Leopold Stokowski
Toronto Daily Star, November 21 1931
Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) went on to have a conducting career that lasted more than 60 years. He was the music director for the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1912 to 1940.
He was married three times, with each marriage lasting 11 or 12 years:
- Olga Samaroff (1880-1948) was an American pianist whose given name was Lucy Hickenlooper. Her agent suggested a name change would help her get more gigs, and you can't really blame her for adopting a more European-sounding professional name. She and Stokowski were married in 1911, and she helped advance his career, lobbying to get him appointed director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. They divorced in 1923, apparently partially because Stokowski was unfaithful.
- Evangeline Love Brewster Johnson was an heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. They were married from 1926 to 1937, and were divorced at about the time when Stokowski went for a vacation with Greta Garbo in Capri. She later married a Russian nobleman named Prince Zalstem-Zalessky.
- Stokowski's marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt (1924-2019) was quite the May-December romance, as she was nearly 42 years younger than he was when they married in 1945; his divorce from Ms. Samaroff happened before Ms. Vanderbilt was born. They divorced in 1955. She went on to marry director Sidney Lumet and then actor/writer Wyatt Emery Cooper; she lived for over 40 years after Cooper passed away in 1978.
Nowadays, Stokowski is probably best remembered because Bugs Bunny portrayed him in a cartoon.
Created August 11, 2025.