NYT: Soprano's Tale, Obsession, Love and Death

For nine years Birgit Nilsson was harassed by Nell Theobald, a former model shown in 1966 with the lion that mauled her moments after the photograph was taken.

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

It began operatically enough in the summer of 1968 at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, the Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson later recalled. The morning of each performance, a large bouquet of dark red roses was waiting at her door. There was a card with the signature "L. Black" and a few lines that seemed to come from a book. "I think I have a great admirer," Ms. Nilsson remembered telling a friend at the time.
But it was no idyll, she came to find. It was the overture to a multilayered nightmare stemming from a fan's obsession. The bitter consequences would come to haunt Ms. Nilsson, the greatest Wagnerian soprano of her era, who died last Christmas at 87 and is to be memorialized on Tuesday evening in a Metropolitan Opera Guild tribute at Alice Tully Hall. "These people can be dangerous," Edgar Vincent, Ms. Nilsson's longtime publicist, said recently. "Opera is, after all, an emotional art form." Mr. Vincent recalled that the episode drove the famously witty and jocular star to "almost losing her temper."
Ms. Nilsson revealed some of the story in an autobiography published in Swedish in 1995 and in German in 1997. (She was holding out for an English translation to her liking and finally approved one that Baskerville Publishing of Fort Worth hopes to bring out next year.) She left out salient details but included enough clues so that the tangled tale can now be unraveled. "There are all kinds of fans, and most are wonderful," Ms. Nilsson said in a 1997 telephone interview from her home in Sweden, while reluctantly confirming unpublished aspects of the story.
Her friend, having looked at the notes sent with the roses, had an intuition about "L. Black." "So who is he?" Ms. Nilsson asked. "Not 'he,' " the friend said. "She." It was indeed a she: a young American beauty from New York whom Ms. Nilsson later described as a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, taller and with dark hair but with the same "perfect figure." Ms. Nilsson called her "Miss N."
"Her name doesn't matter," she said in the interview. "I was very scared. She found out everything about me. She followed me for nine years." The lines in the notes, it emerged, had come from a 1936 novel, "Of Lena Geyer," by Marcia Davenport, a biographer of Mozart and daughter of the renowned American soprano and early recording artist Alma Gluck. The book is a fictional biography of a Bohemian prodigy who sings her way to the pinnacle of the opera world under the tutelage of Lilli Lehmann and the baton of Gustav Mahler in the early 1900's.
In the story Lena is wooed by a mysterious admirer who sends yellow roses before each performance, along with a card signed "E. deH." It doesn't escape Lena's aristocratic French lover that a young woman in black has been sitting in the front row wherever Lena sings. Uncovering her identity — Elsie deHaven, a mousy American blueblood — he instantly suspects her of an erotic attraction for Lena.
Elsie has indeed been smitten by Lena since hearing her sing Wagner's "Tannhäuser" in Paris. She comes to shadow Lena until they meet one day in a London shop. Lena, who has also recognized Elsie from her front-row perch, invites her to supper.
Elsie is overcome to tears, and Lena comforts her with an embrace. "I felt as if I should die for love of her," Elsie confides. Although Elsie decides that "no human love could touch Lena Geyer," she becomes her lifelong companion, attendant and talisman, even through Lena's late marriage to a wealthy and devoted patron. Was her own admirer a would-be Elsie, Ms. Nilsson wondered? If so, her identity remained elusive. After Bayreuth, red roses and cards signed "L. Black" greeted her at every performance around the United States, Ms. Nilsson said. At the Met one night, a strikingly attractive young woman came into her dressing room with Terry McEwan, a Decca recording executive. He didn't really know her, he said, but she had bombarded him with letters and calls begging to meet Ms. Nilsson.
When Ms. Nilsson flew to Vienna not long afterward, she said, the same woman was on the plane. And when she flew on to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize gala, the woman was in the seat next to her. They finally talked. The woman said she was a model in New York working on a TV soap opera — leaving out some crucial details. But she loved grand opera and dreamed of becoming a singer. She said she would be staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, where, as it happened, Ms. Nilsson was also booked.
The woman talked her way into the Nobel gala. And at the hotel she gave Ms. Nilsson's name as a reference after her checks bounced. Ms. Nilsson said the woman caught up with her again in Munich, begging to be her friend. Ms. Nilsson was firm, she said: she picked her own friends and did not want to be shadowed anymore.
It was the last time they would speak, but hardly the end of the matter. The woman continued to send flowers and show up at hotels where Ms. Nilsson was staying, sometimes taking the room next door. She also continued to turn up in the first row of the singer's performances, on the arms of different escorts and always dressed, like Elsie deHaven, in black.
Then, in 1971, Ms. Nilsson came across a newspaper article about a model who had settled a big lawsuit. It was her nemesis, and the story was astonishing. Now for the first time, three years after the first roses in Bayreuth, Ms. Nilsson knew her tormenter's name. She never released it, but she did not have to. How many models have been mauled by a lion in Columbus Circle?
The woman, research would show, was Nell Theobald, a model, actress and dancer from Atlanta. In April 1966, at the 11th International Automobile Show at the New York Coliseum, she was posing at the BMW exhibit with a 225-pound, 2-year-old lion named Ludwig when, apparently angered by its handler's proddings, it lunged at her, sinking its teeth in her thigh and holding on until the handler pried open its jaws.
Ms. Theobald, then 21, underwent surgery to save her leg and recovered. She sued the animal agency, the public relations firm, the automaker and the coliseum for $3 million. Five years later a jury awarded her $500,000, which was halved by a judge as excessive.
Now, Ms. Nilsson found, her stalker could follow her in style, and more brazenly than ever. Her possessions started disappearing from her hotel rooms: photos, dresses, jewelry, even underwear. In 1973 she and her husband, Bertil Nilsson, had just landed in Perth, Australia, when a plane from Hawaii disgorged Miss N. In Fiji, a woman in native costume in the hotel restaurant turned out to be Miss N. On the flight home Miss N. was occupying Ms. Nilsson's favorite seat: left aisle, first row.
Then events took a dark turn. In Vienna in 1977 Ms. Nilsson returned from singing "Tristan und Isolde" to find a thick envelope from Miss N., who was staying in the same hotel. It was a letter of farewell, ending with Isolde's final lament: "Death. Both of us dead." She asked for her ashes to be strewn over Ms. Nilsson's garden in Sweden. Hotel workers broke down her door and found her unconscious from tranquilizers. She was revived in a hospital. But not long afterward, in the early hours of Aug. 19, 1977, in the Skyway Motel in Astoria, Queens, Ms. Theobald ended her sad quest. The night before, according to the New York medical examiner, she had been robbed near Lincoln Center, losing her purse and jewelry. It may all have been too much for her.
Ms. Nilsson got the news from a clipping sent by a friend. She never understood the fixation, she reflected. Had Miss N. so yearned to be her that she had erased the line between fantasy and reality? Was it a cry for help? We may never know. She left no traceable family.
"In another time," Ms. Nilsson concluded, "it surely would have been made into an opera."