by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As has been noted here previously, it is hard to overstate the revolutionary importance of commercial radio and one of the earliest of the stations established in Los Angeles was KFI, which began operating in spring 1922 under the ownership of the very successful automobile dealer Earle C. Anthony. The broadcasting studio was in the entrepreneur’s Packard Building (named for the brand he sold) at Hope and 10th streets and, soon, KFI also aired programs for the Los Angeles Examiner and Los Angeles Herald, the Hearst-owned daily newspapers.
The featured artifact from the Museum’s collection for this post is a large-format mailing card publicizing KFI and mailed on 4 December 1923 to a Pittsburgh recipient. One the front side of the document are four photos of the radio room, broadcasting studio, reception room and the Packard Building with the roof apparatus for the station.
The schedule was 5 to 11 p.m., with some gaps, each day save Sunday and from 10-11a.m., 4-5 p.m., and 8 to 11 p.m. on those days. A statement thanked recipients for their “report to us on hearing KFI” adding “it is a pleasure to know that you are enjoying our programs.” It was noted that the station had a 500-watt set by Western Electric. The card further stated, on the obverse, that
KFI programs are the direct result of a definite ideal held jointly by the Allied Music and Civic Interests of Los Angeles and Earle C. Anthony, Inc. The importance of Radio as a carrier for wholesome, instructive and entertaining programs was thoroughly recognized, and in consequence the Allied Music and Civic Interests of Los Angeles have undertaken the responsibility for KFI’s concerts.
A listing of monthly programs was provided including offerings under such local organizations as the Gamut Club, a longstanding musical association; Woman’s Lyric Club of Los Angeles; Opera Reading Club of Hollywood; Matinee Musical Club; Public School Music Teachers Association of Los Angeles; Musical Optimists; Los Angeles Oratorio Society; George J. Birkel Company, which sold instruments and other items related to music; Los Angeles Music Teachers Association; Orpheus Club; California Federation of Music Clubs; and the Junior Music Clubs of Southern California.
There were also performances on Wednesdays and Sundays by Theron Bennett and his Packard Six Orchestra, named, naturally, for one of Anthony’s best-selling vehicles, as well as a once-monthly offering by the Hollywood Girls Quartette and weekly concerts by the male singers of the Packard Radio Club. Early Sunday mornings there were programs from the aforementioned newspapers and other sponsors, while religious offerings by the Church Federation with musical services by the National Federation of Music Club during afternoons were also on the schedule. One of those who took full advantage of the power of radio was Trinity Methodist Church’s Bob Shuler, whose crusades against corruption created controversy and legal problems for “Fighting Bob” in subsequent years.
From 6:45 to 7:30 each night, there were several offerings, including of Peter Rabbit and stories from the Nick Harris Detective Agency for the younger set and from Los Angeles County dental and medical societies, the central Y.M.C.A. and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce for older audiences. Additionally, these early evening time slots presented musical selections under the auspices of the Junior Music Clubs. On 3 December, the evening before the card was sent out, one of the performers was 12-year old pianist and dancer Marie Victoria Pergain of Monrovia and the Monrovia News of that day reported her appearance and commented,
Little Miss Pergain, who is of French birth, is so accomplished a pianiste that critics regard her as a prodigy certain of a brilliant musical feature. Monrovia friends will welcome the opportunity to hear this talented child.
Actually, Pergain doesn’t appear to have been of French birth at all, though her family history is murky and cloudy enough that isn’t at all clear what her origins were. Her mother’s name was Elsie Elizabeth Hoffman, but three census listings show her birthplace as Russia, Germany and Finland, while two of them stated her first language was German or Russian, and Marie’s birth certificate states that Elsie hailed from New York City. Her father’s background is also mysterious. He was alternately known as Albert Michelin Pergain, or A. Michelin Pergain, or Michel Pergain, or Michael Pergain, but, on Marie’s birth certificate and her baptismal record, he is shown as Arthur Mitchell Pierce.
