Wehner, George B.

Composer, actor, writer, painter, and spiritualist, George Benjamin Wehner (1890-1970) led an extraordinarily varied, yet strangely productive life.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, George was the son of the sculptor Carl Herman Wehner and Annie Haslett. Much of his early childhood, however, was spent in Newburgh, New York. Wehner's own musical abilities emerged early on, and, by the age of five, he had begun composing and had devised his own notational system. Following the death of his mother in 1904, George and his sister were sent to live with their maternal grandmother in suburban Detroit. Allegedly inspired by an immersion into Native American culture forged through his interactions with a nearby encampment of Ojibway Indians, George composed a four-act opera, which earned him a scholarship to the Michigan Conservatory of Music in 1908. He studied composition, theory, and piano, and, later, taught at the Conservatory. Around this same time, Wehner also began to explore more seriously those pronounced psychic abilities he already believed he possessed. He trained with local mediums and began to hold his own séances with friends and neighbors, as well as colleagues from the Conservatory. By the early 1920s, Wehner had left Detroit for New York City. He quickly infiltrated show business circles in New York, struggling as a songwriter and sometime performer, but finding greater success in building up a portfolio of clients for his services as a professional medium. Most notable among these patrons was the actress Minnie Maddern Fiske and designer Natacha Rambova. Wehner spent much of the rest of the decade focused on promoting his reputation as a medium; those efforts culminating in the publication of his autobiography, A Curious Life, in 1929.

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