Opera Buff

This season, grand opera at Manhattan's Metropolitan opened with a slightly fussier fuss than usual. Last week, however, the Met got in the groove--a few new voices and a new red carpet, but the same old scenery, same old gilded box holders, and opera's perennial bright angel, NBC, occupying Grand Tier Box 44 for the Saturday matinee, Boris Godunoff.

Since 1931, for the privilege of broadcasting to some 10,000,000 music lovers and a countless short-wave audience, NBC has paid the Metropolitan a cool $100,000 a season. Some years it has been higher, with sponsors like Lucky Strike, Listerine. This year there is no sponsor, but NBC is still the Met's best-bet patron.

In Box 44 sit two men the radio audience never hears. Engineer Charles C. Grey has a control panel at his fingertips; Production Man Herbert Liversidge hardly lifts his eyes from an edited, last-minute score. Liversidge reads the score some six bars ahead, keeps Grey posted with hand signals on who or what is coming--a thumb-forefinger circle for female soloists, a single, raised finger for men; two for duets, all five for choruses, a clinched fist for the whole works. Grey watches the signals, ready to take squeals out of coloraturas, distortion out of tenors, ear-splits out of ensembles.

To most radio listeners, however, a third man in Box 44 is synonymous with opera itself. He is 42-year-old Milton John Cross, a huge, humble, bespectacled, music-charmed announcer whose cultured, genuflecting voice seems to his public to come straight from NBC's artistic soul. Radio listeners hear a tremolo of anticipation when Milton Cross's bated, bass-viol voice tells them: "The house lights are being dimmed. In a moment the great gold curtain will go up. . . ."

The opera has been Milton Cross's job, hobby, and spiritual sustainer for more years than NBC has been a patron. As a boy, vacationing from his Hell's Kitchen Manhattan neighborhood, he fought for the job of delivering butter to the great Louise Homer's country house, just for the exquisite thrill of seeing the great Homer herself. Once he paid to carry a spear in a Metropolitan mob scene. He studied at the Damrosch Institute of Musical Art, sang in choirs, doodled clefs & staffs on tablecloths and phone pads and dreamed of a career in music.

Radio got him first. In 1921 he went to WJZ, then merely a sort of cloister off a ladies' rest room of the Westinghouse factory in Newark. For $40 a week he sang, played the piano, operated the Ampico player-piano, announced, told bedtime stories, recited Uncle Wiggly, read the Sunday funnies. Since those days, many an NBC announcer has come & gone, but Milton Cross is still on the job, an NBC standby.

He is undoubtedly the people's choice for musical programs. When he has no programs to announce, he has to sit watch in an empty studio, waste his vast voice every 15 minutes or so saying "WJZ, New York" during station breaks. For these exalted and lowdown services, his basic studio salary, after 18 years, is about $80 a week. Commercial jobs pay much more, but Milton Cross's extreme unction is unsuited to most commercial shows, which usually require more extraverted talent.

His main commercial nowadays is Information Please, which is right up his broad alley. For this weekly half-hour, he collects $100 a week from Canada Dry. But since he announces it on NBC's time, the network thriftily docks him three-quarters of an hour's basic pay--about $2.

Milton Cross has won all sorts of prizes for dewy diction, but even he bumbles one now & then. The one he laughingly denies, although many others remember it lovingly, is the time he presented, with great fanfare, "The A & G Pypsies." Last semester, anxious to keep his diction up to snuff, he joined a course at Columbia, but he had to give it up. Too much homework.

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