On Nov. 11 it will be 133 years since Mary McCormic was born in Yell County.
If you've never heard of her, don't feel out of some loop. I've spent days researching her online, and Google still directs me to pages about actress Mary McCormack. But from what I see in newspaper archives, McCormic was vastly well known in the 1920s and '30s. "Superstar" is not much of an exaggeration.
She was an internationally known opera singer, a lyric soprano. But more than that, she was a hard-working woman with a happy knack for joking about her awful taste in men.
Mamie Harris was born in wee little Belleville to John and Mary Harris, and she had at least three brothers. John was a dry goods clerk who eventually owned multiple stores in southwestern Texas. And that's where Mamie became Mary and a promising singer.
If you know your Arkansas social history, though, you can guess that Arkansans eagerly claimed Mary McCormic as a native. No matter from what distant state your shiny star eventually ascends, if you were born here and you make good, you are permanently Arkansan. Don't pretend we don't do this, because you know that we do. Exactly how long did Gen. Douglas MacArthur reside in Little Rock? Hmm?
Anyway, 100 years ago, the Arkansas Democrat and Arkansas Gazette were dee-lighted by our splendid young singer's brilliant success during her first tour to Italy with the Chicago Civic Opera. Headline in the Gazette: "Arkansas Singer Receives Ovation."
Never mind that she received her seminal musical education at Amarillo, Texas. Never mind. She did study music a bit with Henry D. Tovey at Ouachita College, before she ran out of money. And, although the newspapers don't appear to have known this, the former Miss Harris did marry her starter husband at Ward in Lonoke County. Married to Kenneth Joseph Rankin in 1908, Mary Rankin had a child in 1910; but they divorced in 1916.
So, she did live here longer than baby MacArthur's six months.
But back to the Nov. 2, 1922, Gazette, which quoted a Chicago Tribune account of McCormic's triumph:
"Miss McCormic made her Italian debut at the opera house at Asti, where the critics proclaimed her voice one of the greatest ever heard in Italy. She sang the part of Santuzza in 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' and her Italian accent was so perfect that she was not recognized as an American, as she was billed under the Italian name equivalent to McCormic.
"On her third successive night a great celebration took place in her honor. She was presented with a huge bouquet containing the Italian and American flags crossed by the municipal officials of Asti."
I wonder what an Italian version of McCormic might be?
MARY GARDEN'S BIG FIND
McCormic was a protege of the marvelous Mary Garden, who was resurrecting a grand opera company out of financial ruin. Newspapers told a tale in which penniless Miss McCormic was earning $5 a week singing in choir lofts when Garden held public auditions to find "a truly American voice" in spring 1921. Garden admired the clever woman who had not studied outside the U.S., telling her that — if she would train all summer — she would get her shot in the fall.
McCormic pegged away at French and Italian day and night and learned eight operatic leads.
That November, in a Chicago Civic Opera production of "Carmen" starring Garden, Lucien Muratore and Georges Baklanoff, McCormic sang as innocent Micaela. "Arkansas Girl Makes Hit," the Gazette cheered on Nov. 28, 1921: "About as successful an entrance as ever a debutante made, it was, too."
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/1107garden/]
In the Dec. 4, 1921, Democrat, children's editor Kay Tallqvist held her up as worth emulating. Headline: "Genius Cannot Be Defined But Is Bound to Find an Outlet."
Tallqvist wrote: "From a prairie schooner to the stage of the Chicago Grand Opera Company she went. Without a dollar — without an influential friend; often with heartbreaking intervals between meal tickets — with nothing but determination and a golden voice."
SUPERSTAR
McCormic was a massive flirt. Prosper Buranelli, the New York World reporter Old News mentioned Oct. 31, wrote about encountering her at an Italian fencing match in July 1922. McCormic rose up from the audience to announce that whoever won the match would have the honor of buying her dinner.
And she was funny, especially about the sad drama of her divorces — four by 1939.
Her ex-husbands were Rankin (see arkansasonline.com/1107joe), followed in 1917 by Chester Adrian Macomic (see arkansasonline.com/1107chester; she took his name but changed the spelling, perhaps to avoid being mistaken for a relative of opera patron L. Hamilton McCormick); and then Russian playboy Prince Serge Mdivani (arkansasonline.com/1107prince); and finally Homer V. Johannsen (I can't find an online memorial).
Actually, in 1939, while telling the press about her engagement to a potential fifth spouse, Joseph Patrick Reilly, she clarified that her second (to Macomic) was bogus. He lied that he was divorced when they married in secret. And I did find a wedding record for "Charles A. McCormic" and "Mamie Rankin," at Kalamazoo, Mich., on July 14, 1917.
"I have been married only three times so far — not four," she declared. "Gosh, I marry 'em, why can't you newspaper men count 'em?"
She also opined, "I guess I'm a romanticist ... I'm in love with love ... but this time it will be different." And it was. She and Reilly didn't marry.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » arkansasonline.com/1107mary/]
THE PRINCE
Her most remarked-upon spouse was No. 3. Mdivani's family lost their fortune in the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II. For their wooing of wealthy women, he and his brothers were mocked as the "marrying Mdivanis."
And he was still married to the actress Pola Negri when McCormic announced her engagement to him. (Negri, by the way, had lost her fortune in the 1929 market crash.) As McCormic stepped off the oceanliner RMS Olympic at Cherbourg, France, on Jan. 2, 1931 — on her way to starring roles in Paris and Florence — she showed reporters her ring from the prince. And she declared, "He isn't divorced yet but I want the world to know my happiness."
When she divorced him in 1933, she told the court, "It was a noble experiment, but it didn't work out."
The judge asked if he had abused her. She shot back, "I'll say he did! He struck me and he threatened to maim me and he called me terrible names."
In 1936, Mdivani married an ex-wife of his dead brother; and then the next month, he himself died in a polo accident. McCormic reportedly wept without restraint.
She also remarried in 1936. The fact that she vowed to obey Johannsen was a fun news item. But when she sued him for divorce in 1937, she said he was cruel, isolated her from friends and knocked her across a table.
GONE HOME
Besides the opera, she was a radio star and appeared in a 1933 film, "Paddy the Next Best Thing."
In the 1940s, McCormic returned to Texas and became artist-in-residence at the University of North Texas College of Music at Denton. She created the school's now highly regarded North Texas Opera Workshop.
She made many appearances in Arkansas, singing for Lions Clubs and teachers conferences and being described as an Arkansan even after her retirement in 1966 -- which is when she moved home to Amarillo to live with her brother's widow.
And there she lived until she died in 1981. And there she is buried, like the Texan she was.
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