Change of Art

Once upon a time Lotte Lehmann had her fortune told. The fortune teller's prediction tickled her (says she) more than the praise and plaudits which operatic fame have since brought her. The seer told her "that a new door was slowly opening for me, a door leading to great success in another branch of art." At ten the door opened a crack when Mme Lehmann sold poems to Berlin's Der Tag. In that struggling season she was still being told that she had "no voice." With occasional articles, a book of memoirs, she managed to keep her foot in the door. Last winter in Vienna Lotte Lehmann wedged her way right through with a first novel.-- With her book now in its third edition in Austria, translated into Italian, French and Czech, 35-year-old Novelist Lehmann last week made her debut in the U. S. A love story, in the same vein as Marcia Davenport's best-selling Of Lena Geyer, Mine Lehmann's story attempts no coloratura flights, is content to be an amiable romance:

Beautiful, blonde twins, devoted to each other and the ballet, Elisabeth and Annemarie are otherwise very different. Ambitious Elisabeth leaves home, becomes a ballet dancer, marries and divorces a rich nobleman, who thought her hard work as indecent as her scanty costumes. Then she becomes involved with a dope fiend who is a composer. When their mother dies, sweet-tempered Annemarie reluctantly joins her sister on the stage. As the Sisters Vernova they dazzle the world. Still unspoiled, Annemarie goes to pieces on a U. S. tour, but a marriage resigns her to her ruined career. Elisabeth, momentarily depressed, sails for Japan. An English duke soon restores the sparkle to her eyes.

A secondary plot that spreads over half the story is the frustrated romance of a middleaged, icy opera singer, named Aimee Francoise, and a frustrated U. S. billionaire who wanted to be a musician. Once, during an Atlantic crossing, she almost thawed when he kissed her. But when he tried it again, the result was a pathetic sort of wrestling match, with Mme Francoise the disgruntled winner. In a last pursuit the billionaire follows her Europe-bound in his private plane, deliberately noses into the ocean.

First test of U. S. response to Author Lehmann's literary career came last week when she appeared as speaker before the overflow audience which opened Manhattan's National Book Fair at Rockefeller Center. The audience begged Author Lehmann to sing.

--EURNT FLIGHT, Putnam ($2.50).

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