just appeared on the doorstep of the Boks’ Merion house unexpectedlyon November 3, 1921. On the threshold was a handsome twenty-one-old. His muscular build and pugnacious good looks, offset by an exotic gypsy quality, would have allowed him to pass, because of his squat short stature, as a professional bantamweight boxer, or, maybe just as likely, as a corner-boy street tough.

The surprise visitor raised his hand as if to shake Mary Louise's. He was holding a sealed letter. The house-holder accepted theenvelope and invited the intriguing interloper into the front hall. That casual first meeting was Mary Louise's introduction to the budding golden boy of avant-garde music—and soon to be a pesky thorn in her side. She had not seen it coming.

She learned that the quick-witted Antheil, born in 1900, spoke German flawlessly (his parents were immigrant Germans, though he claimed to be of Polish extraction); that he was born in Trenton, New Jersey; that he was a high-school drop-out; and that had a flair for grandiosity, cupidity, and mendacity. She knew less about his big dreams. And big schemes.

While Antheil cooled his heels in the living room, Mary Louise read the letter. Interested, she gave him $10 ($166 today) and sent him on his way.

But not for long. The $10 had become only a down-payment.

The letter Antheil carried came from Constantin Elder Ivanovich von Sternberg, a Russian-born composer, pianist, and musicologist. He was also the overlord of the Philadelphia-based Sternberg School of Music, and a mentor to Antheil.

Sternberg portrayed Antheil as a near prodigy, as “one of the richest and strongest talents for composition that I have ever met here or in Europe.” Inversely, he indulged in Dickensian bathos, painting Antheil as a variant of Tiny Tim, minus the crutch. “[T]he boy has now to face the struggle for existence. For this struggle, however, he is by his unworldly disposition and lack of experience utterly unfit [… and] entirely an ' étranger au grand monde,” very likable, but utterly inexperienced in the ways of the world....”

Sternberg laid it on thick: “Believe me, my dear Mrs. Bok, that I did not send the boy to you…with any thought of asking you for monetary aid and I know that such is not his purpose.” [1]

This prevarication was just part of it. The penurious Antheil, in fact, had gone to Sternberg to see whether he could wheedle financial help from whatever quarter available. He had already exhausted charity to pay for composition lessons. “I told him [Sternberg] I was broke and that I was getting rather tired of it,” he recounted later.[2]

Sternberg depicted Mrs. Bok as Philadelphia's Lady Bountiful, and encouraged Antheil's mission—letter in hand. In this case, Sternberg was almost right. Mary Louise did bite—a mouthful. Evincing her own naïveté—a charming, but an otherwise a dangerous trait—she saw George as struggling composer and, as she remembered later, as being “very definitely” “ill” and “starving.”[3]

His weathered, battered visage was another consideration. Some said heoften looked like he had taken the worst of it afternine rounds. Or, maybe not so much. George told his son Peter that he had broken his nose in a parachuting mishap from a fighter plane during World War I. “My father was a wishful thinker,” Peter wrote.[4]

Mary Louise gave Antheil a spot at Settlement and a monthly stipend of $150 (about $2,500 today]. The money was more than enough for essentials, food, clothing, rent—andthe polishing of an image as a local boulevardier, sporting English-made shoes, a mahogany walking stick, and a matching, “awe-inspiring English accent.” [5]He moved from a single room to a roomy apartment.

Mary Louise was connedby George's well-crafted sob story. Its creditably, after all, had been vouched for by none other than Sternberg, a respected, world-known music figure and well known to the Boks as a member of their inner circle. Like Josef Hofmann, the musicologist was also a regular contributor to The Ladies' Home Journal. Hofmann, in turn, had admired and performed some of Sternberg's compositions during European tours.

***

ANTHEIL WAS TIRELESS. Besides his work as a composer, he developed in later years into a talented polymath, an inventor, a novelist, a magazine writer, a composer of Hollywood musical scores, and an arm-chair crime fighter, credentialed by the Paris Prefecture of Police and as an honorary life member of the Parisian Sureté. [6]

Mrs. Bok's lapse of nous hounded her, costing her nearly $40,000 (about $700,00 today), and untold humiliation. She had been harmlessly infatuated with the glamorous conductor Leopold Stokowski. But she fell hard for Antheil.

Stokowski, too, had been once the recipient of patronage largess. While still in New York, prior to his move to the Philadelphia Orchestra, he and his wife Olga Samaroff were beneficiaries of Maria Dehon, the sole surviving heiress of the Brooks Brothers clothing company. Like Mary Louise who called Stokie her “prince,” Dehon also had a pet name—for herself. In correspondence with Stokowski, she referred to herself, in German, as ‘muttchen,” or “mommy.” She called Samaroff “dearie.” [7]

As his career took off, Stokowski weaned himself from Dehon’s financial backing, which included, as a price to pay, her meddling in his and Samaroff’s private lives.

As luck would have it, Antheil never bothered to interfere in the Boks’ ménage.

By March 1922, George had completed a new piece, and dedicated it, obsequiously, “For the happiness of Mary Louise Bok.” He called the work Symphonie No. 1, gratuitously giving the composition a bogus French pedigree. Like Antheil’s claim of Polish ethnicity, the conceit—again, shades of Stokowski—was another attempt to realign his identity within a European musical heritage. However contrived.

The opportunity to burnish legitimate European bona fides came a month later, when in April he asked Mary Louise for an outright payout of $900 (about $16,000 today) and an additional unspecified amount “to finance...my concert career” in Europe. Antheil had arranged a piano recital tour, and he hoped that his toadying (other dedications were to come) might coax even more monetary support. It did. George had described two tours, one plain costing $3,900 (roughly $69,000 today) or a “deluxe” version at $6,400 (about $113,000 today). As were her wont, she selected “deluxe.”[8]

Less than a year later, George had managed to spend it all, including an additional $500 (about $8,600 today) that Mrs. Bok had wired him. But her patience was wearing thin. In March 1923, she wrote, “As a human being, & a man, you must row your own weight—and take care of yourself.” She went on:

I gave you your opportunity to be heard—to study—to see other countries— & meet people—to the extent of $6,000—a big sum. I expected it would bring you to a point where you be able to make connections for yourself—& then float yourself, financially.[9]

***

DESPITE HER ADMONITION, Mrs. Bok upped her ante, increasing George's monthly stipend to $75 ($1,300 today), and, in October 1928, to $100 ($1,700), a sum she maintained to July 1932 through the first years of the Depression.

George's expenses were ever increasing, pointedly after he married a Hungarian student named Elizabeth “Boski” Markus in 1925 in Budapest. After meeting George, Boski's parents immediately sensed his perfidy. His lack of trustworthiness, meantime, was only dawning on his faraway patron. The Markuses opposed the marriage. Mary Louise, on the other hand, again acquiesced. After the wedding, she sent George $1,000 ($17,000 today), and intermittently thereafter other sums, in the thousands.

Ironically, Mary Louise all along entertained doubts about the quality of George’s music. And how he vulgarly courted controversy. George had always hoped that his works would spark public outcry, and he tried to engineer publicity stunts modeled after the disturbances in Paris that had greeted the 1913 début of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

Mary Louise reserved a special place in, if not exactly in hell, at least purgatory, for Antheil's magnum opus, Ballet Mécanique, scored, for its opening in Paris, in an atonal mélange of eight grand pianos, xylophones, electronic bells, bass drums, and, according to George, “what not.” [10] “What not” included a siren and three airplane propellers.

George's rôle playing as one of his generation's enfants terribles had little appeal to Mary Louise's classical ear and conservative sensibility. Her final pronouncement came following BalletMécanique's American première in 1927 at Carnegie Hall. George had rented the venue.

In the audience at Mary Louise's request was Josef Hofmann, whose report to Mary Louise suggested that his demeanor at the concert alternated between holding his nose and covering his ears. He cautioned Mary Louise about her patronage of Antheil. “I believe that, having at one's [your] command a power which potentially holds both good and evil, one can never be too careful when letting it into play.”[11]

Shortly after, Mary Louise advised George, based on Hofmann's briefing:

I am frank to tell you that I dislike extremely the key in which the concert was presented. It was blatant, sensational and screaming, and I can see no reason why it should have been done in such a manner. I abhor such methods. [12]

Hofmann was not alone in counseling Mary Louise against Antheil. The composer Samuel Barber, was probably reading the tea leaves—with a finger in the wind— when he wrote to Mrs. Bok in 1936 about his disapproval of George’s score for the recently released film The Plainsman. Barber, only two years from graduating from The Curtis, was then a new recruit to Mary’s patronage and, interestingly enough, was now in the same boat that had previously floated Antheil. Until George’s sprung a leak.

Barber damned the score with sarcasm: “A few cowboy tunes and the usual galloping horses, and no-one payed [sic] the slightest attention to the musical score.” [13]

Barber’s condemnation was just icing on the cake. Several years earlier, in an April 1931 letter, she reaffirmed her distaste for George’s musical formula, as first expressed before in 1927. While wishing George well, Mary Louise added, “As you know I am not in sympathy with much of the so-called modern trend.” [14]

***

MARY LOUISE WAS equally disturbed how Antheil played loose and fast with facts. She had no quarrel when he frequently called her a “good friend,” albeit a dubious description, but she drew the line at his false assertions of his prior association with The Curtis Institute of Music, then in its infancy. As its founder, she brooked no compromise to the institute’s integrity, nor reputation.

George was just sloppy. He could never quite understand that he had been simply a student under Mary Louise's good graces at Settlement, notThe Curtis. He always managed to conflate the two, contending that his new savior “immediately enrolled me in the Curtis Settlement School, the forerunner of the now tremendous Curtis Institute....”

He continued, “[I]t is only today that I begin to realize, fully, how much she [Mrs. Bok] and the budding Curtis Institute have helped me.”[15]

In a letter to George, Mary Louise squelched such notions:

I have read your book [Bad Boy of Music] and do not at all object to whatever you wrote therein about me. I do object, however, to the impression that you were once a Curtis Institute student. This you never were. There was never a Curtis Settlement School... [T}here was never any connection between The Settlement Music School and The Curtis Institute of Music.[16]

George was repentant. Writing from Los Angeles, where he was then living, he admitted, “Undoubtedly, it was my fault.” “I remember you always as the one who has helped me the most in life, and am very unhappy that you have misunderstood me.”[17]

***

STERNBERG CAME BACK for seconds. This time he championed Carl Lachmund, an American-born former student of the late Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. At sixty-nine, Lachmund had written a four-hundred-page memoir of Liszt, and wanted it published. In 1924, he turned to his friend in Philadelphia, who had also been a Liszt student, to seek help in publishing the typescript.

Never one to not exploit a friendship, Sternberg again suggested Mary Louise as a soft touch. Again, his gambit was puffery. He wrote to her, “Even if I knew every woman of high spirituality in Philadelphia, I should have turned to you first because of the breath of conception of music which you reveal by every step you take in its cause.”

Sternberg's blandishments failed. She was not as gullible as she had been three years before.

To be sure. Mary Louise was not the only one to be ensnared in George’s wide net of entrapment. In Paris, he tried to entangle Igor Stravinsky. If only she had turned to posting on her door at Swastika what the Russian composer had tacked to his to deflect George’s unsolicited entreaties. “Mr. Igor Stravinsky is not at home today, this week, this month, this year, or any other year.” [18]

In the event, belief in Mary Louise's judgment had been tainted by her tone-deaf duping by Antheil’s chicanery. Joseph Hofmann undoubtedly had also shared his misgivings about Antheil with Edward Bokand Cyrus Curtis. That revelation would not redound well for her.

Chapter XII

RITTENHOUSE SQUARE

WHILE SCOUTING FOR asuitable home for The Curtis, Mary Louise looked well beyond the rough, grim confines of the “foreign quarter” that had nurtured Settlement. What better way to distant her new, world-class music conservatory from humble Settlement than by defining its independence in the city's most prestigious and picturesque precinct, venerable Rittenhouse Square. Disassociation came to preoccupy her, and she was always quick—as she was seen years later in batting down George Antheil's confusion over the matter—to clarify the nuances of separation.

Rittenhouse Square characterized the cosmopolitan air and flair of the new Curtis Institute of Music, baskingin reflected status. Named after David Rittenhouse, a 19th century astronomer, the seven-acre garden-park had become one of urban America's most hauntingly beautiful bucolic spaces—imbued over time with a poetic sense of “duende.”

At the same, looking beyond its refinement, its wealth, and power, the residential centerpiece also symbolized élitism and crude pomposity—the guts of a combative cognitive dissonance between the best and worst of American culture and Capitalism.

From Rittenhouse Street South, to Rittenhouse West, to Walnut Street on the north, to 18th Street to the east, the square was encircled with the mansions of Philadelphia's Great and Good. National luminaries like the Drexels, Lippincotts, Wanamakers, and Peppers called the square home. Two of their favorite Episcopal churches were nearby, the Church of the Holy Trinity at the corner of Walnut and Rittenhouse West; and St. Mark's, not far from the square on Locust Street. Another kind of exclusive communion was on offer at the Rittenhouse Club, located on Walnut Street.

By 1923-1924, as The Curtis site search was underway, the square had matured to a new, modern form. Even architectural oddities like two high-rise buildings had arisen. Their norm-busting futurism was not to everyone's liking, especially those grandees fearful of demographic change. The first was an apartment house, the Wetherill, built in 1913 on the square's south side. Further upheaval occurred three years later when John H. McFadden, the cotton magnate and art collector, built the Wellington, an apartment house and hotel, at Walnut and 19th streets.

***

THE PROPERTY SEARCH was discreet. Had it become known that the daughter of Cyrus Curtis was vetting properties, such knowledge would surely have destabilized the area's real estate market, kick-starting a price boom and sky-high sales bidding.

Cyrus Curtis, of course, was already initiated in taking the temperature of real estate vagaries. Competitive market forces were brought home in previous property purchases, in buying his first publication offices in Old City; later, the Public Ledger Building across from Independence Hall, and finally in acquiring Lyndon in Wyncote. Caution was a watchword.

***

CURTIS BOK ALSO joined the site search, acting as his mother’s lawyer. He took care of legal details. Attesting to real estate deeds among them. Mother and son were close. In letters, Curtis often addressed her as “Muvvie,” and she, in writing back, called him “Darlink.” It was a take-off on an accented pronunciation of “darling,” which she likely picked up from her Eastern European cohort at The Curtis. Though the term was really insulting—at least, through today’s lens—it was supposed to be cute.

