Fun at the Opera House

Manhattan's press used to cover opening nights at the Metropolitan Opera with awed respect, hat-in-hand. It took a man standing on his head at the Met to show tabloid editors what they had been missing. So last week 80 photographers, columnists, society reporters and legmen, not counting the critics, moved in on the opening. They saw plenty. And--except for the well-bred school (Times, Herald Tribune and Sun)--they told all.

ERMINE WINS, MINK 2ND IN MET OPEN, headlined a who-wore-what story in the tabloid Mirror. Newsmen blinked at luscious Lucius Beebe, one of their alumni, who spent the whole evening at the bar with a pint-sized companion, both wearing silk hats. No really well-dressed man, sniffed Hearstling Cholly Knickerbocker, would wear a top hat with a dinner jacket.

Why, Mrs. Throckmorton. The gum-chewing Daily News was fascinated with an ermined customer who puffed a fat cigar while she sipped a drink. Its picture of her was hastily identified as "A Mrs. Throckmorton (she's not in the Blue Book, by the way)." A day later it told more about her: she was not just any old Mrs. Throckmorton, but the Mrs. Cleon Throckmorton of Cape Cod and the nightclubs, who was "reliably reported to carry $4,000 in her handbag at all times--plus a gat in good working order. She . . . once appeared in a nightclub in a chenille bedspread."

In the absence of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, dowager queen of the Met, the press found Mrs. George Washington ("Tiffany's front window") Kavanaugh almost as impressive and much more cooperative. She arrived in her Rolls-Royce, reported the Post, and left in her Cadillac, basking in a sunburst of flashbulbs. When photographers bawled at her to count her diamond bracelets (she had made wonderful copy last year by losing one), she sweetly obliged. Said class-conscious PM: "She had on a chinchilla cape not worth a penny more than $80,000."

Leg Up. But the darling of the cameramen was tiaraed Mrs. Frank Henderson, identified by Knickerbocker as "The Milton Berle of Society." Betty Henderson "came in directly behind Mrs. Kavanaugh," giggled Society Columnist Charles Ventura in the World-Telegram, "and suffered a sound thwack over the tiara with a folded program by a dowager who resented having to wait in a drafty doorway until Betty was photographed. . . ." The press heard that she had paid only $48.25 for her gown at S. Klein's. She even put a 71-year-old leg up on a table in the Opera cafe, and repeated the performance for photographers later. The Post's Saloon Editor Earl Wilson confronted her. The dialogue:

"How are you, Mrs. Henderson?"

"Tight, thank you."

"Why'd you put your legs on the table?"

"Wanted to show they're better'n Marlene Dietrich's." As for the opera, she told a columnist, "I never saw the damn thing."

Thinking it all over, the Daily News's Drama Critic John Chapman felt depressed. "Not even for one night should one of the world's great theaters be turned over to boors, sots and publicity seekers," he wrote. "Next year, they [should] hand-pick their first audience and call in the FBI if need be to screen it."

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