The Curious Corinna Mura

March 16 was the birthday of singer/guitarist Corinna Mura (Corrina Wall, 1910-1965). Mura’s career was brief but fascinating.

Through only one quarter Spanish she made a career as a “Latin American” chanteuse. Born in San Antonio, raised in Connecticut, she was trained to sing opera, but chose to interpret Spanish language folk and pop songs in cabarets and nightclubs and on radio. Circa 1936 she met Edward Gorey’s father (also Edward Gorey), a newspaper reporter, while performing at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. He left the boy (then only 11) and his mother for Mura, who became his second wife. By the early ’40s Mura had left Gorey; the illustrator’s parents reunited when he was in his late ’20s.

By then, Mura had become a movie star of sorts. She had flashy turns (almost always as an exotic singer) in Hollywood movies for a period of years. They include Call Out the Marines (1942), Prisoner of Japan (1942), Casablanca (1942, he most famous role), Passage to Marseille (1944), The Gay Senorita (1945), and Honeymoon (1947). In 1942 she starred in a very campy Soundie of the song “Babalu”, nowadays associated primarily with Desi Arnaz. In 1944 and 1945 she also appeared in the Broadway show Mexican Hayride. It is said that she also sang for President Roosevelt on three separate occasions. After a gap of ten years she returned to the screen one last time in The Helen Morgan Story (1957).

Mura was living in Mexico City and married to a man name Tibor Fejer at the time of her death by cancer in 1965. It is thought that Gorey’s 1968 book The Blue Aspic, in which the aspiring opera singer Ortenzia Caviglia becomes the ruination of a hapless fan named Jasper Ankle, was inspired by Mura’s relationship with his father. “Caviglia” means “ankle”, btw. My wife loved that detail so much she has often used it as an online alias.

For more on the history of show business,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.