Ida Brooks Hunt: Of Society and Soldiers

August 7 was the birthday of opera singer and actress Ida Grace Brooks Hunt (1878-1929) — and if that isn’t a Gilded Age millionaire sounding name I’ll eat my top hat. Hunt’s main claim to fame was having created the role of Nadina in the original Broadway production of Straus’sThe Chocolate Soldier (1909-10), in which she sang the hit song “My Hero”.

Hunt’s father was a rich American banker, her mother was Spanish. She was born and spent her early years in Panama, which at the time was part of the nation of Columbia. Educated in convent schools, she married Indianapolis dentist George Edward Hunt in 1898, but it rapidly proved a mistake. Not long into the marriage, she went to New York to study singing, got an offer to appear in an opera called Woodland, and took it. She toured with the show, and made her Broadway debut in it 1904-05. She returned briefly to her husband but they were estranged by this point, and were divorced in 1906. In 1908 she studied voice in Paris; Oriska Worden was one of her fellow pupils. She then returned to Broadway to appear in Victor Herbert’sAlgeria (1908), followed by The Chocolate Soldier.

For a time she toured in vaudeville, at least part of the time in an act with Columbia recording artist Alfred de Manby. During World War One, she went to Europe to entertain the troops. The experience gave her what has been described as a nervous breakdown (the soldiers there were definitely not made of chocolate), and she spent several months in a French hospital recovering. Though she sang at the opening of the Pershing Stadium in Paris in 1919, after this experience she essentially retired from performing. She had emerged from that retirement to appear in the Broadway production of Robin Hood when she died of a stroke in 1929.

For more about vaudeville, pleasesee my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.