Oregon Cyclone

I NEVER GREW UP (316 pp.)--Cobma Wright--Prentice-Hall ($3.75).

"Youth," says Cobina Wright Sr., in one of the more thoughtful moments in her autobiography, "is, in truth, wasted on the young."

From this premise* and from the title of her book, I Never Grew Up, it might be assumed that the whole life of the celebrated belle (and managing mother of an equally celebrated one) has been wasted. The assumption would be both hasty and unkind. In its own gossipy fashion, Author Wright's autobiography is something of a personal history of the 20th century. It is also a record of one of the most buoyant egos ever hatched.

"You Are God's Child." Cobina got her first good look at the century on her sheep-raising family's "several enormous ranches as big as counties, in the state of Oregon." There, in the early 1900s, as a poor little rich girl named Elaine Cobb, she grew up in the silence of the eternal hills. When the silence got on her nerves, she would holler--and she hollered so vigorously that her family allowed her to go off to Europe with a maiden aunt to have her voice trained.

On the way across, Elaine met her first celebrity, young "Bertie" McCormick, later to become the famous colonel of Chicago journalism. "She's refreshing," Bertie gasped, after a whirl among the wide-open spaces of Elaine's personality. "Like a minor cyclone."

Europe survived the Oregon cyclone, though the young men were laid flat in windrows. "Artists," Author Wright recalls demurely, "have told me that I had a perfect figure." She also discovered that she had "the divine gift" of an artistic temperament, and found a more artistic name to go with it--Cobina. And then one night, when she took stage fright at the prospect of singing the Queen of the Night in a third-string production of The Magic Flute, 16-year-old Cobina had her revelation.

A voice "from I knew not where spoke to me. 'You are God's child . . . Nothing is more powerful than God's child. You were given dominion.' " What did it all mean? Cobina left the mystery for the mystics to explain, and hurried home to fasten her dominion on New York City. In a short time the young singer was surrounded by famous admirers (T.R. himself, she says, called her voice "Deelight-ful!"), won the patronage of the famed operatic soprano, Mme. Frances Alda, and married bestselling Novelist Owen (Stover at Yale) Johnson.*

"Within two weeks of my divorce," says Cobina, "America entered the war." President Wilson could scarcely have timed it better, for when the first Yanks arrived in Paris they found Cobina there to entertain them. She buddied around with General "Jack" Pershing, Barney Baruch, Jesse Jones and the Aga Khan. The spiritual ruler of millions of Ismailian Moslems was famous in those days, Cobina remembers, for his vast appetite at table and a fabulous bed, large enough for 24 people.

The Front Page. Cobina fought clear of foreign entanglements in 1919, and went home to Manhattan. Soon after her return she met Millionaire Bill Wright, "the best man on the floor" of the New York Stock Exchange. "The first moment we danced together . . . I knew that at last I was honestly, deeply in love." They were married, and fortified by the Wright millions, Cobina threw a succession of parties that made her the busiest hostess on the Sands Point-Palm Beach-Cafe Society circuit. At the same time, she dazzled Manhattan concert audiences with a recital mixture of popular soprano numbers and lavish costumes.

Then came the 1929 crash. Cobina blames herself now for being so heedless of business affairs; while the bottom was falling out of the stock market she was busy with cross-country concerts and social life. She had also lost touch with her husband. A few years after the Wright millions went down the drain, the marriage broke up. Bill went off with another woman. They were divorced, not without a scandal "spicy enough," she notes, "to share front-page space with the trial of the Lindbergh kidnaper."

"After Materialism, What?" Cobina called on her courage--"always," she admits, "immense"--and went back to work, first as the proprietor of a supper club that failed, later as a nightclub singer at $500 a week. When daughter Cobina was 16, mother stood her in the public gaze, named her "Jr.," tacked "Sr." to her own name and retired to the wings. She coached the young beauty into a quick, bright career as the Glamour Girl of 1939, but all ended in confusion when Cobina Jr. threw up her Hollywood contracts and married wealthy young Palmer Beaudette, son of a Detroit manufacturer. It took Cobina Sr. a long time to adjust to the change in her plans. It was two years, she confesses, before she was "made whole," and reconciled to the marriage.

Since that time, Cobina Sr. has aired the linen of high society in a column for the Hearstpapers. She has also given much of her time to pondering such questions as "After materialism, what?" and to deciding what, after all, life adds up to. She finds that she agrees pretty much with English Writer Thomas Burke (1886-1945), when he said, "All living is hunger, without hunger we perish."

* Which George Bernard Shaw advanced, years before Cobina did, in the dictum: "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." * Who died last month (TIME, Feb. 4). Cobina was the second of his five wives.

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