Music: Mary Lewis

A great many healthy young women from country towns have chirped and kicked, at one time or another, in the annual musical revues of Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld—so many, in fact, that the “Ex-Follies Girl” now has the weight of “Ph. D.” or “Elk”: it connotesmembership in a sort of national oddfellows’ society.

Yet it is no empty phrase, for the training which these women receive equips them to enter other professions. Some, broadening and deepening as the years pass, make excellent mothers to rich little children; others keep their figures and their friends and go on entertaining long after their footlight days are over; a few seek fame. Last week one Mary Lewis was engaged by Gatti-Casazza to sing with the Metropolitan Opera. Before her debut in January as Mimi in La Bohème she will give a concert in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.

Mary Lewis is tall, dark. Her eyelashes are longer than those of most opera stars, her ankles slimmer. Her face is pretty in the strong sun of midday. She has 15 parts in her repertoire, including Louise, Manon, Marguerite, Mimi, Gilda (in Rigoletto), Antonia (in the Tales of Hoffmann), and Thais.

Once she earned her butter and eggs in Christie Comedies with Colleen Moore in Los Angeles, in the days when film stars thought nothing of scraping segments of mulberry pastry from their well-shaped noses. She spent two years with the Ziegfeld organization. After seven months of study abroad, she made her debut in Vienna as Marguerite, had a London triumph in Hugh the Drover and an even more sensational one in Paris in The Merry Widow. When her Metropolitan contract was announced, every paper blared EX-FOLLIES GIRL TO STAR IN OPERA. Tradition dictates that one out of every three Follies girls must be a preacher’s daughter. Mary Lewis was adopted when she was eight years old by Rev. William Fitch of Little Rock, Ark. He was moved to take this step after hearing her sing, in a childish treble, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Mrs. Fitch, a shrill-voiced and bony-handed woman, taught her the words of hymns, while the dominie, who had been a drummer in the Civil War, instructed her in music. Both, with passionate fervor, spanked her.

When she was 19 she ran away to join the cast of Reckless Eve when that masterpiece was playing in Little Rock. The Fitches had told her she could take nothing out of their house, so she left wearing two dresses, with her blouse stuffed with trinkets. Reckless Eve got as far as Tulsa where it gasped, flopped twice, and lay still. Mary Lewis gave singing lessons to the soubrets and earned enough to buy a ticket to the Coast. After her season with Christie Comedies, she got an engagement with the Greenwich Village Follies, then with Mr. Ziegfeld’s. It was during her second winter in Manhattan that she studied languages, opera roles. Last summer in Paris Otto Kahn heard her sing a selection which was not “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” He arranged an audience with Manager Gatti.

Said Mary Lewis: “I don’t think I have ever seen a story about myself without ‘Ex-Follies Girl’ in the headline. . . . The real value of my churchly upbringing still endures. . . . It is wonderful to wake up in the morning and know that I’m not going to be spanked.”

Wrote a Paris critic: “Even her faults are charming. , , , “