The Colonel's Lady

At a Chicago breakfast in honor of South Pacific's road-show company last week, Actor Emmett Keane rose and angrily denounced "one vitriolic woman" as "the reason there are so few plays running in Chicago now."

Everybody knew that he was talking about Claudia Cassidy, the Chicago Tribune's triple-threat (drama-music-ballet) critic, who had just given Keane and the road show a mild clawing. Said Actor Keane: she ought to get married. When someone said that Critic Cassidy is married already (to ex-Stockbroker William Crawford), Keane snapped: "Well, then, why not have her divorced and get her married to Westbrook Pegler?"

Publisher Robert R. McCormick, who likes a good fight as well as his readers, ran Actor Keane's diatribe in a big box below Critic Cassidy's famed "On the Aisle" column. It was more evidence of the fact that Claudia Cassidy is the paramount critic in Chicagoland. Her critical judgment is not infallible, but her reviews can usually make or break any show in Chicago.

Critic Cassidy has often taken off a performer's hide with such vigor that some victims, including Actor Maurice Evans and Pianist Eugene Istomin, have vowed never to appear in Chicago again. But she has worked even harder to put over shows she liked, e.g., The Glass Menagerie, whose merit she was one of the first to spot.

Critic Cassidy is not bowed down by her responsibility as Chicago's cultural guardian: "I don't really know what my idea of criticism is. I don't believe I have ever really thought about it."

She was born in Shawneetown, Ill., graduated from the University of Illinois, and got her start in 1925 reviewing music for the Chicago Journal of Commerce. She had no musical training, but she knew what she liked and said so in quotable phrases, sometimes purple. The Journal lost her to Marshall Field's new Chicago Sun. In 1942 Bertie McCormick took her away with a fat boost in salary, which is now over $10,000.

She earns it in readership. During her successful campaign to drive Conductor Desire Defauw from command of Chicago's Symphony Orchestra, thousands of Trib readers who had never read a music story read Cassidy to learn how she would scratch Defauw next. At the height of the battle, the Trib received 200 complaining letters in one week from Defauw supporters, and Miss Cassidy offered to resign. Cried Bertie McCormick, "Two hundred letters to the music department? You keep right on writing!"

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