In person, Curtis liked to be called “Ty,” a childhood nick-name recognizing the young man’s favorite baseball player, Ty Cobb, a highly-praised center-fielder for the Philadelphia Athletics. Everyone in the family, even into Curtis' adulthood, went along. Mary Louise, not so much.

Mary Louise herself got stuck with a pet name from Josef Hofmann, who addressed her affectionately in correspondence as “Marussia,” a Polish diminutive of Mary.

There was nothing callow about Curtis Bok. He earned a bachelor's degree at Williams College in 1926 after serving in the Navy during the First World War. He went to earn a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School in 1921. From 1927 to 1929, he was at Oxford University.[1]

***

THE CURTIS’ OPENING in 1924 was as much a personal inflection point for Curtis Bok as it was for his mother. The year also signaled, for Curtis, a romantic occasion. After an announced engagement on December 1, 1923, Curtis married Margaret Adams Plummer, a twenty-year-old ingénue from Main Line Ardmore just some months later. Their union could have been produced and directed by a Hollywood match-maker—his movie star good looks complementing her beauty queen magnetism. Parenthood came soon after. Margaret Welmoet was born in 1925; Benjamin Plummer, in 1926; and Derek Curtis, in 1930. Derek grew to be six-feet-tall—and Harvard University's twenty-fifth president.

Like his grandfather, mother, and father, Curtis shared an interest in art-collecting. His father’s dabbling in art markets was met with varying degrees of success. His grandfather Cyrus could smell a ringer.

Picture buying, whether in Europe or in New York, was not an uncommon past-time among wealthy Philadelphians. (Collections then underway by the Wideners, Elkins, John G. Johnson, John H. McFadden, and others were already taking center stage in national prominence.) Like his father, Curtis' inclination apparently also tended toward the Netherlandish.

Curtis Bok had moved into private practice, with a Center City office in the Commercial Trust Company building. One day, a letter arrived, seemingly unsolicited. It was from an art gallery in New York, Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc., inquiring about Curtis' potential interest in some “very fine” Old Master Dutch paintings that “we have just brought back from Europe....”[2]

That early effort by Seligmann—a respected art gallery founded in Paris in 1880—at direct, targeted marketing was just beginning. It was also a first salvo in Seligmann’s “junk” mail campaign.

For the next three years, Seligmann bombarded Bok with offers. On April 25, 1925, the firm's persistent letter writer (believed to be G. Gifford Trevor, a company officer in New York) invited Curtis to meet him in Paris to tour Seligmann's head offices at the Palais Sagan at 3 rue de Talleyrand. (Now the Polish Embassy.) In November, Trevor was wondering whether Bok might want to drop by the Seligmann gallery at 705 Fifth Avenue to inspect “several fine Seventeenth Century Dutch paintings....” Another solicitation arrived on January 21, 1926. A follow up was dated January 23, 1926. [3]

Bok usually ignored the missives. Or, he prevaricated, telling his secretary, Mary A. Reed, a Curtis family retainer, to tell Trevor that he was “on an extended absence, and the date of his return...was indefinite.” Or, “Mr. Bok is away, and his return to this office in indefinite.” Finally, Curtis flatly halted mail campaign. “While I am interested in these things from the standpoint of culture, I think you have confused me with my father. Mr. Edward W. Bok,” he wrote Trevor.

***

THOUGH NEVER A Rittenhouse Square set insider, Mary Louise was not unfamiliar with its colorful, rich fauna. She could count on close friends to prudently search the availability of properties: in particular, Jennie Fels, her friend, former associate at Settlement, [4]and a volunteer stalwart of the Rittenhouse Square Flower Show. Mary Louise went on to appoint Fels as a founding trustee of The Curtis.

Another Rittenhouse denizen was Christine Wetherill Stevenson, founder in 1915 of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, then one of the area's few existing nods to cultural nourishment. [5](Stevenson's father, Samuel Price Wetherill, had been the controversial builder of the square's first apartment tower.) Both Boks were involved with the Art Alliance, and Stevenson thought enough of Edward Bok that she named him an honorary vice-president.

Mary Louise’s old nemesis, George Antheil, would also pop into the Alliance when in town—especially when he knew he might cross paths with and troll his disaffected patron. For most of 1931, George was in Philadelphia, ostensibly completing his composition Helen Retires and never resisting an opportunity to chat up Mary Louise. In an effort to impress her, he played selections from the new piece at the Art Alliance. He knew she would be in the audience. [6] She was not impressed.

Two mansions on the square—on opposite ends of 18th Street—leaped out. Both were spacious, well-appointed, and architecturally-striking. The immediate problem was they were both occupied—by Drexels, a family well in the running as one of Philadelphia's richest. (After the Curtises, of course.) The properties were also legacy dwellings, not the kind of houses that dynasties are used to giving up easily.

The residences, one on the northwest corner of 18th Street at Walnut, and other at the southeast corner of 18th at Locust Street, were owned by two of the six children of the late banker Anthony “Tony” Joseph Drexel, Sr. (1826-1893), the Drexel in the bank superpower Drexel, Morgan & Company; and the founder of Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry, later Drexel University. George William Childs Drexel lived at the 18th and Locust property; Sarah “Sally” Rozet Drexel Van Rensselaer, at 18th and Walnut. Like their siblings, Sally and George, thanks to their inheritances, became vessels of patrician civic power.

Mary Louise and Edward knew the Drexel heirs by their shared cultural associations. The Locust Street Drexels were prominent patrons of the Philadelphia Orchestra. George's brother-in-law Alexander Van Rensselaer, Sally's husband, was its president. Jennie Fels' husband, Samuel S. Fels, was on the orchestra's board of directors. Of course, Edward was a major patron.

Inter-locking memberships were common. Van Rensselaer was, as already noted, an early supporter and board director of Settlement. As such, he was an intimate of Mary Louise and Jennie Fels. Professionally speaking.

Alex was Sally's second husband, after her first spouse, John R. Fell, president of A. Pardee & Company, a prominent Pennsylvania coal producer, [7]died in 1895. Sally was, according to her niece, Cordelia Drexel Biddle, “a small, gay, witty woman with the brightest blue eyes I've ever seen.” [8]

“Alex Van,” as he was known to everyone who was anybody, was dashing, handsome, and a scion of the distinguished New York Van Rensselaers. He also looked somewhat like “Mr. Monopoly,” the top-hated, mustachioed mascot of the Depression-era board game. In widowhood, Sally built the Walnut Street residence.[9]A year later, in 1897, she married Alex—after a test run on a pre-nuptial cruise on her yacht. Presumably, he passed muster.

Sally had no interest in relinquishing her “Renaissance palace,” designed in “architectural good taste” by Peabody & Stearns of Boston. [10]She did the next best thing, inducing her brother George to sell his property to Mary Louise. Sally knew that George had inherited a neo-Tudor-styled estate, Wootton, in suburban Bryn Mawr, and he and his wife, Mary Stretch Irick Drexel, were planning to move there.

The George Childs Drexel property had a connection to the Curtises—if an ironic one. George's father Anthony J. Drexel, Sr., had been a previous partner with George William Childs (no relation) in owning ThePublic Ledger, at the time Philadelphia's most respected and biggest newspaper. (George's given name Childs was “gift” from his father in honor of his colleague George William Childs.) The Ledgerwas subsequently purchased by Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, who in turn, in 1913, sold the paper to Cyrus Curtis. This, of course, was the same Cyrus H. K. Curtis who, as a twenty-six-year-old newcomer to Philadelphia, fell spellbound when he first encountered the monumental Public Ledger Building and its signature statue, sidled beside it, of Benjamin Franklin by Philadelphia sculptor Joseph A. Bailly (1825-1883).

Curtis was determined to align his acquisition with the era's other distinguished newspapers, among them, The Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Herald Tribune. He subsidized bureaus, in London, Paris, and Berlin, and hired one of the then-leading female correspondents, Dorothy Thompson. She also had a monthly column in The Ladies'Home Journal.[11]

***

THE THREE-FLOOR Drexel mansion at 1726 Locust Street dominated a commanding corner across from the area's defining oasis, Rittenhouse Square, and was just up the street from another hallowed place, the Wanamaker family-endowed St. Mark's Church. Like the Van Rensselaer house, the Drexel redoubt had also been designed by the family's go-to architectural firm, Peabody & Stearns, at a cost of $45,000 (about $1.5 million today). In the event, the house was just a mere wedding bibelot, patriarch Tony Drexel's gift when son George married Mary in 1891. Like Sally's house, too, it was an ersatz Italianate palazzo, a pollination of Romanesque and Renaissance styles. The Philadelphia Record described the dwelling as “magnificent” and “plain, massive and roomy.”[12]

The property became The Curtis' centerpiece, part of a three-structure complex envisioned to house and categorize the school's divisions, practice rooms, concert spaces, and offices. Mary Louise also funded, from the sale of Curtis Publishing Co. stock, a second property of the trio, the Cramp mansion, across South Bouvier Street to the east. Though the building at 1720 Locust, built in 1908 for ship-building magnate Theodore F. Cramp, was only a modest sixteen-years-old, its additional space and compatibility was a boon. Cramp was aged, had moved to the Union League, and died there just months after he sold the house.[13]

The third component, the Sibley Mansion at 235 South 18th Street, adjacent to the Drexel on the south, was vacant following the death of its owner, Ellen G. Sibley. Edward Bok bought the property (with his own funds, to be sure) from Sibley's heirs, and gifted the property to his wife as a “token of faith.” For someone who had little inclination for romantic expressions, Bok's gift was a supportive gesture to his wife—and recognized, tangentially, his indebtedness to Cyrus and Louisa for success in his life’s work.

Still, Mary Louise seemed irked by the gesture. She thanked her husband for buying Sibley, adding curtly, “But I don't think we will need it.” “I am sure you will,” Edward retorted. 14]

Procuring the three landmark structures—basically under the radar of public glare—was hat-trick of epic real estate proportions. But it had its financial costs. If Mrs. Bok had hoped that her connections to the Drexels might have resulted in sweet-heart deal, a surrender to a soft spot, or a peppercorn price, that serendipity never materialized. The price tag was at fair-market value, and she paid George and Mary $200,000 (about $3.5 million today), based on an original deed signed by Mary Louise on October 7, 1924.

The consolidation of the Rittenhouse Square properties, according to the 1925-26 edition of Pierre Key’s Music Year Book, created a “harmonious environment, devoid of unnecessary hurry or tenseness.”[15]

***

MARY LOUISE HADmemorialized the new Settlement to her mother. Cyrus was sure that The Curtis would be his daughter's memorial to him.

Cyrus understood how providential the sale of the project's keystone building, the Drexel mansion, was to Mary Louise's vision for The Curtis. Without that piece to the puzzle, his daughter’s “castle-in-Spain” project might have collapsed. Cyrus, in part, was key in finding and fitting the missing bit.

To avert calamity in closing the sale, Cyrus paid his own tribute to George Drexel—and Drexels at large. Shortly after the building’s sale, he more than tripled the amount Mary Louise had given to George and Mary Drexel for it, in a donation of $750,000 (almost $13-million today) to build an academic center at Drexel Institute. Cyrus knew the center was another “castle-in-Spain” project—this by his contemporary, banker Anthony “Tony” Joseph Drexel, Sr.

In 1928, the fruits of Cyrus’ largess, the Curtis Hall of Engineering opened its doors to much fanfare and acclaim. In attendance at the cornerstone dedication were George William Childs Drexel and Alexander Van Rensselaer, as president of Drexel's trustees. Despite their dutiful obligations to the institute, Drexel's and Alex Van’s joint presence solidified bonds on another level. Official patrician Philadelphia had spoken with one voice.

“God helps those who help themselves,” Cyrus told the throng, an assembly of students, academics from Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania, and a memorable contingency of Philadelphia's Great and Good. [16]

Cyrus was later named a Drexel trustee.

***

LIKE MANY NEWLY acquired properties, the Drexel, Cramp, and Sibley buildings needed, as people are fond of saying, “a lot of work.” And furnishing. Scores of Steinway & Sons grands cascaded onto the premises in a “parade” of pianos. The allotment, it was said, was “one of the largest shipments of pianos” to ever to descend upon Philadelphia, maybe anywhere. [17]A fleet of piano-packed trucks circled Rittenhouse unloading the grands. Gawking rubberneckers were stupefied

Chapter XIII

MID-LIFE

BY LATE 1924, when the ink was still drying on the new deeds to the Drexel, Cramp, and Sibley mansions, Edward and Cyrus attempted to clear the air with Mary Louise. Common cause had not always been their strong suit. As the conservatory's début neared, they shared a foreboding about The Curtis' long-term financial “validity”—whether, indeed.pumping millions more into the venture would be “worthwhile.” [1] These second thoughts transformed into cold feet.

Josef Hofmann believed timing was everything. He sounded a warning as early as in 1921. A letter dated May 15, addressed to “My dear Marussia,” Hofmann’s pet name for Mary Louise, carried a warning:

Your very kind letter of May 12th does not sound as if there would be very much for you and your new school, except lots of work, risk, worry and possible trouble. I am a strong believer in not attempting things when circumstances and conditions point against them.

Less than three years later, Hofmann turned sanguine. “Your school looks very 'promising'!,” he wrote on January 26, 1924 from London while on tour. Yet, he added another caution: “I hope that you find the right kind of teachers to enable you to keep the 'promise'! It is no easy job, you will find efficient people usually perform themselves and have no time to teach.”

His caveat was ironic. A few months on, his faith again buoyed, Hofmann accepted Mary's offer to head The Curtis' Piano Department. Never mind “efficient people” not teaching. While still in London, he wrote on May 6, 1924: “Let us hope that I may be able to render the services which you so kindly solicite [sic] and that I shall be able to prove worthy of your confidence.” [2]

Skeptics Bok and Curtis wereoutwardly queasy about The Curtis’ fiscal welfare, But, behind her back,they took to a whispering campaign to float a sticky sub-text, whether Mary Louise was really up to the task of building a new school from scratch. Certainly, she was dedicated to the school's proposed mission, spoke eloquently on its behalf, and, in her own right, could finance the institute— at least, in the short-term.

It came down to moxie: did Mary Louise possess the practical traits for success? Uppermost, the intuition and worldliness to meet febrile administrative challenges and, as important, juggle the fiery, often overwhelming personalities of faculty members?

