Overture of Hope, page 23
Or maybe, like her sister, she found it simply too difficult to look at the letters and the photographs “and see face after face of the people for whom we could do nothing.” For among that correspondence that Ida could never get around to organizing were letters from “two little boys, eight and ten, who insisted on writing out their own records in round, painstaking handwriting.”21 Their letters arrived too late for the sisters to save them.
As Ida wrote in her memoir, the sound of the telegraph boy’s motorcycle screeching to a halt in front of 24 Morella Road during those dramatic years before the war filled them both with terror.
Louise preferred not to dwell on the painful past. When she wasn’t attending opera with Ida or listening to records at their gramophone soirées, she retreated to a world of romance and fantasy. Friends remember that she kept up with all the television soap operas, even though she never watched them on television. “She read the plots in the newspaper and knew everything,” said Henny. But she depended still on Ida’s outgoing confidence. “I remember thinking how interesting she was and what a shame Ida had always done all the talking, but then she was a mesmerizing speaker.”22
Ida was also in charge of their daily lives. She shopped, cooked, and paid all the bills. Not surprisingly, when Ida was diagnosed with cancer, her main concern was for her sister. She drew up a will, leaving Louise the Morella Road house and created a trust that would allow Louise to collect the royalties from her romance novels, which numbered a staggering one hundred and twelve books. Ida died at a hospital in Wimbledon a few days before Christmas in 1986. She was eighty-two.
Louise was helpless. She had no idea how to do even the most mundane of household tasks. She didn’t know how to use the stove “because Ida had always done everything,” said Henny, who offered to show Louise how to turn on the cooker. “She said it wasn’t necessary because she didn’t care much about what she ate.” After Ida’s death, the opera-listening parties ended abruptly at Dolphin Square, and friends worried that without Ida, Louise wouldn’t be able to carry on.23
Louise missed her beloved sister so much that less than six months after her death, she sought to communicate with her in “the other world.” According to Leslie Flint’s diary, Louise made an appointment to visit the medium on May 26, 1987.
“I love you, I’m very close, I shall never be far.” Ida’s voice came through clearly on the tape that Flint made during their emotional session. He gave the tape to Louise to take home. “I am just waiting for the time eventually when you join us, but you have got a little longer to go yet…”
“Oh, darling!” wailed Louise. “Oh, darling, is that you? Oh, darling…”
“I love you. I want you to be happy. I want you to be patient with yourself. You have to take things as they come. I’ll come again! I’ll come again,” said the Ida voice as it began to fade.24
Following the seance, Louise retreated to the flat, becoming a virtual recluse until her own death from septicemia at Westminster Hospital on March 27, 1991.
Louise was so bereft without her younger sister that she never played their opera records again. Without Ida, Louise had no idea how to use the record player.
But it didn’t matter, Louise told a friend. She said she had all the music in her head.
Acknowledgments
In the nearly four years that it took to research and write about the Cooks, I was fortunate to meet so many people around the world who shared my enthusiasm and excitement about these incredible sisters.
When I told Holocaust historians Jonathan Petropoulos and Wendy Lower that I was working on a book about opera and the Nazis, these august professors at Claremont McKenna College both seemed to drop everything to help me. Jonathan Petropoulos pointed me in the direction of the scholarship on classical music and opera in the Third Reich, providing important introductions to scholars such as Michael Kater in Toronto, who was also generous with his time.
Wendy Lower made introductions for me at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I am certain that without her guidance, I never would have been able to access the Cooks’ file at Yad Vashem. Many writers had tried in the past—I know because I saw their letters in the file asking for the Cooks’ archive to be opened to them. For more than half a century those incredibly important documents that contain the missing personal stories of the refugees the sisters brought to safety in Britain had been closed to researchers. Without the Yad Vashem documents, there would be no Overture of Hope.
Unfortunately, Yad Vashem does not have a complete list of the twenty-nine refugees that Ida and Louise brought to safety.
The Holocaust memorial’s files only include letters from a handful of refugees that Ida provided to them. Still, these made all the difference in being able to tell their harrowing stories of escape from the Third Reich.
Although I used Ida Cook’s We Followed Our Stars and Safe Passage as guides to the lives of the refugees, there were few clues as to what happened to them after they reached London. The career setbacks and hardships faced by Clemens Krauss and Viorica Ursuleac are only briefly mentioned in Ida’s book, but they came into harsh reality in the mounds of official documents scattered throughout archives in Germany and Austria. Using archives and public documents, I was also able to flesh out what were heart-wrenching stories of the trials faced by the refugees in adapting to a new country.
