Four notables who crossed my path

Reflections on four recently departed notables whose diverse paths crossed mine at some point over the past 60 years:

Carmen, as I knew her

Risë Stevens, mezzo-soprano, died March 20 in New York, age 99. My very first opera was Carmen in 1957, with Risë Stevens singing the title role that she virtually owned at the Met through the 1940s and '50s. If a seasoned soldier like Don José could be driven to destruction by this saucy and beautiful woman with the sexy mezzo voice, you can imagine her effect on a 14-year-old kid sitting in the second row (not to mention the effect of all those glamorous cigarette girls blowing smoke while singing that gorgeous Bizet score).

Indeed, years later, that performance of Carmen made my short list of five key events in my formative years— from age five to 16— that raised my awareness of the female gender as something distinct from my own. And Risë Stevens became the standard against which I judged dozens of other Carmens in the years to come.

Yet the strange thing about that watershed night in my life was that I already knew Risë Stevens— not as a great opera diva, but as the part Jewish, part Norwegian mother of one my campmates at Camp MacJannet, an international camp in the French Alps. I had met her on visiting day two years earlier; she and her husband (the Hungarian actor Walter Surovy) had chipped in with my parents to rent a motorboat for a tour of Lake Annecy.

On the basis of that connection, as a Penn undergrad in 1961 I stopped backstage to say hello when she sang with the Penn glee club, and I reconnected with her again in 1965, when I was a young journalist in Indiana and she was general manager of the Met's new (and short-lived) national company, then making its world premiere in Indianapolis.

As a diva in the rarefied world of opera, Stevens was often placed on a pedestal in the public mind. In a TV comedy skit in the '50s, the comedienne Martha Raye and the boxer Rocky Graziano went on a double date with Risë Stevens and Caesar Romero; the gags revolved around Raye's fear that she and her oafish boyfriend would commit some social faux pas in the company of such an elegant couple. (Graziano called Stevens "Rise" "instead of "REE-zuh.")

Not until I read her obit did I realize that Risë Stevens was born and reared in a railroad apartment in the Bronx, the daughter of an alcoholic advertising salesman named Steenberg. She was not opera royalty at all, but an artist who rose on her merits to democratize a previously exclusive art form, and always remained approachable, even to ordinary folks like my parents, and even to a kid like me.

A '60s sensibility

Roger Ebert, film critic, died April 4 in Chicago, age 70. Ebert I were exact contemporaries— he was eight days my junior— and both of us shared the idealistic belief of our "Kennedy class" (so called because JFK was elected in our freshman year of college and assassinated in our senior year) that society could be reformed for the better, unlike our '50s elders, who accepted the status quo, or the later '60s radicals who believed in tearing everything down and starting anew from scratch.

In the early '70s we were both film critics in Chicago— Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times, I for the monthly Chicago Magazine, then published by the local Public TV station, WTTW. I ran into him often at screenings; he also contributed essays and moral support to my publication, the Chicago Journalism Review, a revolutionary monthly published by working journalists to embarrass their papers into doing a better job.

I moved to Philadelphia in 1972 but continued writing my film column for Chicago. Then in 1975 WTTW came up with a novel idea: a TV program that would review movies.

As Chicago Magazine's critic, I was the logical choice to host the show. But I was unwilling to move back to Chicago, so WTTW came up with an even better idea: a show co-hosted by Ebert and Gene Siskel, the rival critics for Chicago's two morning dailies. The drama generated by their love-hate relationship boosted their "Sneak Previews" show into broad nationwide syndication. In the bargain, Ebert eventually became the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and probably the most trusted. (He had 800,000 Twitter followers when he died.)

Do I sometimes think to myself that, had I stayed in Chicago, I could have been Roger Ebert? Sure. Am I sorry? No— because I couldn't have been Roger Ebert.

Ebert was willing and even happy to devote all of his time to the movies for the remainder of his life; I wasn't. Ebert was a print journalist who was happy to expand into TV; but TV struck me as a shallow medium (and still does). Ebert took an opportunity and made a career beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. I moved in other directions with no regrets— only admiration for my erstwhile '60s compatriot.

