Recently I traded in my old Volkswagen Golf from 1998 (after nearly 200,000 miles of high performance) for a 2008 VW Rabbit. So far so good. But what I love most about it is the fact that it comes with a 6-CD changer. My last car didn’t even have a cassette tape player! So I am finding a million excuses to hop in my car (despite the soaring gas prices — $4.21 a gallon in Red Hook!) in order to listen to my old CD collection. For years my disks have just lain in the closet since I never have time at home to listen to them anymore. Now with the Rabbit as my own deluxe stereo system, I can listen to Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang in its entirety and in what amounts to glorious surround sound.

While scouring my collection of beaten-down old CDs, I uncovered one that I hadn’t listened to since my first apartment (of my own) in Manhattan twenty years ago. It’s one recorded by Ornella Vanoni. Ornella who? I can hear you saying. Most of my American friends have never heard of this magical singer. While Ornella Vanoni may not have the pipes of a Barbra Streisand or even of Mina, the great Italian chanteuse, she makes up for it in expressiveness. Her voice is dry and pointed, almost breathless at times. There’s a pained angst at its heart; an almost neurotic cri de coeur emanating from its center. It’s a broken voice — that of a slightly lost soul amidst a chorus of oversized and over-emoting blowhards. Ornella Vanoni aches with poignancy and passion.

I know very little about her. Before the days of the internet, I used to listen to her CDs and wonder who she was. I couldn’t read the jackets of her recordings because they were in Italian. It was hard 20 years ago to find any of her music in American stores. Tower Records was the only place I could find that had decent imports. But over time I collected several of her albums. I have since learned that she was born in 1934 in Milan. She started her career in the early 60s as a theatrical actress performing Bertholt Brecht. Vanoni began to sing in public, specializing in a mixture of folklore and dramatic pieces. While her voice was untrained and had no operatic qualities at all, she managed to bring a theatrical expressionism to lyrics that made up for the slightness of her voice. Throughout the 60s, she had hit after hit in Europe and won the Napoli Festival in 1964. She made her mark in the Sanremo festivals where many of her best-known signature songs were introduced.

Perhaps her greatest album is the Brazilian-inflected one she did in 1976 with Vinicius de Morae and Toquinho: including the marvelous rondelay “La voglia, la pazzia, l’incoscienza e l’allegria”. My father, who was something of a Brazil nut, was floored by this album which featured classic bossa nova tunes recast with an Italian flavor.

No doubt most people will find her an acquired taste. She lacks the lungs of a Piaf; the intensity of Ute Lemper; the versatility of Caterina Valente. But what Vanoni has that all these other vedettes of vinyl are missing is vulnerability. She’s painfully real. And deliciously unique.

Below is a link to YouTube where you can watch several videos of this vivacious vixen.

CLICK here: Vanoni or  Ornella

The other night I experienced a strange confluence of coincidental forces. While in the midst of research into my family’s roots in Salford, Lancashire, England, I just happened to have the TV on. I always check to see what’s playing on TCM when I’m home of an evening. As I was reading about my ancestors, the O’Haras, who were shoemakers in Salford, Robert Osborne introduced a film by David Lean entitled Hobson’s Choice. Well, I like David Lean movies as much as the next guy, but I’d never seen this one. So I peeked at it while scouring Ancestry.com for my genealogical links. Suddenly the TV screen was alive with images of Salford in the late 19th century. Hobson’s Choice, based on a play by Harold Brighouse, takes place in a shoemaker’s shop in Salford and stars one of my all-time favorite actors, Charles Laughton.

It was as if someone had opened a family scrapbook and showed me photographs of my ancestors! For David Lean’s keen eye for detail makes Hobson’s Choice come alive with vivid authenticity. The wet pavements, the dreary gray buildings set against ominously dark skies, the working class pubs and cosy storefronts of Salford. The film opens with a spooky shot of a mysterious leg swinging in the wind. One’s mind wonders if someone has hanged himself. It turns out just to be a boot sign, but it sets the slightly black-humor tone for this brilliant, under-appreciated film.

