Million-Dollar Voice

(See Cover) It was the emotion-packed end of Act I of Pagliacci, and the clown's heart was broken; the sob-racked notes of Vesti la Giubba soared out of the phonograph, quivered through the cluttered den of Mario (The Great Caruso) Lanza's Beverly Hills home. An exuberant young man with the face of a choir boy and the frame of a prize bull let the vibrations pour over him until he could stand it no longer. His bright black eyes glistened. "Oo, Mario," he cooed lovingly, "you can sing like a sonofabitch ! " Both the voice on the record and the ecstatic compliment came from Mario Lanza himself, at 30 the first operatic tenor in history to become a full blown Hollywood star.

Millions of ardent fans agree with Tenor Lanza, in his admiration of 'the voice that has lifted him, almost as smoothly as it clears high C, from Philadelphia's Little Italy to a unique spot in U.S. show busi ness. For natural power and quality, though not for training or polish, it is a voice that many experts rank with those of the titans of opera. The voice sells Lanza, but Lanza, also sells the voice with curly-haired good looks and a paradoxical combination of beaming boyishness and hairy-chested animal magnetism. He is at once the delight of bobby-soxers, house wives and ordinary song lovers, and the despair of musical highbrows who believe that a great singer's goal should be the Metropolitan, not Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Broken Record. Lanza, who learned to sing mainly from listening to phonograph records, is the only classical artist in RCA Victor annals to sell in a year more than 1,000,000 copies of a single record (Be My Love). It is a feat the company happily expects him to repeat with The Loveliest Night of the Year. Though he has sung in only one opera (two performances of Madame Butterfly in New Orleans), his phenomenal drawing power in appearances was matched around the U.S. in the past season only by Britain's Sadler's Wells Ballet. His third and latest movie, The Great Caruso, an aria-studded pseudo-biography of another pretty good tenor, broke a record in Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall by piling up $1,500,000 in ten weeks.

For these labors, plus a summer radio show for Coca-Cola on Sunday evenings (CBS, 8 p.m., E.D.T.), Mario Lanza this year will rake in something between $750,000 and $1,000,00 --roughly twice last season's deficit of the Metropolitan Opera.

Last week Tenor Lanza, a onetime street-gang wiseguy who never did a day's work until he was 21, was working hard for his money. In a sweltering rubber suit, he puffed along California roads or sparred with his bodyguard-trainer, trying valiantly to sweat off the excess poundage that was costing an exasperated M-G-M many thousands of dollars for an eleven-day delay in the start of his next picture, Because You're Mine. For the moment, Lanza looked more like Mike Di Salle than Lieut. Pinkerton or any other operatic dream prince. Just under 5 ft. 10 in. without his elevator shoes, he weighed a tubby 240 Ibs. M-G-M demanded 40 Ibs. off by mid-August, and he was sure he could meet the deadline.

Reducing Diet. Lanza, who once weighed close to 300 Ibs., peeled down to a svelte 169 for his first movie, 1949's That Midnight Kiss; that time, Director Norman Taurog kept a scale on the set and weighed him in like a jockey every morning. His weight went up in 1950's The Toast of New Orleans, and again in his latest picture. "I gained weight on purpose during those pictures," insists Lanza, who is sensitive on the subject. "I wanted to look like Caruso, didn't I? What do they want to have to do--put a pillow in my middle?"

As long as he eats the way he does between pictures, such mechanical fakery should never be necessary. Lanza's idea of dieting, based on his own theory that proteins can add no weight, is to pile chicken legs, half-pound chunks of rare steak and a mound of barbecued kidneys on his plate, devour them and then heap on a second helping. For breakfast, he holds down to a steak and four to six eggs. He usually skips lunch. With great effort ("I go crazy"), he resists the spaghetti, ravioli and pizza he dearly loves, and the beer he loves scarcely less. In the old days, Lanza once polished off 40 pieces of fried chicken at a sitting, and washed them down with a quart of eggnog.

