TRILLER IN UNIFORM

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This week, on Saturday afternoon, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera will loop heavenward its new $13,000 gold curtain, revealing an inner curtain painted like a picture book. On the book is a likeness of Soprano Lily Pons, in red-white-&-blue uniform and cocked hat, surrounded by Alps and military symbols.

So for the first time in 22 years, the Met revives The Daughter of the Regiment, whose bubbling tunes were written by Gaetano Donizetti a century ago. It revives it specifically as an ear-tickling, eye-tickling vehicle for Coloratura Pons, who is vocally and boxofficially about the best there is.

When the curtain of the Met goes up on a newly designed production--as it does three or four times every year--seasoned critics, subscribers and standees are prepared for anything, even the worst. The Met is one of the last great lyric stages in the world, but opera at the Met has a way of prattfalling between two stools. The Met guards the grand operatic tradition, but it also yearns to tickle its public. The Daughter of the Regiment is a tickler.

The trills, roulades, la-la-las and rarefied staccato eek-eeks of the coloratura are of ancient tradition. The most famed of all coloratura heroines, Lucia di Lammermoor (music also by Donizetti), goes mad, to the accompaniment of an implacable flute. That is typical. Most coloratura roles are in operas in which the heroine goes daft, is throttled, poisoned, knifed, or dies improbably of tuberculosis, along about 11 p.m. But in The Daughter of the Regiment, a coloratura has more chance for fun. The greatest singers of the last century--Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, Marcella Sembrich, Luisa Tetrazzini--made the most of the chance, although the heft of the last two made the fun pretty heavy going. Lily Pons's principal worry is keeping her weight up to 105 lb., which she does by eating plenty of potatoes.

Better Lookers. As Marie, an orphan who is adopted as a mascot by the regiment, Soprano Pons beats the drum, falls in love with a peasant who turns soldier so that he may marry her. A marquise claims Marie as her niece, carries her off to a chateau to make a lady of her--but not for long. The peasant, now an officer, turns up to claim Marie, with drum rolls and general rejoicing.

This small, jolly opera might well get lost in the majestic spaces of the Met. But Viennese-born Stage Director Herbert Graf and Rumanian Scene Designer Jonel Jorgulesco, besides framing the production with its own curtain, brought the four brightly-colored sets as far down stage as possible. Ladislas Czettel designed gay costumes to match Lily Pons's, which was run up by famed, high-priced Dressmaker Valentina. To the military in the original libretto Director Graf added 24 high-stepping vivandieres, explaining: "You cannot think of a regiment with Lily Pons in it without having more female soldiers."

Besides Soprano Pons and a competent though none too handsome tenor, French-Canadian Raoul Jobin, The Daughter of the Regiment boasts, in the role of Sergeant Sulpice who foster-fathers Marie, a notable new singer, Italian Basso Buffo Salvatore Baccaloni. The Met's production ends with everyone singing La Marseillaise*--an idea contributed by Mme. Pons's band-leading husband, Andre ("Kosty") Kostelanetz.

A notable achievement of the Met's Manager Edward Johnson has been to hire lookers as well as singers. No other opera house of comparable artistic standards boasts such svelte and glamorous ladies as Czech Soprano Jarmila Novotna, Brazilian Soprano Bidu Sayao, U. S. Sopranos Helen Jepson, Grace Moore, Hilda Burke, Rose Bampton and Eleanor Steber (a West Virginia debutante of this month), U. S. Contraltos Rise Stevens and Gladys Swarthout.

Best Seller. But Manager Johnson's best-selling good-looker dates from the regime of his predecessor, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. Lily Pons has exuded practiced charm, emitted light but flawless high notes at the Met for just ten years.

The name is pronounced (approximately) to rhyme with lawns, but most people rhyme it with bronze. Lily Pons was born 36 years ago in Cannes, in the south of France, was named Alice Josephine by her Italian mother and French father. Papa Pons was an automobile engineer who once attempted to drive from Paris to Peiping. After nearly starving in Tibet, he was towed into China.

Lily studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire, took a prize at 13, later went on the Paris stage. Her extraordinary vocal cords contrived few public beeps, and no acrobatics at all, until after she was married--to August Mesritz, a wealthy, middle-aged Dutch lawyer and journalist. Husband Mesritz resolved that Lily should sing, took her to Alberti di Gorostiaga, an elegant Spaniard who ignored French gender but knew everything about bel canto singing technique. Exclaimed di Gorostiaga: "Mlle. Pons, he is a charming, a gentle lady, he is the most hard-working pupil of my life, he has the range of Patti."*

Within a year Soprano Pons made her debut, in 1928, in the provincial French opera of Mulhouse, Alsace. Her voice was heard in a few more second-string opera houses--Cannes, Vichy, La Baule--and, still unknown in France, pricked the ears of a couple of tourists. They were Maria Gay, an oldtime opera singer, and her husband Giovanni Zenatello. They took up the innocent Lily, promised her an audition at the Metropolitan. Within a few months Lily Pons was taking 16 Metropolitan curtain calls in Lucia, 30 a few nights later in Rigoletto. Later the Zenatellos sued for the right to manage her, take 15% of her earnings, lost their case.