So what about my ancestors? Most people when I tell them I have been compiling a family genealogy roll their eyes and quickly slip away. I know exactly how they feel. The subject of one’s roots is fascinating to the person doing his family research but of little interest to those outside the immediate family circle. Even my own family rarely discussed its ancestors. I could have asked my grandmother all these things while she was still alive but I waited until both my parents were dead and she was in the grave for over 30 years before I even knew her name! It turns out her name was Florence Brooks. She married my grandfather, Carl Bruno Peters, on September 11, 1909 in Manhattan. She was 22 years old and lived with her parents, Henry and Margaret Brooks.

My fascination with my grandmother’s family (on my father’s side) has to do, unsurprisingly, with the name Brooks. I’ve always loved that name and was curious to know its origins, at least within the family context. Most people think of Brooks as a WASPy British name, but it’s also a popular old Irish name. My Brooks ancestors came from Ireland to New York in the mid-1840s, during the early years of the Potato Famine. My grandmother’s father, Henry worked in retail, supervising a crockery shop that belonged to his wife Margaret. She turns out to have been born Margaret O’Hara. By checking New York City’s archives (which include bride and groom indexes, police census from 1890, and various vital records statistics) I was able to assemble a somewhat hazy picture of her family. Maggie’s mom was also named Margaret O’Hara and had moved to New York from England in the 1860s. Throughout the 1890s, this elder Margaret O’Hara (”widow of Peter”) ran a store at 119 8th Avenue variously described as selling “crockery,” “furnishings,” “hardware,” and “china.”

But genealogy is a very difficult and treacherous pursuit. First of all, a lot of the information recorded is simply inaccurate. Sometimes this is the fault of the person gathering the data. A census taker might write down the name O’Hara as O’Hare, or O’Harrah, or O’Hear. Thus finding the person you are looking for can be time-consuming and sometimes futile. Other times it is the person being asked the questions to fill out who is in error. Very often a person did not know the correct answer and merely fudged a reply. Or they deliberately lied about their age. Or they were protecting themselves against some perceived injustice. (A good case of this happened on the Peters side. When filling out a WWI registration card in 1917, my great uncle Bruno Peters gave “Mabel” as his mother’s name, even though she was called Bertha. But in 1917 the name Bertha was hardly a pro-American type name and rather than risk his mother being investigated as a spy, he called her by an English name. But more on the Peters clan later.)

I was having a great deal of trouble finding dependable information on the O’Haras. Old Margaret’s crockery shop had originally been located at 1959 Third Avenue, and before that at 215 First Avenue, and was run at that latter address as early as the 1870s by Hugh O’Hara. Hugh died in 1879 at the young age of 24 from “a blood clot to the brain” as well as “catarrhal pneumonia.” Hugh, I knew, was the son of this older Margaret O’Hara. I learned all this by studying the archives, and by visiting Calvary Cemetery on Long Island where the family is buried. Graveyards are usually the best place to find accurate genealogical information.

Once I found the elder Margaret O’Hara’s death year, I was able to find a death record. She died at home (119 8th Avenue) in 1897 from “apoplexy” at the age of 78. She was listed as “widowed.” The death record states that her father was Robert Wright and her mother Jane Wright, meaning her maiden name would have also been Wright.

When I looked at the younger Margaret O’Hara’s wedding record, however, I faced a major hurdle. My great-grandmother Maggie married Henry Brooks in 1880 in Manhattan. In the section where she was to name her parents someone had put in that her father was named August O’Hara and her mother was Mary Kelly. Well, this information didn’t match the names on her death certificate (which I also was able to read on microfilm in the Municipal Archives). Margaret, approximately 54 years old, had died in 1903, at 841 8th Avenue, from “acute Bright’s disease,” a kidney disorder. On this document, someone had written that her parents were named “Peatie” and “Margaret Brooks.” First thing wrong there, of course, is that her maiden name was O’Hara, not Brooks. And whoever wrote in this information didn’t know how to spell “Peter”! But that aside, the obvious inference is that her parents were Peter and Margaret O’Hara.

Well, if young Maggie didn’t know who her parents were, who would? I instinctively trusted her earlier marriage license more than her death certificate. But that was a mistake on my part. By continuing my research I have discovered that there has never been a single “August O’Hara” in any census record in the USA. I knew that her father probably didn’t make it over from Ireland, but the fact that there were no other August O’Haras anywhere at all indicated the fact that this was a suspiciously uncommon name. In fact after years of research I have never encountered anyone by this name in any connection to Irish records, or in any documents at all. I began to believe that this information was just plain wrong.