His passion for food is only one of Mario's freely indulged appetites. "All my life I liked fun," he explodes. "I'm young and alive. I like people with heart. Even today when people get gloomy around me, I swear in high C and smash a glass against the wall and say, 'Let's get going! You're fracturing me with this misery.' " Once, in a moment of high spirits, he dispelled all the misery in the immediate vicinity by bursting out of his studio dressing room, clad only in an athletic supporter, and raced hilariously around the set, while girls fled in all directions. Though Mario's literary preferences lean to body-building and movie-fan magazines, his uninhibited zest for startling pranks sometimes seems inspired by the gustier tales of Chaucer.

Tears of Gratitude. Mario likes the grand gesture, whether he is in a temper tantrum or a mood of warmhearted generosity. When he learned that Louis B. Mayer, cofounder and chief of the M-G-M lot, seemed to be on his way out, Lanza remembered that Mayer had fought an almost lone battle to get The Great Caruso made. He telephoned Mayer to express concern and ask whether he could help the man long ranked as Hollywood's No. 1 executive. Mayer--as Lanza recalls the incident--wept tears of gratitude.

When the mood is on him, Lanza, can gorge his ego as freely as his stomach, and his studio bosses have sometimes tried needling him to deflate his head as well as his hide. Whether such needling does him much good is a question. Lanza hungers for praise of his voice, and, though he gets plenty, from 500 fan letters a day and from the personal entourage of nine which he rules like a comic-opera Latin American dictator, he also supplies it himself. From idolizing Enrico Caruso as far back as his childhood, he has passed through the stages of imitating Caruso's style, impersonating him in the movies and, finally, patronizing him in interviews.

"At my age," Lanza has said, "Caruso was nowhere, nohow, nothing. I don't think I'm as great a singer as Caruso because you never think you are as good as your idol, even though others may say you are better. But at 29, Caruso used to crack on a high B-flat, and I have a record to prove it, which is nothing against him, of course. Sure, I haven't sung in the Met yet. But the day I do, all hell will break loose, the way it did in pictures. The world hasn't heard from me yet. Wait till I develop."

Out of the Park. Lanza has frequently pictured the Met as showering offers on him, but the Met itself seems to know nothing about them. Even critical listeners agree that he has notable power, richness and range--though not necessarily all at the same time. He can sail up to D-flat above high C with ease, and he has sung a low A that gives some baritones trouble. But he lacks musical taste, discipline and the years of training needed to settle even the greatest voice.

A man who prides himself on his chest (50 in.) and biceps (17 in.) and his prowess in weightlifting, boxing and baseball, Lanza treats his voice as if it were a special athletic talent, such as a good batting eye; he likes to swing for a home run every time, and when he has to bunt (as in a soft passage), some listeners have an uneasy feeling that he is trying to punch the ball out of the park. He overworks the Caruso sob. His Italian is rough. He tends to swallow his notes. His brilliant tone is often "white," i.e., lacking resonance. Worst of all, from a singer's point of view, he is forcing his voice, especially in the abandon with which he hurls himself into high notes at top volume. Lanza's voice may be able to take this abuse for two or three more years before he hurts it, say the experts; ultimately, he will burn it out.

To such criticism, Lanza, snorts: "I can't help it if God gave me a big voice. They say I'm pushing and making a tremendous amount of tone. Well, you know what? When I push, it gets ugly, out of focus. I say to myself, 'Watch it, Mario; it's blurred.' I have an ear. I know. Tito Schipa said to me, 'Mario, you have the greatest given throat ever heard in a young man. Take care of it.' I am taking care of it."

Dead-End Kid. The gift from God came into the world Jan. 31, 1921. Mario (real name: Alfredo Arnold Cocozza) was born and grew up in South Philadelphia. As part of the self-made Lanza legend, he sometimes likes to shock friends or interviewers by painting a lurid picture of his old neighborhood as a hotbed of crime, where stray gangster bullets might have nipped his career at any moment. Outraged by some of the tall tales, South Philadelphians once hurled stones and tomatoes at Lanza's grandfather's home, and made a public ceremony of smashing all the Lanza records they could round up. Mario took comfort in the thought that they would have to buy new records.

Actually, young Cocozza lived in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood, where his parents, Antonio and Maria Cocozza, had a six-room house and brought up their only child with pampering indulgence. The elder Cocozza, a decorated World War I combat veteran on a total disability pension, is a semi-invalid; his wife worked as a seamstress in the Army quartermaster depot. Freddy, as everyone called their son, was a spoiled, reckless kid: one of his teachers still remembers him with a shudder as "one of the biggest bums that ever came into the public-school system."

