happened to him there. A fellow soldier in the same outfit, Bert Hicks
from Chicago, introduced him to his sister Betty, who became the one
and only Mrs. Lanza after Mario was discharged. They were married in
Beverly Hills Municipal Court, with neither of their families knowing
anything about it. At a Frances Marion party loaded to the doors with
stars, with Father Murphy up from New Orleans, and myself, Mario sang
clear through from eleven o’clock one night until the birds started
giving him competition at seven the next morning. At another party,
Frank Sinatra heard him and invited him to stay at his home.
After I’d heard Mario sing, I asked him over to my house. There was a
big, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace in the den. “I could break
that with the power of a single high note,” he boasted. Like a fool, I
told him: “I’d like to see you try.” Like a little boy, he had to prove
it. When he had gone, the house seemed oddly quiet. I was sweeping up
bits of glass for days.
Walter Pidgeon and I both became Lanza boosters, but it was Ida
Koverman, true to form, who took him to Louis B. Mayer. Mario had been
cutting some tests for RCA-Victor to see whether his voice would be
right for commercial recording. Ida, who was a board member of the
Hollywood Bowl, laid hold of some of those disks to play for her boss.
To Louis, that tenor sounded like a symphony orchestrated for cash
registers. Mario was presented with a seven-year contract, starting at
$750 a week, with a bonus of $10,000 payable on signature. I begged him
not to sign, because his voice wasn’t ready to be exploited the way
Metro was sure to exploit it. But he was beating his chest so loudly he
couldn’t hear me. He was twenty-six years old. He had twelve more years
left to him.
Metro had a sad history with its tenors and baritones. There’d been
Lawrence Tibbett, a baritone of large frame and a big voice, who was
hauled out of the Metropolitan Opera to do _The Rogue Song_, music by
Franz Lehar, screen play by Frances Marion. He did _New Moon_ with
Grace Moore, then faded like the morning dew.
Igor Gorin was hustled out to Culver City, too, under Mayer’s strategy
of always keeping an understudy in the wings to prevent any star from
getting too big-headed. Gorin was kept hanging around doing nothing in
particular for two years, though Louis admitted he had a better voice
than Nelson Eddy, who was piling up the profits for the studio as a
team with Jeanette MacDonald.
But Louis grew tired of Nelson, so he was handed the Impossible Script
treatment--given stories so remote from his abilities that he was bound
to turn them down. This continued until he cracked and announced: “I’m
through.” That was the day his bosses had been banking on and waiting
for.
Food was always a delight to Mario right from the teen-age days when
his invalid father used to serve him breakfast in bed. He swore by
“Puccini and pizza--greatest combination since Samson and Delilah.”
Also by spaghetti, ravioli, meat balls, a steak and six eggs for
breakfast; thirty and forty pieces of fried chicken at a sitting,
rounded off with a whole apple pie and a quart of eggnog.
His studio bosses watched his weight go up and down like the stock
market. There were times when they put him in a drug-induced coma for
days on end; he would have to lose twenty pounds before he was allowed
out of bed. They peeled him down to 169 pounds for his first picture,
_That Midnight Kiss_, and kept scales on the set to weigh him every
morning like a prize bull readied for market.
He hadn’t started picture number two, _The Toast of New Orleans_,
before he took to the bottle as enthusiastically as to the knife and
fork. He recognized no authority, no discipline, no frontiers except
his own gigantic appetites for food and drink and women. One afternoon
on the set he fell into a brief, blazing argument with Joe Pasternak,
the producer. But he resumed work in the scene, a lavishly decorated
New Orleans restaurant, replete with crystal chandeliers, velvet
draperies, snow-white tablecloths adorned with glass and silver.
In the middle of one take, he spotted a friend who had come onto the
set, so he stopped cold, still raging from his quarrel with Pasternak,
to take the visitor to his portable dressing room. Inside, Mario
launched into a tirade against the producer, the studio, and the lousy
picture he was making. From the little clothes closet he pulled out a
fifth of Old Granddad and yanked out the cork. In two gargantuan gulps
he emptied the bottle.
Suddenly he was calm as a lake. “I think I’m making too much of
little things,” he said, and, steady as a rock walked back before the
cameras. There were two steps leading down to the restaurant floor. He
negotiated the first without difficulty, but on the second the bourbon
hit him. He gave a thundering roar, then burst on the set like a bomb.