Voila, thanks to Ancestry.com which I was scouring while watching Hobson’s Choice the other night, I have finally come to a satisfactory solution to this bizarre dilemma. And it all came down to a tiny slip of paper. I was able to find a Request for Naturalization record for Hugh O’Hara from 1875 that has put everything into perspective. In it, I learned that Hugh O’Hara had come over from England in 1864. (See actual record below; note the address).

Armed with this vital statistic, I then combed the online Passenger Ship records and found that on January 13, 1864, the O’Hara family traveled from Liverpool to New York on a ship called “The Cultivator”. Margaret O’Harrah was 45, listed as a widow, originally from Down County, Ireland. Her daughter, Mary, 19, was born in Lancashire and was listed as a “boot braider”. Her sister Catherine was 15. Hugh, her brother was 9. Agnes 7 and young Margaret, was 4. I am confident this is the same family because I happen to know that Catherine and Margaret were sisters (through a friend of my uncle’s who has since passed away) and later documents backed it up. (Below is an ad for a packet ship not unlike the one that my ancestors took from Liverpool).

In 1870 the O’Hara househould shows up in the census living in Brooklyn. Mary, Catherine and Hugh are all listed as “shoe fitters”. This was not a surprise to me as my uncle Brooks had once told me that our Irish ancestors had been in the “shoe business.” The important thing here is that young Margaret is listed as “daughter.” If she had been a niece or cousin, they would have most likely described her as “other.” (Below is a photograph of an American shoe shop, similar I would imagine to the type of establishment my forebears would have toiled in during the 1870s and 1880s in New York.)

To put a final nail in the shoe leather, so to speak, I sent for a census record from England, and found that Margaret O’Hara and her children lived in Salford, Lancashire with her husband Peter O’Hara, “boot and shoe maker.” He and his children are enumerated in the 1851 census. In 1861, they reappear, with young Maggie listed as their daughter, 2 years old. Peter must have died sometime between that census and when Margaret, the elder, sailed with her brood to the new world. (Below is another photo I found of an old-fashioned shoe shop in England. I imagine the O’Hara store was similar in spirit.)

I wanted to find out more about Peter O’Hara, the shoemaker, and contacted a researcher in England. She helped find a wedding record of a Peter O’Hara, “cordwainer” (shoemaker) who wed a Jane Wright in Manchester England in 1847. But that would mean their daughter Mary was born before they were married, as certain dates would indicate from census records. So either this is the wrong couple or perhaps Peter had a daughter from a previous marriage, or perhaps most likely, the date was transcribed incorrectly when it was entered later into an index. If it were 1844 or 1841, it would match the rest of the details perfectly. Such questions are legion when conducting research into a family’s background. It’s best sometimes to ignore it until all the facts are straight, if they ever are.

(Below is a photograph I found on the web showing a typical Salford street in the 19th century.)

I can only imagine what life must have been like for them in Salford. Immigrants from Ireland, living in the poorer section of an industrial, heavily polluted town. Although I hardly think they were impoverished. A “cordwainer” (which derives from the French word cordovan) was a step above a “cobbler.” A cordwainer worked with new leather to create new shoes, while a cobbler mostly repaired old shoes, or worked with used leather. The 1861 census indicates that Peter O’Hara hired two assistant shoemakers. This would put him on a par with Charles Laughton’s character Hobson in Hobson’s Choice. The entire premise of the play and film is that Hobson is eventually outsmarted by his allegedly dim-witted boot hand, aided in his quest for partnership in the firm by his clever wife, Hobson’s daughter.

I suspect Margaret O’Hara was as clever as Hobson’s daughter. She managed to pay for her entire family’s trip across the Pond to America. And they traveled in what was described on the Passenger Register as “After Upper Between Decks” which I imagine was a cut above “steerage.” I can just see Margaret O’Hara, my great-great-grandmother bossing her husband Peter O’Hara around, just the way Brenda De Banzie does to John Mills. Seeing Hobson’s Choice brought to life on film has made me feel closer to these erstwhile ethereal relatives. Here is a link to a clip from the film I found on Youtube. Enjoy.