"I must have been a little bastard," the grownup Freddy candidly admits, "but I was always the leader." What bothered his teachers more than the way he flunked courses was such extracurricular activity as yelling obscenities from the auditorium balcony, or commandeering textbooks from other pupils and selling them back for two bits apiece, "way below wholesale cost," as one of the old gang puts it. Conscious even then of his big voice, he liked to sneak up behind victims in the school corridors and blat a loud note into their ears. Southern High expelled him within two months of graduation. As Mario tells the story, it was because he socked a teacher for slurring his Italian extraction. By then, Freddy weighed 250 Ibs., a blubbery fact that did not prevent him from cutting a wide swath among the local girls.

Breakfast in Bed. From his earliest years, living near a record shop that blared Italian opera into the street all day, Freddy was an opera fan and a tireless listener to his father's own large collection of records. At seven, he once played a Caruso record 27 times at a single sitting. But it was not until he was about 19, after dabbling unsuccessfully with piano lessons, that he began to take his own voice seriously. One summer day, listening to records in his room, he burst into a duet with Caruso. His father was a thrilled eavesdropper. After talking it over, the family decided that Freddy must go to a voice teacher and develop his talent.

He went to Irene Williams, a former operatic singer, who gave him a lesson every other day for two years. Teacher Williams, who is now suing Lanza for breach of contract, was convinced that he had great possibilities, but she found him a lazy pupil, unwilling to train seriously. Since his mother had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to go to work, Freddy's father would serve him breakfast in bed. "Sometimes," recalls the teacher, "he'd be barely awake when he came for his lesson at 2 in the afternoon. I used to chide him for being so lazy while his mother worked so hard. 'Well,' he would answer, 'she likes to.' "

After a year and a half of the lessons, Freddy's maternal grandfather, a wholesale grocer, put his foot down and insisted that Freddy go to work. "My mother and father had to give in," says Lanza. "My pop said, 'Look Fred, at least make the gesture.' So I figured, after all, I never worked in my life, this might be all right. Incidentally, I have a conscience--and neighbors talk, too." But Freddy was on his grandfather's delivery truck only a week and three days when Teacher Williams tracked him down in great excitement. Dr. Serge Koussevitzky was conducting at the Philadelphia Academy of Music that night; Music Patron Dr. John Noble and Concert Manager William Huff, who had heard Freddy, wanted him to sing for the conductor.

Beer in the Berkshires. The audition launched Tenor Mario Lanza. "That's a great voice!" cried Koussevitzky when he heard Lanza do Vesti la Giubba. "You will come up with me to the Berkshires." Recalls Lanza: "I didn't know what the hell the Berkshires was, but I figured it must be something big and great." He borrowed and adapted his mother's maiden name, Maria Lanza, and went on a scholarship to the 1942 music festival at Tanglewood, Mass., where he and Conductor-Composer Leonard Bernstein were Koussevitzky's favorites. There, too, the tenor found beer-drinking with the stage hands more fun than studying, but the New York Times's critic Noel Straus heard him sing and hailed his "superb natural voice." After the festival, Lanza signed up with Columbia Concerts, Inc. In a serious moment he told Teacher Williams: "You've shown me the other side of the tracks. And I like what I see."

What he saw was brusquely interrupted by the U.S. Army, which drafted Lanza. The Army sized him up, in its mysterious way, as good military police material, and packed him off, first to Florida and then to the dusty heat of an air base at Marfa, Texas. By the time Private Lanza waddled into the Special Services offices at the summons of Corporal Johnny Silver, he had been brooding for months over his broken singing career. "His shirt was open, he didn't have a hat, no laces on his shoes," recalls Silver, now a featured player in Broadway's Guys and Dolls. "He hadn't taken a bath in six months. He hadn't even taken his socks off in six months, and the guy weighed 287 Ibs. He just didn't give a damn."