Berlin-based researcher Orsolya Thorday conducted invaluable research at archives throughout Germany and Austria, translating epic stacks of documents related to Clemens Krauss’s career and his denazification after the war. She found long-forgotten letters from Ida Cook that had eluded other researchers and helped me piece together many of the lives of the Jewish refugees the sisters saved, extracting a great deal of their personal histories from public records in Austria and Germany. I am also grateful to her for the brilliant work she did helping to resurrect Georg Maliniak, Krauss’s deputy conductor and a tragic figure in this story.
In Northumberland, I owe a great deal of thanks to Michael Grant, a volunteer archivist at the Bailiffgate Museum in Alnwick, where the Cook sisters spent many of their childhood years before and during the First World War. Grant not only searched out school records for Ida and Louise at the all-girl Duchess’s School, but he also volunteered to walk from their old family residence at Lovaine House in the market town to the site of their old school when I asked him how long the walk to the school might have taken the girls every morning. His answer? “Twelve minutes at a steady pace” on a straight walk mostly downhill. “I guess if the girls were late they could have run it in much less,” he said. Grant sent me photographs chronicling some of the landmarks the sisters would have seen along the way, and even dug up a YouTube video showing the interior of the nineteenth-century stone structure where they lived with their family. He provided me with some of Ida’s earliest stories, including important chronicles of the sisters’ first trips to America and Ida’s first stab at romantic fiction.
In London, Joe Zigmond at John Murray has been a tough and exacting editor. I am grateful to him and his colleagues, including the brilliant Caroline Westmore and Morag Lyall, for their professionalism and uncompromising devotion to the narrative. Zigmond was the first publisher to be excited about the project, even as some of the research seemed daunting, knowing that Louise had burned much of the sisters’ correspondence regarding their refugees.
Thank you to my agent Frank Weimann for his professionalism and unwavering enthusiasm in this project.
I am grateful to the entire staff at Regnery Publishing in Washington for their support and passion for this book, particularly Tom Spence, Tony Daniel, Joshua Monnington, and the marketing team.
The staff at the Victoria & Albert Theatre and Performance Collections at Blythe House were extremely helpful and kind, never flinching even as I asked to see multiple envelopes in the Ida and Louise Cook Collection that needed to be weighed and recorded over and over again.
In England, John Harris and his family were very generous with their family stories about the sisters, as was Jeanne Henny, who also shared her stories about the Mayer-Lismann family. In Rome, Cecilia Gobbi was incredibly generous with her time, and allowed me unfettered access to her father Tito Gobbi’s private correspondence with the Cook sisters at the Associazione Musicale Tito Gobbi. I will never forget her wonderful hospitality at the Associazione, which is located at the beautiful Gobbi family home on the outskirts of the city where Ida and Louise would spend part of every summer in their later years.
Thank you to the staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was here that I found an important trove of letters Ida had written to her idol Rosa Ponselle that chronicled a great deal of the sisters’ post-war history.
Research staff at the NYPL’s main branch and the Center for Research in the Humanities were incredible. I was really privileged to be able to occupy a research study room during the work on this book, even if access to the library was cut off during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Still, I had the luxury of being able to ask a team of NYPL archivists for assistance even while the library was closed. A special thank you to Melanie Locay at the Center for Research in the Humanities and Lyudmila Sholokhova, the curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection, as well as to my colleagues in the program who offered so many good suggestions during a works-in-progress discussion.
Linda Zagaria was among the early readers of the manuscript, and I am grateful for her piercing and exacting study.
In Washington, I am extremely grateful to the staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for their efforts on behalf of this project, and also to archivists at the Library of Congress for their help with the Joshua Logan Papers.
In Los Angeles, thank you to Paul Baker and Mani Mekler Baker for sharing letters and stories from Ida and Louise, and for opening up their home to me when I visited. I would also like to thank Jonathan Marc Feldman, a tremendous screenwriter, who first suggested I pick up Berta Geissmar’s The Baton and the Jackboot, and who has adapted the Cooks’ incredible story for the screen.
Staff at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles also combed their archives for correspondence between Amelita Galli-Curci and her friend and guru Paramahansa Yogananda.
On Long Island, I want to thank the staff at Geek Hampton in Sag Harbor, especially Tristin Theret who somehow managed to restore the manuscript when it seemed to vanish from my computer. It took him less than twenty minutes to find it, and he then dramatically restored it seconds before power went out during a summer tornado.
Thank you also to the staff at the University of Manitoba that houses an archive devoted to British medium Leslie Flint. I also want to thank Karl Jackson-Barnes at the Leslie Flint Educational Trust in the United Kingdom, who provided insights into how the celebrated medium conducted seances in London that were attended by the Cooks.
Hannah Milic excitedly transcribed most of those seances from tapes made by Flint and helped research the book’s complicated endnotes and sourced photographs. I am incredibly grateful for her support and proud to be her mother.
