"Grand-Mama"

Excerpt from "American Social Leaders", INTERNATIONAL NOMADS, by Lanfranco Rasponi (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1965)


The third great hostess in Nassau, Mrs. Charles Munroe, lives on Cable Beach, amidst a verdant oasis of green, in a pink villa which is not at all splashy but comfortable and snug. In the drawing room, over the fireplace, hangs a superb version of Monet's "Lillies in a Pond." Liable to stay here four months of the year, since she has no other permanent home, she roams the rest of the time. She is a true wayfarer, taking her immense zest for life wherever she goes and making all her friends the richer for it.

Three times a widow and the mother of two sons, Rudolph and Philip Benkard, she was born Ann Ditchburn in the state of Oregon. Gifted with a radiant voice, she studied singing in New York City and became, under the stae name of Ann Swinburne, such a first-rate musical comedy star that Victor Herbert wrote The Madcap Duchess for her. Her love for music has never faltered, and she renounced her skyrocketing career only to marry into the solid and well-estalished musical publishing family of the Schirmers. Today she is still an invaluable member of their Board of Directors. Her musical knowledge is geniune, and she is a fmiliar figure at the Spoleto, Bayreuth, and Salzburg (where she always rents a house) and attends the Festival every year. An intimate friend of many of the musical great, she undertakes long journeys to hear anything new in which they are involved. An enthusiastic supporter of Samuel Barber ad Gian Carlo Menotti from the very beginning of their careers, she has followed each step they have undertaken with something close to maternal pride.

She entertains often and easily, wherever she is. If it's Paris, it will be Maxim's; if London, Claridge's. Excellent at mixing people of all nationalities, she is enough of a linguist to cope with a professor of some German University or a French musicologist if it proves necessary. Restless in a gypsy-like manner, she moves incessantly with her small caravan, consisting of a maid and her English chauffeur, Sims, in a luxurious Mercedes, and rapidly puts up her tents, feeling at home everywhere. To be free to do what pleases her, upon the death of her husband she sold the huge Chateau at St. Jean on Cap Ferrat to Detroit's Ernest Kanzler.

In the thirty years I have known her, her spirit has not changed and her enthusiasm for everything she undertakes - the swim before breakfast in Nassau in the amethyst-tinted sea in front of her bedroom, the daily game of golf and cards, and the pause at the piano to go over a Mozart sonata ("It relaxes me so," I have heard her say often) - is part of the bubble of a charming human being unspoiled by riches or success. In Nassau she chooses her guests from all walks of life and they are apt to be Manhattan's dowager with the mostest, Mrs. William Woodward, Sr., Lorelai, Duchess of Westminster, Conductor Thomas Schippers, lawyer Henry Hyde, or theatrical producer Gilbert Miller and his Kitty.