The Real Romance

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Half a dozen graduates of Washington's now defunct Gunston Hall school for girls got together last week to celebrate the 27th birthday of their friend and classmate Margaret Truman. The night before, Margaret had come down from Manhattan to Washington for the occasion. A late riser by preference, she roused herself for an "early" (8:40) breakfast with her father at Blair House, lunched with her mother before going off to Best Friend Jane Lingo's house to gossip, giggle and eat her favorite chocolate cake with her old school chums.

"Marg" has a lot to tell her girl friends these days. She has come a long way since she first arrived at Gunston Hall 17 years ago as the obscure daughter of a freshman Senator from Missouri. In those days Margaret's classmates sometimes twitted her about the "silent Senator" who never opened his mouth on Capitol Hill. Margaret herself, a competent scholar and an indifferent athlete, got scant attention from her contemporaries--until, one day at recess, they discovered that she could hit a higher note and hold it longer than anyone present.

Since then, Margaret Truman's voice has become one of the most heatedly discussed topics in the nation.

Not for Children. Close friends in both Washington and Independence, Mo. have a way of referring to Margaret's sudden eminence as "this thing"--much as though it were a crippling disease of childhood or a family scandal best left unmentioned. Perhaps they protest too much that everything is just the same as it was before the Truman family was translated to the

White House. Bess and Harry Truman have done their best to preserve the pleasant fiction. But the fact remains that the American public takes a deep, proprietary interest in anyone who lives rent-free at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It reserves the right to poke, pry, carp, coo and criticize at will.

The White House, Harry Truman once said, is no place to bring up a child. When the Trumans moved in, Washington's newsmen, deprived of the exciting round of dogs, diaries, Balls and divorces that had romped through the presidential quarters during the twelve Roosevelt years, aimed their pencils hopefully at Margaret!

Margaret Truman was 21 and marriageable--the first marriageable White House daughter in more than a quarter of a century. Gossip columnists hopefully reminded their readers of the wooing and winning of T.R.'s daughter Alice by Nicholas Longworth, and the marriages of the Wilsons, father & daughters. They noticed, and noted in their syndicated columns, every young man Margaret saw more than once.

On Delaware Street. Margaret's mother, a reticent woman who has never made any bones about preferring Independence to Washington, did her best to pull the White House blinds down. "I will always be a part of Missouri," said Bess Truman. In Missouri, "nice people" do not peer into other nice people's windows.

In the old gingerbread Wallace house on Independence's elm-lined North Delaware Street, where Judge and Mrs. Harry Truman lived with her mother, little Margaret was brought up under fond, watchful eyes, in carefully guarded privacy. Bess and Harry were doting parents, partly because their only child was born to them late, when each was close to 40, partly because she was a delicate child thin and pale, with frequent deep circles under her eyes. There were other doting relatives: a cluster of uncles and aunts Mrs. David ("Grandmother") Wallace. Bess's mother, and redoubtable Grandmother ("Mama") Truman. Margaret admits that "I was spoiled outrageously."

The Hicks. Margaret's best friends in Independence today are the half-dozen girls who lived within a block of her grandmother's house during her early schooldays. Bess, loath to have Margaret stray far from home, encouraged them all to come and play on Mrs. Wallace's lawn, where there were swings and a slide to lure them, and in the capacious Wallace attic and basement. There was an old slave quarters in a backyard close by, which had done time as a henhouse in its later years. There Margaret and her friends organized a club known as the "Henhouse Hicks." The Hicks furnished their clubhouse with castout furniture collected pictures of such girlhood idols as Clark Gable and Nelson Eddy, put out a weekly paper which lasted for five issues and produced a play which was favorably noticed by the Independence Examiner.

Margaret is best remembered by the Hicks today as the diplomat and peacemaker of the group. When an argument broke out, said one of them, "Margaret always liked to see that everyone made up and went home happy. It was almost as though she were afraid, if we went away mad, that we wouldn't come back."

Like many an only child, Margaret could produce a serviceable tantrum herself if the occasion warranted. Once when her parents were about to go visiting, leaving her behind, Margaret flung herself into a crying fit. Harry and Bess were firm, firmly departed. "As soon as they were out of sight," says Margaret, "I promptly turned off the weeps." Generally, her parents were more amenable. "I never bawled out Margaret but once in my life," the President confesses, without specifying the cause.

