Monday, Oct. 11, 1926

Charges

Some seven years have passed now since Augustus D. Juilliard, Manhattan financier, died and left the largest bequest to music ever recorded--the Julliard Foundation. In the summer of 1920 the trustees, businessmen all, announced the appointment of Dr. Eugene Allen Noble, Methodist minister, as executive secretary. Last week the Juilliard Foundation was called to account on the basis of its limited accomplishments for the first five years of its existence in proportion to its resources now known to be more than $13,000,000. It was charged with never having obtained a New York State charter, of acting nevertheless as a private corporation, of disregarding the wishes of the founder, of creating a feeling of suspicion rather than of good will on the part of the public in its educational programs, of never having given a musical entertainment as specified in the second clause of the will, of never having assisted the Metropolitan Opera Company. Harshest of criticism was leveled at Secretary Noble, "a misfit ruling with an iron hand," cleaver always to the policy of utmost secrecy.

"Eternal Life--Small Lake"

All last month a small young woman whose chest expansion exceeds that of mighty Jack Demp-sey-- traveled from city to city in the U. S. Every night but Sunday she performed a strange rite. Entering a small cubicle engaged for her in advance, she closed the door, molded a blob of wax, placed it on the bridge of her flattish nose. She fastened flesh-tinted court-plaster to her slanting eyes, creamed and powdered her broad cheeks, all so deftly that an Indo-European girl, or at most a Eurasian, left the dressing-room where a little Nipponese had gone in. Not until she reached Detroit last week was real attention paid this young woman by newsgatherers. Then the fact was broadcast that the Yum-Yum of the Messrs. Shubert's Mikado road company, was none other than Hisa Koike ("Eternal-Life Small-Lake"), 19, descendant of proud Samurai,f whose ambition vaults not only as high as grand opera but also beyond the roles to which Japanese prima donnas have always been limited in the Occident--Madame Butterfly, Madame Chrysantheme, Lena in La Princesse Jaune. It was to be a Marguerite, a Lady Marian, a Xenia, that Hisa Koike, after studying music at Columbia University, undertook to learn western make-up methods and practiced them even while playing Yum-Yum. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, her present employment has little to do with her case. Critics, having heard her vocal chords vibrate under drafts from her super-Dempsey lungs, grant her at least an even chance of making good.

--Dempsey, 4% in.; the young woman, 4% in. tHer father, Aiji Koike, sound Methodist, manufactures glass in Tokyo