Lanza perked up after Silver arranged to get him out of the MPs and into Special Services as a singer. They became fast buddies and fellow performers. Then came a chance for an audition before Sergeant Peter Lind Hayes, the nightclub and TV comic, who was traveling through to recruit performers for an Army Air Force show, On the Beam. In spite of his rare protective talents as a chowhound and goldbrick, Lanza's throat was so raw with Texas dust that he could not sing. Silver, who was already selected for the show, devised a ruse: he put Lanza's name on a label and pasted it on a homemade recording (taken from a radio broadcast) of the Met's Tenor Frederick Jagel singing a Tosca aria. Impressed, Hayes took Mario on. Later, when Lanza could sing the aria himself, Hayes marveled: "You're even better than you were on the record!" Ever since, not content with this version of the story, Lanza has insisted that the record was really a Caruso.

Eight-Hour Shift. From On the Beam, Private Lanza went into Moss Hart's Winged Victory, but the big success of his Army career actually took place during a furlough in Los Angeles. At a party loaded with Hollywood celebrities, he sang from 11 o'clock at night until 7 the next morning. A growing number of influential admirers were fascinated by Lanza and felt a sense of mission to play some role in bringing his voice to the world. Among them was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mario to stay at his house during the furlough. Hedda Hopper and Walter Pidgeon also boosted him, and an RCA Victor agent signed him to a recording contract with a $3,000 bonus. Soon afterward, in January 1945, Mario got a medical discharge (reason: postnasal drip). He returned briefly to Hollywood to marry pretty Betty Hicks, sister of an Army friend, then headed for New York City.

He got some radio shows and smalltown concert dates, but his voice would not work the way he wanted it to, nor pay the bills he was piling up in high living. Lanza, was broke, hoarse and dispirited, but his luck was just about to click again. One day at a singing coach's studio he met a sunny little realtor named Sam Weiler, a man with plenty of money and a great yearning to be a singer. Realtor Weiler was ready to face up to the fact that he himself was no Caruso, and never would be. He listened to Lanza, then told the tenor: "I am going to have a career through you." Patron-Business Manager Weiler paid off $11,000 of Lanza's debts, canceled his current broadcasts and concert bookings, gave him $90 a week to live on and sent him to study with Enrico Rosati, then 72, who had taught the great Beniamino Gigli. In all, he sank some $90,000 into Lanza before any money began to come back.

"I have waited for you for 34 years--ever since Gigli!" sobbed Maestro Rosati. For 15 months, under Rosati and with help from Teacher Grant Garnell, Lanza buckled down to work. He even learned something he had always shirked: how to read music. Finally, he could sing concerts again without nervousness tightening his throat; his reputation and fees began to rise. One of his first big dates was at Chicago's Grant Park before a summer crowd of 55,000. The next night, after the Chicago Tribune headlined, "LANZA BORN TO SING," on its front page, he drew 76,000 people in spite of rain.

Gold in the Hills. Meanwhile, Lanza was making test records for RCA Victor to gauge when his voice would be right for commercial recordings. The records found their way to Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer's executive secretary, a power at M-G-M and a board member of the Hollywood Bowl. She played the discs for an impressed Mayer, then persuaded the Bowl to book Lanza. In the late summer of 1947, Lanza interrupted a concert tour to appear at the Bowl; it was his 200th concert. In one of his own favorite phrases, he fractured 'em.

Next day, he auditioned for a sound stage full of M-G-M producers and directors. To them, he sounded like pure gold; they gave him a $10,000 bonus to sign a seven-year contract that ties him to the studio only six months each year. That left him free, before making his first picture, to do 90 more concerts from Nova Scotia to Mexico. In June 1948, he reported to the studio and settled down in Beverly Hills, where he now lives in a two-story white stucco house with his adoring wife, their children, Colleen, 2, and Elissa, 8 months, his still-doting parents, the ancient Victrola of his childhood and a gold 45-r.p.m. record that RCA Victor presented to him for selling so many of its Vinylite cousins.

Before The Great Caruso appeared in a theater, 100,000 albums of the operatic numbers used in the picture had been sold. The sale was doubtless helped by Lanza's technique of plugging his records and films like a disc jockey from the concert stage--an unorthodox practice that pains some traditionalists even more than his habit of acknowledging applause with the overhead handclasp of a prizefighter. Yet no one quite foresaw what a hit the movie would be. Some of MGM's top brass took a gloomy view on the theory that the U.S. public would not buy anything heavier than Victor Herbert in so large a dose. But after the first preview, Studio Boss Dore Schary sent Lanza hampers of fruit, flowers and champagne.

