A CIRCUS LIFE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3927, 16 July 1937, Page 3

A CIRCUS LIFE

PIANIST’S “SECRETARY” WIFE “I had been married only 24 hours when my husband told me I was to be his secretary and gave me a letter to write,” said Mrs Beno Moiseiwitsch when she arrived in Sydney fiom Melbourne recently (states the ‘Morning Herald”).* “I had no idea just what that was going to mean, but now the work keeps me so busy that when there is a lull I get quite bored and nervy. “I write all my husband’s correspondence by hand, and it is ruining my handwriting, which, at the end of a letter, develops into a scrawl. I always sign myself ‘secretary’ and use my maiden initials. Before her marriage, Mrs Moiseiwitsch lived in Shanghai, where she met her husband in the artists’ room after a concert. “He always says he married me because he liked my mother,” laughed Mrs Moiseiwitsch. “You see, they are both Russians, and she used to cook him Russian delicacies. My mother was musical, but my father used to go te sleep at concerts. “We were married in Shanghai, and since then it has been a circus life. We travel about with golf bags and a dummy piano, which my husband, who is very considerate of neighbours, uses to practise his exercises. He always takes it to the artists’ room, and warms his hands practising scales before a concert. Other artists we have known have used electric hot-water bottles or bowls of hot water. “My own interests?” repeated Mrs Moiseiwitsch. “As you see they are all absorbed in my husband’s work. Even frocks have diminished in importance, and I had only ten days to prepare for my trip to Australia; but as I usually wear a great deal of black and always plainly-made clothes, it was sufficient.”