Grace Moore

Grace Moore was a figure out of another era, almost a geological age's distance, in popular entertainment-an opera singer who found success on the silver screen and even charted some hit records. Her story is also one of the most compelling tales of success, defeat, redemption, and tragedy in the history of American entertainment. Born to the family of a travelling salesman (and later department store owner) in Tennessee, she developed a love of music, and, fueled by a magnificent voice, bluffed her way onto the Broadway stage. From an eventual star's berth at the Met, she jumped to motion pictures with the advent of the talkies, was destroyed at one studio by the pressures for success and then rescued, and given a whole second career on screen and the concert stage by the politics at another studio, only to die in an air crash a decade later. Moore was born in Slabtown, Tennessee, and her strict Baptist upbringing hardly made her a likely candidate for a career in entertainment, and she did intend, early in life, to become a missionary. By age 16, however, the "skinny, long-legged ugly girl" (as she described herself) had discovered music, and that she had a voice that was worth spending some time developing. She studied singing and music theory at Ward-Belmont College in Nashville, and then extended her music training in Washington, D.C., in the process making contact with the likes of Alma Gluck (1884-1938) and Mary Garden (1874-1967), and at 17 was a participant in a Washington, D.C. recital given by Giovanni Martinelli, the celebrated Metropolitan tenor, which got Moore her first mention in a review. She moved to New York and bluffed her way into the cast of a 1920 Jerome Kern-scored revue called Hitchy Koo. She continued to develop her singing and earned (and...