Fiction
The American author Barbara Paul has written several murder mystery novels based on Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, and the Metropolitan Opera.
Ring Lardner has one of his characters attend a performance of Carmen starring Farrar in the short story 'Carmen' (Gullible's Travels, 1917). He remarks it stars 'Genevieve Farr'r, that was in the movies a w'ile till they found out she could sing,'. On the way home, his party (including a man named 'Hatch' who has no dress sense) discuss it:
Well, when we got on the car for home they wasn't only one vacant seat and, o' course, Hatch had to have that. So I and my Missus and Mrs. Hatch clubbed together on the straps and I got a earful o' the real dope.
"What do you think o' Farr'r's costumes?" says Mrs. Hatch.
"Heavenly!" says my Missus. "Specially the one in the second act. It was all colors o' the rainbow."
"Hatch is right in style then," I says.
"And her actin' is perfect," says Mrs. Hatch.
"Her voice too," says the Wife.
"I liked her actin' better," says Mrs. H. "I thought her voice yodeled in the up-stairs registers."
"What do you suppose killed her?" I says.
"She was stabbed by her lover," says the Missus.
"You wasn't lookin'," I says. "He never touched her. It was prob'ly tobacco heart."
"He stabs her in the book," says Mrs. Hatch.
"It never went through the bindin'," I says.
Read more about this topic: Geraldine Farrar
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
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“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.”
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“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
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