Small and large issues unsettled them. Despite her rôle at Settlement, the pair recognized that Mary Louise had no real academic and management training, nor any hands-on business experience. The Ogontz School, where she spent her teenage years, was just a fancy finishing school, after all.

She was easily distracted, they thought. Her falling prey to George Antheil's flimflam, costing her tens of thousands, raised serious questions about her judgment. Her retention of the deed to the new Queen Street Settlement building, costing the school much-needed charitable funding; and her insistence on naming Johann Grolle as the conservatory's first director (in defiance of Leopold Stokowski's recommendation) were other red flags. [3]

But Bok and Curtis also ignored the obvious. Mary Louise was an auto-didactic polymath. Her mind careened over numerous interests, from theater to horticulture. She read widely. Her knowledge of classical music was voluminous. Important, too, as many were fond of saying, she enabled those she worked with to seek the best in themselves.

Some years later that inchoate quality was summed up by a Curtis official and friend, Merritt Todd Cooke III:

Ideals are empty matters without the will and energy and realism to implement them. Mary Louise Curtis Zimbalist possessed those powers beyond the great material inheritance which enabled her to use them. [4]

Others spoke of her modesty, at least in public. “What money I have was not earned by me and, therefore, I have a small regard for it but I always bless my father for what he left in my hands as a result of his own work,” she said. Over time, she sounded similar variations. “I feel about money that there is something corrosive about it with one exception, i.e., where it is given with love and accepted with love.”[5]

For all thissoul-searching andself-effacement, her pronouncements were disingenuous. Her “regard” for her wealth was never insignificant. It had invested her with an incalculableinfluence that few Americans, much less women of her era, possessed. She unleashed a power still fewer chose to exercise, high-minded charity. Whether, as steward of her father's wealth, Mary Louise was finally motivated by “will,” “energy,” “realism,” or, as she claimed, “love,” wealth in her hands was never caustic.

***

HER MANAGEMENT STYLEand abilities aside, Mary Louise invoked a prominentprecept of Business 101, respect—with a dash of trepidation. When the mood struck, her facial features would soften in a gleeful, benign smile, exhibiting a twinkling pixie-like look. Students called her “Aunt Mary,” or “Mother Bok.” (Her sons referred to her as “Mother,” or 'Muvvie.” To her grandchildren, she was “Granny.”)

Other times she could adopt a regal-like air, spiking her conversation with off-hand interjections of “darling,” à la the same languid, tossed-off expression that Tallulah Bankhead made her brand.

The school's dress code was buttoned-up: dresses for females and, when they passed into adolescence, neckties and jackets for males. Formality was the watchword. It extended to an established tea time, three o'clock on the dot each Wednesday. Students and faculty were expected to gather, and they would be sure to be punctual. A guest might address the group. Mary Louise would always pour—from a silver samovar into white, china cups. Some thought the ritual a bourgeois affection.

Mary Louise was laconic, not given to small talk in public. One regular at the weekly teas, a faculty member, once quipped to her grandson Derek Bok, “I've seen your grandmother a number of times. But in all that time, I've heard her say just four words: 'One lump, or two?'”[6]A student from the 1940s, Diana Steiner, said she never observedAunt Mary engage in a “long conversation” in a public setting. She was “a little bit standoffish,” projecting a grandmanner, Steiner said. [7]

At forty-six, Mary Louise, in middle age, remained slender. For her height, at five-feet-six inches. Some might have noted, however unkindly, that her figure was becoming offset by a matronly “broad in hip.” [8]Her signature coiffure, a short bob, had not changed for years. Still, her tawny-colored hair was exhibiting streaks of gray—but nowhere approaching the full head of silver gray that in later years always made her a cynosure in any crowd.

When she turned fifty, she demanded the last word on hair color; apparently it had become cause for continuing debate. She said, “I am not a peroxide blonde nor red-head nor raven-tressed. My hairdresser calls me a blonde, but I look to myself [as] light-brown.” [9]Whatever the shade, she was a stand-out. But never a knock-out.

Her fashion taste—elegant and refined—blended in with other conservative ladies in Philadelphia and New York. Her wardrobe could have been designed by an haute couture designer. Or, it just included chic numbers from Bergdorf Goodman's Fifth Avenue store. Outdoor-wear came from Abercrombie & Fitch on Madison Avenue. Her go-to jeweler was Tiffany & Co., conveniently located just across Fifth from Bergdoff's. Her most frequent accessories,pearl stud ear-rings and a single string of pearls, presumably came from there. Or, J. E. Caldwell, the provincial jeweler of Philadelphia’s haute monde. She found her strand to come in handy in fraught moments—all the better to clutch and twirl meaningfully. And toproject power and wealth: the beads wrapped around her neck were easily worth $50,000, calculated in today’s values.

On outings in mid-town Manhattan, she “Bendeled” at Henri Bendel, the upmarket department store then at 10 West 57th Street.[10] About town in Philadelphia, she scouted Bonwit Teller & Co., in the seventeenth-hundred block of Chestnut Street; and Gimbels; and Strawbridge & Clothier, other Center City department stores. [11]

A visitor to The Curtis around this time remembered her as “a slim, trim, tailored, youthful-looking woman, with delicate features, short light hair beginning to gray, keen yet kindly dark eyes, and an air of immensely vital energy.” [12] Another who knew her well, the pianist and writer Virginia Bird Martin, described her brown eyes as “intense.”[13]

Her most iconic depiction, known to most modern-day Curtis Institute alumni, was by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), a frequent cover illustrator for The Saturday EveningPost. The head-and-shoulder oil portrait (eighteen-inches by fifteen-one-half inches), commissioned in the 1940s, recorded Mary Louise as confident, serene, and with just a hint of a smile. She appears commanding and wise. Her piercing eyes stare forward, almost daring the viewer to blink first. Her hair-do is a shock of white. Balancing the picture are her ubiquitous, signature pearls, centered mid-portrait.[14]

Her daily regimen was uniform. When in town, she would arrive each morning at 18th and Locust in her chauffeured, maroon-colored Rolls Royce. From the back seat, shielded by golden-threaded, silk curtains, she would alight, assisted by her driver, Patrick McAuley, attired in a matching maroon livery and cap. She exuded an air of substance; one not to be trifled with. By the 1950s, she had done away with the Rolls. For the time being, Patrick stayed.

Not that she always needed a car. “I walk furiously, and for never less than an hour, whenever I get the chance….” she told a friend.[15]

***

MARY LOUISE WAS never Philadelphia's Lady Bountiful. Despite what Constantin von Sternberg might have believed, or had hoped for. For a female in 1924 to strike out as an independent business person or entrepreneur was almost unknown. Even more so for a woman of Mary Louise's social and financial stature.That she might be a patron, surely. A committeewoman, certainly. Even Jennie Fels, at the end of day, was always a volunteer.

Mary Louise had crossed the line. From being a well-regarded, bighearted champion, she had become one of only a handful of independent, female administrators of a premier Philadelphia cultural institution.

A woman had guidedthe Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, but well after its founding in 1877 by Leipzig-trained pianist Richard C. Schirmer. In 1913, after Schirmer's retirement, the conservatory was co-directedby German-born pianist D. Hendrik Ezerman, a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Dutch-born violinist Hedda Van den Beemt, also anorchestra musician. (Leopold Stokowski's then-wife Olga Samaroff, a star pianist in her own right, was on the faculty.) [16]

Thereafter the most prominent woman in Philadelphia’s cultural evolution was Christine Wetherill Stevenson, who established the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1915. Its home was nearby The Curtis, at the corner of Rittenhouse Square South and South 18^th Street. Like Mary Louise, Stevenson sought to spearhead a selfless ideal—but defined by a narrow mission, sponsoring rotating exhibits, performances, and outdoor art shows.

Philadelphia was fertile ground for music schools. Most were parochial, small mom-and-pop operations. The 1924 edition of the authoritative Patterson's American Educational Directory listed a half-dozen well-known local schools. The most notable, at least in relation to Mary Louise’s checkered association with its owner, was the Sternberg School of Music.[17]“Sternberg,” it will be remembered, was the same Constantin Ivanovich von Sternberg who had introduced George Antheil to Mary Louise. (In 1924, The Curtis' inaugural year, Sternberg died.)

Outside of parochial, high-hat Philadelphia, women were taking center stage. Working women were reflected in the fictional creations of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and the lesser known, but wildly popular female novelist Ursula Parrott. The Roaring Twenties gave rise to Flappers, who broke norms, wore short skirts, and sported bob hairdos. Suffragettes, dressed in white shirtwaist dresses, struggled for the women’s right to vote. They got it in 1920.

Unbounded female exuberance and brio found voicein some unlikely pulpits. Authors of the day made millions writing forThe Saturday Evening Post—even The Ladies’ Home Journal, If Edward Bok, its chief literary warden, found any irony in this—or whether he was inclined to admit to “guilt” by association—he never spoke to it.

Chapter XIV

INTROSPECTION

DESPITE THEIR OSTENSIBLE encouragement—really just window-dressing—Edward Bok and Cyrus Curtis were not ready to accept Mary Louise as an independent change agent. Though passage of women’s suffrage was already four years old, Bok was still gagging on the bitter pill. “[I] felt that American women were not ready to exercise the privilege intelligently and that their mental attitude was against it,” he lamented.[1]

Had Bok—Cyrus Curtis, anyone—even bothered to ask Mary Louise what she thought about about the 19^th Amendment? There can be little doubt that she supported the right-to-vote measure. Though perhaps surreptitiously, given her husband’s overbearing obtuseness on the subject. She was a woman, after all, who frequently dressed in white, the symbolic calling card of suffragettes. Had Edward noticed?

A new reality was setting in. Bok and Cyrushad no choice but to adjust to changing women’s rôles, in public, at home—and, significantly, in business. However awkward the transition might be,

To assuage their uneasiness about The Curtis’ viability, the men called upon an “efficiency expert” to evaluate the institute’s' business plan. That was the stated idea. The two really wanted a trusted peerto peel back the school’s primary concept than to formulate atraditional shovel-ready strategy. A “Castle in Spain” might well do in abstraction. But its real-world practicality in Philadelphia was another matter. No doubt, Edward and Cyrus had some preconceived notions where the study would lead—mostly to ambivalent assessments, it was safe to assume.

Whether Mary Louise was forewarned of the inquiry is open to question. In the end, Edward and Cyrus stated they wanted a “financial expert” to “analyze” The Curtis' feasibility. Logically enough, when informed of the undertaking, Mary Louise “may have been irritated by their interference....”[2]

A one-time Curtis faculty member, Sol Schoenbach (1943-1944 and 1946-1977), spoke of the episode. A retired bassoonist from the Philadelphia Orchestra, Schoenbach had become Settlement's executive director, succeeding Johann Grolle. Despite his kinship with Grolle, Schoenbach's detailed version of events captured the verisimilitude of the moment.[3]

It was not exactly what Bok and Curtis had expected.

Schoenbach said the commissioned report—he called it a “deep study”—found that the conservatory's pending opening in 1924 was perfectly attuned to a “wonderful” period “in the history of the United States to have such a school.”

Even a negative finding regarding hoped-for foreign enrollment was not as dire as it might have seemed.

The Bok-Curtis study noted that a then-current immigration downturn could weaken a major aim—educating and developing talent from around the world. “Immigration from Europe was not as plentiful as it had been before, and there would a shortage of instrumentalists coming over from Europe.”

Contributing to the decline was the just-adopted Johnson-Reed Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924, which had established stiff quotas on foreign nationals seeking residence in the United States. The law emphasized immigration from northern European countries, and places like the United Kingdom, France, and Scandinavian countries got the best of it. Much of The Curtis' proposed foreign constituency, young people from eastern Europe and Russia, were relegated to the end of the line.

The institute found a work-around, petitioning the U.S. Department of Labor for a waiver. It must be assumed that Mary Louise had a hand in this.

Commissioner General of Immigration Harry E. Hull had good news:

It gives me pleasure to advise that your school has been duly approved by the Secretary of Labor as an institution of learning for immigrant students.... The Department of State has been notified of this action.... [and] all American consular officers...will then be in position to consider applications for the required non quota student visas.

As The Curtis got off the ground, it started enrolling students from at least ten countries, including Hungary, Germany, Russia, and China.

Josef Hofmann's misgivings about timing, first expressed to Mary Louise in his 1921 letter, could be safely assumed to have been shelved.

For all its optimism, the feasibility study however contained some unmistakable bad news—for Mary Louise. It stated that The Curtis’ newly appointed director Johann Grolle, Mary Louise’s favorite, “was not the proper person to be the head of such an institute.”

From the start, Mary Louise's support of Grolle as The Curtis' first director was problematic. No broad search had been launched. Her curious “incuriousness” in the selection process was, in fact, alarming. Still, the choice could be rationalized: Grolle and Mary Louise shared enough aims and concepts to make the choice at least comprehensible.

Most troubling, though, was Grolle’s failure to fully meet publicized job specifications—to be an experienced executive, above and beyond being an accomplished musician and teacher. His management credentials were thin. (Running Settlement hardly super charged a curriculum vitae for work at a multi-million-dollar global music incubator.) His stature as a former violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra—in the back field of first violin section—was only a marginal asset.

What Grolle did have was the backing of Jennie Fels, Mary Louise’s close friend.

The new director’s friend, Carl Flesch, was not sure of Grolle’s readiness for The Curtis’ top job. The Hungarian violin virtuoso, a Curtis teacher (1924-1928), and a member of the school's prestigious Advisory Council, claimedGrolle was hobbled by his “Utopian” world view.

So compromised was Mary Louise, who Flesch suspected was drawn to Grolle by his ivory-tower idealism “Like Grolle, she was inspired by vague artistic aspirations without giving much thought to their feasibility.… Money would be no consideration, the world's best teachers would be engaged, and pupils should live solely for their studies, without financial worries,” Flesch said. [4]

No doubt Leopold Stokowski, another in The Curtis’ brain trust, also agreed that Grolle wasan unwisepick. When Mary Louise had dismissed his choice for the post, Dr. Augustus Stephen Vogt of the College of Music in Toronto, it must have stung.

Mary Louise’srejection of Vogt was unintentionally sagacious.His selection would have also turned out to be awkward. Vogt died in 1926, meaning that another testy hunt for a successor would have soon been required.