Tables collapsed as he crashed into them, chandeliers shattered into
fragments, curtains were torn to rags, while above the chaos sounded
the screams of his co-star, Ann Blyth. He made his way across the set
leaving havoc in his wake, then subsided to the floor, unconscious.
_The Toast of New Orleans_ presented a special problem to Mario, who
had been introduced to the pleasures of coffee and brandy by J. Carroll
Naish. Starting before breakfast, Mario was taking thirty cups of
coffee a day, with disastrous effect on his kidneys. The picture was
being shot on the old lot back of Culver City, a long block away from
the nearest washrooms. He spent the better part of his working day in
transit, until production had slowed to a crawl. He made poor time
walking, anyway--he had broken his foot, which was in a cast, and he
was forced to limp along with a cane.
His director, Norman Taurog, and Joe Pasternak appealed for help to
Dore Schary, who, with Mayer on his way out, was now in charge of
production. Schary luxuriated in an impeccable office furnished in
old-English fashion, with a mahogany desk that reeked of class and the
antique showroom. The first time Mario was summoned, he sat nursing his
cane in patient silence. “We can’t have the picture held up by your
bladder trouble,” said Schary. “We must find a solution.”
“Okay,” said Mario. “Leave it to me.”
His solution was simplicity itself. By now, shooting was concentrated
on a New Orleans quay, bright with fishing nets and boats at anchor.
Mario didn’t bother hobbling to the washroom. The water in the
quay was more convenient. So was a bucket half filled with a still
photographer’s used flash bulbs.
The whole company was in an uproar, most notably David Niven, whose
voice was raised in indignation on behalf of Ann Blyth and other women
in the cast. Mario was called again to Schary’s office. But now his
temper had changed. He shouted down every word that Schary tried to
utter, until the producer cowered in fright behind his beautiful desk,
watching Mario pound it to a battered wreck with his cane. But Schary
wasn’t one to nurse grudges. After the first preview of _The Great
Caruso_ he showered Mario with hampers of fruit, bouquets of flowers,
and cases of champagne.
When I first heard his mighty voice, I wrote: “If Lanza can act, he’s
the man to play Caruso.” I still have Caruso records, along with a
framed caricature he drew of DeWolf Hopper to celebrate the birth of
our son. Caruso’s eloquent title for his sketch of Wolfie, scribbled
on the back of a Lambs Club banquet menu, was _The Bachelor_!!!!!!!
Nick Schenck was opposed to _The Great Caruso_, whose chances of
box-office success he rated at zero. Mayer, prompted by Ida, pushed
it along toward production. It was completed in thirty-one days of
shooting; it ran for ten weeks and earned $1,500,000 at New York’s
Radio City Music Hall alone; around the world it piled up $19,000,000
the first twelve months after release. Mario’s pay check was $100,000.
His finances were already tangled like knitting wool tossed into a
cage full of tigers. On the face of it, he was earning from movies and
records about $1,000,000 a year. But there were complications. The
greatest singing attraction in the world was a monumental spendthrift.
After _Caruso_ he bought two dozen gold watches, had them engraved
“With love from Mario,” and handed them out like lollipops. He insisted
on having 14-karat gold fittings on his brand-new Cadillac, which was
upholstered in tiger skin. He ran up delicatessen bills so huge he was
leery about showing his face in the shop.
And there was Sam Weiler, who collected a cut of everything Mario made.
Weiler was a nondescript little man who owned a boys’ summer camp in
Pennsylvania and yearned to be a singer. Soon after the Lanzas went to
New York to spend their honeymoon in the Park Central Hotel, he heard
Mario singing at the studio of a voice teacher, Polly Robertson, and
decided on the spot that managing this talent was a much better bet
than trying to make it to glory on his own larynx.
When he offered to pay off Mario’s debts--$11,000 or so, by Weiler’s
account--and subsidize his career, Betty and her new husband calculated
they could get along on $70 a week living expenses. In return, Weiler
was to collect five per cent of all Lanza’s earnings for the next
fifteen years. Eighteen months later the manager’s share was increased
to ten per cent. A third contract pushed up his cut to twenty per cent,
and when Mario signed for a radio show later, Weiler was in on the
ground floor at $500 a week. According to his protégé’s reckoning,
Weiler advanced $70 a week for seven months and drew a subsequent total
of more than $350,000 in commissions.
