Sustaining a High Note

Forty years ago, Nadine Conner was the toast of New York and a star soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Now she lives quietly in a townhouse here, cherishing her memories and preparing to celebrate her 90th birthday next week.

Her bright-lights, big-city life was exciting, Conner said, “but I don’t miss it. To all things, there is a season. I enjoy living now in my little community. You know, most people around here don’t even know I’m a singer.”

The operatic world, however, knows and still remembers Conner, who performed at the Met from 1941 to 1960 and was also a national radio star.

The Met has set up an Internet Web site in her honor, and she is also getting a flood of fan mail and flowers at her home.

“She not only had a solid voice, she was also an extraordinarily beautiful woman. She still is,” Robert Tuggle, director of archives for the Met, said in a telephone interview.

Retired opera great Rise Stevens recalled that “Nadine was a wonderful friend and colleague. I loved being with her.”

Stevens, also speaking by phone from New York, said she remembers Conner as a true believer in the performer’s maxim that the show must go on.

“I remember one time in ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ where I was Hansel and Nadine was Gretel,” Stevens said. “At the close of one scene, Nadine suddenly fainted. The curtain came down and the doctor came backstage. But she revived and was back on stage for the rest of the opera. She had that kind of determination in her blood.”

Conner, in an interview at home, said she remembers the fainting incident well. “I had the flu,” she said. “In that scene, I was supposed to be going to sleep, and as I concentrated on it, I just passed out. But of course I made it back to do the rest of the performance.”

She recalled that another performance when she was ill brought her rave reviews. “I was playing Violetta in ‘La Traviata,’ ” Conner said.

“I was actually very sick with flu, and by the time of Violetta’s death scene, I was feeling very badly. I remember one critic wrote that my death performance that night ‘outdid [Sarah] Bernhardt.’ ”

Conner’s sharp memory is complemented by a lively sense of humor, and she is not shy to admit that she is still proud of her trim figure.

“My waist is the same size as when I performed at the Met,” she confided. “And I had the smallest waist of anyone at the Met.”

She follows no particular diet. “I eat what I want, including steak and wine. But I do take long walks. That’s why I keep my dog, so I’ll have someone to walk with.”

The dog, Cio Cio, is now her sole companion. Her husband, surgeon Laurance Heacock, died in 1987. She has relatives in the Southland, though, including her son, Loren, who lives in Fountain Valley.

“They’re going to have an early birthday party Sunday at my son’s home,” Conner said this week. “My daughter Sue Lyn is flying in from Texas, and all four of my grandchildren will be there.”

Conner still sings and plays a baby grand piano in her home. “Music has not just been a career,” she said. “Music has been my life.”

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Conner was born Feb. 20, 1907, in Los Angeles and christened Evelyn Nadine Henderson. Her family lived on a ranch in a lightly settled rural area that is now the suburb of Compton. She graduated from Compton High School and won a music scholarship to USC.

Just before going to USC, she took singing lessons from a Hollywood-based singer named Amado Fernandez. “He was a wonderful teacher, and I did what he taught me for the rest of my career,” she said.

“Amado told me to get rid of nervousness, I should take deep breaths and say, ‘energy, energy.’ He also told me the reason for pitch. ‘Think of the poor people who had to save just to get the seats high up, and sing to them,’ he said.”

After college, Conner married a USC classmate, but the marriage dissolved two years later. “His last name was Conner, and that’s where I got my stage name,” she said.

Before joining the Met in 1941, Conner frequently sang on national radio, which in those days often paired operatic singers with Hollywood stars on the air and for personal appearances. She toured nationally with film star Nelson Eddy and also worked with singer Gordon MacRae.

Among her acquaintances were Al Jolson and George Burns and Gracie Allen. Aviation hero Jimmy Doolittle was a close friend. “Jimmy got me to set up an opera for him at the Hollywood Bowl,” she said.

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When music stars banded together in 1960 to raise money for the Music Center in Los Angeles, Conner was among them. One corporate patron donated an elaborate curtain for the center in her honor. “There’s a plaque with my name on it,” she said.

She and her husband moved to Cypress in 1970, and in retirement she was a mentor for young singers. She also became involved in Cypress civic affairs, helping to defeat a 1993 proposal for a card club.

“She was at our victory party . . . seated among pizzas and pitchers of beer,” said James Hagenbach, a neighbor. “She looked around and said, ‘If my friends at the Met could see me now!’ ”