Further complicating matters, in 1942, when he applied for Social Security benefits, under the name Albert M. Pergain, he listed his birthdate as 19 November 1883, birthplace as Nice, France (other sources say New York City), and his parents as Thomas Pergain and Marie Piromallo. Yet, shipping manifests for 1903 and 1904 clearly show that Thomas Pergamo emigrated from southern Italy, not far from Naples and then was followed several months later by Marie Piromallo and several children, including 20-year old Aniello, who, unlike the others in his family, did not have the stamp “Admitted” next to his name, indicating that he may have already been in America.
A Piromallo family document located online, however, states that Aniello died in 1907, so, while his birthyear matches that of “Albert Pergain,” there is the problem of whether of not this was one and the same person and, perhaps, a mistake was made about when Aniello died. We do know that Albert M., or A.M., Pergain, appeared with the Fritzi Scheff Opera Company on Broadway in at least four operas between November 1903 and June 1906 and then followed this with a vaudeville run at the Hippodrome Theatre from November 1906 to August 1907. Whether he was Aniello Pergamo, reimagined into Albert Pergain, or not, the evidence is suggestive of Italian origins as are the few photographs located of him.
Albert Pergain was married first to Lillian Jaccard, who also had a musical background as her mother Wilhelmina was a music teacher and Lillian had a long career, spanning nearly six decades, as a “music engraver” or lithographer. The couple had a daughter, born in 1906, Cleo, who went on to be a professional dancer, peaking during the 1920s when she performed with members of the famous Foy family. That marriage ended after just a short period and Albert then married Elsie Hoffman.
Marie was born in South Bend, Indiana on 9 May 1911 (and was followed by two sisters, Cecile, born in Denver, and Cleo M., born in Utah—from these varying birth states we can see that Albert was peripatetic, or traveling and moving from place to place.) Albert “Pierce” was listed as a salesperson, which would at least largely explain the frequent moves through the country after his brief operatic career ended. While living in Denver, Albert, who was well into his thirties enlisted with the American Expeditionary Force after the United States joined the Allies in the First World War.
While some accounts later stated that he was wounded in action with a medical unit in France, Albert was actually injured in camp and the back problems he sustained led to his discharge in August 1918, after about eight months in the serve and a few months before the war mercifully came to a close. Apparently needing a warmer climate in which to live, Albert, Elsie and their children headed south and settled at Tucson, Arizona. At the first of 1919, Albert advertised in the Arizona Republican as a salesperson for phonographs, though the ad didn’t provide a brand and sales were cash only.
The following month, the Santa Fe Coal and Coke Company in New Mexico took out an ad warning readers that Albert was not authorized to sell stock in the company. By May, he was a representative selling land in Pecos County, Texas, between San Antonio and El Paso purported to be oil rich, though there was no company name to be found.
The next month, he was an agent for the Three-in-One Oil Company offering stock for oil properties in Wichita County, northwest of Dallas. In early August, two ads were taken out in the Republican, one flatly stating that Elsie left him a few days before and another under “Ned” Pergain asking for someone to take in their daughter Cleo as “my wife has deserted me and I am a disabled soldier.”
When the 1920 census was taken at the beginning of the year, Albert and Elsie were reconciled and living together again, while he was listed as an “Oil business promoter.” Later in the year, however, there was another split and Elsie, in December, married Grant Swan, and taking her children with her. Albert, having formed a mining company at the end of 1919, then turned to automobile sales, though he also began singing in public again in and around Tucson.
As 1920 came to a close, he was in Prescott, northwest of Phoenix, where he completed another career shift by advertising as a teacher of “vocal culture” through the “true Italian method.” Over the next couple of years, he wandered further, in Alamogordo and Albuquerque, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and he promoted his past as an opera singer as well as his (brief) war record.
Elsie Swan remained in the Tucson area and began grooming Marie, and other young dancers, for a career in that field. From 1921 to 1923, the girl was described in several Arizona newspapers as a prodigy on piano and as a dancer, though the latter was especially promoted. An April 1922 performance in Tucson as part of the Arizona state music federation included the attendance of Lynden E. Behymer, whose involvement in the Los Angeles music and arts scene was ubiquitous. While there is no direct evidence to the effect, it seems very plausible that Behymer, impressed by Marie and three other young local dancers, encouraged them to go to the Angel City and study with top professionals in the field.
