Francis Grierson: Beyond The Valley of Shadows to the halls of Villa Montezuma

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Sep/Oct 2004 by Simonson, Harold P

Grierson did not give up his music when he seriously started writing. In his concerts abroad he held his aristocratic, cultivated audiences enrapt as he wove his piano improvisations. Hearers testified that Grierson could produce the weirdest and most powerfully emotional music they had ever known. The reaction of the famous English publisher John Lane was typical. Lane's biographer, J. Lewis May, records that Grierson played on and on as the twilight deepened. Finally in the gloom he improvised on the sinking of the Titanic. The treatment of the theme was so overwhelmingly impressive and had such a profound el led upon Lane that he postponed for a fortnight his departure for America, although he had arranged to sail the very next day.

Grierson's interests also included spiritualism. He conducted séances in Europe and America, using his music to set the atmosphere. At the Eddy farm in Chitlenden, Vermont, in 1874, he met the two founders of Theosophy, Madame H. P. Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcolt. Later in San Diego he persuaded two brothers, newly converted spiritualists themselves, to build him a house valued at over $30,000 in which he held séances and recitals. Called the Villa Montezuma, the house became know as a temple of occultism. Still later, in Los Angeles, he lectured as a "World-Famous Mystic" on prophecy, vision, cosmic consciousness, and four-dimensional space. His last book, Psycho-Phone Messages (1921), purports to record spirit messages he received from illustrious men and women of the past.

His final years in Los Angeles were spent with his faithful amanuensis for over forty years, Lawrenee Waldemar Tenner, and with Count Michael Teliki, a refuge from Hungary and the last of a long family of magnates. Teliki and Tonner operated a small dry cleaning business, but profits were hardly sufficient to support the three of them plus Teliki's mother. Grierson repeatedly pawned souvenirs for food. A week before his death, at the age of seventy-nine, he pawned a gold watch given to him by King Edward VII. On May 29, 1927, he gave a recital for a group of close friends. And alter his final improvisation he slumped over on the keys and died.

-Harold P. Simonson

Author, editor, and historian Harold P. Simonson, received his doctorate in English studies from Northwestern University in 1958. In addition to his biography on Francis Grierson (1960), he has written about American Romanticism and the Christian Consciousness, Jonathan Edwards, and Midwest regional literature. This above essay was printed in August 1961 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.