Journalist, Author, Catalyst, Lecturer, Traveler

The Many Talents Of Kay Halle By Tim Feran

As a child of privilege, Kay Halle became acquainted with fame and power early. When she was 13, the family was visiting Washington when President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, a former Cleveland mayor, instructed a young aide—future newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann—to show her around the capital. Lippmann not only arranged for Halle to see a fragment of the bullet that killed President Abraham Lincoln but also had her admitted to a special session of Congress, where she witnessed Wilson’s request for a declaration of war in April 1917.

Halle’s father, Samuel, and uncle, Salmon, had established Cleveland’s Halle Brothers Co. in 1891 to cater to the carriage trade, and the firm grew to become one of the city’s premier department stores in Euclid Avenue’s retail district, which was often compared to New York’s stylish Fifth Avenue. Her mother, Blanche M. Murphy Halle, married Samuel Halle in 1901. The first of five children, Katherine Murphy Halle was born in 1903.

The family was deeply involved in Cleveland’s cultural and social life, and Halle attended what were considered “the best schools,” including Laurel School in Shaker Heights; Miss Wheeler’s Finishing School in Providence, Rhode Island; and Smith College.

According to at least one account, Halle was bored at Smith College and left after one year to study piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Back home, she launched herself enthusiastically into support of the Cleveland cultural and arts scene, especially the Cleveland Orchestra.

Halle And The Churchills

Her sole focus on Cleveland changed in 1931 when Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill, visited the city’s English Speaking Union to begin a lecture tour of America. Churchill met Halle and quickly became enamored of the slim, beautiful, blonde heiress.

After he was invited to visit the Halle residence on Harcourt Road in Cleveland Heights, 19-year-old Randolph proposed marriage to 27-year-old Kay. But, Halle’s sister Ann said, “she was afraid of losing her freedom,” and she declined his proposal.

The next year, however, after Randolph had encouraged her to “look over the hedgerow” to see what the rest of the world had to offer, Halle visited England and stayed at Chartwell, the Churchills’ country house. At Chartwell, she met many prominent people, inspiring her to create “On the Boulevard,” a regular column which she wrote for the Cleveland News.

Later in 1932, when Winston Churchill himself embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, he stayed with the Halles at their Cleveland Heights home, cementing a friendship with Kay that lasted the rest of their lives.

Halle Meets Gershwin

That same year, Halle moved to New York City, where she met George Gershwin after a concert, and the two became close. It was in Halle’s apartment and on her piano that Gershwin completed the composition of Summertime for his opera Porgy and Bess.

Through Gershwin, Halle witnessed Todd Duncan, the head of the voice department at Howard University, successfully audition for the part of Porgy. And as Gershwin’s friends in music became Halle’s friends, her apartment became a gathering place for Fred Astaire, Fats Waller, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and Oscar Levant.

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Halle family friend, invited Gershwin and Halle to a

New Year’s party at the White House, where the composer played the piano at Roosevelt’s request.

Know Your City

Although living in New York, Halle never lost her love for Cleveland. Beginning in 1938, she broadcast a radio show, Know Your City, to encourage Clevelanders’ appreciation of their hometown. It was characteristically highbrow, as Halle was hardly a sports or popular culture fan. For example, when she was to interview Bob Feller, she didn’t recognize the great Cleveland Indians pitcher when he walked into the studio.

Always on the move, Halle embarked on an extended 18,000-mile flying trip around South America in 1940, regularly recording her impressions of people and places, which were broadcast on Cleveland station WGAR. In 1941, having completed her South American tour, Halle returned home to become the Cleveland Orchestra’s intermission commentator, a post she frequently filled well into the 1950s.

The advent of World War II didn’t sideline Halle; quite the contrary. She spent four years as an intelligence operative in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, in Washington, D.C., where she received training for parachuting behind enemy lines, using handguns and deploying land mines.

receive from a submarine crew in Alaska after my Cleveland Orchestra shows. They wrote that they waited to hear my voice come to them up there in that wilderness.”

Around the OSS office, Gen. William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the spy agency, dubbed her “Mata Halle.” While some said the nickname was a pun, Halle did have a reputation as a femme fatale.

A Graveyard For Suitors

But while Halle once showed a friend a list of 64 men who’d proposed to her—among them the prominent Democratic politician, businessman and diplomat W. Averell Harriman—no one really knew the truth. She turned down offers to write a tell-all memoir and chose to keep her romantic life a mystery.

A New York Times story after Halle’s death read, “Even intimates who are certain … that she had been Joseph Kennedy’s favorite mistress cannot say for sure whether her friendship with Gershwin, who home and, as she had in New York, she became a hostess of the famous and powerful. Close friends who frequented her home included the Roosevelts and Kennedys, Dean Acheson, Buckminster Fuller, David Lloyd George, Sinclair Lewis, Helen Hayes, Arturo Toscanini and Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter.

“I much prefer working behind the scenes,” Halle said. “I like being a catalyst, bringing people together ... I find you can achieve much more that way.” Her brother-in-law George Crile, son of one of The Cleveland Clinic’s founders, put it more simply: “Kay just loves people.”