In spring 1923, Elsie Swan, Marie, the siblings Harriett and John Griffiths (who became professionals) and violinist Willis Reinhardt (a long-time orchestra musician), settled in Monrovia, living in a little bungalow north of Foothill Boulevard. Almost immediately, the 12-year old Marie, who attended Wild Rose Elementary School, made a major impact in the San Gabriel Valley town and the 23 November 1923 edition of the Monrovia News reported that she was to get a private audience in Los Angeles with renowned pianist and conductor Joseph Levine, for whom she was to sing.
The account added that she’d studied at the famous Denishawn dance studio and was to be in one of the dance scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s upcoming epic, The Ten Commandments. Two weeks after her KFI performance, she was called “a child artist of exceptional ability” as she prepared for a performance of piano and dance for the local woman’s club.
A photo of Marie appeared in the 2 March 1924 edition of the Los Angeles Times noting that she was a private pupil of an instructor at the Marta Oatman School and at Denishawn, the latter a very prominent school for dance. The next month, the paper ran an ad for the Southern California Music Company promoting Dr. Alexis Kall and his “artist pupils” on the piano, including Marie, at a recital at Philharmonic Auditorium for the end of April. In June, she performed at an Actors’ Fund benefit at that venue as part of a “bathing girls’ chorus” and as “Grecian maids.”
In April 1924, on one of her several trips back to Tucson during school breaks, where she performed, often with the Griffiths, Marie was reported as having signed with the Pantages vaudeville circuit for three months at $200 a week, though it wanted her to perform for twice that period, but Kall and Denishawn were adamant that she continue her studies in Los Angeles.
A year later, when she was again in southern Arizona, performing with Harriett Griffith, with Marie on piano as her partner danced, it was stated that she won a three-year scholarship to study the instrument in Paris, though this was not pursued. In the meantime, however, there was some trouble with respect to her performing at the well-known Plantation Café in Culver City and running afoul of child labor laws because she was just 13 years of age.
By spring 1925, Albert Pergain showed up in greater Los Angeles, with the Riverside Press of 19 May reporting that he intended to settle permanently there and was to teach opera, French and Italian (again, suggestive of his origins), and stage deportment. It was claimed that, while he was born in Nice, he studied four years in Italy and then performed opera for 15 years in America, though that was clearly not the case, his career being likely just a few or several years. In fact, it was added that his injury during wartime service curtailed his singing career.
Ever the wandering type, Albert wound up in Denver teaching voice in 1926 before heading back to this area, where he reopened his Pergain School of Opera in Hollywood. The 5 November 1927 issue of Pacific Coast Musician included a photo of Albert and an article that stated he was entering his sixth year of teaching in Los Angeles, though this, too, was a fabrication, while adding that he instructed in the Angel City and Riverside, while spending much of his time in Denver. Said to be fully recovered from his war injury, Albert was quoted extensively on his views of teaching American students.
With one daughter, the elder Cleo busy with her dancing career, including in a George M. Cohan musical, in the East and another, Marie, on the rise in local music and dance, it is not clear how much contact Albert had with either. In spring 1927, Marie appeared in the film Fashions for Women, starring Esther Ralston and directed by one of the few women helming pictures, Dororthy Arzner. This was a uncredited appearance as were Marie’s parts in four other films in 1927 and 1928, including Mack Sennett’s The Girl From Everywhere.
Also in 1927, Marie eloped with another mysterious figure in Hollywood, Prince Youcca Trubetzkoy (1905-1992), who was said to be a member of Russian royalty with ancestry back to Catherine the Great, though he was born in Los Angeles. He was an actor from 1925 to 1939, including The Beautiful Cheat, starring Laura LaPlante and released in 1926. Marie and Trubetzkoy ran off to Santa Ana, which seemed to be a popular place, both far enough away and close to Hollywood, for quick nuptials. Within two years, however, Marie left, purportedly for England, and Trubetzkoy secured a divorce.