Cash money and Mario were almost strangers. He never saw the tens of
thousands of dollars he made every week. Nobody actually put cash into
his hands until he was in the middle of a man-killing concert tour that
took him and two or three followers clear across the nation, singing
his heart out at every performance.
His life had come down to a deadly dull routine: sing every night, come
off stage and drink a case of beer, sleep, drive on to the next town.
Even his thick-skinned followers felt sorry for him. “Why not give him
something for himself?” they asked each other. “Let him have the money
from the programs.” Those souvenirs of the concert sold at one dollar
apiece, cost no more than twelve or so cents to produce. So while the
tour was bringing in $30,000 a week in Oregon, which is silver-dollar
territory, Mario was permitted to store up five hundred of those
dollars, which he squirreled away in a canvas bag.
Only this bull of a man would have the muscle to tote around that sack
of silver like a change purse, but he took it everywhere with him, day
and night. In the car, he set it down on the floor between his legs and
occasionally, subconsciously, gave it a reassuring chink. At night, he
slept with the bag under his bed.
The biggest money came in, unseen by him, from his records. He sold
more than 110,000 albums from _Caruso_ before the picture was shown to
any public audience. Then he topped this by selling a million copies in
less than a year of a single record, “Be My Love.” No classical artist
in RCA history had ever equaled that mark. The record was cut in one
flawless attempt while he was muzzy with wine and soaking wet from
head to foot. When he was awarded his first golden record for selling
a million copies of it, he would have nobody but Hedda Hopper present
it to him. The studio was furious. They wanted one of their stars to
perform that service so all the glory could be kept in the family.
He had gone through a normal rambunctious day at Culver City,
drinking steadily but staying out of trouble. At seven-thirty
that evening he had an appointment at Republic Studios, where one
particular sound stage came so close to acoustic perfection that RCA
consistently hired it for cutting its classical-label records, Red
Seal. A sixty-five-piece orchestra had been engaged to work with him
through the night in a four-hour session, to make an armful of master
recordings.
On his way home from the studio Mario thought he’d stop by for another
drink or two at the home of a good friend of his, a free-lance
writer. The tempestuous tenor was distinctly the worse for wear when
he arrived, and his condition did not improve. Phyllis Kirk, a young
actress who lived in an upstairs apartment, was invited down to have a
drink with Mario. Before he collapsed into alcoholic slumber, he had
tried to rip the dress off her shoulders.
Lanza’s long-suffering press agent was eating dinner when he had a call
from an RCA representative waiting at Republic: where was Mario? Within
minutes another telephone call provided the answer, from the free-lance
correspondent: “Will you kindly come over and get your degenerate,
unprincipled client out of my apartment?”
The agent had a favor to ask first: “Can the three of you drag him
into a cold shower, prop him up, and keep him there? If he drowns, he
drowns, but will you please try it for me?” Be happy to, the writer
said. When the agent got to the apartment, Mario was fully clad,
three-quarters conscious, and half drowned. The idea that he had work
to do had somehow penetrated his curly head. But he had a bargain to
make first.
“I’ll go out to Republic if you come with me,” he told the agent. “I’ll
do one number, then we go and have a bottle of wine together.” Agreed.
The orchestra, impeccably dressed, had been waiting nearly two hours
when Mario staggered in, splashing water wherever he stood. He frowned
at the conductor, then turned on the musicians. “---- all of you,” he
said to introduce himself. “I don’t want any bull. We’re going through
this thing once, and it had better be right.”
And that’s how it was done. Half an hour later Mario was sitting with
his press agent in a bar in Coldwater Canyon quaffing Ruffino by the
quart. A year and a half later the same agent was handed a check
for Mario representing his take from nine months’ sale of “Be My
Love”--$405,000. The one record earned over $2,000,000. In 1961, Mario
Lanza records were still collecting royalties of $275,000. Mario wasn’t
around to share in as much as a nickel, but the percentage merchants
still had contracts which continued to give them their cut.
“Be My Love” was selling like hot cakes, especially in Philadelphia,
when a fan magazine appeared on the newsstands quoting Mario’s
reminiscences of his old neighborhood. These memoirs had been concocted
between the singer and a writer in the course of another battle of
the bottles that began at five-thirty one afternoon in Mama Weiss’s
Hungarian restaurant and ended at seven-thirty the next morning when
Mario got home to Betty. His imagination had run wild through the night
with lurid tales of gang wars in Little Italy and bullets whistling
past his ears when he lived on “Murderers’ Row.”
