Born 100 years ago this week, the Basketball Diva of East Tennessee attempted to squeeze several careers into one very short life.

by Jack Neely

Back when highway cloverleafs were a big deal and had proper names, we had one that was named for Grace Moore. She was, after all, world-famous. She's one of only a handful of East Tennesseans who has been the subject of a popular biography and may be the only onetime Knoxvillian who was ever the subject of a major motion picture.

Stop someone on Main Street today and ask who Grace Moore was, and you'll likely hear some desperate guesses. Is she the one that had that cooking show in the '60s? The third woman ever to sit on the county school board? That gray-haired librarian everybody liked?

To describe her today, you'll need a lot more than her name. Grace Moore doesn't begin to suggest a picture of this long-legged blonde who couldn't sit still, who had eyes so blue they named a tint after her, who drank champagne and hung out with Scott and Zelda and Noel Coward in Paris and Venice, whom Cole Porter mentioned in a song. Florenz Ziegfeld called her one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was a popular actress on Broadway and in the movies and was even nominated for an Academy Award.

All that, though, was incidental to the fact that she could sing. Grace Moore sang for all sorts of audiences, Greenwich Village nightclubs and Broadway theaters and small-town Baptist churches and the great opera houses of Paris and London. Grace Moore may not be the finest soprano who ever sang at the Met, but she was once the most famous. Modern writers have called her the Pavarotti of her time. The great singer Lily Pons called her "a golden whirlwind." Men responded to her differently. Virgil Thomson's reaction might surprise those who know him as composer and one of New York's best-regarded music critics: "Grace Moore always radiated sexuality; every man longed to lay her." Chevalier was crazy about her; Francis Robinson, of the Met, called her "ravishing, preposterous, a law unto herself."

Who's Grace Moore? It might have seemed unlikely we'd ever have to ask.

Florida Street Serenade

She was born in a homely place called Slabtown, near Del Rio in the hills of Cocke County one century ago this Saturday, and is well remembered there. Newport is hosting a Grace Moore film festival this weekend.

She spent her adolescent years in Jellico, which she considered her hometown; she is also remembered there. Last month that town got together to dedicate a monument to Grace. Her fans, thinning in numbers but still devoted, came from as far as Iowa to be on hand.

Somewhere in between Slabtown and Jellico, though, she spent much of her childhood in Knoxville. You won't read much about that in either her 1944 autobiography, You're Only Human Once, or her official biography, Grace Moore and Her Many Worlds; both state she moved with her family to Knoxville when she was five and stayed a very short time. Her 1951 biopic, So This Is Love—starring musical star Kathryn Grayson and an extremely young Merv Griffin—is thick with color and detail about Jellico but doesn't mention Knoxville at all.

In her autobiography she recalled moving to circa 1903 Knoxville at age five as a traumatic experience for this country girl. "I hated my new city clothes and my awful city shoes—the first I had ever worn," she wrote. She remembered her "confusion and humiliation" at the city kids making fun of her pink ribbons and overstarched dress.

Records available at the library tell a different story. The 1900 census has the Richard Moores already living in an especially urban neighborhood of Knoxville with their one-year-old daughter "Gracie." According to city directories, they lived here for about seven years. Moreover, city directories also indicate that the Moores spent most of their Knoxville years in a house on old Florida Street, then one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Knoxville. When the Moores lived there, Florida Street was Knoxville's officially designated red-light district, a street crowded with saloons, poolhalls, and brothels.

We can only speculate about how much Grace Moore knew about her childhood neighborhood's reputation, and whether she chose to compress—or suppress—her Knoxville years, calling them "only an interlude," allowing them just three paragraphs in her autobiography.

By 1907, the Moores were living in much more comfortable circumstances in downtown Jellico, where Grace developed a reputation as a prankster—she allegedly once liberated all the hitched horses downtown—and as an athlete. She became captain of the girls' basketball team, circa 1916. (If the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame wishes to be complete, they should include some homage to Grace Moore.) Her interest in music, she said, came unexpectedly with a visit to her black nursemaid's church, on the hillside near Grace's house. There, she recalled, "I found myself singing, for the first time, from a deep inner need."

In New York, she sang in a Greenwich Village nightclub called the Black Cat Cafe, and in 1920 made her way to Broadway with a comedy called Hitchy Koo. After further successes, she left the great white way for Europe to study opera in Italy. By the time she returned, we'd heard of her.

Retired UT librarian and author David Harkness is Grace Moore's greatest champion. He began his long infatuation with Grace back home in Jellico, the hometown he and Moore shared. He was 15 years younger than Moore, and spoke to her in person only once—that was years later, backstage in New York—but when he was a boy and Grace Moore was off touring the world she'd write letters home to her mother; Harkness would read her exotic tales to Mrs. Moore, who preferred to relax and listen.

The first time he recalls hearing her voice was in 1928, just before her debut with the Met, when she sang at her sister Emily's wedding at Jellico's First Baptist Church. "I remember this gorgeous creature in white satin," recalls Harkness, then a sophomore in high school. "Oh, she was so beautiful." He recalls she was already wearing a decoration bestowed upon her by the King of Belgium; she sang "Oh Promise Me" and "I Love You Truly," wedding standards in 1928.

Word of her talent and imminent stardom had gotten around. Even though it was snowing, many had driven the narrow mountain roads up from Knoxville just to hear Grace Moore sing. The large church was packed to the balconies, and many who weren't part of the wedding party had to stand outside in the snow. "The ushers opened the stained-glass vents so people out on the lawn could hear her."