Though Dutch born like Edward Bok, Grolle—unlike Bok—was parochial. He favored enrolling Curtis students from Settlement's talent pool. The same for faculty. [5] Worse, were Grolle's politics. Whether he was a radical “Bolshevik” (as he was tarred in some rumor mills), a Socialist, or just a left-leaning social-democrat, Grolle's idea of national and world order did not sit comfortably with Philadelphia’s über Capitalists and, more immediately, his minders at The Curtis.

Flesch damned him as a Socialist with “rather confused ideals, aiming at humanity's redemption through art.”[6]

Socialist economics was a bridge too far—even for Mary Louise.She was a registered Republican, and was probably preparing to vote for GOP candidate Calvin Coolidge. The upcoming 1924 presidential election was set for less than a month after The Curtis' launch date. She opposed the New Deal. [7]Nonetheless, she had nothing caustic to say about President Roosevelt himself—though many society élite considered him “a traitor to his class.”

Bok and Curtis, according to Sol Schoenbach, put Mary Louise on notice: “You have to be the one to tell Mr. Grolle that he is not wanted.” She did.

It was a management stress test. She was betwixt Grolle's activist manifesto backing music as a tonic to societal woes and between the strict, value-free virtuosity and artistry advocated by her faculty superstars—the “Prussians,” as they collectively called. Jennie Fels, Grolle’s in-house supporter, she recognized, was another thorn.

Though the patriarchal order might have lookedand felt otherwise, Bok’s and Curtis’ demand for Grolle’s ouster did Mary Louise a favor. The Curtis was never meant to be a social experiment. In any case, it was a wrong battle in which to engage, and one that Mary Louise could not have likely won.

Grolle’s fury followed.He had persuaded himself that creation of The Curtis was his doing from the start. He consigned Bok, Curtis, Stokowski, and Hofmann, and, above all, Mary Louise, all members of the initial “Castle in Spain”kitchen cabinet, to rôles as bit players. He was “embittered” [8]and petty, according to Schoenbach. He declared that Mary Louise would never set foot again Settlement's “Mary Louise Curtis branch.” (After his dismissal from The Curtis, he had returned as Settlement’s Head Worker.)

Grolle's threat of banishment was a bluff. Settlement's founders, Jeanette (Selig) Frank (1886-1965) and Blanche (Wolf) Kohn (1886-1983), both maintained cordial relations with Mary Louise. It was unlikely they shared Grolle's pique.

If Mary Louise was resentful, she never showed it. In May 1930, she gave Settlement $25,000 (about $444,000 today), more than ten percent, of a $200,000 ($3.5 million today) Depression-era endowment fund-raiserthe school had then underway. [9]Grolle accepted the check.

Five years after Grolle retired as Head Worker, in 1962, Settlement offered a tribute to Mary Louise—now Mrs. Zimbalist—with the opening of the Mary Curtis Zimbalist Garden. The recognition could have been interpreted as making amends for Grolle's bad behavior.

***

SETTLEMENT SHAPED THE Curtis' raison d'être. The school was never far from Mary Louise’s mind. Even three years after The Curtis’ launch, she told an Associated Press reporter, who had inquired how Settlement figured in her calculations: “We found music the best way to reach out for the sympathy of these [Philadelphia Settlement] young people. While visiting the settlements [elsewhere] I saw how many talented young musicians were compelled to give up a promising career because of poverty.”[10]

The Grolle imbroglio underscored what Bok and Curtis had feared. Mary Louise had been lax in detailing Grolle's job specifications and terms of service. Her written employment offer to him was so informal that it was post-dated (January 21, 1924) after his hire date, January 1, 1924. His salary was mentioned, $7,500 yearly (almost $130,000 today). He casually accepted by letter a week later.

The fickle Grolle even had an equally petulant change of heart. In November, just weeks after The Curtis formally opened, Grolle had the temerity to suggest a revision to his “contract.” Going forward, he wanted a per annum salary of $16,000 (roughly $275,000 today), more than doubling his then-current wage.

Grolle believed that his employment term expired on December 31. Sounding more like a newly-inspired Capitalist than an erstwhile Socialist, he told his boss that he wanted to renegotiate to a “fair remuneration.” This especially, he added, for “a position that calls for executive ability, vision, musical and artistic training, and experience,” qualities he assigned himself, though some of these attributes—as seen by others—were in dispute.

The feckless Grolle was pushing his luck. On December 24, he resigned. On December 27, the public got a whiff of the intrigue:

GROLLE LEAVES/MUSIC SCHOOL

Differences with Mrs. Bok

Lead Curtis Institute Director to Quit [11]

In a follow-up, on January 9, 1925, he added, “I regret exceedingly that our years of service together have come to this great tragedy.” Also on January 9, Mary Louise was corresponding with “My dear Mr. Grolle,” noting that he should consider himself “quite free of the Institute after Saturday, January 10, 1925.”[12]

Mary Louise never severed ties with Settlement. Until her death, in 1970, she paid the school's housekeeping bills, including salaries to cooks and cleaners, coming to, in today's valuation, about $25,000 yearly. “[J]ust to show you what a lady she was,” Schoenbach said. [13]

When Grolle retired from Settlement in 1957, Mary Louise also paid his life pension.

Chapter XV

DÉBUT

THE INAUGURAL WAS supposed to be on October 1, 1924, only five months after The Curtis received its degree-granting imprimatur from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. New premises at Rittenhouse Square were still being feverishly refurbished when the school's state charter and articles of non-profit incorporation were, according to the legal jargon of the day, signed, sealed, and delivered on April 18, 1924 in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. The sumptuous document, festooned with impressed seals and Roman calligraphy, looked like a knock-off of a royal decree.(Elsewhere on April 18, maestro Leopold Stokowski was celebrating, on this same day, his forty-second birthday.)

A new entity, The Curtis Foundation, an indenture created on May 19, 1924 by “Mary Louise Curtis Bok.” attested to the institute’s financial bedrock. Transferred to the foundation was almost half (“five-elevenths”) of her bequeathed income from her mother's estate, estimated at the time at $XX-million, roughly $XX-million today. From that amount, she endowed The Curtis with $10-million (about $173 million today.) Always on the look-out for evidence of fiscal sustainability, Edward Bok and Cyrus Curtis both sighed with relief.

Income from the initial endowment was always key. Though there was never any question that its corpus could be replenished. Cyrus had created a preferred stock scheme in the Curtis Publishing's corporate structure that would ensure that his daughter would be forever Midas-like rich, with an established payout something along the lines of a guaranteed annuity.

Indeed, at the time, Curtis Publishing was paying lavish dividends of between fifty cents to a dollar on its common stock—each month. Even in the run-up to the Depression, in early 1929, the Curtis company distributed almost $20-million (about $370-million today) in dividends. Most of these profits went to Curtis board members. Mary Louise was one of its most prominent.[1]

This income paled against Mrs. Bok's earned yearly salary—one dollar, her pay as a Curtis Publishing director. Mary Louise always got a chuckle from the risible amount, given the millions she received otherwise from Curtis stock. In what became a well-worn kabuki, Mrs. Bok would regularly show up at annual board meetings—often with two small dogs on leads in tow—and earnestly ask why her salary could not be doubled. She always got the same answer—economic conditions did not permit it. And that was the end of that. Until the following year. [2]

Cyrus Curtis was also raking in profits from preferred stock dividends. In 1924, Cyrus, took home a personal income of more than $5-million (about $87-million today), making him only one of five Americans in that year to earn as much. [3]

Endowment offset budget shortfalls. Annual tuition was $500 (about $8,600 today), and would hardly defray, even in the aggregate, operational costs.[4]Twelve full scholarships were announced, six funded by the institute and six personally-endowed. Of the later, one was offered by concert pianist Olga Samaroff, Leopold Stokowski's newly-divorced spouse; and another by Curtis Bok. In the long run, if the applicant could prove need, no one was turned away.

What with one thing or another—mostly attributed to delays in renovations—The Curtis' actual launch was on October 13, 1924 [5],a Monday. When the doors opened, an eager, would-be professional violist Max Aronoff was the first to enter the newly-christened citadel of music. [6]

Eighteen-year-old Max—who in 1929, just five years after that inaugural day, would become himself a Curtis instructor—was followed in climbing the five steps at 1726 Locust Street by two-hundred-two other aspirants, including the youngest entrant, a five-and-one-half-year old. Besides those from Settlement, other “freshmen” trickled in from Alabama, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas. [7]

Josef Hofmann was not there—despite his new appointments as the piano department head and as an Advisory Council member. He was in New York, just returning from a New England tour. Instead, his best wishes arrived by mail. “Am delighted to learn that you have 300 pupils already! Oh, a mighty good sign! Why should it be otherwise, however!” [8]

Johann Grolle was formally still the school's director (so said its first 1924-1925 catalog), though—run out by Mary Louise months later—he never fulfilled a complete year. Perhaps anticipatingunfavorable reaction to the foreign-sounding name of the institute’s first director, the pre-printed catalog Anglicized it to “John Grolle.” [9]Anti-Bolshevism was always on the prowl.

Forpublic consumption, “John” Grolle was said to have resigned, happily returning to the familiar confines of Settlement—and, no doubt, just as happily re-assuming his identity as “Johann” Grolle.

Other public relations gaffes needed to be squelched.

The lingering disarray, in the public mind,of Mary Louise’s attempts to create a “conservatory” division at Settlement needed addressing.As always, Mary Louise emphasized The Curtis' independence. She kicked off an informational campaign to underscore the split in early 1924. It was less than subtle.

Advertising notices bellowed:

Announcement!/The Settlement Music School begs to announce The Curtis Institute of Music[.]/The Conservatory Department of the Settlement Music School has been taken over by the Curtis Institute of Music, which will be under the financial auspices and direction of the Curtis Foundation.... The Institute will be entirely independent of theSettlement Music School, which will continue its work heretofore at 416 Queen Street.

For more information, the advertisements—confusingly, to be sure—recommended that queries be addressed to The Curtis at “416 Queen Street.” [10]

This broadside against public misunderstanding opened almost as many questions as it answered. EvenThe New York Times, an arbiter of accuracy in American journalism, got the details wrong.

In its announcement of The Curtis's proposed début, The Times in February reported: “Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publisher, has endowed the Curtis Institute of Music, which will open as a music school....” [11]

In May, the newspaper did better, recognizing that “Mrs. Edward Bok” had endowed the school and named it as a “compliment” to Cyrus. Still, in referring to “John Grolle” as The Curtis' still-putative director, Grolle's name got another unfortunate spin as “John Grolie.” [12]

Later that month, The Curtis' “opening announcement” in Musical America finally unraveled much of the previous, bewildering operational details. The newspaper cited its endowment by the Curtis Foundation, its faculty roster by name, and its new location at the “S.E. Corner of 18th and Locust Streets.”[13]

What was left nebulous was The Curtis' stated mission. Mary Louise had previously cited—in explicit terms—her own notions of the school’s aims. Shaded nuance, springing from several quarters, began to add context to her credo.

Initial enrollment in 1924 fell far short of a stated commitment to recruit nationally and internationally. Most students were “alumni” of Settlement's Conservatory Department, just relocating themselves and their musical instruments from down-market Queen Street to up-market Rittenhouse Square. While the school had not yet adopted a global flavor, for these young people from South Philadelphia, it was still an other-worldly experience..

In a Times interview, Mary Louise noted the institute's commitment to lofty idealism—still sentimentalizing her thoughts along the lines articulated by Johann Grolle. She went on:

They [students] also will profit by a background of culture, quietly impressed upon them and with the stimulus of personal contact with artist-teachers who represent the highest individual qualities in their manhood and womanhood as they will represent the highest and finest there is today in their art. [14]

A short time later, Olin Downes, The Times' music critic, wrote that The Curtis would adopt teaching methods from France, “where the elements of music are taught, perhaps, more systematically and effectively than in any other country in the world.” [15]

Everyone agreed that the place would be an exclusive preserve of the classical—in orchestral instrumentation, chamber music, and operatic vocalization. Virtuosity would be paramount.

The school's direction became a favorite talking point for faculty and students, especially following the uncertainty created by Johann Grolle's abrupt, disorienting departure. Gossip would often take center stage at the Barclay Pharmacy, at the northeast corner of Spruce and 18th streets. Students loved to mull over the school’s future over hot beverages and soft drinks from a favorite soda jerk.

The Barclay Pharmacy later moved to the corner across the street, replaced at its original site by Day's Deli Restaurant. Debate continued. Down the street, at Broad and Locust, another gathering spot, the Harvey House, also attracted the latest Curtis chatter-boxing. The restaurant's modest prices and late hours helped.

Mary Louise was a Barclay Pharmacy regular. “That rendez-vous is almost an annex of the school,” she observed.[16]

It could have been at the Barclay Pharmacy that someone suggested that The Curtis should be more like the St. Petersburg Conservatory, founded by Anton Rubinstein and known for whip-sawing students into shape.[17]That prospect did not get very far.

Mary Louise left the last word to Josef Hofmann. She remembered once asking him what the school's “purpose” should be. She took no exception to his answer: “[T]o hand down thru [sic] contemporary masters the great traditions of the past—to teach students to build on this heritage for the future.”

Mary Louise added, approvingly, “This might well be called the Creed of The Curtis Institute.” [18]Further, she saw to it that the “creed” was published in all future annual catalogs.

In the first 1924-1925 edition, Mary Louise aligned the institute's “principles” along the same lines: “To foster the student's sense of discrimination through opportunities which the private teacher is usually unable to give.... To stimulate the student's creative faculties by maintaining an environment conducive to personal response and serious study.” [19]She also emphasized a holistic approach, incorporating study in the liberal arts.

Mary Louise and Hofmann saw eye to eye. For now.

***

THE CURTIS WAS in safe hands—also in ones Mary Louise knew to be supportive of her wishes, even acquiescent to them. Up to a point. A largely unknown newcomer had joined The Curtis' inner circle.

Philip S. Collins, newly-appointed as vice president of a new body of five trustees, was introduced to the sanctum sanctorum by Cyrus Curtis, himself a trustee. Rounding out the board were Mary Louise, as president; Curtis Bok; and Jennie Fels, who remained a loyalist despite her wavering during the Grolle contretemps.

Collins was a safe pick—for many years Curtis Publishing Co.'s vice president and treasurer. He was also Cyrus Curtis' neighbor in Wyncote, and the magnate’s family friend. (After Cyrus' death in 1933, Mary Louise extended the friendship.)