"Dopey," "Dearie." Margaret herself can remember one occasion when her father took a firm stand. His daughter, whose conversation even today is generously larded with such schoolgirlisms as 'gosh," "golly" and "dopey," had suddenly taken to calling everybody "dearie" --from her grandmother to some stray cat. Harry at last warned her that every "dearie" from then on would cost her 10-c- out of her allowance. After losing 40-c- at one dinner, Margaret was cured.

Friends suspect that Bess Truman never wanted Margaret to sing in public, that it was indulgent Harry who gave his daughter encouragement. But the Trumans have always presented a solid front in public, and except for Harry's reservation that Margaret must first get her college degree, there was no open family opposition to her career. Harry himself taught her to play her first piano piece (The Little Fairy Waltz) when she was only six. At twelve, Margaret joined the choir of Independence's Trinity Church.

Harry Truman gave up his ambition to become a professional pianist because, as he explained later, half-seriously it was "sissy." But Harry's daughter, a serious-minded honor student with a strong predilection for "self-improvement," was as earnest about her music as about everything else she tackled. Moreover, she frankly admits, she was hopelessly stagestruck. In 1939, a family friend gave her burgeoning ambition a forceful boost.

The 298th Gypsy. Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler, the wife of a Missouri gas-company executive, was then a bustling woman with an interest in music and unlimited enthusiasm. She somewhat dramatically claims to have discovered the full quality of Margaret's voice during a rainy automobile ride when she and Margaret sang together to pass the time She promptly informed Bess of her discovery. "Mrs. Truman," she said later, didn't appear much impressed, but she agreed that if Margaret's voice had possibilities, she should have training." Mrs. Strickler went to work. For almost seven years, during her schooldays at Gunston Hall and George Washington University Mrs. Strickler's protegee worked in obscurity. In 1943 she made one public appearance in a Denver summer opera company during a visit to relatives out West. But that hardly counted. "They had 297 gypsies in the chorus of Countess Maritza" Margaret says, "and they needed 298. I was it."

In May 1946, a year after her father became President, Margaret graduated from George Washington with a high B average. The one condition Harry Truman had put in the way of her career was at last fulfilled. Ten months later she made her debut as a professional coloratura soprano with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It was a bow made to the accompaniment of such curiosity as has rarely been accorded an untried concert artist. Margaret sang a brief program of such trifles as Cielito Lindo and The Last Rose of Summer. The music critics who turned out kindly reserved serious judgment on the newcomer. But the nation's newsreaders cared little about the voice. What about the girl? What was she like?

No Padding. Those who had expected to see a gawky amateur make a fool of herself in public were surprised. The President's daughter had the poise of a professional. Nobody could call her beautiful, but her fine gold hair, easy smile and near-perfect complexion made liars of the gaunt-featured newspictures that sometimes appear in the papers. Smaller and trimmer than she looks in pictures, Margaret stands 5 ft. 4 in. high. Her shoulders are square and shapely, her waist a neat 26. On stage and off, her clothes are not notably "high fashion" (her father disapproves of tight fits and low necklines), but her Manhattan dressmaker, Madame Pola, says: "I never have to touch her figure. She needs no padding."

If Margaret Truman's first concert failed to establish her as a singer, it went far to prove her a person. Her friendliness was apparent to everyone. "Keep your fingers crossed for me," she had grinned at newsmen just before the concert. The hard-bitten journalists went to their typewriters inclined to do just that.

To those who had seen Margaret at Washington social functions, her naturalness with people of every sort was no news. In the round of Washington functions to which she was called, the President's daughter was seldom profound and seldom demonstrative, but she could chat in as friendly, casual a fashion with South Africa's late Prime Minister Jan Smuts as with an elevator boy. She was easy and self-confident. She was neither cowed nor over-impressed by the protocol that surrounded her. During a wave of petty pilfering which plagued the Secret Service, Margaret brightened a formal Blair House dinner by unobtrusively putting a presidential silver spoon in the pocket of Thomas J. Watson Jr., scion of International Business Machines.

The Pro. Margaret's second appearance as a concert artist was in the Hollywood Bowl in August 1947, before an audience of about 15,000. The indomitable Mrs. Strickler, who seemed to be running the affair singlehanded, despite the official presence of Conductor Eugene Ormandy and other notables, took pains to assure the press beforehand that her protegee's voice could fill the stadium easily and soar without effort to G above high C. After the concert, a technician at the sound controls deep in the stadium's heart gave Margaret's voice a decibel rate approximating that of Bing Crosby. The critics agreed that her voice was small.