Publication of these highly colored tales so enraged some of his former
neighbors that they invaded local stores and smashed every Lanza
record they could seize. Rocks were hurled through the windows of his
relatives. The mayor was forced to telephone Hollywood: “Please bring
Mr. Lanza to Philadelphia for a personal appearance, or I’m afraid we
may have a major riot here.”
Mario was always officially on a diet. “I’ve never been fat,” he
bragged, “only seductively buxom.” But he was a compulsive eater
who ballooned up to three hundred pounds between pictures. Schary
was forever plagued with the problem of paring down Mario, who was
pure gold at the box office; his four pictures for Metro brought in
$40,000,000, a phenomenal figure. He had so many temptations to eat and
drink in Hollywood that Schary decided his prize tenor would have to be
hidden away somewhere for the poundage to be lost.
Ginger Rogers had a secluded ranch on the Rogue River in Oregon. She
would be happy to let Mario use the place for reducing. He couldn’t
ride in planes because of a punctured eardrum, so he was driven up
there with Betty, his press agent and wife, and a colored butler. Mario
wasn’t short of will power when the occasion demanded it. For six weeks
he held himself down to eating three tomatoes and six eggs a day. Every
morning he puffed half a mile each way up and down the road, sweltering
in a specially made latex suit. He had to work out alone. The agent sat
on the porch of the ranch house with a .22 rifle. Whenever Mario slowed
down, a shot would come singing into the roadway by his feet to speed
him up again.
He had one more great record, “The Loveliest Night of the Year,” and
one more miserable movie, _Because You’re Mine_, to make before his
feud with Metro took on the proportions of nightmare. Much of the blame
has to be loaded onto his wife’s shoulders. She loved her husband in
her own shrill fashion, but she no more knew the greatness in him than
she could sing _Aïda_.
She loved the money he made, the house it bought with butler, cook,
maids, gardener, chauffeur. She loved the $20,000 mink he bought her,
but she couldn’t spare the time to listen to his new recordings when he
burst into the house with them like an excited schoolboy.
He was wonderful with his own children and every other child. I’ve seen
him romp around his living-room floor by the hour with his family--who
are a family of orphans now. He tried to keep one little child alive
and failed through no fault of his. Raphaela Fasona of New Jersey was a
ten-year-old fan, one of the army of them throughout the Western world
whose letters kept Mario’s mother, father, and a staff of three others
busy answering them. Ray was in the hospital, a victim of Hodgkin’s
disease. Mario had great compassion for the sick, sent out hundreds of
his albums to them. He talked to Ray in person or by telephone every
week, sang to her, told her fairy tales.
He brought her with her mother to Beverly Hills one Christmas, gave
her a party with stars and their children as guests--Kathryn Grayson,
the Ricardo Montalbans, Joe Pasternak, David May, Mrs. Norman Taurog
among them. The children chuckled over a puppet show and a magician,
and I watched Ray’s great luminous brown eyes fill with wonder. When
her illness came to its inevitable end, Mario planned a concert in her
memory, donating the proceeds for cancer research.
Betty Lanza was a cheerleader in the bleachers that were filled with
the stooges who lived off Mario. “You don’t have to go to the studio,”
she used to tell him. “You’re too big a name for that now. Make them
come to you.”
The studio did come to him once more, to make _The Student Prince_,
though the bosses were panicky about his weight, which had puffed
him out to look more hippopotamus than tiger. I went to his house
to get his side of the donnybrook that broke out and kept his name
in headlines for months. “I was treated cheap while I was Tiffany.
Box-office Tiffany. They gave me the little-boy routine, and I’m not a
little boy. They took my advice before. Then when I became a big star,
they said: ‘We’ll take the reins in on this sonofabitch.’”
I could hear all kinds of people talking through his lips as he spoke:
his wife, his sycophants, whole generations of stars and the relatives
of stars dating back to the days when Hollywood first made dreams of
fame and greed come true.
Eddie Mannix, MGM vice president, was a target for Mario’s fury. “I
told him I’d kill him. He said: ‘You wouldn’t hit an old man.’ I said:
‘I’ll tie my hands behind my back and fight you with my head.’”
