With a Century of Memories, She Looks Ahead : La Belle Epoque--Full Life That Spills Over the Edges

Disconcerting is the word for Belle McKee.

Ask her what she thinks of the ‘80s--a perfectly innocent, even trite, question. Belle won’t answer right away. She’ll take a long, thoughtful pull on a Havana cigar half-again as big as she is. She’ll fix you with a clear if quizzical eye. Then she’ll ask in turn: “Which ‘80s do you mean?”

A perfectly innocent, not-so-trite question. Belle McKee is 100 years old.

Ask her to describe the dance she did with the legendary madcap, Isadora Duncan, and she’ll go you one better. She’ll demonstrate the dance, as supple as Mary Lou Retton and infinitely more graceful.

Ask her why she’s smoking a cigar and she’ll tell you it’s because she left her pipe upstairs--the one Marshal Foch gave her.

Ask her what she did last weekend. After the regular meeting of the L.A. Philharmonic Committee, she’ll say, Buddy called up and asked her to go swimming in his pool. Buddy? “Buddy Rogers. You know, the actor.”

Irrelevant is the word for Belle McKee’s age. Accurate, but irrelevant. You don’t tell Belle she looks marvelous for her age--she’s always looked marvelous. You tell her she’s “spry” only if you’re prepared to duck, fast. If you must pay her a compliment (and you must, you must!), tell her she’s got a great pair of legs. She does, and she’ll show ‘em. Ask anyone who’s been to the annual Viennese Ball.

One hundred gets in the way only occasionally, a fact of life to be dealt with briefly and perfunctorily, like dusting the spare room. “All my friends are dead,” says Belle, rolling her eyes less in sorrow than in censure, as if they were all a bunch of party poopers. “All my old friends, that is.”

New friends she makes daily, cultivates them in fact--rather shamelessly if they have a swimming pool. Belle loves to swim; used to swim, in fact, with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic immortal from Hawaii.

A Practiced Eye

. . . New friends at the monthly meetings of the Women’s Committee of the L.A. Philharmonic Assn., for which Belle keeps a practiced eye out for promising musical talent.

. . . New friends on Beverly Hills rounds with her daughter, the actress known as Andrea King whose real name is part mystery, part ongoing family joke.

But old friends Belle remembers too. Old friends like Thomas Edison. . . .

In a life so full it sometimes spilled over the edges, Belle McKee never lacked for suitors. Thomas Edison, though, was the light of her life. Literally.

The Wizard of Menlo Park lived across the street in Milan, Ohio, where Lovina Belle Hart was born on Jan. 29, 1885.

Her mother and Edison were friends, and Belle used to tag along on neighborly visits. “I remember him sitting on goose eggs,” she says, “trying to make them hatch. Kind of kooky.

“I can see now that he must have been thinking about inventing the incubator, but at the time it was just this nice-looking man, very down-to-earth in ordinary clothes, a little preoccupied, sitting on these big eggs. He gave me one once, and I tried it. All I got was a warm goose egg.

“I was disappointed, but I figured he knew what he was doing. We’d been told that he was a ‘great man,’ that he’d invented electricity. Of course, I had no idea what electricity was. . . .”

She found out.

“My father gathered the family in the living room one night. I sat on the couch with my sister Bertie, and my father nodded to my brother Ernest. Ernest pushed a switch and the whole room lit up!

“We were so excited we were numb. You just couldn’t believe such a thing could happen!

“For an hour, my brother just stood there turning the lights off and on. Electricity! And the man who did it was right across the street.”

It was by any standards an idyllic childhood. Belle’s father, George Hart, was co-inventor with the Otis family of the grain elevator, and, by himself, the automobile turntable. (Turn-of-the-century garages were long, not wide; reverse gear, if any, was balky, and those wealthy enough to own two cars would drive one in, spin the turntable and drive the other out. For George Hart, it was practically a necessity. The family owned five cars, including a white, seven-passenger Stanley Steamer, the first one on the market.)

Besides the Milan house, there was the farm at Spears Corners (named after a maternal grandfather; mother Deborah Wilcox Hart traced her ancestry to Jonathan Wilcox, a captain of the Minutemen), where the children were occasionally allowed to drive the family phaeton behind a matched pair of horses called Cap and Gown. They rode bareback too (“I’d slide down a huge haystack and try to land on a horse’s back; sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn’t”). But what Belle remembers most fondly were the family’s “musical evenings.”