Lily Pons divorced Husband Mesritz seven years ago in France. She announced her engagement to a surgeon from Hamburg, Germany, but nothing came of that betrothal. The name of Mme. Pons began to be obbligatoed by that of balding, businesslike, Russian-born Mr. Kostelanetz. Lengthy was Kosty's courtship, during which he crossed the continent so often that U. S. airlines gave him a silver mug as their No. 1 passenger. He also dispatched to Singer Pons, in Hollywood, a 300-lb. piano.

Traditionally, divas are prey to harmless superstitions. Lily Pons, born with a caul on a Friday the 13th, counts 13 her lucky number. She asks for room 1313 in hotels, buys souvenirs (like South American birds) by the baker's dozen; her house in Silvermine, Conn. bears the street number 13. So, by her and Kosty's account, she held out for 13 proposals of marriage, then straightway accepted. They were married in June 1938.

Docile, Shrewd, Smart. Ten years in the U. S. have put Lily Pons and the English language on a footing of jovial acquaintance rather than intimacy. Her soprano chatter is the sort which newspaper interviewers, transcribing every zis and zat with loving care, particularly admire. Of England's late King George V she said: "Ze Keeng--he ees tres gentil--zo zhentle, zo keeng." Of a shoe which was too small for even her No. 2 foot: ;'Eet ees no. I cannot enter." Pert and naive-looking with her big brown eyes, her childish face framed by a reddish pageboy bob, Lily Pons is to all appearances docile, even-tempered: she has all the French virtues, is genuinely kindly and cute comme un bou-ton--mais, zut alors, elle est shrewd, smart and has a will of iron. She has always worked hard, spends months preparing every role she sings at the Met,* is punctual at rehearsals.

In her brief (1935 to 1937) movie career, in which she was not a great success, she sang arias 50 times running without a murmur of complaint. Lily Pons hates champagne, drinks little wine, likes Coca-Cola, touches hard liquor and cigarets not at all. She still feels faintly seasick all day before a concert or opera performance.

Soprano Pons got $445 a week when she started at the Met. Now she earns $1,000 a night, which only Soprano Kirsten Flagstad and Tenor Lauritz Melchior equal. Concerts pay Lily Pons $4,000 apiece. This is success, and Soprano Pons enjoys the symbols of it: dizzy hats, spectacular gowns, never the same twice in succession. Soprano Pons likes chunky aquamarines, emeralds, diamonds. Once in San Francisco, feeling short of jewels, she borrowed $150,000 worth.

Such tastes make for publicity, and the U. S. press has faithfully reported Lily Pons's comings & goings, her decorations and honors. She is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, holds Belgium's Order of the Crown, the Gold Medal of the City Paris, a certificate as honorary consul of Cannes, an honorary inspectorship in the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles. Three flowers, a South American race horse, a restaurant, a Boston & Maine locomotive and a New Jersey Central streamlined train have been named for her. Los Angeles and Norwalk, Conn. have celebrated Lily Pons days.

Newspapers reported that she knits for the poor, that she was kissed by an ape at Dr. Voronoff's monkey farm near Menton, France, that young female operagoers at the Met banded themselves into "Lily Pons Fans," in imitation of the "Gerry-flappers" of Soprano Farrar 20 years ago. A Maryland town, whose chief industry is water lilies and goldfish, eight years ago publicized itself as well as the diva by taking the name Lilypons. The full flowering of this pun occurred when Lily Pons sang to the lily ponds, while politicos, from Maryland's Governor on down, listened in rapture. Last week at the Star-Spangled Ball, a big Manhattan benefit for the William Allen White Committee, Lily Pons it was who sang the Star-Spangled Banner.

Since her marriage to Kostelanetz, Pons has become the top attraction at summer concerts in U. S. parks and stadiums. The coloratura voice, which even musical dopes can tell is high-priced, accounts for part of her drawing power, but not all. Andre Kostelanetz is a competent stick-waver, and on records and the radio he plays, not symphonies and not jazz, but the kind of music plain people really like: his arrangements of "standard" pieces, Victor Herbert and such, beautifully done up in balanced brass, reed and string tones, as rich as a lobster Newburg well laced with sherry. In summer, the team of Pons & Kostelanetz earns $5,500 a night. The 300,000 people they have attracted to Chicago's Grant Park of a summer evening is the biggest crowd ever assembled to hear good music. Says Lily Pons: "On m'a dit que only dictators peuvent get crowds like that." And, underlining Kosty's part in the partnership, she has trilled: "A woman who is not happy cannot sing nice."

* From middle C to G in alt (above high C).

* In 1918 Frieda Hempel, as Marie, interpolated Keep the Home Fires Burning in the opera.

* Lucia, Rigoletto, Mignon, Barber of Seville, Linda di Chamounix, Somnambula, Coq d'Or, Tales of Hoffmann, Lakme (her favorite).

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