A Friend Of The Kennedys

Halle’s ties to the Kennedy and Churchill families went back decades. In 1932, she visited 15-yearold Jack in the hospital and found at his bedside a volume of Winston Churchill’s memoir of World War I. So it was hardly a surprise that Halle was instrumental in the campaign to name Churchill an honorary U.S. citizen during Kennedy’s presidency, the first time anyone had been so honored.

Nor was it surprising when Kennedy asked Halle to join his inaugural committee after he won the 1960 presidential election.

She was alarmed by the initial guest list, which she described in an oral history interview as “feeble … governor’s wives and governors. I asked Stanley Woodward, the head of our committee, whether they had any plans to bring the eminent people in the arts, sciences and humanities as special guests of the president? There was a dead silence.”

At Halle’s urging, nearly 200 leaders of the arts, humanities and sciences were invited, setting a new bar for future presidential inaugurations.

In addition to her inaugural committee work, Halle was appointed by Kennedy to the advisory committee for what was to become the Kennedy Center.

A few months after Kennedy’s inauguration, Halle visited Winston and Randolph Churchill at Chartwell. “During lunch,” she wrote, “I sat next to the Great Man, at his right, and he rose with his glass of hock and turning to me he said, ‘Kay, let us drink to your great President, and—and ours.’ I think it was his delicate way of expressing his fervent wish for a union of Great Britain and the United States as a beginning for a union of all the Democracies.”

A corridor in Halle’s Georgetown house was devoted to the Churchills, and included three paintings by the artist John Churchill, a nephew of the statesman and frequent house guest. Halle enjoyed pointing out that Churchill’s mother was American. Sir Winston was, she said, “half American and all British.”

When the British Embassy in Washington was preparing to erect a statue of Winston Churchill on the embassy grounds, Halle suggested that the statue be placed so that one of Winston’s feet would be on British Embassy soil and the other on American soil just outside the embassy. Thus, Churchill’s statue stands today in both countries, in recognition of his dual citizenship and lineage. Fittingly, the competition to design the statue was won by Cleveland sculptor William McVey.

In 1968, Halle received the honor of Officer in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II, in acknowledgement of her work in support of Anglo-American relations. Over the years, Halle would publish four books about Winston and Randolph, including The Irrepressible Churchill: Winston’s World, Wars & Wit; Winston Churchill on America and Britain; Randolph Churchill: The Young Unpretender; and The Grand Original: Portraits of Randolph Churchill by His Friends.

What she especially admired about Winston Churchill was “his verbal felicity and ingenuity with which he transposed his thoughts into so many striking phrases ... blowing them into the air like so many colored bubbles.”

At age 73, Halle was still very active, serving on the 1976 Bicentennial Committees in both Cleveland and Washington. “There is so much to be done,” she said. “Life is more interesting than fiction.”

Kay Halle died at age 93 on Aug. 7, 1997. Her papers are preserved at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. To the end, her brother-in-law said, she was “ageless ... a very graceful and dignified figure.”

Tim Feran is a native of Cleveland and a graduate of Harvard University. For more than 40 years, he’s been a professional journalist, first at the Lorain Journal, then for 30 years at The Columbus Dispatch, and currently as a freelance writer. He lives in Columbus with his wife, Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, Franklin County clerk of courts.

Learn More

The Movie-Radio Guide ’s Robert Bagar interviewed Kay Halle for a 1943 feature story on Halle’s efforts to get the Cleveland Orchestra broadcast on the radio. Not only did she succeed, but Halle also became the intermission commentator for the broadcasts, at the time “the only one of her sex to hold such a post in music.” You can read Bagar’s interview at ohiohistory.org/Halle1

Listen to a fascinating hour-long interview of Kay Halle conducted by William M. McHugh for the JFK Presidential Library in 1967 at ohiohistory.org/Halle2

Kay Halle’s books—Winston Churchill on America and Britain; The Irrepressible Churchill: Winston’s World, Wars & Wit; Randolph Churchill: The Young Unpretender ; and The Grand Original: Portraits of Randolph Churchill by His Friends—are readily available online.

Top: Kay Halle and book publisher Bennett Cerf on air in the CBS Radio studio in New York City.

Bottom: Books were the subject when these six authors met in Cleveland in 1966 for autograph sessions in The Book Shop at The Halle Brothers Co. Discussing their latest efforts were, from left, Robert McCloskey, author of Burt Dow: Deep Water Man; Fletcher Knebel, The Zinzin Road; Louis B. Seltzer, former Cleveland Press editor, Six and God; Anita Loos, A Girl Like I; Kay Halle, The Irrepressible Churchill; and Bill Wambsganss, a contributor to The Glory of Their Times

When former patrons of Summit Station decided to honor the bar that was a home away from home to many, Julia Applegate launched the Friends of Summit Station web and GoFundMe pages. These snapshots were taken by patrons over the nearly three decades that Petie Brown owned and ran Summit Station. Consider them a kind of Summit Station scrapbook.

We want to bring a few to your attention. Top row, right: The only sports team Brown ever sponsored was the Pacesetters, Columbus’s own women’s football team. According to her, there were too many softball teams and she wanted to be fair, so she didn’t sponsor any and chose the Pacesetters instead. Second row, left: The annual Christmas Show was a highlight of the holiday season and raised thousands of dollars over the years for children in need. Second row, middle and right: Brown perched atop the roof and in a head shot. She put every penny she had into purchasing Summit Station in 1980.