A countess from Philadelphia

Mary Ponsonby, Countess of Bessborough, died April 13 in Philadelphia, age 98. When Fitzgerald said, "The rich are different from you and me," he could have had the former Mary Munn in mind. Mary's great-grandfather, the Philadelphia banker Anthony J. Drexel, once underwrote the pay of the entire U.S. Army when Congress refused to do so. One of Mary's uncles donated his yacht to the U.S. government during World War I. After the great Anthony J. died in 1893, four generations of Drexel men declined to work for a living— not because they were wastrels (although some surely were), but out of a sincere, if misguided, belief that by accumulating greater wealth they would somehow impoverish others.

Anthony's strongest descendants were not the men but the women: grand dames who were characterized above all not by pomposity, but by free-spirited eccentricity interlaced with empathy and gentle politeness.

Mary herself, although born in Philadelphia in 1915, was raised in Paris by her mother, Mary Paul Munn Allez— better known during World War II as "Pauline," a daring underground informant who funneled information to the French resistance gleaned from her contacts among upper-class Prussian officers who detested the Nazis. Mary's husband, the tenth Earl of Bessborough, was descended from ancestors who were granted the Bessborough name as well as an estate in Ireland by Oliver Cromwell.

I first met Lady Bessborough in London in 1991, when I was researching a profile of the Drexel family for Town & Country magazine. At the time, she was 76 and excitedly preoccupied with a crusade (ultimately successful) to restore Benjamin Franklin's dilapidated London townhouse.

When I asked about her husband's noble pedigree, she replied unaffectedly, "I married into a very good family." When I suggested that surely her husband had married into a good family too, I detected, through her thick spectacles, the twinkling eyes of past generations of vivacious Drexel women.

"I dare say," she replied impishly, "he didn't do so badly."

You can imagine my surprise when, in 2002— at the age of 87, after spending her entire adulthood abroad— the now-widowed Countess of Bessborough chose to finish her life where it began: in Philadelphia.

It was always a kick to come across this elegant nonagenarian in Rittenhouse Square, and downright bizarre to bump into her in the checkout line at Great Scot's Rittenhouse Market. She was like a visitor from another time and place, unafraid even in her 90s to pull up stakes and try something new, to the benefit of those, like me, who were lucky enough to cross her path.

Pro and amateur, comparing records

Pat Summerall, professional football player and broadcaster, died April 16 in Dallas, age 82. In December 1959 Summerall was 29 and a famous placekicker whose last-second 49-yard field goal in a snowstorm a year earlier had enabled the New York Giants to survive to a post-season playoff game. I was the 17-year-old high school senior placekicker for the Fieldston School in New York.

Summerall was one of the celebrity guests at a big New York City high school all-star football banquet that month, and in the course of the evening I was introduced to him as the city's leading placekicker during the season just concluded.

Summerall could have brushed me off with some perfunctory greeting, like, "Nice going, kid." Instead he asked: "What was your record?"

"Overall, 18-for-22," I promptly replied. "Excluding blocked kicks, 18-for-19."

These numbers referred not to field goals (which then were rarely attempted in high school games) but to points-after-touchdown. Nowadays some pros kick field goals more consistently than I kicked extra points back then.

On the other hand, in those days the pros played with the goal posts on the goal line rather than the back of the end zone. Consequently, an extra point in high school or college was a longer kick than perhaps half the field goals attempted in the National Football League— a fact of which all kickers, pro and amateur alike, were keenly aware.

Upon hearing my numbers, Summerall looked me squarely in the eye, put his right hand on my left shoulder— I can feel it there still— and said, "Son, that's good in any league!"

The entire exchange lasted less than a minute, but as you can see, I never forgot it. This renowned athlete at the peak of his fame had paused to express interest in a nobody. In the process this instinctively decent man had encouraged me to think that I might some day become somebody too.♦


To read another memory of Mary Bessborough by Andrew Kevorkian, click here.
To read responses, click here.