the ugly earring

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Lou Tellegen started performing on the Amsterdam stage in 1903 and by 1909; he was the toast of Paris as a leading man to Sarah Bernhardt. The two toured North America together in 1910. An extremely handsome man, Tellegen starred in 26 movies during the 1920′s. Despite all his early success and large fan base, by the 1930′s, his career was in shambles. He starred in only three movies between 1931 and 1935.

By late 1934, Tellegen was ill, having had his face burned and being diagnosed with cancer. He was also despondent over his debt and had to claim bankruptcy. He decided there was only one solution to his problem. As a guest in the Cudahy mansion near Hollywood and Vine, with posters and photographs of his glory days nearby, Lou Tellegen walked into the bathroom, shaved and powdered his face, stared into the mirror and taking a pair of gold scissors (engraved with his name), he stabbed himself in the heart seven times. (more here).

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 He was married to Geraldine Farrar from 1916 to 1923. When asked to comment on her ex-husband’s death, she responded, “Why should that interest me?”

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Lou Tellegen was burned to ashes which, as a last theatrical gesture, he ordered sprinkled on the waves of the Pacific. Newspapers gave him gaudy obituaries,* told how at 15 he ran off with his father’s mistress, how he specialized in love-making while he was successively a baker’s assistant, a trapeze artist, a model for Auguste Rodin (“Eternal Springtime”), how he first arrived in the U. S. as Sarah Bernhardt’s leading man. The final Hollywood picture was of a broken, hollow-eyed matinee idol who kept having his face lifted. (more here).

“It was a voice that made her The Queen of Queens in all of singing. Ponselle, almost more than any other singer, had the unique combination of voice and musical profundity to advance operatic interpretation by decades, simply by the sheer genius of her artistry…She is also among the most copied of any singer in history…She is an ideal, an almost mythical figure in opera singing. Whenever young singers ask whom they should pattern their singing after, I always respond, ‘Make a sincere study of the recordings of Rosa Ponselle.’ To every young singer in any age–ours, or some distant one–this will always be excellent advice.”

–LUCIANO PAVAROTTI