e repertoire of scores he conducted from
memory. This feat involved heartbreaking work, for his memory, while
good, is not unusually retentive. In the middle years of his career,
he devoted from ten to twelve hours a day to studying scores.

In periods when the Stokowski brain was unproductive of new stunts,
his private life and his recurrent rows with the directors of the
orchestra about matters of salary and control kept him in the papers.

His divorce from Mme. Olga Samaroff, the pianist, a Texan born as Lucy
Hickenlooper, whom he married in the dim days when he conducted in
Cincinnati, provided Rittenhouse Square with chit-chat for a whole
winter. So did his marriage to Evangeline Brewster Johnson, an
extremely wealthy, eccentric and independent young woman, who later
divorced him.

Mr. Stokowski's doings of the last few years can no longer be classed
as minor-league musical sensations. They have become Hot Hollywood
Stuff. First, there was his appearance in films. Then his
collaboration with Mickey Mouse. Then his friendship with Greta Garbo.
Then his five-month sentimental journey over half of Europe with the
Duse of the screen. Today he is as big a feature of the fan magazines
as Clark Gable and Robert Taylor.

Upon his return from Europe in August, Stoky made the most amusing
remark of a long amusing career. He told this reporter:

"I am not interested in publicity."

XXV

SERGE KOUSSEVITZKY

In the official biographies of Serge Alexandrovitch Koussevitzky you
will find that the boss of the Boston Symphony learned the art and
mystery of conducting at the Royal Hochschule in Berlin under the
great Artur Nikisch, but in this town there lives and breathes a
rather well-known Russian pianist who tells a different story.

Long ago, says this key-tickler, when he was a youth, he was hired by
Koussevitzky, then also a young fellow, to play the piano scores of
the entire standard symphony repertoire.

He pounded away by the hour, the day and the week, while Koussevitzky
conducted, watching himself in a set of three tall mirrors in a corner
of the drawing room of his Moscow home.

The job lasted just about a year, and our pianist has never looked at
a conductor since.

There's also an anecdote to the effect that, much earlier, when Serge
was still a little boy in his small native town in the province of
Tver, in northern Russia, he would arrange the parlor chairs in rows
and, with some score open