Fiery & Silvery

Handsome, well-born John Lavalle was planning to become a portrait painter in 1917 when the War changed his plans and he became instead a commanding first lieutenant in the same air squadron with a New Yorker named Fiorello LaGuardia. After the War, what with having four handsome children, the death of his first wife and his marriage to a pretty, high-strung daughter of the Cincinnati tobacco Wilsons, he developed his art career slowly. Last week at the age of 38, he finally got 26 able portraits up on the walls of Manhattan's Grand Central Fifth Avenue Galleries. Critics called the men virile and first-rate, the women decorative, did not mention the portraits of Lavalle's Daughter Alice, 14, and Son John, 10. Socialite friends. Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt and Mrs. Junius Morgan, poured tea for the reception, while his wife visited her Cincinnati kin. Next night John Lavalle slept soundly in his bed in Manhattan's Harvard Club and the critics' calm little notices of his first show in years were already in print for the Sunday supplements, when at dawn tragedy smashed insanely into John Lavalle's life.

It mushroomed up from the dumbwaiter shaft of his sleeping house in Boston's Back Bay where lay his crippled 70-year-old mother, four women servants and his four children, and suddenly the core of the house was a torrent of fire. Daughter Alice and her grandmother were roasted in their beds. Two maids were scorched off fourth floor window sills to which they clung, fell to their death. Mary, 13, with the fire on her back, jumped out a second story window and mortally hurt herself. Ellen Elaine, 6, jumped and survived with bad burns. Plucky little John opened his door and saw a hallful of flames.

"I knew," he said,."my sister Ellen was asleep in the rear, I screamed but the more I screamed I got choked with smoke so I stopped screaming. The flames came into my room. I just had my pajamas on. I could not get to my sisters and then I opened the front window and heard the fire engines coming.

"I yelled to the first man to save my two sisters and then I heard pounding on the front door. I jumped from the window and landed on the lawn, and I thought I was going to die.

"When I landed I didn't dare to get up because I've heard about people breaking their legs when they jumped. Finally a big policeman came along and said. 'Are you hurt bad, son?' and I said, 'I guess I am.'

"He lifted me to my feet and I was all right.''

A little past dawn John Lavalle Sr.'s telephone rang in Manhattan.

Five days later the calm little notices came out in the Sunday art sections: "The visitor may well wonder if the artist is not more interested in men than he is in women as subjects for his pictures. . . . Use of silvery backgrounds is a novel feature. . . .

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