Collins had held a largely faceless position at Curtis Publishing, being among the company's Old Guard. He kept company with the likes of Edward Bok and George H. Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post.[20]Collins was a number cruncher; a financial whiz. By professional background, tempered by his fealty to Curtis, “financial watchdog” might have figured in too.

***

THERE WAS REASON to be concerned. Without oversight, Mary Louise compensated her “best and brightest” almost without check. She was generous. Even profligate, free-floating salaries without any personal knowledge of paid work, pay scales, equity, nor, really, any economic nous. Department heads received, as a minimum, $1,000 ($17,000 today) a week, or $100 ($1,700 today) per lesson. Salaries were distributed unevenly. Some faculty, many of whom lived almost two hours away by train in New York, received, in addition, travel allowances. Others did not.

Violinist Carl Flesch, on The Curtis' maiden faculty, revealed that his pay was never less than $25,000 (about $400,000 today) for about six weeks of teaching. [21]

Josef Hofmann was the most handsomely paid. Even when The Curtis faced belt-tightening during the Depression, his base salary was $100,000 ($1.7-million today.)

Lesser lights got “lesser” pay. The base salary of the school's dean, Dr. Grace H. Spofford, was $7,500 (about $130,00 today). Despite this seemingly generous amount, its variance against other salaries—given Spofford's academic training and previous experience at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore—smacked of a whimsical imbalance.

Hungarian-born Flesch, at fifty-one and at the height of his career, took a jaundiced view; he thought faculty compensation—even his own—to be improvident.

Flesch had first-hand knowledge to the institute’s inner

workings as a member of the institute's Advisory Council.

Nevertheless he maintained a friendship,likely a stealthy

one, with Mary Louise’s vexatious irritant Johann Grolle. He

spoke how “principal teachers” felt guilt about their

financial good fortune, trying to find extra curricular ways

to contribute to The Curtis' “prestige”’ [22]

Flesch's autobiography, published in 1957, thirteen years after his death in 1944, was a marvel of revelatory vitriol. He laid bare his backstabbing, seething jealousies, egoism, disloyalty, petty feuds, vanity, and anti-Americanism. And ethnic prejudice. He believed only Jews, like himself, could be world-class violinists.

He whined that his genius was under-appreciated, citing that his initial Curtis employment was conditional. “[T]he lady [Mary Louise] did not know anything about music and was unable to form a proper idea of my teaching methods.... [I]t was decided that I should be engaged for a trial period so that my educational gifts could be tested.”[23]

Thanks to the “lady” who not “know anything about music,” he got the job—head of the violin division.

Despite Flesch's slow burn, it came to pass that he had no second thoughts about attending Mary Louise’s “big” send-off reception when he departed The Curtis in 1928. He capped her toast by accepting “a plaquette coined in memory of my activities there.” [24]

Mary Louise was always in the cross-hairs of Flesch's greatest disdain. Thoughthoroughly willing to take hercoin, he simultaneously slapped her hand. His “exaggerated remuneration,” he said, “was solely due to the fact that Mrs. Bok was immensely rich and regarded any businesslike calculation as superfluous.” [25]

His animus was so unsparing, so unqualified that his critiques are sometimes simply too hard to swallow; being nowhere near the whole truth. It would be easy to disregard Flesch's invective as malicious tripe. Still, his mind-set was also a window, however opaque, into behind-the-scenes turmoil at The Curtis. Mary Louise was probably among the last to know of the conflicted in-house struggles, jealousies, and boiling anger of many the institute’s immigrant virtuosi; they being displaced persons forced to abandon homelands in times of political upheaval and antisemitism.

In Flesch's case, one is left wondering whether his low opinion of Mary Louise was really a case of misdirection. His actual target was, more likely, Josef Hofmann, his rival for Mary Louise's attention and esteem. Flesch stretched his rancor of Hoffman to the extreme, charging at one point that he was solely responsible for The Curtis' pedagogical “decline”—beginning, no less, in 1924, the institute's début year.

Flesch squeezed in one good word, praising crestfallen Johann Grolle as “an honest idealist....” [26] Grolle met all of Flesch’s prejudicial litmus tests: an immigrant, a violinist, a Jew—and a detractor of Mary Louise.

Finally, he lashed out at Leopold Stokowski, the golden-haired titan of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The maestro was not “sufficiently selfless.” “He did not serve his art; it served him,” he said. [27]

***

STOKOWSKI HAD HIGH hopes for The Curtis. The institute, he said, might just become “the most important musical institution in the country, perhaps in the world.”[28]Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Justin Davidson wrote, “The Curtis Institute of Music is a conservatory in Philadelphia so tiny and elite that even an excellent musician's chances of getting in basically approach zero.” [29]

If only the “Johann Grolle Affair” could have been swept under the rug.

Chapter XVI

COURSE CORRECTION

WILLIAM EDWIN WALTER was the tonic The Curtis needed. After a rocky first year, the school's board broke out of its insider comfort zone: it appointed the manager of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as the institute's new administrative head. Officially, he was Johann Grolle's replacement. Unofficially, his remit also entailed securing The Curtis’ sound financial footing.

Mary Louise Curtis Bok, as president, still reigned as the school's ultimate power, despite sotto voce rumor mongering—not for the first time—that her rôle was more figure than head.

But it was hard to overlook the influence that board vice president Philip Collins had in naming the new director—as a counterweight to Mary Louise handling of money matters. Another check was Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Detroit's celebrated conductor, recently appointed to institute's newly created Advisory Council. The advent of the two Detroiters, showing up almost simultaneously, clearly bore an air of collaboration, if not collusion.

The wagons were circling around how the conservatory would conduct its future financial affairs. While a small point, the school's administration was reconstituted from a “board of trustees” to a more managerial, business-like sounding “board of directors.”

Ironically, it was Grolle who came closest in crafting what would become Walter's marching orders. In a parting shot, Grolle cited three areas of immediate concern:

1. Finances
2. Morale
3. Promotion

Grolle's suggestions emerged in a resignation letter to Mrs. Bok, dated Christmas Eve, 1924. On December 27, forty-eight hours later (over Christmas Day, no less), Grolle's resignation and Walter's appointment caught the attention of TheNew York Times.[1]

In his letter to Mrs. Bok, Grolle wrote, “This is a time when many details need to be developed and put on a business basis.”

And, predating the muted thoughts of his friend Carl Flesch, he added: “Another important part of the work [to be done], the development of the morale of the faculty and the students also needs attention....”

And thirdly, he stressed the necessity of a public information campaign to underscore “the fundamental idea upon which the Curtis Institute is based.”

He added:

It is the latter principle especially that needs to receive our greatest consideration, because, according to my opinion, it is the very life of the Institute, and in the end will prove to be the factor that will enable the public to differentiate between the Curtis Institute and other institutions where excellent faculties are being developed. [2]

On this last point, Mary Louise had no quarrel.

***

WALTER WAS CLOSE to fifty-years-old; a graduate of the University of Michigan, Class of 1892. His selection was a temporary, two-year mid-career appointment, to begin in May. [3] For the second time, as had been the case with Grolle, the school named someone whose background fell outside the originally established employment specifications.

The new Board of Directors ignored Walter’s lack of experience as a musician and teacher. Though, it was said, he was a “prominent member” of the University of Michigan's Glee Club.[4]

Walter was, however, an experienced executive, especially one skilled in niche orchestral management, a new business-oriented specialty. He had previously run the Boston Symphony Orchestra and, for a time, was the U. S.-based manager for the celebrated Polish composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski. His influence was such that he was able to attract the German conductor Bruno Walter to appear in Detroit in 1924 for a block-buster all-Wagnerian program. Perhaps most important, he had a proven record in reining in costs, recently overseeing the reduction of Detroit's annual deficit by $50,000 (the equivalent of about $850,000 today). [5]From a fiscal viewpoint, Walter was just what the doctor ordered.

Walter's two years (1925 to 1927) at The Curtis galvanized a student body to achievement and a faculty to distinction. Department heads included such savants as Marcella Sembrich, Voice; Josef Hofmann, Piano; Carl Flesch, Violin; Louis Bailly, Viola; Felix Salmond, Violoncello; Carlos Salzedo, Harp; and Leopold Stokowski, Orchestra. They all resonated with a blue-chip ring.

***

MINDFUL OF GROLLE’S third recommendation to Mrs. Bok—promotion—Walter readied the launch of a media blitz. It was an area of expertise, and he spearheaded a publicity campaign—more a media assault, really—that was crucial in establishing The Curtis' educational standing in the first rank of America's music conservatories. This, in the public mind, as well as in the consciousness ofthe professional world.

As important, he saw the use of unpaid media as a recruitment tool. Press reports could reach potential students in a way that even targeted marketing in trade publications could not.

Walter’s effort reached more than two hundred newspapers (those with the biggest circulations) from coast to coast. He wrote the music editors individually for support in “informing the American people of the character and purpose of this unusual undertaking.” Newspapers responded favorably.

Not surprisingly, given Walter’s ties to Detroit,The Detroit News was particularly lavish with space. Following a visit to Philadelphia by the newspaper’s music editor, it splashed before readers an illustrated eight-column-wide article. The New York Times’“special representative” delivered “an interesting and comprehensive article.” [6]

To underscore prestige, paid advertising was directed to well-respected music magazines (Musical Observer, The Musical Digest, The Musical Leader); the local press (The Philadelphia Inquirer); in an important, high-minded literary magazine of the day, The American Mercury; and in High Society’s bully pulpit, Vanity Fair.In this last publication, there were several inserts. Walker had a particular weakness for Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair.

***

NOT ALL PUPILS were, of course, precious prodigies; yet enough were. Many were to figure, in varying ways, in the unfolding legend of The Curtis. Future violist Max Aronoff, the first to step over the threshold, established a path for thousands to follow. In his footsteps, in 1924, were about two-hundred-fifty other new entrants, including Lois zu Putlitz, Mary Binney Montgomery, Edna Phillips, Samuel O. Barber, Iso Briselli, and Orlando Cole. As time would tell, a stellar cast.

Mary Louise was on the threshold at 1726 Locust Street to welcome newcomers,a ceremony that down the years became her opening day ritual.

Among the new recruits were the recipients ofthe first-allotted scholarships, Ruth S. Strauss for piano study and sixteen-year-old Jacob Savitt for violin. [7]

Mary Louise saw promise in drawing pupils from places in America traditionally underrepresented in theclassical music arena. Some were neophytes. Others, not so much.

An early class member was William Frederick Cardin, a future violinist born into the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. He wasfamiliarly known by his Native American name, “Pejawah,” or “Big Cat.” Cardin had previously studied at The American Conservatory in Fontainbleau, France, and was an already a tested professional. He turned to The Curtis to hone skills in composition and violin, graduating in 1927.

In Josef Hoffman's second-floor studio, Angélica Morales von Sauer, a native of Puerto Rico, trained on the piano, landing a professional début at age thirteen.

Another piano coach. George F. Boyle, saw equal potential in Ursula Guy Curd, one of six Black students in the inaugural class. Native-born Australian Boyle was impressed: “[S]he disclosed decided talent pianistically, coupled with high musical and artistic ideals. She has…consistently matured and developed so that she is now an interesting and accomplished pianist.” Curd graduated in 1926, moving to a performance career she combined with private teaching and instruction in Philadelphia public schools.

Mrs. Bok auditioned another African American student, Carl Robinson; quickly gave her approval for his admission, and welcomed him in 1926 to study piano under David Saperton. Robinson's student record detailed his “excellent marks and teacher commendations.”

Robinson was among the plucky few who found Josef Hofmann approachable. Despite Hofmann’s towering eminence, Robinson turned to the remote piano department head, of all people, to unburden himself about hopes he harbored for African American musical artists. His dream, he told Hofmann, was to “incorporate [and fund] a foundation which will have for its purpose the education of the best musical talents of the Negro race.” [8]

***

AT FIRST, MRS. Bok nodded deferentially to the newly established Advisory Council. As is usually presumed with such bodies, governing directors were supposed to draw on a board/council for unvarnished advice. The Curtiscouncil lasted just two years, from 1924 to 1926. The group turned out to be anything but independent—rather a clutter of controversy; conflict of interest; nepotism; and compromising, interlocking friendships. One council member was even a Nazi-leaning crypto fascist, an ugly facet to his life that was plainly unknown initially to Mary Louise and to his council cohort.

Given its short-lived existence, the Advisory Council devolved to be—as these things often are—just window dressing.

Structural weakness in the administrative hierarchy redounded to Mary Louise’s benefit. From it, she consolidated power, filling a vacuum that William Edwin Walker, nor her husband and father were able to fill. She knew everyone, students, faculty, and staff alike by name, and tried to establish individual commonalities—schmoozing, as it were—to create as many personal relationships as possible,

As outsiders to the tightly knit, learned in-crowd, family directors Cyrus Curtis and Edward Bok did not bother with The Curtis' intramural politics. As usual, they were more inclined to monitor finances.

Friendships and cronyism were widespread. Conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who had steered the Detroit Symphony Orchestra into the top rank of American orchestras, was an associate of The Curtis' director Walter, by way of their mutual collaboration at the DSO. Gabrilowitsch rose in the American cultural hierarchy and in esteem when he married Mark Twain's daughter Clara Clemens, a concert singer, in 1909.

Gabrilowitsch also forged links with fellow councilors “Madame” Marcella Sembrich, an internationally celebrated operatic soprano and a prominent Curtis voice coach; the omnipresent Josef Hofmann; the irascible Carl Flesch; and other colleagues in the entrenched eastern European music diaspora. During numerous Curtis-sponsored summerbreaks in Maine, violinists jocularly referred to themselves as “fiddlers.” In domestic and international professional tours, they reclaimed their sober mien as master musicians.

Violinists Efrem Zimbalist, who had joined The Curtis in 1928, and Lea Luboschutz, a faculty member from 1927 to 1947, were also frequent Curtis-sponsored summer vacationers. Mary Louise and Luboschutz joined in a lasting friendship. Zimbalist's destiny was more capricious, and, ultimately, exceptional, becoming Mary Louise's second husband, after Edward's death in 1930.

***

OTHERS ON THE twelve-member advisory panel concealed opaque self-interests, or out-right conflicts.

Walter S. Fischer was the son of Carl Fisher, namesake of Carl Fisher, Inc., one of America's flagship music publishers. Carl Fisher, Inc., gave Frederick “Big Cat” Cardin his first contract for his compositionCree War Dance. Other Curtis composers also shared close business ties with the publishers.

