Copyright 2010 * All rights reserved
J.C. (Jim) Tumblin, OD, DOS
3604 Kesterwood Drive, East
Knoxville, Tennessee 37918-2557
(865) 687-1948

Mary Costa

Reunion at the Orangery

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the author was privileged to spend a delightful evening at the Orangery recently with three high-achieving Tennessee women, all with Knox County roots.

Last May an E-mail came from Scarlett Stahl, great-great granddaughter of Fountain City icon Col. J.C. Woodward. She had noticed the biography of her ancestor on the “Fountain City, Tn. history” website.  Readers will recall that in the 1890s Col. Woodward awakened a sleeping farming village in Grassy Valley by purchasing the Fountain Head Hotel and Resort. He soon improved the park, impounded the heart-shaped lake and built his own Park View mansion and Lakeview (now Gentry-Griffey Chapel), a home for his son.

Stahl’s great-grandmother, Laura Natalie Woodward, the first of Col. Woodward’s four children, married Christopher Bland Proctor and moved to Memphis, where her husband became superintendent of the Memphis Street Railway system.  At its height the company had 75 miles of track and over 300 cars of various types.

She completed grade school and high school in Memphis, enrolled at New York University and lived in Greenwich Village. After working mainly in public relations for three separate airlines, she retired from Delta Airlines in 2002 to her condominium in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles.

As a free-lance writer, she has long been active with Disney-related publications. Her recent in-depth article on the late Wayne Allwine, the voice of Mickey Mouse, was published on Laughing Place.com and placed in the Disney archives.

Upon learning that she traveled in the East often, I invited her to visit Knoxville and to take a guided tour of the Fountain City sites connected to her great-great grandparents.

Scarlett Stahl. Barbara Aston-Wash and Mary Costa

with the Author (Left to right)

Interestingly, Scarlett met Knoxville’s own Mary Costa in the late 1980s when assigned to interview Mary who was working with Disney as the voice of Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty.  They have been in touch since that memorable time. When Stahl visited Knoxville recently, Costa arranged a delightful reunion at the Orangery and invited her long-time friend, famed Knoxville author Barbara Aston-Wash, and myself.

Aston-Wash’s distinguished career with the Knoxville News Sentinel dates back to 1960. Her “portfolio” includes many columns on nationally-known celebrities--numerous Tennessee governors and senators, Walter and Joan Mondale, billionaire John D. MacArthur, Letitia Baldridge (Jackie Kennedy’s secretary), New York and Hollywood stars (including Liberace, Baryshnikov and Nureyev) and famous designers and architects. In researching personalities from Roy Acuff to Ellen McClung Berry, one finds that her comprehensive interviews resulted in the most insightful feature articles to be found in the files of the C.M. McClung Historical Collection.

Aston-Wash holds dear her close friendship with Mary Costa who has been a friend since childhood. Her columns reveal the most interesting life-story of the world-renowned opera diva who chose “to return to her roots” in 1994 when she returned to Knoxville. After living in Beverly Hills, Washington, D.C. and Palm Beach she now cherishes her elegant condominium off of Kingston Pike.

Mary Costa’s musical ability was obvious at a very early age. She sang in Sunday School at First Baptist Church when she was only six and soon was singing special music with the church choir. Her father, John T. Costa (1878-1947), a Tallahassee, Fla. native and an accountant with TVA, and her mother, Hazel Ogg Costa (1892-1993) lived on Magnolia Ave. and later on Fairmont Blvd. Hazel was one of 12 children born to Leona (Hall) and John C. Ogg, descendant of Peter Ogg’s early Emory Road family. Mary graduated from Park City-Lowry Elementary School and Christenberry Junior High School. 

She attended Knoxville High School and sang solos in “Pop” Hamilton’s legendary chorus. Then the family relocated to Los Angeles when she was 14 where Mary soon won a Music Sorority Award as the outstanding voice among Southern California High School seniors. She entered the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to study with the famed maestro, Gaston Usigli.

As her music career developed, Costa was discovered by Jack Benny, appeared on the Edgar Bergen radio show (1948 -1951), sang with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in concerts and made numerous commercials for the Lux Radio Theatre.

Her big break came in 1952 when she auditioned with Walt Disney himself for the role of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. Disney did not want to be influenced by looks so she sang behind a curtain. Disney personally called her to announce that she had won the part after his three year search. Marc Davis, the animator who created the heroine Aurora, saw Costa singing her lines with arms waving much like her Italian father and used her as the model for the character.

When the film was released in 1959, her mother accompanied her to the premiere. Right in the middle of the scene in the woods, her mother exclaimed quite audibly, “Oh, Mary, that looks just like you.” And it did.

Her stellar 1960 performance as Violetta in La Traviata in San Francisco would associate her with that most demanding of roles for her entire career. Her starring role in numerous operas opposite Nicolai Gedda, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Richard Tucker and others and her many tours of the U.S. and Europe, including two triumphant tours in Russia, assured her place in the history of the art. Casting in movies like Sleeping Beauty and The Great Waltz (the life of Johann Strauss Jr.) only added to her fame.

One music editor summed up her qualities, “She has all the qualifications of a great artist—innate musicality, flawless enunciation and sense of pitch, carefully trained voice of wide range and timbre, secure high or low, versatility of a coloratura or a dramatic soprano (a range of 3 ½ octaves), and the molder of many moods.”

As a child Mary was often told she sang like an angel. When the beautiful blue-eyed, blonde six-year old Mary Costa sang in a First Baptist Church Christmas pageant, her voice poignantly told the story of the Christ child. Her performance brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience. The tears were not lost on the sensitive youngster. She told her mother that she didn’t want to ever sing again “because the audience didn’t like me.  They cried.”

Radio, movie, TV and opera audiences over scores of years and in many countries are so fortunate that Mary Costa changed her mind.

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