“We’d sit around a wood-burning stove. Bertie (later Bertha Hart, a notable concert pianist) would play the melodeon and we’d all sing together. We lived as families then. . . . “

Bertie’s budding talent led to several European trips with father, Belle tagging along as usual: “Once we went to Heidelberg to see an uncle. He was in jail. He’d been on one of those toots. Too many beers in too many rathskellers.

Her First Cigar

“It was in Copenhagen where somebody first offered me a cigar. I was all of 15. I tried it; I liked it. There’s nothing more satisfying.”

(“I like a good pipe too,” Belle adds, “but it can’t compare to a cigar. Smell this Havana. Isn’t it delicious? Sure, it takes a long time to light, but at 100, who’s in a hurry?”)

After high school came a stint at Cleveland’s exclusive Kindergarten College--”There weren’t many professional avenues open for a young lady in those days”--and a proposal.

“Sid Otis, the elevator heir, asked me to marry him. Oh, he loved me all right, but I never could marry a man with baggy pants. The seat hung down to here.

“Sometimes I wish I had married him. It would have given me a little more moola. But oh, those baggy pants!

“And then there was the music. It was in my blood. I talked my father into sending me to Barnard in New York City, to study dance. Pretty daring in those days for a Midwest girl. I graduated, then went on to Columbia for my BS degree. By then, of course, I’d met Isadora.”

A surreptitious visit downtown to the defiant Duncan’s dance studio was even more daring than a trip to New York. “Such a free spirit she was,” Belle recalls, “a glorious creature. Her hair was her mood: down to the waist when she was in a tempest; high on her head, held by mermaid combs, when she was being serene.

“She was so liberated she scared you. She believed in free love--mad Russian lovers and illegitimate children, which she said would have a special quality since they were conceived in love. I wanted to be just like her.

“She had three girls who danced with her, disciples of hers. I asked if I could join. ‘I’m not taking on any more girls,’ she said. Then she thought it over.

“” ’Take a bath,’ she said, ‘and let me look at your figure. I got into her tub--she always bathed in public--and she looked me over. Then I had to show her I had rhythm.

Concert in the Park

“I joined her for a while. I remember a concert we gave in Central Park. Panties, we wore, and chiffon scarfs. That was it. That was it for her, too, when she caught a scarf in the wheel of a car after the war. Isadora wasn’t meant to die of TB or something lingering. For her, it was the perfect way to go.”

It was World War I, in fact, that separated Belle from Isadora. Ann Morgan, J.P.’s daughter, was organizing a group of women to drive ambulances in France. Belle, of course, volunteered--”I was thrilled to the core. My family was a little less so. . . . “

She saw plenty of action--of all sorts. She remembers lying on the floors of the ambulances as bombs whistled overhead, remembers picking up the wounded just yards from the front lines, remembers picking up a fragment of shrapnel, which she still carries in her left hand.

Remembers, too, the rest and recuperation with the troops in chateaux generously provided by the French aristocracy (Belle herself turned over her Aix-les-Bains apartment to Marshal--then General--Foch, who rewarded her with “his favorite pipe”).

Remembers, with very mixed emotions, one “Georges Andre Barry,” a “French fighter pilot” and father of Andrea King, whom Belle may or may not have married. (“It was a hectic time,” Belle says. “You couldn’t remember every little detail. Of course I married him. In Nancy. . . . Well, maybe I didn’t actually marry him. I certainly would have, definitely, only he was shot down two days before the Armistice. No, I think I did marry him. I must have. Anyway, does it matter that much? He was very dashing, I can tell you that much!”)

Whatever, it was while watching Sarah Bernhardt in “L’Aiglon” at Paris’ Odeon theater that Belle went into labor (“during the second act,” Andrea adds; “Mommy’s never forgiven me”).

Violently ill after Andrea’s birth--”They called it ‘childbirth fever,’ ” Belle says--she was near death until given an injection by a young French doctor. “The doctor turned out to be Louis Pasteur’s daughter,” Belle says, “which makes Andrea the first postwar pasteurized baby. . . . “

Father’s Fatal Illness

Belle’s plans to stay in Paris “for the rest of my life, with Isadora” were interrupted by her father’s fatal illness. There was a brief return to Cleveland, then back to New York and an offer by producer-director Norman Bel Geddes to return to Paris to appear in “The Miracle.” “I probably should have gone,” Belle says, “but I was afraid they’d cut off my allowance.” Any regrets? “It’s too late to regret now. Anyway, I would have missed California.”

Instead of a stage career, it was off to Claremont to teach Duncan’s “rhythms” at Pomona College and environs. “I’d drive an old Model-T through a 40-mile radius to teach dance to girls and their mothers--who at the time thought the extent of a young lady’s exercise should be energetic needlepoint, or at the most, croquet.