Hofmann, a pitchman for Steinway & Sons for many years, was friendly—maybe too friendly—with council member Ernest Urchs, head of the piano company's concerts' and artists' bureau. The conservatory's advertisements and publicity materials announced that “The Steinway is the official piano of The Curtis Institute of Music.” By the decade's end, about seventy-five Steinways grands were packed into Curtis buildings. Each one retailed at a minimum of $875 (about $15,000 today). In October 1925, Hofmann lent his talents at the “grand opening gala” of Steinway Hall, the piano company's massive showroom in mid-town Manhattan. Cyrus and Edward were there. Though there was no record, Mary Louise likely attended, as well.

Hofmann also had a bone to pick with Grace Harriet Spofford, Mary Louise's eminently qualified choice as the school's executive secretary. (Later, the title became “dean.”) After William Walter's departure in 1927 and the pianist's subsequent rise to director, he forced her out. Hofmann’s differences with Spofford were never aired.

Another councilor, Edward Ziegler, [9]was assistant general manager at the New York Metropolitan Opera, an important funnel to professional success for Curtis voice students. (Sembrich was a frequent Met performer.)

Felix Adler, a professor of political and social ethics, was a founder of the Society of Ethical Culture, a secular, politically left-leaning spiritual group. Jennie Fels, Mary Louise's good friend and a Curtis director, was the head of Ethical Culture's Philadelphia branch. Adler's son, Lawrence Adler, was the school's Academic Department dean. Lawrence, in turn, was married to Emily L. McCallip, registrar of the Preparatory Department. Later, in the Hofmann administration, she became a student counselor. Her husband was her boss.

Under a veneer of Old-World courtliness, chief mischief maker Carl Flesch characteristically seethed with an internalized ill-will against Hofmann and Stokowski. He barely checked his hatred for his patron Mary Louise. His American students, unschooled in such European niceties as bowing to music maestros, got short-shirted. Flesch was not particularly fond of Americans, anyway.

The most problematic council member was Dutchman Willem Mengelberg, the internationally acclaimed conductor of Amsterdam's Concertgebou Orchestra. At the time of his appointment, he was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—and also a latent fascist. Mengelberg's politics were not overt. But he nurtured a Nazi ideological affinity—ironically enough, on a Curtis board where more than half of its members were Jews. In 1940, he showed his true colors, welcoming the German invasion of his Dutch homeland.

“Conductors suspected of cooperating with the Nazis have lost favor among the defiant Dutch,” the Chicago Sentinel reported. “The famous conductor, Willem Mendelberg, has been stamped as 'an eager collaborator of the Germans,' and his concerts are sparsely attended, despite the fact that he is Holland's most famous conductor.” [10]

Soon after the end of World War II, Mengelberg was cashiered by the Netherlands's Honour Council for Music. Dutch Queen Wilhelmina later stripped him of his Gold Medal of Honor.

***

THE PRESS REPORTED that an “extensive remodeling” of The Curtis's campus buildings was “practically completed.” “Not only do these buildings afford satisfactory physical equipment but through their charm of design and location they contribute to the environmental stimulus which is so desirable,” Chicago's Musical Leader concluded.[11]“Practically” was still far cry from completely.Even as late as 1930, the institute was still without its proposed new lighting fixtures.

Renovations were improvised (the old parlor room in the former Drexel mansion doubled for recitals and rehearsals, for example), and all the buildings retained their dark, wood-paneled interiors of late Victorian vintage. Mrs. Bok managed to relieve some of the gloominess by installing clear windowpanes in the dining room. “Not a sign of colored-glass panels, of course!” she declared to a friend. [12]

The place was packed with oil paintings in a scattered, old-fashioned manner. Etchings, statuettes, tapestries, Oriental rugs, marbles, and bronzes, all furnishings normally appealing to a person favoring Victorian style, were helter skelter. And a lot of ferns, a go-to period flora.

Since she signed off on the interior design, one can say Mrs. Bok favored the look. A staff English teacher praised the “rare beauty” of the objects d'art. “The beauty of the work in stone, metal, and wood can scarcely be described to those who cannot see and experience it,” he had declared.

The abundance of art had purpose. Oil paintings and accompanying bibelots affirmed Mary Louise’s commitment to holistic education. The following from an early catalog could have easily flowed from Mary Louise’s pen:

Believing that the study of one form of Art is stimulated by the appreciation of another, The Curtis Institute of Music seeks to provide an atmosphere that will furnish this subtle influence.[13]

Among forty paintings, there were works by then-contemporary artists Childe Hassam (1859-1935) and George Inness, Jr. (1854-1926), whose names still echo favorably today. Inness was a particular favorite of Edward Boks, and his work also found place of pride at the Boks' Merion house.

Winged Figure or Angelby Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921), hung in the old Drexel mansion’s parlor—rechristened the “Common Room”—captured an enigmatic feeling. The unidentified female in the picture was realistically portrayed. Angel wings excepted. Harvard's Fogg Museum has a similar version.

The Curtis’ bloodline got its due. An unattributed, eighteen-inch-high plaster bust of Mary Louise adorned the center of the Common Room's mantle, above an imposing recessed fireplace. No visitor would likely miss a gilt-wood framed picture of founder-president, by early 20th-century, Philadelphia-born artist Agnes Allen. It was nearly four-feet high. Cyrus Curtis, the institute's namesake, was also recognized by a nearly twenty-six-inch-high figurative bust. The plaster work was by prominent sculptor Charles Allan Grafly (1862-1929), a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. [14]

Not forgotten was Edward Bok's reproduction of the Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, which Mary Louise had “rescued” from the Curtis Building after her husband's death. Though not immediately installed, the giant oil eventually found pride-of-place on a wall above the first landing of the Common Room's richly carved wooden staircase.

Some commissioned art was less conspicuous, but still slyly projected the new institute’s sought-after prestige.There was no mistaking that tone in early catalogs illustrated byLouis H. Ruyl, a famed Massachusetts artist. His etchings captured a posh Rittenhouse Square, universally populated, or so it seemed, by glamorously dressed Center City denizens. They were meant to be, onesupposes, just typical plain folks—not runway models, as they actually appear.

***

THE BUILDINGS WERE treated to decorative high art, manifested in wrought-iron fabrications by America's premier metal designer Samuel Yellin (1884-1940). Working from a Philadelphia metal-smith shop, Yellin produced works patterned in curvatures of rosettes, curlicues, flower buds, and petals. These were embedded in all sorts of things, lamps, screens, stair railings, and in fashioning in-door and out-door gates, and the like. In 1922, he designed the entrance portal to St. Mark's Church in nearby Locust Street, just east of The Curtis.

Edward Bok’s Philadelphia Award went to Yellin in 1925. Though a public recognition, thought to be free of influence and collusion, Edward always called the shots. Yellin’s selection was Bok’s way of bestowing his personal imprimatur on the artist’s oeuvre. It also made him look good as a taste-master. The Boks had previously commissioned Yellin for work at their Merion house.

The ur Pennsylvania Museum of Art also acquired some of Yellin’s master works. By Mary Louise’s good graces, the museum’s so-called Yellin Collection expanded in 1930 with examples of foreign-made metal-smithing. Yellin had acquired them for his patron when shopping—with her checkbook—for art “abroad.”[15]

For The Curtis, Mrs. Bok called on the metal sculptor to craft interior and exterior gates, in particular intricately designed works for the Drexel building on Locust Street and the Sibley mansion, fronting South 18th Street. The ornamental gates contain eye-popping detail. Because of their heavy weight, however, opening and closing them can be an ordeal.

***

ABOVE THE COMMON Room was a second-floor balcony, leading to the offices of the director; Mary Louise; and Mary Louise’s secretary, Mary Reed. (Reed was something of family factotum. She also worked for Curtis in his law offices.) Studios, classrooms, and recital and practice rooms were scattered elsewhere in the general area. Some staff were assigned living quarters on the third floor.

Mary Louise scheduled office time on four days each week. Reed juggled the ebb and flow. Everyone was welcome. Interspersed were other duties; regularly attended new student auditions. “She was there only as a listener,” recalled pianist Vladimir Sokoloff, who spent a near lifetime at The Curtis, as a student from 1929 and later as an instructor until his death in 1997.

She was scrupulous in vetting and selecting new faculty, particularly in early years. Though on occasion she took counsel from Stokowski, the final call was always hers. [16]

***

AN IN-HOUSE LIBRARY was cobbled together from an electic mix of a few texts on hand.William Newnham Chattin Carlton, or W.N.C. Carlton, as he was referred to formally, wound up as chief librarian following a colorful, circuitous route.

In his native England, Carlton had tried his hand at rare book dealing.His efforts never panned out, and he then decided to try his luck in the United States. A meteoric career followed,as a professional librarian, from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the American Library in Paris; and the Hamilton Public Library in Hamilton, Ontario. The peripatetic bookman finally wound up at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Carlton's studies, professional experience, and personal inclination never included musicology. In fact, according to The New York Times, his academic training was far afield; he was an eminent authority on the French Emperor Napoleon.

Never mind. Carlton was known to Cary and Curtis Bok, both former students at Williams, and their favorable support cinched his selection by Mary Louise. By 1930, the library's holdings amounted to about 12,000 books, music scores, and a “generous collection” of long-playing vinyl records.

Mary Louise also threw her weight behind a Curtis academician Jean-Baptiste Beck, a faculty member from 1924. Besides teaching French and music history, Beck was the editor of an obscure, scholarly transcription of French music and lyrics from the Middle Ages. His plan, one could say, was ambitious: the publication of “every surviving thing non-liturgical that was sung in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteen centuries.”

Given the economics of publishing such a majestic—to be sure, massive—work, it was not surprising that LesChansonniers des Troubadours et desTrouvères (The Songs of Troubadours and Trouvères) had not found a publisher. Mary Louise remedied that, funding its printing by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In a scholarly journal, Speculum, the Penn Presscredited Mrs. Bok’s “generosity,” making “the great enterprise possible.” [17]

A year before, in 1927, Mary Louise and Edward Bok tried their own hand at self-publishing, albeit in a less ambitious manner than that she later extended to Beck. The Boks’ effort was a Christmas greeting called Mary's Son: A Christmas Brochure. [18] The “brochure” was actually a ten-page hardback that told the tale of a thief deterred in robbing a jewelry shop when overtaken by Christmas spirit. Given its mawkish quality, the anonymously written story had the earmarks of a work by Edward.[19]

The “brochure” hinted at an otherwiselittle-known religiosity by the Boks. That they were Christian was a given. Mary was nominally an Episcopalian, and an Episcopal priest had presided at the Boks’ wedding at Lyndon. Otherwise, organized faith had only a figurative rôle in the lives of the Curtises and Boks.

***

WILLIAM WALKER’S CONTRACT ended in summer, 1927. His mission as financial fixer was accomplished, and Mary Louise had only praise for his “good business administration.” [20]Whereupon Walker joined the St. Louis Symphony Society as its business manager. In 1945, he was found unconscious in a New York City apartment, dying soon after in a local hospital. He was in his early seventies. Nocause of death was given. No survivors were mentioned. The Curtis offered no recognition.

INTERMEZZO

Chapter XVII

JOSEF HOFFMAN

                 (In Progress)

      THIS CHAPTER IS INTENTIONALLY BLANK

Chapter XVIII

WIDOWHOOD

MARY LOUISE DID not ease lightly into friendships. She had many acquaintances, and for these she could draw from a plentiful, diverse stock of Philadelphia Society figures, cultural titans, as well as business executives at the Curtis Publishing Company. In addition, she was well connected with academicians, performing artists, and those in league to advance classical music education in America. Musicologists moved freely through her life as respected, often cherished colleagues. Some in her orbit were not always reliable. Carl Flesch disguised his negative feelings toward her. Johann Grolle turned on her. A stalwart, Josef Hofmann—even when battling his own personal demons—was always a sage advisor.

Her community of acquaintances formed an interlocking web of contacts, allies, and the benefactors of her financial largess. Mary Louise was the pivotal nexus. The Curtis, its crossroads. Relationships were symbiotic; sometimes transactional, but they shared fundamentals: talent, professional success, and an investment of time. For Mary Louise, add fortune.

She was an inveterate “goer”—opera-goer, lecture-goer,movie-goer, and theater-goer. After the equally euphonious and bold sounds of orchestration, bravura declamation on the stage was among her greatest delights. For nights out at the theater after Edward's death in 1930, whether in Center City or in New York City, Cary was her usual escort.Her tastes, not surprisingly, ran to classical operas and challenging, serious dramas.

At a performance of Mozart's Così Fran Tutte by the Philadelphia Grand Opera, Eleanor Roosevelt joined Bok in her box at the Academy of Music. She was funding the Curtis-affiliated opera company. [1]

With Cary at her side, she attended Georges Bizet's Carmen. A “brilliant” performance, she declared. [2]Gian-Carlo Mendotti, the young composer and her one-time protégé and favorite during his training at The Curtis, joined her for an opera production of Porgy and Bess at the Alvin Theatre in New York.

Through the 1930s, she took in a slew of stage productions, including Chekhov's The CherryOrchard in New York (after refreshment at Rumplemeyer's, a mid-town staple for East-side ladies who lunched); a Broadway début performance of Grand Hotel (a year later, in 1932, a movie adaption featured Philadelphia native John Barrymore); a Broadway production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (at The Plymouth Theatre); Ibsen's Ghosts(with the Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova, one of Mary Louise's favorite stage performers); The Taming of the Shrew, headlined by married partners Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, who were “delightful”; and the Broadway production of Edith Wharton's dark drama Ethan Frome (with Canadian actor Raymond Massey invoking his trademark “Voice of God” in his portrayal of Frome.)

In between, she went to a screening of Feet First, one of Harold Lloyd's popular, absurdist comedies. She found its humor wanting.“So we gazed at Harold Lloyd scaling the front of an impossibly high office building, slipping and sliding and falling.” Unlike other audience members, she could not summon “little screams or ohs and ahs”. With a self-deprecating turn, she added, “It seemed to affect a lot that way, so of course there is something wrong with me!” [3]

In December, 1935 she and Cary attended the International Live Stock Show in Chicago. They showed up as sponsors, on behalf of the Curtis Publishing Company. The outing amused her. “I will try to gaze intelligently at the world's largest bull!” she quipped.

