As an opera singer, she specialized in the coloratura soprano repertoire and was particularly associated with the title roles in Lakmé and Lucia di Lammermoor.

Her opinions on fashion and home decorating were frequently reported in women's magazines, and she appeared as the face for Lockheed airplanes, Knox gelatin, and Libby's tomato juice advertisements.

Opera News wrote in 2011, "Pons promoted herself with a kind of marketing savvy that no singer ever had shown before, and very few have since; only Luciano Pavarotti was quite so successful at exploiting the mass media.

At the onset of World War I in 1914, she moved with her mother and younger sister Juliette (born December 22, 1902 – died 1995) to Cannes, where she played piano and sang for soldiers at receptions given in support of the French troops and at the famous Hotel Carlton that had been transformed into a hospital, and where her mother worked as a volunteer nurse orderly.

She was discovered by the dramatic tenor/impresario Giovanni Zenatello, who took her to New York, where she auditioned for Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.

[5] In 1944, during World War II, Pons cancelled her fall and winter season in New York and instead toured with the USO, entertaining troops with her singing.

The pair performed at military bases in North Africa, Italy, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, India, and Burma in 1944.

[6] In places, the heat of the sun at the outdoor performances was so overbearing that Pons, always wearing a strapless evening gown, held wet towels to her head between numbers.

[9] In 1949 Pons translated into English Jean Cocteau's screenplay and accompanying essays for The Blood of a Poet, calling his film "this great piece of French visual music.

Another role Pons learned, but decided not to sing, was Mélisande in Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande; the reason, as she confided in a later interview, was twofold: first, because she felt soprano Bidu Sayão owned the role; and secondly, because the tessitura lay mainly in the middle register of the soprano voice rather than in the higher register.

The incomplete sketch was found among Gershwin's papers after his death, and was eventually revived and completed by Michael Tilson Thomas; it was given the simple title, "For Lily Pons".

[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] Pons donated Ita, her pet ocelot, to the New York Zoological Gardens when it became too dangerous to remain in her apartment in The Ansonia on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

In 1937 the Boston and Maine Railroad, at the suggestion of Wayne E. Whittemore of the Hobbs Junior High School in Medford, Massachusetts, named its locomotive 4108, a 4-8-2 Mountain type in her honor and invited her to a ceremony at North Station to dedicate 4108 and other Mountain locomotives whose names were chosen by New England schoolchildren.

[25] Pons left a significant legacy of recordings, on the Odeon (1928-29), RCA Victor (1930-40), and Columbia (1941-54) labels, and included excerpts from Il barbiere di Siviglia, La bohème, Brother and Sister, Les contes d'Hoffmann, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Die Zauberflöte, Lakmé, Mireille, Le nozze di Figaro, Parysatis, Rigoletto, Alessandro, Le coq d'or, Dinorah, Floridante, Lucia di Lammermoor, Mignon, L'enfant et les sortilèges, La fille du régiment, Linda di Chamounix, La perle du Brésil, Porgy and Bess, I puritani, Il re pastore, Roméo et Juliette, La sonnambula, Le timbre d'argent, La traviata, Le toréador, Zémire et Azor, as well as songs by Julian Benedict, Henry Bishop, Claude Debussy, Henri Duparc, Gabriel Fauré, Charles Gounod, Myron Jacobson, Frank La Forge, and Darius Milhaud.