This is the first in a series of postings about my family. Stay tuned for the next installment: The Quirks of Old Chicago.

Recently I’ve been on something of an Elsa Maxwell kick.

After re-reading Cleveland Amory’s hilarious skewering of the glitterati entitled Who Killed Society in which he hoists Elsa Maxwell on her own petard, I went back to the books I have in my collection that she wrote and began to dip into them for amusement’s sake.

One might be surprised by the extent of Elsa Maxwell’s oeuvre. Besides her books on etiquette and entertaining, of which she wrote several, there are two memoirs, The Celebrity Circus and R. S. V. P. In England, the latter was published as I Married the World. I began to read this version and was immediately struck by its differences from the American edition. One chapter in particular stuck out like a sore thumb.

What I discovered is that for all her reputation as “the queen of Cafe Society” and the darling of the nabobs of the glitterati, Elsa Maxwell was an ungainly blowhard. She may have been the best friend of Cole Porter and Noel Coward, the nemesis of the Duchess of Windsor, and the tireless promoter of Maria Callas, but Elsa Maxwell was her own worst enemy, a deeply conflicted person who routinely bit the hand that fed her. Worst of all, she was a hypocrite and a bore. You’ll see why in a moment.

For in her memoir, which purports to explain her rise from being a homely upstart in Keokuk, Iowa to the dazzling doyenne of society in Paris, Monte Carlo and New York, she abandons her endless name-dropping for a moment to tackle a subject which is far more troubling to her than war, famine or poverty: homosexuality. Below are a few paragraphs taken from this appalling tirade.

“Much as I dislike to mention a distasteful subject I cannot gloss over the shocking increase in homosexuality that is apparent today. Thirty years ago, Lesbians and sash boys were almost unknown to the majority of people. I call them ’sash boys’, because they always go about as though waving a sash in their hands and because I prefer that euphemism to the commoner terms I do not care to use. Perhaps I was more naive at the time, but I never saw a woman who was an obvious Lesbian until I went to Europe. Of course there were homosexuals in theatrical and artistic circles, but outside that one rarely, if ever, encountered one. Now it is like a contagious disease, spreading here, there and everywhere.

The incidence of homosexuality always has been greater in some countries than others. It varies in time and place. I believe in England it can be attributed in some measure to the general custom of sending boys to boarding-schools at an early age and confining them in this unnatural environment during adolescence. But there are so many confusing and contributing factors to the disease that it is difficult to isolate one particular cause. I have seen scores of thoroughly normal men and women turn to perversion in their forties or fifties simply through boredom, or idleness, or dissatisfaction.

In a large measure, women are greatly to blame for the increase in homosexuality. They are unconscious carriers of the germ. At a recent house party in England an obvious sash boy — obvious to me, that is, for I can spot them the moment they enter a room — came over for cocktails. After he had left, his hostess said, ‘What a charming man, so amusing.’

At which her daughter, aged fourteen, said with obvious disgust, ‘Oh Mother, how can you say that! He was horribly effeminate. He even wore a bracelet.’

The girl’s repugnance was refreshing; she took no account of the fact that in her mother’s eyes the man could be excused all else because he was ‘amusing’. Sash boys, with their feminine sensitivity and graceful manners, make especially agreeable companions to women. They are ’safe’, they are entertaining. A husband will hardly object to his wife’s friendship with a man he knows he has no reason to fear, who can give no cause for jealousy.

For older women, particularly those who are rich and manless, whose husbands have died or who have never married, the homosexual is the complete answer. Because women live longer today, because they outlive the age of sexual attraction, they take refuge in the society of the homosexual ‘gigolo’. For that is what many of them are, taking commissions and percentages on any purchase they may arrange of jewellery, cars, furniture and property. It is for the older woman a sweet illusion of youth to have young or even middle-aged sash boys around, lavishing on them all the appearance of lovers.

A further carrier of the germ is the mother caught up by an almost incestuous love for an only son, whom she constantly keeps beside her, pampering him and denying him the normal friendship of other women. Little do such mothers realise the perverted prison to which they condemn their beloved sons.

The aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trial placed such a social stigma on perversion that it virtually disappeared for two decades in London. Then little by little it reappeared, flourishing first in Berlin after the First World War, then Paris, and now London. From the world of the theatre, it spread to successful male dressmakers and interior decorators and elsewhere, until you have the terrible situation today that a normal young man comes to realise that it will actually be an advantage in his career to become ‘queer’, that perversion pays. It is a frightening prospect.

A number may say, ‘How can you take up this attitude when you know very well a number of these men are among your friends and acquaintances?’

It is quite true. I am guilty of contradiction here. But I just cannot apply the same rules to genius. It may be morally indefensible but I feel there must be one law for the especially rich in mind and another for the remainder. I fully appreciate the danger in condoning it in the few, because the insidious prestige they create makes it only too easy for others to follow.

Values change, of course. Recent events, in England at least, have shown that if Oscar Wilde came out of prison today he would not spend the rest of his life in furtive seclusion abroad. Today much of the world seems, as it were, to be discovering sex as though for the first time, sex is rampant, flaunted everywhere, naturally and unnaturally. I read only recently that the number of persons tried for homosexual offences in England and Wales has increased over the past fifty years from five hundred a year to five thousand.

Only perhaps by some revival of puritanism will there come about a corresponding revival in moral restraint. Either that or a change in fashion and manners. The world is fickle. It turns against a certain type of person as it turns against a style in clothes. The sash boys may soon come to find themselves as out of date as a cloche hat, and perversion be no longer a priority passport to material, artistic and social success.

I say that because there are already straws in the wind. Until last year dressmakers and interior decorators were holding their position on the social roost in Paris. Now I see a change; there are signs that their prestige is on the wane, in a word that they are slipping from their favoured niche. People are growing a little bored with them. And something of the same thing is happening, in Paris at least, with the sash boys. At my last party out of four hundred there were only nine present. That is a very low percentage in these times.

To my mind, it is in the power of women to stop the spread of homosexuality, to set up a barrier to their effete, lavender decadence by no longer courting and coddling their presence in their homes and at their parties. A dearth of hospitality will achieve a quicker death to homosexuality than any act of Parliament. You will never destroy it, human nature being what it is, but you can deter the spread of the disease by applying the social stigma of ostracism. As Lord Vansittart said in a debate in the House of Lords, he had “an uneasy fear that the great increase in this vice would not be checked without some balanced revival of the reprobation with which it was once reported.’

One can only wonder what Elsa’s friends Cecil Beaton, Cole Porter and Noel Coward thought of this unladylike outburst!

Most chroniclers of Elsa Maxwell’s life claim she was a lesbian. She lived with Dickie Gordon-Fellowes for nearly fifty years. A casual search online leads one immediately to a list of famous lesbian couples. Elsa and Dickie are on the list. But Elsa Maxwell clearly did not think of herself as a lesbian. Nor as a member of a burgeoning gay movement. She was resolutely stuck in the past, unable and unwilling to see beyond her own tired prejudices. It’s tragic, in a way. And pathetic. But it also perhaps explains why Elsa Maxwell is not more famous today and why she was basically forgotten the moment she died.

Recently I watched a video of her being interviewed by Mike Wallace on TV. In it Elsa Maxwell says that she is loved by 25 million of her fans. It’s a ballsy statement, but there’s little doubt that she believed it. The sad thing is that just six years after giving the interview, Elsa died. Barely a dozen people went to her funeral. It’s no wonder. She was a tireless self-promoter, but she gave so little in return.

You can watch this video of Elsa and Mike at this link. The University of Texas in Austin has an amazing archive of interviews that Mike Wallace did in the 50s and 60s. Just scroll down to Elsa’s from 11/16/1957. Perhaps you too will come away wondering what demons inspired Elsa to make such ridiculous critiques of Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield and others. It’s almost as if she had a self-destructive streak and was compelled to spout off the most outlandish and ill-considered ruminations. She may have known how to toast her titled friends, but she was a poor judge of talent. Ultimately the last laugh is on her, not with her. She dismisses Cleveland Amory as a nobody, but ironically it is he today who is still in print, and has legions of fans, while she languishes in the bowels of used bookstores, gathering dust.