***

DEEPFRIENDSHIPS WERE longstanding, inviolate, and, as important, intense. She was loyal and generous in spirit. When needed, she offered monetary assistance, born, as she would say, from 'love.” Her dearest friends were independent-minded women. Some were driven mavericks in the arts, theater mostly. Almost always they were self-sufficient achievers. Some were crushes.

Whether near or far, Mary Louise was a committed letter writer. Family secretary Mary Reed transcribed her correspondence. When time allowed, and when so inclined, she was able to knock off, on average, a two-to-four-page letter almost daily. To business associates, they were formal. Missives to her acquaintances were warm and correct.

Mary Louise’s female intimates—her “sisterhood,” as it were—got to see another side to her, especially in later years after Edward's death in 1930. Those outside her immediate circle could hardly guess at her closely guarded inner nature. When she let down her hair, the grande dame was more dame than grande. Albeit, a decorous one. Frequently on the arm of son Cary, she was a fixture in Philadelphia at the theater and at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Overnight jaunts to New York included shopping at up-market emporiums and theater-going. She was always on the go to Maine.

She defied the strictures of Prohibition (1920-1930). She hosted large soirées at Swastika. (She did not retire the house name until 1935, well after the rise of National Socialism in Germany.) When entertaining, she passed around mixed “cocktails;” occasionally, vintage French Bénédictine brandy, and, for special events, high-end Champagne.[4]She once contemplated a Prohibition-free holiday in Bermuda with Cary where they could indulge in “a few spurts on the side!” “Rah, rah for repeal!” she cheered in one letter. [5]

She flirted with the risqué. On a pre-Thanksgiving venture in Philadelphia with friends and family, Mary Louise and her group took in “a lascivious [unnamed] play—a musical comedy...which was dirty and third-ratish [sic] altogether! The only funny things were the naughty ones!'[6]

To know her then—in her mid-fifties, at the height of her powers—one would have had the companionship of a droll, cheeky, and merrily Puckish figure. As Mrs. Bok, she was not as free to cut such a figure. Before widowhood, she was straitlaced as her position and the public appearance of that status demanded. In fact, she could be prudish. When a copy of James Joyce’s banned book Ulysses somehow managed to evade U. S. Postal Service censors to fall into her hands, she was not a literary fan. “Bad taste,” she pronounced. At least, she read the book. [7]

Letters to friends were an amalgam of wit, humor, gossip, news, insight—and sappy, goofy school-girl-like exchanges that had been denied her when she was growing up.

These now were the friends she never had as a youngster, nor as a yearning, developing teen. She had never dated, nor, more precisely for the time, had been “courted” before Edward. When he swept her off her feet as a teenager, he also swept away her adolescence. Devotion to her mother Louisa and her work as a junior scribbler at The Ladies' Home Journal sub-planted girlish hi-jinks and the normal, shared intimacies of girlfriends. As she herself matured, Mary Louise’s circle of friends were her late-blooming confidantes.

Her earliest friendship of this ilk developed from her interest in theater, not music.

***

ANNIE RUSSELL WAS an English-born stage actress, who made her name in American show business in New York in 1878. Through the turn of the 20th century, she was well thought of by critics, but her range and success were circumscribed by type-casting—curiously, of her own making.

Even into her late thirties, she somehow managed to project adolescent innocence, often by playing a doe-eyed gamine in one Broadway hit after another. A New York Timescritic singled out one performance of this ilk as “a marvelously sincere and amusing impersonation of a girl of sixteen just out of an orphan asylum.”[8]

Her celebrity was such that in 1903 she caught the eye of Edward Bok, who had decided to run a story on her personal life in the May 1903 edition of TheLadies' Home Journal. In a letter to Edward Bok, she explained, “...[M]y bussiness [sic] is to play young girls parts.” [9] Later, mastering the nuances of her stage persona, she transitioned to soubrette.

After the luster of Broadway waned, Russell organized her own touring group, the Old English Comedy Company, and on occasion she would play in Philadelphia. One booking in Philadelphia, in 1914, saw her in the role of Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan. Meaning, that by that time, she had graduated from her “bussiness” as ingenue and flirtatious damsel to a more worldly young married, her role as Lady Teazle.[10]

When Russell died in 1936, Mary Louisetold Faith Baldwin, the romance novelist and another a long-term friend of Annie, of her own decades-long bond with the actress. Mrs. Bok spoke of her “friendship of forty-three years....” [10]She meant thirty-three, dating to Russell’s 1903 “discovery” by Edward Bok in the pages of The Ladies’ Home Journal.

Mary Louise’sletters to Russell were affectionate, compassionate, and passionate. The interaction was well short of libidinous; more like a school-girl crush. Annie got consigned with a pet name, “Angel,” with numerous variants, “My dear Angel,” “My dear Angel Child,” “My Precious Angel,” “Beloved Lil Angel,” and “Angel Dearest.” The one thing Annie never was was “Annie.”

Mary tagged herself “wurm,” a self-deprecating take-off on “worm” one supposes—suggesting a curious, even extreme, self-introspection. In another missive, she was “Mamie.” One of her favorite terms of endearment was again “darlink.” She flexed clever wordplay and tricky grammatical construction. She twisted “How were you?” into a jocular down-market pretzel, “How was you?” and, “Is well. You was too?”, and summoned giddy baby-talk, as in “werry fine.” “So-be-it" transitions were accompanied by “La, la!” She displayed an eclectic vocabulary. “Salah,” Arabic for “prayer,” crops up.

She occasionally signed off letters, with complementary closings, “Your luvingest,” or the cryptic acronym, “B B S O C Y K.” In fact, not so cryptic, as it was a then-popular young person's code meaning “Bye Bye Sweet One and Consider Yourself Kissed.” [11] The one-hundred-year-old acronym is astonishingly similar to abbreviations that salt communications in social media today. The quaint period term “motor,” rather than “drive, is felicitously anachronistic. “Honest injun” appeared for emphasis. No ironywas intended.

Her understanding of public health was captive to the science of her time. She informed Annie that flu was contracted by a “germ,” rather than by a viral infection. [12]

***

MARY LOUISE’S MASH letters illuminated a candor otherwise not expressed publicly. Her personal life was carefree, vibrant, and seemingly untouched by the then-prevalent after-shocks of the Depression, leading up to World War II.

When it touched a nerve, she got serious. The forced departure in 1934 of Leopold Stokowski—her Prince Charming—as the Philadelphia Orchestra's director was an abomination.In a rare display of public vitriol, she castigated the orchestra’s Board of Directors at a meeting of the orchestra’s subscribers at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. The setting was in shouting distance of the Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home just south on Broad Street.

In Mary Louise’s eyes, Stokowski was Philadelphia and their identities were twinned as one.

Her hackles up, she declared: “For Philadelphia to lose Stokowski is unthinkable.” [13] As president of The Curtis, she spoke from a powerful bully pulpit. As the widow of Edward Bok, the orchestra’s early financial angel, she spoke with the authority of his legacy.

With Russell she shared her resolve to distance herself from the orchestra's management and “donkey” board. To make that point, she resigned herseat as an orchestra board director. Curtis, in turn, resigned as the board’s president. “The whole city is agog, not understanding what it's all about, but every one [sic] unites in wishing Stokowski to remain with the Orchestra…”

Stokowski's “resignation”—technically, he had refused to renew his contract—was “the fault of the Association Board of Directors, who are the world's prime collection of asses!”

Rising to furtherindignation—an emotion rarely associated with her—Mary Louise added, “It has been hard to endure, really, to sit in the Board meetings and see their smug sureness that [sic] they run the Orchestra, and so little loyalty to Stokowski or their President [son Curtis]. And such amateur bungling! Neither Curtis nor I can blame Prince [Stokowski].”[14]

Some letters spoke of quotidian matters, housekeeping at The Curtis, or “C I.,” as she often referred to the institute in written form. “The dining is in order, and the windows are a great improvement to the room. Not a sign of the colored-glass panels, of course! But the pictures are in place. We still await lighting fixtures! La, la!”

President Herbert Hoover invited her to the White House in 1932. “[H]eaven knows why,” she said. Perhaps disingenuously. The Curtis Publishing Company, especially as expressed in editorials in The Saturday Evening Post, had always been a vigorous supporter. Had she forgotten her support for Hoover’s European food drive following World War I, a philanthropic rescue plan she championed in Philadelphia?

Otherwise, she described her visit:

It is a pretty thing to see, although all that happens is you stand around the beautiful rooms and halls, and finally get in line and are at last presented to the President and his wife [Lou]. It consists of a smile and how-do-you-do and a handclasp to most of us.... He looked tired—his face very lined.

Three years later she was at a dinner and music recital at the Polish Embassy in Washington. “Ain't I the stylish lady?” she wisecracked. Again, disingenuously. Josef Hofmann, The Curtis’ director, was a Pole born in Krakow, after all.

Some exchanges passed along gossip A lot about the woes of having to suffer the putative inanities of servants—evincinga shallow tone deafness to the woes of the Depression-era working class. She sacked her chambermaid Elizabeth “inasmuch as she continued to hurt her co-workers' feelings.” Elizabeth, in turn, was replaced with an “expert”. Another servant's replacement was “a very pleasant, nice type of Irish-Catholic.…” Adding a dash of arrogance, she added, “[S]he seems to like me. So you see she is intelligent!”

She related how she sold a Packard; replaced it with a Chrysler, another automotive behemoth; following up the car exchange by an equally “[f]irst important event,” hiringa new all-purpose chauffeur. (Long-term driver Patrick McAuley was seemingly no longer around.)

She credulously went on, describing her new driver as a Russian named Vladimir, or “Vlad,” who had served as a colonel in the military of deposed Czar Nicholas I. He “knew the imperial children well” she continued, and had graduated from Kiev University with an engineering degree. “Have checked up on it all, and it's true,” Mary Louise boasted.

Mrs. Bok’s dogs were always close companions. “Snorky” and “Mr. Cox” were among her sidekicks. On walks, Mary said, they “examine everything minutely, and apparently with great interest...” Adding a quip, [B]ut they say very little about what they see. La, la, and again, la, la!” Another four-legged friend, “Two-Bits,” was “hard on the rugs!” “Michael” was her Airedale. “Tammie” would run away.

She also gaily confided her flirtations with the opposite sex—at least one, that is, memorialized in a heady letter to Russell.In early 1931, a year after Edward's death, she gushed abouta rendez-vous with an unnamed “boyfriend,” even teasing asuggestion, despite a disclaimer, of an overnight tryst.

My 'boyfriend' departed this noon—bless his sweet old heart! I gave him boutonniere of forget-me-nots this morning. 'Twas the only allure, I swear it, that I offered! He said, with warm accents that he would treasure them all his life. Beyond this, my dear Angel, we did not go! I saw him off at the train, and our parting was above reproach. [15]

***

MARY LOUISE TRIED to be neighborly. But her attempt to woo Dr. Albert C. Barnes, an art collector who lived on Latches Lane, nearby to Swastika, went horribly wrong. Mary Louise had hoped to introduce a friend, New York artist Leo Katz, to the reclusive Barnes.

Barnes was the impresario of the Barnes Foundation, a gallery of early modern art he founded in 1922 and the home of paintings by Picasso (1881-1973), Matisse (1869-1954), and Modigliani (1884-1920), among scores of other works by the era's luminaries. In fact, it boasted the greatest number of pictures by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) anywhere.

Everyone in art circles (particularlythose among Proper Philadelphians) knew Barnes to be an irascible, rich curmudgeon. He was also a bully, a loudmouth, and vulgarian—condemnations always stated in sotto voce as not to ignite avituperative response. “Neighborly” was hardly a word he had any familiarity with.

As for meeting Katz, Barnes would have none of it. In Barnes’ jealously-addled mind, that the invitation came from the châtelaine of Swastika; the high priestess of The Curtis Institute of Music; the daughter of Cyrus Curtis and the wife of Edward Bok, and someone in first rank of Philadelphia’s Anointed, concocted a mixture of enough brimming status envy to fuel rejection of Mary Louise’s entreaty.

Mary Louise had entered Barnes’ venomous snake pit innocently enough. In a letter dated November 15, 1928, she requested, on behalf of Katz, an audience and a gallery tour. She added superfluously, “[He is] a well known lecturer on art subjects and himself an artist of distinction.” Actually, Katz’ distinctions included works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and in other notable venues. Left unmentioned was that Katz was bristly opinionated, a sore point for many.

At first, Barnes was coy, seesawing between “nay” and “yea.” Finally, he rejectedthe request, claiming that the Barnes Foundation was not a public gallery, but a private educational institution closed to random visitors. Still, he alsoarranged for the artist to visit the foundation for a music program and lecture—well short, to be sure, of the Cook's tour that Mary Louise had hoped for.

Three days later, during Katz’ visit for the music recital, it went from bad to worse. Wandering away from the recital, Katz found Barnes showing off his prized pictures to others. According to Barnes, in a subsequent letter of outrage to Mary Louise, Katz allegedly had had the temerity to address the great man directly.

Katz had meandered into Room Number Four. Pointing to Saint Jerome and the Lion by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), he bellowed to Barnes, “That is not a Dürer.” Barnes was incensed by the impertinence and by the artist’s “very bad manners.” (Katz was also wrong; it was a painting by the German master.)

Barnes ordered Katz to exit. “I am merely giving you a needed lesson in deportment. Get out of here,” he declared, detailing the rumpus in a November 19 letter to Mrs. Bok.

She wrote to apologize. “Please believe that I regret very much [if Katz] had done or said anything to displease you....” [16]

Barnes believed that rabble—that is,high-hat rabble—should be banned from his Latches Lane playpen. His exclusionary rule became an ad hominem, named for his arch-nemesis Fiske Kimball, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art's director and the subject himself of many of Barnes’ toxic earfuls. In a letter to Kimball—in Barnes shorthand known as the “Fiske Kimball letter”—he disabused the PMA director of “a very prevalent idea that the Foundation is a place for more or less of conspicuous Philadelphians to entertain their friends.” [17]

Of “conspicuous” Philadelphians, Mary Louise was of course among the most visible.

Chapter XIX

CONTRETEMPS

(In Progress)

ANOTHER DISPUTE WAS brewing. Its protagonists were composer Samuel Barber, the Curtis-trained prodigy newly making his way professionally in New York; and a promising, Russian-born immigrant violinist named Isask Brisselli, a young scholar at The Curtis. The kerfuffle had all the hallmarks of a misunderstanding, and at first the contretemps could have been dismissed as nothing more than a simple mix-up. That was not to be.