She debuted at the Met later that winter, singing the role of Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme. Everybody was there, even George M. Cohan, who cheered loudly and boasted to orchestra members than he'd known Grace years ago.

It led to more appearances on the Met and, six years later, the kind of stardom the Met's greatest seldom see. The movie One Night of Love, which some saw as a fanciful life story, had been a popular smash. This movie about an American country girl who goes to Italy to learn to sing was nominated for an Oscar, as was Grace Moore herself. While not exactly graceful, Grace Moore gave every scene an athletic energy, never gliding, but striding across the stage like—well, a basketball player.

The movie was especially popular among grateful musicians, who gave it standing ovations; some regarded it as the first good-quality cinematic musical. The movie gathered six Oscar nominations in all, winning two for music and sound, plus a special award for technical innovation with the soundtrack. (The title is fittingly ironic; in the movie, Moore's character twice turns away from romantic prospects in favor of her career.) The movie also introduced the song "Ciribiribin," which became her trademark.

She tried to keep her big feet in both worlds, enjoying her movie stardom—she averaged one movie a year from 1930 to 1937—but staying on the payroll of the Met: Tosca, Manon, and even singing a command performance for Queen Mary at Covent Garden in 1935. Known for her high living and what was then called glamour, Grace charmed audiences and colleagues with her personality as much as her voice. When the great Hungarian-born conductor Fritz Reiner attempted to advise her about singing a well-known Stephen Foster song, Grace shot back, "Who the hell do you think you are to tell me how to sing 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny?'"

Two Sopranos

Along the way she sang back in Knoxville at least a couple of times, once for the Tuesday Morning Music Club at Central Methodist. But the big show everyone remembers came in 1937. UT's Alumni Gym was then known as Alumni Auditorium, but it doubled as a basketball court even then. The diva arrived early for a sound check and happened to notice a basketball left on the floor. She picked it up and pumped it at the goal for a perfect two-pointer.

"I did that many a time in Jellico," she said.

That Alumni Auditorium show in 1937 was the biggest show Grace Moore would ever perform here. Some may have been listening more intently than others. In the audience that night was a seven-year-old East Knoxville girl named Mary Costa.

Costa, of course, would later be famous as an opera star herself, not to mention the singing voice of Disney's Sleeping Beauty. But in 1937, she recalls, "I was a sandbox singer. My mother was never serious enough to push me, but she gave me piano lessons and occasionally took me to concerts," including Moore's.

"Her voice was so warm and appealing," Costa recalls of Moore's last Knoxville show. "She had a warm, enticing voice with a lot of color to it." She also recalls Moore's infectious energy and spontaneity.

"I'm sure it did have an impact on me," she says. That show would be the only time Costa ever saw Moore, except in the movies.

Later Costa would sing many of the same roles Grace Moore had performed a generation earlier. Though their soprano styles were very different, Moore and Costa were similar in one respect: their popular projects made them better known to the public at large than most opera singers become. One Metropolitan Opera impresario, in fact, would call Costa "the Grace Moore of our time."

Though she remained popular in Hollywood, Moore gave movies up after co-starring with Cary Grant in When You're In Love (1937) to concentrate on opera. She worked closely with composer Gustave Charpentier to work on the title role of Louise; some consider her appearance as Louise at the Met in 1939 to be her finest moment. She sang the role for a 1940 French film.

In 1944, she published her memoirs, an unusual move for a singer still performing in her mid-40s. It's a lively book, colorful, funny, and not altogether accurate, but it opens with an apology for writing her memoirs long before she reached old age: "It will be a big surprise to me if I ever get old...."

She died less than three years later in a plane crash near Copenhagen. There were other celebrities in the same crash, including Prince Gustav Adolph of Sweden. Moore got top billing in the New York Times obituary: "Grace Moore dies in burning plane," went the headline. "Prince also killed."

Costa was on hand last month for the dedication of the Grace Moore memorial in Jellico, the only opera singer among the hundreds in attendance. In the last 51 years, there have been other tributes to Moore's life and career. Downtown highways have changed so much people who remember it aren't sure exactly where the Grace Moore Cloverleaf was. And there was that 1953 movie about her, So This Is Love.

A full-length biography by Rowena Farrar released in 1982 did a good job of bringing out the contradictions in Grace Moore's character, but got lukewarm reviews. An article in this September's issue of Opera News recites some peppery anecdotes and includes a large photograph of Grace, circa 1935, posing on a bear rug with a martini.

And there are some recordings, though not as many as you might think. Six CDs of her work have been released in recent years—David Harkness mentions the two-volume set, The Irrepressible Grace Moore—but only two of her eight movies are available on video: One Night of Love and The King Steps Out (with Franchot Tone). Both are apparently rare at local video stores, so you may have to order them. Lawson-McGhee Library does have a copy of One Night of Love.

Sniffing at her technical quality as shown in old audio recordings, opera critics tend to regard Grace Moore as a movie star who occasionally wowed an audience in an opera hall. Her voice, of course, was only half of her spell. Movies, where we can see her flirt with us, would seem a better way to experience her work.

But movie sources don't seem to know what to make of her, either. In several popular movie guides, her name doesn't appear at all; she may be the only Best Actress nominee not to get her own index listing. When you do find Grace Moore mentioned, right between Dudley Moore and Mary Tyler Moore, they seem to regard her as an opera star who occasionally slummed to make a movie.

She was never wholly one or the other. Critics never called her the definitive Carmen, and she wasn't pressing her hands in the cement on Hollywood Boulevard, either. She was something different. She was Grace Moore, and in the end, like her frustrated lovers, the world has never quite figured out what exactly that was.