Whispering Campaign? Lanza's paycheck for Caruso was $100,000. For his next picture he will get $150,000 (less 10% to Manager Weiler and another 10% to his agent); for the next record album, he is dickering to improve the deal that now gives him a 10% royalty on sales. But he is none too happy about the new movie script, which he rejected several times and accepted only after what he calls "a vicious whispering campaign" about his temperamental refusals. The whole thing was making him so nervous that he could not sing. To Lanza, nothing seems worthy to follow Caruso, despite the quiet opinion of Mrs. Dorothy Caruso, the famed tenor's widow, that Caruso's story is yet to be told in the movies with a script and star that are up to snuff.

Caruso himself, at any rate, never commanded the hysterical adulation that swamped Lanza last winter and spring on his latest concert tour. Sam Weiler has a nightmarish memory of a fracturing scene in Scranton, Pa., where the tour began: "We get to the department store [to autograph record albums], and we can't get through the people. They make an aisle for us. There were women everywhere. You couldn't move. They were trampling merchandise, standing on washing machines, on counters, everywhere. Some women yelled, 'Hey, Mario, be my love!' They started shoving. The Fire Department finally had to get them out. The ceiling was beginning to shake."

In Baltimore, the fans broke a plateglass window trying to get to Mario. In Pittsburgh, where 2,000 paid just to hear him rehearse, two girls had to be taken to the hospital. Says Lanza: "They go for your handkerchief. They go for your buttons. They rip at your lapels. They try to kiss you. Oh, how they try to kiss you! I love every minute of it." While the police grappled with mobs that tore detectives' badges off in their frenzy to reach their idol, Lanza collected an average of $4,530 from box offices in each of 22 cities.

American Tragedy? On his next tour, now being booked for the winter, he will sing only in arenas and stadiums that can hold enough people to permit a take between $15,000 and $20,000 for each concert. His other plans are grandly hazy. He is tempted by a $250,000 offer to tour in Argentina. He sometimes speaks vaguely of accepting an offer to appear at Milan's famed La Scala, where he would like to sing Andrea Chenier, one of the twelve operatic roles he has learned. He is even vaguer about the great day when he may be ready to sing at the Met (top fee: $1,000 a performance).

To such serious musicians as Dr. Peter Herman Adler, the conductor who worked with him in The Great Caruso, the case of Mario Lanza is a peculiarly American tragedy. "Opera singers are like wild animals," says Dr. Adler. "They must be trained, kept in strict discipline. In Italy, there are a dozen opera houses for young singers to train where they can be in the right artistic atmosphere. Where in America can a young singer go but these two opera houses in New York (the Met and the N.Y. City Opera), to sing once or twice a week in minor roles?

"Mario went to Hollywood, and Hollywood has been his Frankenstein. The pressure he is under is tremendous, always having to put up a front; and his voice is not settled yet. He knows he has come up too fast and he feels insecure. For this he overcompensates by boasting and showing off. There is still time. Ten years with the right opera company, and no one could compare with him. But who can expect him, after being a star, to go back to learning? I have been trying to talk him into touring in Italy a year. But you cannot tell."

Caught in a Dream. Something more than his overnight success and riches seems to bind Lanza to Hollywood. Caught in the daydream of a small boy, he is not ready to take up the role of the mature artist, the man from whom people have come to accept--and expect--a brilliant performance. It is easier to think of himself as a prodigy borne on the shoulders of the fans; every time he opens his mouth, he wants someone to be hearing his voice incredulously for the first fracturing time.

If he has misgivings, Lanza can rationalize them by reflecting that he is making a vast public more opera-conscious than ever before. If the prophets of doom are right, and his big voice begins to slip, he may still enjoy a long movie career; MGM's expert sound technicians, who now do virtually no tampering with Lanza's voice, can work wonders with their electronic gadgets. And if the scripts seem anticlimactic after The Great Caruso, he can always look ahead to the all-fracturing day when some smart producer will star Mario Lanza, in The Great Lanza.

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