The Bowl concert was followed by a tour through the South and Southwest, during which Margaret sang to packed houses in Amarillo, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, Tulsa and half a dozen other cities. "If there was a fire in Independence tonight," said a fellow townsman of Margaret's when the touring singer came to Kansas City, "there wouldn't be anyone there to see it."

At the end of her tour, Margaret temporarily renounced her own career to help her father's; the 1948 campaign was on. There was more than a casual parallel between the two. The nation's music critics have done little more to encourage Margaret in her ambitions than the political pollsters did for Harry. At best, they have been kind, holding back in gentlemanly restraint from the blasts they might have loosed at a more seasoned professional. "Few artists now appearing before the public have Miss Truman's physical advantages," wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson. "She seems to sing carefully, is obliged to, indeed, by the poverty of her resources."

A few have been encouraging. "It is a pleasant duty to cheer a promising beginning . . ." wrote the Washington Times-Herald's Glenn Dillard Gunn. "Her musical feeling is sure and persuasive [but] it has yet to be matured."

None of the critics has gone further in outright praise than to describe Margaret's voice as "agreeable in quality" and "produced accurately."

"Laugh It Off." But some of Harry Truman's native stubbornness has been inherited by his daughter, and has perhaps given her a happy indifference to criticism. "When the papers say mean things," she explains, "Dad and I just laugh it off." That "Dad" is not impervious to criticism directed at his only child was made plain in the now famous, outraged letter from the President to the Washington Post's Paul Hume, who wrote bluntly: "Miss Truman cannot sing very well."

With the presidential campaign over, Margaret went back to her singing, without benefit of Mrs. Strickler. This time she was coached as a lyric soprano by another Missouri girl, Helen Traubel. Diva Traubel, a longtime idol of Margaret's, was not properly a teacher at all, but for about a year she served in a voluntary, friendly capacity to give Margaret the benefit of her long experience.

Soprano Truman is still a long way from being in Soprano Traubel's league, but hundreds of thousands of people have now paid money to hear her sing and, as Margaret says, "they haven't thrown anything yet." She has received an average of $1,500 apiece for close to 70 concerts. She has earned from $2,000 to $3,000 each for appearances on radio and television with such stars as Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead. Her first recording, an RCA Victor album of folk songs, will soon be on sale at music stores. Last week her business manager was arranging the final details of a contract with NBC which will guarantee Margaret between $25,000 and $35,000 for appearances on radio and TV during the next year. An NBC vice president says he would be happy to sign Margaret as an M.C. whether she could sing or not. NBC's checks, plus some 20 to 30 concerts planned for next year, should bring her earnings close to the $100,000 her father gets as President.

Among the Celebrities. Besides all this, Margaret's singing has brought her a good measure of the independence that may have been its initial attraction. Her family permits her to keep a 3 1/2-room apartment in Manhattan with her mother's secretary as companion. There, in a fashionable apartment hotel, Margaret practices her music (an hour or so each day), pays her own bills, cooks her own breakfast ("toast, coffee, milk, fruit juices and sometimes an egg"), entertains her friends, and lives her own life as far as she is able.

Secret Service men are always close, family friends in New York have been told to keep an eye on her. Blair House is on the telephone daily. But within this circumspect frame, Margaret finds more freedom than she has ever known.

Recovering from a slight cold last week, Margaret kept close to her apartment,' where she did some practicing and discussed business with her manager. She did find time, however, to join some friends at a matinee of the D'Oyly Carte's Gondoliers and an evening performance of Iolanthe. "I've been so busy humming the tunes ever since," she complained later, "that I've neglected my practice." After Iolanthe, Margaret dropped in at Sardi's.

Next to playgoing and shopping, she likes best to pay an occasional, well-chaperoned visit to Manhattan's better-known night spots. There she drinks milk or Cokes (she can no longer stand the tomato juice which was once her teetotaling tipple) and stares happily at the celebrities. She is still refreshingly unaware that most of the celebrities are staring back.

Margaret's major annoyance at the moment is the fact that the newspapers are still trying to marry her off. She is an expert dancer who has no trouble finding escorts. But so far, there is no one among all the candidates selected by the gossip columnists who has earned the right to share even a rumor with her. She is too busy with other things. "Music," says Margaret Truman, "is the real romance right now."

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