Thank you to my family and friends in Canada and the United States, including Franklynne and George Vincent. Melissa Klein and Serena French, as well as Sasha Josipovicz, Isabel Madden, Milosh Pavlovicz, Tom Anderson, and Caroline Bongrand have been faithful supporters of my work and good friends. Also, a big thank you to my incredible colleagues at the New York Post, among the most intrepid reporters and editors I know.
In Westhampton Beach, I want to thank the Burner family, especially Nancy and Mike Burner who so generously gave me the keys to an office when I had nowhere else to work. Thank you to Kerry Dowd for putting up with the insanity.
A very special thank you to Ray Dowd who provided a wonderful place to work during the worst of the pandemic and a great deal of love and support during the challenges involved in writing this book. His equanimity and compassion kept me sane and grounded.
Film producers Andreas Roald and Donald Rosenfeld have never wavered in their enthusiasm for this project. The discovery of the Cook sisters began with Donald’s old and dear friend Bryan Bantry encountering them at Yad Vashem and telling Donald: “Wow, do I have a Merchant Ivory movie that we just have to make!” Donald, especially, loves the Cooks as much as I do. He delighted in every new archival discovery I made about the sisters and their opera-world friends, and faithfully read every draft—sometimes several times.
About the Author
ISABEL VINCENT, an award-winning investigative journalist for the New York Post, is the author of the bestselling memoir Dinner with Edward, the biography Gilded Lily: The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows, the sex-trafficking exposé Bodies and Souls, and See No Evil, an investigation into Latin America’s biggest kidnapping case. Her account of the Swiss bank accounts left dormant after the Nazi era, Hitler’s Silent Partners, won the Yad Vashem Award for Holocaust History. A native of Canada, Vincent covered South American drug cartels for the Globe and Mail and later reported on the conflicts in Kosovo and the civil war in Angola. For many years, she has reported on the madness, mayhem, and corruption of New York City for the Post and a host of other publications.
Like Regnery History on Facebook Follow us on Twitter
RegneryHistory.com
Selected Bibliography
Archives
Austria
Archiv der Isrealitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien / Archive of the Jewish Community of Vienna
Archiv des Musikvereins Graz / Music Association Archive, Graz
Archiv des Theatermuseums Wien / Archives of the Vienna Theater Museum
Archiv der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien / Archive of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Musiksammlung—Clemens Krauss Archiv Wien / Austrian National Library Music Collection—Clemens Krauss Archive, Vienna
Österreichisches Staatsarchiv / Austrian State Archives, Vienna
Stadt- und Landesarchiv Wien / Municipal Archives, Vienna
Canada
The Jim Ellis Collection (Leslie Flint Recordings), Psychical Research and Spiritualism Collection, University of Manitoba
Germany
Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin / Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München Bildersammlung / Bavarian State Photo Archives, Munich
Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv München / Bavarian State Archives, Munich
Bibliothek des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung des Preußischen Kulturbesitz in Berlin / State Institute for Music Research of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin
Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde / German State Archive, Berlin
Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden / Hessian State Archives, Wiesbaden
Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt / Hessian State Archives, Darmstadt
Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main / City History Institute, Frankfurt
Musikwissenschaftliche Bibliothek der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin / Humboldt University Library of Musicology, Berlin
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Musikabteilung / State Library—Musicology, Berlin
Israel
Yad Vashem Archives: Files of the Department of the Righteous Among the Nations, File #60, Jerusalem
Italy
Associazione Musicale Tito Gobbi, Archivo Storico, Rome
United Kingdom
Duchess’s School Archives, Bailiffgate Museum, Alnwick
Ida and Louise Cook Collection, Victoria & Albert Theatre & Performance Collections, London
Leslie Flint Educational Trust, London
London Metropolitan Archives, City of London
The Wiener Holocaust Archives, London
The Opera Archive, Glyndebourne, East Sussex
Wigmore Hall Archives, London
United States
Center for Jewish History, New York
Joshua Logan Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Leo Baeck Institute, New York
National Institute for Holocaust Documentation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Rosa Ponselle Papers, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Books
Bartrop, Paul R. The Evian Conference of 1938 and the Jewish Refugee Crisis. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Burchell, Mary. Wife to Christopher. London: Mills & Boon, 1936.
———. A Song Begins. London: Mills & Boon, 1965.
———. We Followed Our Stars. London: Mills & Boon, 1950.
Cook, Ida. Safe Passage: The Remarkable True Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis. Toronto: Harlequin, 2008.
Geissmar, Berta. The Baton and the Jackboot: Recollections of Musical Life. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944.
Gourvish, Terry. Dolphin Square: The History of a Unique Building. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Grenville, Anthony. Jewish Refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, 1933–1970. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009.
Haddon, Jenny, and Diane Pearson. Fabulous at Fifty: Recollections of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, 1960–2010. Great Britain: Romantic Novelist’s Association, 2010.
Harris, Mark Jonathan, and Deborah Oppenheimer. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Kater, Michael H. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
