“It was a beautiful shade of pink”
This note is from the case file of Katherine Orlovsky (Екатерина Орловская, née Крыловская), the popular opera soprano in Russian Shanghai. In 1947, she applied for a visa to come to the United States under the “Sweetheart Bill No. 471”, to marry her fiance, Alexander R. Boyd, sixteen years her junior.
Orlovsky in costume, Shanghai, 1930s. Krylovsky family archive.
The heyday of Katherine Orlovsky’s stage career in Shanghai was in the 1930s. Her colleague, the orchestra musician Vladimir Serebriakov, recalled: “The Russian Light Opera had no financial worries: all the performances were sold out. This was largely thanks to “Katiusha” Orlovsky, Valin’s wife. She was the cornerstone of the company. Her name on a playbill guaranteed the lines at the ticket office. She was young, extremely beautiful, flirtatious, graceful and possessed unique musicality. She had no musical training, yet she could learn an entire opera in a few days. This allowed her to often help out her colleagues. Orlovsky’s voice was ethereally beautiful; one conductor compared it with a silver bell. [...] She so charged the audiences with her vigor, that they would jump up from their seats and clap with the music.”
Sapajou’s vision of Orlovsky (Orlovskaya) as a star of the Shanghai light opera. North-China Daily News, 1932.
Orlovsky did, in fact, have some musical training. Born in 1908 into an aristocratic family in Vladivostok, she attended a music school and started her career in the Khabarovsk Musical Comedy Theatre in 1926. She adapted her surname from Krylovsky to Orlovsky to avoid ruining her family’s reputation. In 1928, she married the actor and director Valentin Valin (Valentin Kattche), and for the next two decades they were inseparable in life and on stage. Having migrated to China around the year 1930, they found their way to Shanghai, where they joined the Russian Light Opera company and lifted it to the peak of its popularity.
Orlovsky and Valin in stage costumes, Shanghai.
In 1946, after the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, things were no longer the same. Orlovsky and Valin officially divorced and concocted a paper in Russian claiming they had been separated from 1936. In 1947, Orlovsky, aged 39, applied for a US visa to marry the young American G.I. Alexander R. Boyd. His heartfelt hand-written letter is attached to the case file. In it, the 23-year-old expresses anxiety and impatience to reunite with his bride. The visa officers found him a “sincere, clean-cut young man”. But they also must have looked at the files of the Special Branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police, which occasionally suspected Orlovsky of pro-Soviet activism. Katherine Orlovsky was a Soviet citizen, after all. Did the piece of pink paper - “the secret airgram” - that flew out the window in Shanghai contain some information, which could have tipped the scale in Katherine Orlovsky’s favor? We don’t know. Her US visa was refused.
Two years later, the American journalist Jack Birns working on the series “China, Last Days of Shanghai” for Life Magazine captured Katherine Orlovsky singing in the Renaissance, on Avenue Joffre - one of the few places that remained open in 1949 and still had floor shows. Soon after that, Orlovsky repatriated to the USSR, where her operatic career did not restart. She stayed in touch with her ex-husband Valentin Valin, who also came to the USSR and languished in provincial theatres. In her letters to her stage friend Larissa Andersen, who settled in France, Orlovsky complained bitterly of loneliness. She died in Soviet Lithuania in 1967.
Orlovsky as the operetta star. North-China Daily News, 1939.
Katherine Orlovsky in the Renaissance Restaurant, in 1949. Jack Birns.