In the middle of the battle Mario took a look into the books of Marsam
Enterprises which agent Sam Weiler had set up with his wife, Selma, as
partner to handle Lanza’s business affairs. The ledgers showed he had
little left. Weiler promptly quit, and Mario subsequently filed suit
against him. His memory was kept green in Mario’s private gymnasium, a
boxing ring under a tent in his garden. Painted on the punching bag was
a portrait of Weiler. “I can keep in trim the rest of my life,” Mario
boasted, “because every time I work out I can beat the daylights out of
the sonofagun.”
The studio had allotted twelve weeks to cut the recordings for _The
Student Prince_. Mario finished the job in two. When he played them
over for me, he sat a million miles away, saturated in the music, until
the last notes had died. “A critic wrote about me once: ‘He sings every
note as though it’s his last on earth.’” Mario said softly: “It’s true.
I do. I can’t help myself.”
The sound track was all he made of _The Student Prince_. He refused to
work on the picture after that. He was suspended, then sued for the
potential profit on that and future pictures. The figures mentioned
in the legal documents were a gargantuan jest to him. “They asked
$13,500,000 plus $855,066.73. Now what I want to know is, what’s
the seventy-three cents for? I guess Eddie Mannix had his drawers
laundered.”
He could joke about it in daylight, but darkness brought about a Jekyll
and Hyde change. He kept to his house during the day; at night, with
his chauffeur-trainer for company, he roved through the streets of
Beverly Hills seeking out his enemies. He drove to Joe Pasternak’s
house to smash the entrance gates off their hinges. Another night he
used the Cadillac to batter down Joe’s mailbox. And some mornings the
men on Mario’s black list found he had ridden up to their doorsteps and
defecated there.
The rocket had exploded, and the charred stick was tumbling down. A
letter from Eddie Mannix, on behalf of Loew’s Incorporated, came to
Mario: “For good and sufficient reasons your employment under the
contract between us is hereby terminated. We shall hold you fully
accountable for all damage and loss suffered by us as a result of your
actions and conduct; and we expressly reserve all rights of every kind
and character acquired by us under said contract.” Mario promptly had
a banner made to hang in his house: “The Lion is Dead,” it proclaimed,
“Long Live The Tiger.”
I was one of the friends who begged Mario to commit himself to the
Menninger Clinic. Once again he tried to strike a bargain with Jack
Keller, another friend: if Jack would go with him, Mario would take
treatment. But he made the mistake of letting Betty know too soon.
“He’s no crazier than you are,” she raged at Jack.
“But it’s for your happiness as much as his.” It was known by now that
the Lanzas were on drink and drugs together. Their domestic battles
often stopped short of murder only by a hair’s breadth. But Betty set
her foot down; no trip to Topeka for her husband.
In theory he could still make records, but he was in no shape for
singing. He tried and failed repeatedly, his throat shut tight
by tension. The Lanzas owed money to everybody, from Goldblatt’s
delicatessen to Uncle Sam. A psychiatrist familiar with his case had an
explanation: “Lanza has lost all touch with reality. He no longer knows
who he really is or the personality he wants to be.”
His first job after two years of seclusion was a television show,
“Shower of Stars,” for the Chrysler Corporation. It ended in a furor
when he simply mouthed the words to old recordings as they were played
off camera. The sponsors had invited reporters from all over the
country to come out for the occasion, with supper afterward at the
Beverly Hills Hotel.
Mario went straight home after his performance. I went to the party
to hear what the reporters had to say. Most of them thought Mario was
through. He hadn’t even been able to synchronize his lip movements to
his recorded voice.
At 12:30 A.M. I drove to his house. He sat in the drawing room with his
wife and the Hubbell Robinsons, drinking pink champagne. I’d always
been rough with him because I loved him. “What do you think you’re
doing?” I asked. “Celebrating a wake?”
He leaped to his feet in a white heat of anger. “What do you mean?”
“That’s what it was--a wake. I stayed at the party long enough to hear
what the reporters had to say.”
Suddenly he became a little boy. “What can I do to redeem myself?”
“There’s only one answer. Nobody thinks you can sing. Can you?”
“Of course, I can.”
“Then tomorrow afternoon you’ll invite the reporters here to your house
and sing for them. You’ve got to if you want to save your reputation.”
“Will you come? Will you sit where I can sing to you?” I reluctantly
said I would. They came, and he sang as only he could when he knew it
was a question of success or failure. He saved what was left of his
career.