The ensuing incident inextricably tangled The Curtis, drawing in Mary Louise; Josef Hofmann; XXXXX, an instructor; Jennie Fels, Mary's close friend and colleague; and Jennie’s husband, Soap King Samuel Fels. The spat rose to clash, coming close to dampening the ardor of Mary Louise's and Jennie's two-decade-old bond.

Johann Grolle lurked as a bit player.

***

ISASK BRISSELLI HAD good luck beyond his wildest imagination. From the start, skeptical American immigration officials had doubted his bona fides as a legitimate refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, Mary Louise Bok saw the twelve-year-old as a dedicated violinist, a highly recommended private student of Carl Flesch, and altogether bright star in The Curtis' 1924 inaugural constellation. In no time, Isask was also living a princely life, lavished upon him by his newly acquired patrons, Jennie and Samuel Fels.

Briselli was born in 1912 into a poor Jewish family in Odessa, the Ukrainian-Russian Black Sea port city. Despite financial strain, his violin studies began at three. In the following nine years, his success was meteoric. In late 1924, the time he entered The Curtis' first class, young Briselli had a new first name, Iso; was the owner of a priceless, eighteenth-century Stradivarius violin, nick-named the “Gréville;” and had become the legal ward of Sam Fels, one of Philadelphia's richest industrialists. When he entered his teen years, Iso also occupied an apartment at the corner of Walnut and 18th streets, paid for by Fels and serviced by a staff of three.

***

Before his appointment at The Curtis, Carl Flesch was also living in Berlin, where Isask had also moved with his parents. Soon enough, the wunderkind became one of Flesch’s brightest pupils and his musical protégé.

Their relationship in Berlin was cut short. Flesch moved to Philadelphia in 1924 as a violin instructor at The Curtis, hired by then-director Johann Grolle, The doomed administrator, acquainted with Flesh by his previous concertizing in Philadelphia, was still presiding over the institute's opening year—a fortunate detail for Isask since Grolle was only months away from being ousted as director by Mary Louise.

Before departing Berlin, Flesch had also arranged for the adolescent Briselli—he called him his “poor Jewish boy”—to be “taken in hand” as his companion on the trip to America. Safely stowed was Isask’s legendary Stradivarius. Flesch never bothered to recount what Briselli's parents thought of their son being summarily spirited away.[1] But it was easy to see why Isask was smothered with Flesch’s affection: he exemplified all of Flesch’s prejudices and predilections for Jews, for violinists, and for eastern Europeans—in that order. Flesch of course fit the mold himself.

Despite his Judeophilia, Flesh believed that Isask’s unfortunate given name might subject him to anti-semitic harm while traveling to board their ship to New York. Somewhere en route, Flesh flipped “Isask,” a then common Jewish name, to “Iso” to conceal his young charge’s identity. Though he never said as much, apparently there was need to modify Iso's surname. It sounded Italian. While he was himself a Jew, Flesch also did not tinker with his own name, presumably for it did not readily conjure any Jewish consanguinity.

Flesch had not counted on an American law that prohibited foreign youths under sixteen from entering the country unless accompanied by “blood relations.” “At passport control [in New York], little Iso was refused to land...,” Flesch lamented when remembering the occasion. “We had to wait until all the passengers had disembarked, whereupon a policeman escorted us to Ellis Island, the purgatory for undesirable immigrants.” [2]

Johann Grolle saved the day. In New York to greet them, The Curtis director arranged for a tribunal to determine Iso’s fate. It found that the youngster could be released to Grolle’s custody if Flesch, as Iso’s companion, “promised on oath that the boy would leave the United States within four months.” Flesch lied. Grolle went along.

 THIS CHAPTER IS INTENTIONALLY INCOMPLETE

Chapter XX

INDISCREET

CARL FLESCH WAS not alone singling out individual students for special attention. Other faculty were also known for their own peculiarities. In some cases, their interactions with students were even more specious than that in the Brisselli affair. The narrow margin between anodyne and public scandal teetered dangerously close. In a time ofno formal, accepted boundaries, nor official safeguards regulating social interaction, liaisons between students and their superiors were unregulated—and ranged from the affectionate to the sexual.

“Prince” Leopold Stokowski fell into the latter category; his roving eye rarely missed spying a nubile musicologist.

Mary Louise, of course, was well aware of Stokie’s flirtatiousness. She had been the butt of it, and even welcomed it. But for details of his intramural and extracurricular behavior, she was either unknowing or willfully ignorant.

Stokowski was particularly drawn to two female students, one a promising pianist and the other an ascending harpist. He was so smitten with teen-aged pianist Mary Binney Montgomery that he proposed marriage—twice. Once, successfully. Alternatively, he just wanted to seduce Edna Phillips, who despite similar travail with others eventually joined the first rank of American harpists.

In 1924, Mary Binney—she preferred the dual-name usage—was in The Curtis' inaugural class when Stokowski spotted her as their paths crossed at 1726 Locust Street. The maestro’s amour-propre was so finely tuned that he saw himself reflectedin Mary Binney—a mirror image, albeit a female incarnation.They shared a Nordic quality. She was beautiful and lithe; he, handsome and slim. They both had blond hair, fair complexions, and blue-colored eyes. They were tall for their time. He, six feet. She, five feet, six-and-half inches.

She was also rich, a débutante and scion of a privileged Main Line family. Her home was a rambling Villanova estate, whose name, Ardrossan, had a Scottish ring. As important, Mary Binney was young, seventeen, projecting a desirabilitythe forty-two-year-old conductor preferred in his love interests.

Philadelphia society columnist Jane Wister proclaimed her to be the "epitome of chic". [1]And talented. While still at The Curtis, she débuted as a soloist with the “Fabulous Philadelphians” at Carnegie Hall. The orchestra, of course, was under the direction of her still unrequited romantic suitor.

Although she promptly accepted aforthcoming marriage proposal from Stokowski, his pursuit of Mary Binney petered out. The maestro’s reputation as a womanizing cad did not escape the attention of Mary Binney's enraged father and mother. Both were blue-bloods: Colonel Robert Leaming Montgomery and the former Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler.

Another black mark was Stokowski’s divorce, at the time a red flag denoting unreliable intentions.(Olga Samaroff left him just a year before.) The door was finally slammed shut when Montgomery figured out that Stokowski was just three years younger than himself.

Stokowski came back for seconds—after a subsequent eleven-year, two-child marriage to Evangeline Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heiress, similarly young as Mary Binney when they married in 1926. Their union dissolved in 1937, and soon after Stokie again pledged his love to Mary Binney. By this time, she had forged a successful career as a modern dancer and as a studio owner-instructor, and she rejected him on her own accord. [2]

Stokowski also struck out with Edna Phillips, who in 1927 arrived at The Curtis as a starry-eyed and eager twenty-year-old from Reading, Pennsylvania. Stokowski's sought-after dalliance with her was just lascivious—and, in addition, extra-marital. Stokie had married Evangeline Johnson in 1926, and was not free again to marry until ten years later.

Daniel Webster, a classical music critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, called Edna “a small-town girl with steely nerves.” Others referred to her as “plucky.” The Evening Bulletingot straight to the point, at least the “point” being what first commended her, in the first place, toStokowski's attention:

Miss Phillips looks more like the illustration on a magazine cover.... She might be the typical American girl with plenty of light, golden curly hair, shining brown eyes, the peaches and cream complexion of sixteen, and full red lips.[3]

Even before joining The Curtis, Edna’s appeal was unavoidable. For a brief time whilea harpist at the famed Roxy Theater in New York, she had to deal with the theater’s pervading risqué culture. Edna quickly returned to Philadelphia. There, French-born master harpist Carlos Salzedo introduced her to Stokowski, who had already retired from The Curtis. (He left in 1927, the same year Phillips enrolled.)

Salzedo, head of The Curtis’ harp department, was so impressed with Edna's abilities, he had arranged an audition for her with the legendary conductor. In fact, Salzedo had decided on his own that the twenty-three-year-old was ready to join the orchestra as its second harpist. It was a controversial proposal—the orchestra's current second harpist was unaware he might be axed at season's end. In addition, if named, Edna would be the first female in an orchestra whose all-male ranks were considered inviolate. The Stokowski-Phillips audition was arranged to be away from prying eyes.

Salzedo lived in The Curtis’ Rittenhouse neighborhood, and had arranged for the encounter to be in his nearby apartment. Prying eyes might have indeed thought the private meeting, scheduled in the evening, as unusual, if not inappropriate. Secrecy was such that Edna was not even certain about the full nature of the get together, nor, for that matter,who besides Salzedo would be there. She was not told about Stokie.

Edna was terrified in the great man’s presence. He was stoic. Overcoming performance anxiety, she plucked faultlessly Debussy's Danses Sacrée et Profane, a musical theme that might have had special appeal to the otherwise impassive conductor. [4]

Then nothing. After a month of waiting, in late February 1930, Edna was summoned to the office of the orchestra's manager, Arthur Judson. The impresario looked displeased. “Sign here,” he ordered, fingering a contract. The fine print was startling. Edna learned that she would replace first harpist Vincent Fanelli. In a snap, Phillips also became not only the first female Fabulous Philadelphian, but the first woman to serve as a permanent member of any major American orchestra. [5]

Stokowski had defied his sexist stereotype. But not as a Lothario. Soon after her appointment, Stokie passed her a note: “Will you take lunch with me today? Answer Yes or No.” Uncertain whether a “No” would jeopardize her job, she answered in the affirmative. Stokowski had planned lunch at his house in Chestnut Hill, a Philadelphia borough of big homes and residents with big wallets. Again, out of the spotlight.

Edna had previously suggested that they meet at a Center City restaurant. In plain view. Stokowski thought otherwise, as he wanted to avoid the gossip that surely would ensue if he were seen with a beautiful young woman—half his age. ”Oh, I don't think so. I don't think people will understand,” Stokie said. Edna repartéed, “What is there to understand?” [6]

She had, she said some years later with an air of pride, resisted “the glamorous one.” [7]

Edna had earlier told Salzeda about Stokie's amorous advance, and she had accepted his avuncular warning: “Do not let yourself get involved with any of these men in the orchestra or you will one day find yourself thrown away like an old shoe.” Salzeda knew all too well, He, like Stokie, was a ladies' man. And he, too, was attracted to May-December relationships.

***

LUCILE LAWRENCE, A descendant of a socially prominent Massachusetts family (Lawrence, Massachusetts, took its name from her forebears), was one in a long generational line of harpists. From age six, her career as a prodigy was almost boundless, especially after she was taken under Salzedo's wing. At fourteen, in 1921, she met Salzedo while summering in Maine with her family. She began studying with him during other Downeast summers and later in New York City. Six years on—the maestro was already teaching at The Curtis by then—Lucile was hired as an associate instructor. She no doubt was highly recommended by Salzedo. The couple married a year later. He was forty-three. Lucile, twenty-one.

The two divorced in 1936, but not before Marjorie Call, a promising harpist from small-town Indiana, began her Curtis tutelage with Salzedo three years before. The French harpist surely found Marjorie’s youth (she was a nineteen-year-old blond) and her ability at the harp reasons enough for their union. In early 1938, a few months after she graduated, they married in the front parlor of the bride's family home in Roachdale, Indiana, somewhere west of Indianapolis and somewhere Salezdo surely, until then, would have had difficulty finding on the map. Their marriage fizzled in 1947.

***

MARY LOUISE WAS not in the dark. Some instructors projected harsh demeanors, more in keeping with their 19th-century European upbringings than what 20th-century American young people were used to. Though short of the physical, bullying and harassment were too often a norm.

Cellist Felix Salmond threw erasers. Pianist Isabelle Vengerova threw barbs that “struck like bolts of lightning.” Carl Flesch could reduce a student to trebling fear. “Send him to Julliard!” he would declare, when any student dared displease him. For some on the faculty roster, “there were the feared and the more feared.” [8]

Gary Graffman, the famed pianist and The Curtis' seventh director (appointed in 1986), was a pudgy seven-year-old, in short pants and knee socks, when he first encountered Madame Vengerova's Herculean wrath in 1936. “...I was never particularly bothered by the Vengerovian storms of rage during my lessons,” Graffman remembered.

After violent, dramatic scenes during which she sometimes picked up a chair and slammed it down on the floor to emphasize her displeasure, she would announce to my parents that there was no hope for me in any field of endeavor whatsoever. I think that what bothered her most was my imperturbability. [9]

Leonard Bernstein also recalled his blistering encounters with Vengerova.

Most of them ended badly—for him. She was just a “Prussian” screamer, and he did not take kindly to it. [10]

Curtis' charges looked upon the “Prussians” as oddities. What with winged-collars, spats, black clothing, pinces nez, and thick accents that often garbled their attempts at normal conversation. Their encounters with students were often tinged with snarling sarcasm, a form of dialog with which American youngsters took offense.

Other European cultural realities misfired. Curtis boys were often sports obsessed, a mind-set alien to the Prussians. Apart from practicing, Curtis boys also wanted to know whether Babe Ruth was going to take the Yankees all the way to the World Series.

Mary Louise knew trouble might be brewing out of sight, and she instructed that “small” windows be installed to doors to teaching studios, classrooms, and practice rooms. She had sensed that inappropriate conduct might be occurring behind closed doors. [11]

FINALE

[TO BE CONTINUED]

ABBREVIATIONS

AEB:The Americanization of Edward Bok

AR: Annie Russell

EB: Edward Bok

EPL: Evening Public Ledger

EAV Eliza Ann Viles

LHJ: The Ladies’ Home Journal

MFM: The Man from Maine

MLC: Mary Louise Curtis

MLCB: Mary Louise Curtis Bok

MLCBZ: Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist

MA: Musical America

PI: The Philadelphia Inquirer

PJE: Philadelphia Jewish Exponent

PL: Public Ledger

NYT: The New York Times

SEP: The Saturday Evening Post

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   THIS SECTION IS INTENTIONALLY INCOMPLETE

   

END NOTES

  CREDITS

   APPRECIATION

 INDEX

  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Carreño has been a reporter and editor for several New England daily newspapers, including the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and The Boston Globe. Among his previously published books are Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon; A Flâneur at Large; and Museum Mile: Philadelphia’s Parkway Museums. He was born in New York, and was educated at New York University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was an educator in the United States and in Britain, where he served as a year-long Academic Visitor at the University of Cambridge. He and his partner, Joan T. Kane, live in Philadelphia.

He can contacted at WritersClearinghouse@yahoo.com.