APPARITION
Commissioned by the D’Angelo School of Music for the 1992 D’Angelo Young Artist Competition in Piano
Apparition is programmatically structured around the events described in the following anecdote:
The Ziegfeld story has an extraordinary footnote. In 1952 Irving (“Izzy”) Cohn, a handyman at the New Amsterdam Theater, was putting some new fabrics on seats in the backstage workshop when he suddenly felt a strange presence in the room. When he looked up, he saw a beautiful girl standing in the doorway wearing a white dress with a gold sash on which appeared the name “Olive.” He said, “What are you doing here?” She simply smiled, leaning against a door with one hand and holding a blue bottle and a glass in the other. She turned and ran up a flight of stairs. When he followed her, she vanished.
Cohn was badly shaken by the incident but put it out of his mind. Two weeks later he began to have the same strange felling that someone was watching him. He looked up once more; she had returned. This time she went downstairs toward the stage. He called up to an electrician, Charlie Breest, who was standing on a ladder, “Where did she go?” Did you see that re-headed girl?”
Charlie said, “Are you drunk? What are you talking about?”
Cohn described the girl minutely.
Charlie froze. Cohn had described Olive Thomas—whom Charlie had worked with and adored to perfection. To the day of his death Charlie believed that Olive had come back from the grave with the bottle and glass to confirm what many of her friends believed—that she had deliberately taken poison in 1920, not accidentally, and that her motive was horror at having discovered that Jack Pickford had given her syphilis.
The most astonishing touch in the story came later. Some weeks after the bizarre incident Charlie came across some old photographs of the Follies. He turned white and almost passed out. There in a stage group was Olive. She wore a gold sash across her white dress, and her name was printed on it.
--Charles Higham, “Postscript,” from Ziegfeld, Henry Regnery Company, 1972
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The famous, brilliantly talented, and vivacious Olive Thomas (1894-1920) is acknowledged as the first “flapper,” and the prototypical icon of the silent film era who pioneered the role of the idolized ‘movie star’ in the nascent industry. A prominent “Ziegfeld Girl” in the Ziegfeld Follies, and favorite of Florenz Ziegfeld, she enjoyed top billing in scores of ‘silent’ shorts and feature films over her brief career. After a tragic death at 25 from poisoning (an unsolved mystery—suicide, accident, or murder at the hands of her costar and husband Jack Pickford), her funeral at New York’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church was attended by hundreds, and mobbed by throngs of hysterical, adoring fans, requiring mounted police to control the crowd. The story described here, of Izzy Cohn and Charlie Breest—the inspiration for Apparition—is but one of numerous accounts through the decades of actual sightings of, or encounters with, Olive’s ghost at New York City’s New Amsterdam Theater. The sheer regularity of the reports has prompted night guards—some of whom had their own experiences—to refuse patrols of the theater, and the house staff is known to dutifully greet Olive’s picture at the start and end of each workday to be sure she is happy, and not inclined to cause mischief.