“I got my own exercise on horseback. Ruth Chandler, a pupil, and I would ride down to Palm Springs, tie our horses to a tree, sleep under the stars and return the next day. Nothing down there in those days but the hot springs and friendly Indians.”

On to UCLA--”when it was on Vermont”--to teach “dance and pageants. We put on some good ones too. Another of my students, Agnes de Mille, helped me with ‘The History of Music’ pageant. Her uncle Cecil supplied us with the props. And I did a water pageant too, with Duke Kahanamoku choreographing the swim sequences. I ran into the duke later, on my honeymoon with Douglas McKee, and we’d (she and Kahanamoku) swim off the Hawaiian coast. Marvelous man!”

McKee? Belle, along the way, had elicited a marriage proposal from Wall Street lawyer McKee, scion of a somewhat stodgy family, who’d “never been west of the Hudson River, by choice. He didn’t have baggy pants, though he did wear those damned plus fours. You can’t have everything.”

From 1925 until McKee’s death in 1962 (they had a daughter, Anne, now Mrs. Richard Chapman of Rancho Santa Fe), Belle lived the life of a society matron, comparatively sedate but not without its own rewards.

Dabbling and Dallying

Summers were spent at Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondacks, where Belle dabbled in a dance “camp” and dallied with the likes of “the Whitelaw Reids, the Standard Oil Pratts and Mrs. Merriweather Post, whose husband bought an entire village in Russia and had it reconstructed, house by house, on the side of St. Regis Mountain.”

While McKee golfed and sailed, Belle--never far from music--became involved with the New York Philharmonic board (“Oh, that Toscanini! Very professional, very reserved, but what an artist!”).

“I was at Carnegie Hall every morning for the meetings,” says Belle. “Then lunch at the Russian Tea Room and then we’d dash over to our box seats.” At night, there was “work” at the settlement houses in Hell’s Kitchen--less a chore, really, than a joy to Belle.

“I’d take the train from Forest Hills, then the elevated to Delancey Street, by myself, at night. It was a little scary, but I needed to do it. I felt there was so much talent among those people, and so little chance to develop it.”

Belle jumped in with both feet and a multitude of scarfs, concentrating mainly on Christadora House, the one sponsored by the Philharmonic’s Marian Rous.

“We didn’t dabble at it like the debutante set, like Brenda Frazier, going down for 10 minutes,” says Belle. “We did it. Nobody was paid, but Henri Barrere, the great flutist, was a regular. Iturbi went down twice a week.

“I got right down with them--the Italian immigrants, the Jews, the Irish. They called me ‘Mama Nature.’ We’d dance on the street, and if they learned something from me, well, I learned a lot from them, too, from their naturalness. We brought them the classics; they brought us their spontaneity.”

Andrea, by then, was making a name for herself on the stage. “She started out with Monty Clift,” Belle recalls. “They were both in ‘Fly Away Home’ with Thomas Mitchell and Betty Field. Monty’s mother and I would sneak in and watch from the back row. Now Andrea’s got her own star in the sidewalk on Vine Street.” (“She never was a stage mother,” Andrea says. “She gave me freedom.”)

And so it was to Andrea (and her late husband, Nat Willis) that Belle returned after McKee’s death. And to music.

“California has such a mixture of people,” Belle says. “I wouldn’t call Los Angeles a musical town--not even an opera!--but the Philharmonic is doing well, even though it had a hard time getting started.”

Sponsored for committee membership by the late Frances Goldwyn (Samuel’s widow), Belle participates in the regular meetings, and wouldn’t miss a dance if they held it on Pluto. (“Joe Wagstaff, the song-and-dance man who was George M. Cohan’s protege, is her regular escort,” Andrea says. “He’s 83 now. They dance up a storm at the Viennese Ball; everybody leaves the floor to watch.”)

And when there’s no ball in town, Belle does her rhythms at home.

“It’s graceful,” she says. “You just let the music flow through your body and relax accordingly. It keeps the body in shape, and the mind too.

“I couldn’t survive without music. I don’t expect I’ll go on forever--not that I think about it much--but wherever it is I go, there’ll have to be music.

“I believe in reincarnation, you know, and I rather hope I’ll come back a soprano. Not one of those mezzos, heaven forbid. An honest-to-God soprano.”

That’s a way off, though. Toasting Belle at poolside the other day, Buddy Rogers sang, “Younger than springtime are you.”

“It depends,” says Belle a few days later.

Depends?

“It depends on which springtime you mean.”