As the Roaring Twenties came to a close, Marie either abandoned film for music or the motion pictures business passed her by. In any case, the 13 January 1929 edition of the Times, in a piece written by entertainment critic Grace Kingsley, Marie was mentioned as being “a very beautiful young pianist . . . who is far on her way to becoming a concert pianist.” Kingsley continued,
Miss Pergain was languidly lovely, and didn’t bother to go into the discussions [about music history], which made her wonderful piano performance later all the more effective. She was in pictures once on a time, but had a scar on her forehead which halted her success. She had an operation performed, so that now it barely shows. But, in the meantime, having studied music all her life, she became very earnest about it, and so decided to give up pictures for music.
When the 1930 census was taken, the 18-year old, listed as “Mari Troubetzkoy,” had no occupation and was living with her mother, a dressmaker, and younger sister Cleo M., in an apartment in West Hollywood. Albert, meanwhile, was still running his opera school and, in March, was featured in the Hollywood Citizen for having Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer officials at the studio to audition four students for possible parts in an upcoming MGM picture. He also intended to stage an opera, Cleopatré, a few months from then, though this apparently was shelved.
Marie’s next flirtation with fame came rather out of the blue. In November 1931, she was in Kentucky, where a controversy over coal mining attracted the attention of the famous author, Theodore Dreiser, writer of Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925.) An avowed left-winger, Dreiser wanted to bring attention to the plight of miners and met Marie when she was the girlfriend of a Hungarian pianist, Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987). Having been introduced by the musician, Marie promptly became the lover of the notoriously adulterous Dreiser.
Seeking revenge on the author, Kentucky officials not only arrested Dreiser and Marie, going so far as to place toothpicks outside the hotel room door where the pair were ensconced one evening and determining that, because none were broken, that was proof of illicit sex, on a misdemeanor morals charge but tacked on a syndicalism felony rap over their purported illegal activity, along with several others, including another famed writer, John Dos Passos in stirring up trouble with the miners. Nothing came of either charge, with the two left alone on the former if they stayed away from the Bluegrass State, while the latter was dropped in 1933.
In 1932, Marie again married, to metallurgist William Jennings, but that relationship quickly went south as she claimed her second husband was overly critical, including about “my artistry,” and that he told her he only married her to spite another woman. Marie quickly got her divorce and then vanished from the public, though her mother briefly was recognized for her design of a popular sport shirt during the Second World War.
All that could be found of Marie after her 1933 divorce was a simple death notice in May 1951, just after she turned 40, but there was no obituary or even a cause of death or remark on the disposition of her remains. Roger W. Smith, who wrote about Pergain in his blog dedicated to Dreiser, has passed along in notes provided by Kevin Bazzana, biographer of Ervin Nyiregyházi, that the Hungarian pianist’s tenth (yes, tenth!) wife wrote that Marie, after her affair with Dreiser and short marriage with Jennings, spent part of the Great Depression years in Hungary with the musician, had other lovers, and contracted tuberculosis from one of them. Being a heavy smoker, she died in a tuberculosis sanitarium.
Her father, having resurrected his opera school after World War II, died in 1947 and, in another bizarre turn to this story, her mother lived until 1974, but, two years prior, married Nyiregyházi, with a 1978 Times profile of the pianist, reporting that he married Elsie Swan, who said to be ten years his senior (it was likely about a dozen), in 1972, four decades after she helped him in an unstated way—likely because of Marie’s affair with Dreiser. To pay for Elsie’s medical bills as she aged, the pianist, who said he loved her through his multiple marriages, returned to public performance before she died.
For a final twist, likely a coincidence, Albert Pergain’s first wife, Lillian, after her more than a half-century as an engraver in New York City and retiring at 77 years of age, moved west in 1960 and ended up in, of all places, Monrovia. She later resided in the Beverly Manor Convalescent Home and was profiled in the Monrovia News-Post, when she turned 100, and it was noted that she was “an accomplished classical pianist.” When she died two years later, she was survived by her daughter, Cleo, the former dancer.
It is so often the case that, with artifacts in the Homestead’s holdings, surprising tangents arise beyond the obvious face value of the object, and it is certainly no different with this KFI mailing card—interesting as it is on its own—and its connection to the Pergain family.
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