Countess Reincarnate

A rare and beautiful woman was Madame la Comtesse Virginie Oldoini Verasis-Castiglione, famed courtesan of the Second Empire who divided her best years between Piedmont's King Victor Emmanuel and France's Napoleon III. The Countess's costumes, her jewels and their donors provided half the talk at the Court in Paris. Artists fought to paint her. Sculptors modeled her hands, her fingers, her shapely legs, even her ears.

Near Versailles today is a chateau owned by a woman as rare in her way as the Countess. She is Ganna Walska and because she looks something like the famed courtesan she has made a hobby of collecting the Castiglione portraits, jewels, shawls, laces. As the Countess reincarnate Madame Walska decided to make a U. S. concert tour this winter. She arrived with 12 trunks full of costumes and after several dress rehearsals she took off last week in Philadelphia.

For four groups of German lieder Madame Walska had four sets of eye-filling costumes.

For Beethoven and Mozart: Billowy black taffeta covered with net, coral jewels, a tiara transformation.

For Schubert: Bouffant brown taffeta, tight sequin bodice, white-plumed hat.

For Brahms: White satin court dress trimmed with big bunches of grapes, a necklace of diamonds the size of malagas, vine-leaves in the hair.

For Hugo Wolf: Madame Walska was her own sleek self in ropes of pearls and tight black velvet, cut to the waist behind. It was Ganna Walska whom Philadelphians turned out to see, regardless of her Second-Empire costumes. For them it was enough that she had overcome her stage-fright sufficiently to sing at all.

Twenty years ago Walska's determination to be a singer was her principal claim to distinction. She was a poor Polish girl studying in Russia when her celebrated succession of marriages began. Baron Archadie d'Eighnhorn, a Russian officer, was Husband No. 1. She divorced him for drunkenness in 1914, married Dr. Julius Fraenkel, a famed New York endocrinologist who died in 1919. Husband No. 2 sent her spirit messages, she said, to marry Alexander Smith Cochran, carpet tycoon, whom she met aboard boat with Harold Fowler McCormick.

Cochran carpets beat International Harvester that cruise. McCormick bet Cochran that he would meet Walska first. He lost. But when he got back to his Lake Shore home in Chicago it was announced that he and Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick were no longer living together. Alex Cochran and Walska lived briefly together in his Murray Hill home. Then in 1920 divorce proceedings started. Madame Walska, with Dudley Field Malone for her lawyer, issued a statement that ''if he [Cochran] wants to get rid of me he must pay until it hurts for his own good."

The Cochran settlement amounted to $3,000,000 and Walska went to Havana to sing. Harold McCormick heard her there, appreciated her if the Cubans did not, invited her to sing with the Chicago Grand Opera which he was then backing. Her debut was to be in Zaza but at rehearsal Conductor Giuseppe Gino Marinuzzi threw down his baton, threatened to quit the company. McCormick stood up for Walska, demanded that she should be allowed to sing. But in the excitement Walska disappeared. Not once did she ever sing with the Chicago Opera.

The McCormick-Walska marriage went through in 1922. Walska went on with her vocalizing, morning, afternoon, evening. Friends teased Husband No. 4 because his wife never sang in public. Her story was that she sang very well alone but that an audience filled her with paroxysms. She went to Paris to live. McCormick stayed in Chicago. But in 1928 when she gathered courage for her first U. S. concerts McCormick dutifully attended most of them. When he divorced her on grounds of desertion (TIME, Oct. 19. 1931) he said: "Madame Walska has my sincere admiration and respect."

Madame Walska concentrated then on perfumes. But luxury articles slumped first in Depression and she got out of business, bought the Theatre des Champs Elysees which she still owns. Singing remains Walska's passion but the Philadelphia audience was hard put to understand why last week. She cannot get along without her notes. Each song sounds just like the last. What tone she has is thin and warbly. Yet with the scantiest encouragement she comes back beaming to teeter through an encore. The Philadelphia Record said: "Madame Walska's art is that of a little child. She should be seen and not heard."

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