Chapter XII: Part 12

The team discovered there was nothing to beat one particular latex item, government issue, for keeping sticks of dynamite good and waterproof. It was pure joy for them to figure what the Pentagon must have thought about the statistics piling up in the quartermaster general’s office concerning the kind of war Team Ten was apparently fighting. Bill, as the tallest and huskiest, was the last aboard the waiting pickup boats after the charges had been set--you had to swim fast because the boat couldn’t hang around waiting for you. On one excursion he happened to turn his head. He saw some loose dynamite protectors bobbing up and down in the water after him and nearly drowned laughing.

Their captain was a grandson of Joseph H. Choate, once ambassador to Britain and the godfather of DeWolf Hopper, Bill’s father. Team Ten received some leave to say good-by to their families. I found out later they’d been chosen for the invasion of Japan. Thank heaven, they were in America when the war ended.

A sense of humor is one of the essentials of this life. You can be rich, powerful, famous, but without a bit of fun in your nature, you’re something less than human. I’m not fond of psalm-singing, solemn piety in anybody. But match devotion with kindness and laughter, and you’ve company after my own heart. It’s time to talk about Father Murphy.

He was born in 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, one of an Irish laborer’s eight children, and he followed an older brother into the priesthood. At one time he was a student together with Fulton Sheen, but one went on to convert the rich, the other the poor. They’ve both exercised their persuasions on me, their faith, I guess, bolstering their hopes for the impossible.

Any danger of conversion by the then Monsignor Sheen was limited to an elevator ride I took with him from the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers down to the entrance level. We’d just been introduced by Clare Boothe Luce, who was a fellow passenger. The monsignor, now bishop, has hypnotic black eyes and a magnetic presence that’s inescapable. I was fascinated by him and his words. Then the elevator reached our destination. “Saved by the basement!” I exclaimed. “Ten more floors and you’d have had me a Catholic.” He roared with laughter.

Father Murphy, bless his heart, has tried longer. I hadn’t known many Catholic priests until I met him at a party in Hollywood, when he was in our town lecturing. I fell under the spell of the soft voice and gentle spirit of this giant-spirited little man. In the Josephite Order of Missionary Priests to the Negro, he served as pastor of the St. Joan of Arc Church in New Orleans, was dean of the department of philosophy and religion at Xavier University there. He did as much for the Negro in that city as anyone alive today.

There was a young man in his parish who had gone as far as he could studying sculpture in New Orleans, though it was plain to Father Murphy that he could become an important sculptor, so funds were raised to send him to New York. Some time later the priest found himself in that city on his way to Rome by way of Paris, and he invited the young sculptor to luncheon. The student had a request to make--would the priest please serve as his eyes and report back to him every possible detail, from the chisel marks to the play of light, of how the statues looked in the Louvre and St. Peter’s?

Father Murphy went straight from the luncheon to the steamship office, where he exchanged his first-class ticket for two tourist berths, with a little spending money left over. He telephoned the young Negro to join him and spent two inspiring weeks in Europe seeing the greatest art treasures of the world through his young companion’s starry eyes. On the voyage home they also shared a cabin.

“Father,” said the young man, “may I ask you a very personal question? I understand that to white people we Negroes have a distinctive odor. What do I smell like exactly?”

Father Murphy’s eyes must have twinkled, as they do constantly. “It’s a little bit like burnt chestnuts.” They both laughed at that. “Now,” said the priest, “we must have a special odor to you. What do I smell like?”

“Well, Father, I’d say it’s--it’s a little bit like an old goat.”

Before he had left Hollywood, it had been arranged that a party of us would meet at the next spring’s Mardi Gras and I’d bought him a suit to replace the one he was wearing, which was turning green with age. He wrote me about both items soon after he got home:

Brace yourself. This is probably your first “mash” note from
a dignified, almost funereal representative of the cloth, on
which you made a positively ripping impression. (Me for the
ecclesiastical tailors!) Your casual conversational reference,
for instance, to someone as an equine posterior (remember? even
though those two words are not exactly the ones you used) left
me limp with inner mirth.

Girl, I’m envious for the first time in my life. With your gift
of gusto, what a ministry I’d have had! I’d have blown Negro
prejudice in N’Orleans to smithereens and been an electrified
Abe Lincoln to the lowly. Henceforth mouse Murphy shall assume
stature and verve. In sheer defiance of incipient arthritis, he
shall frisk.

Don’t forget our date for Mardi Gras. It is said on the Delta
that all good Americans go to N’Orleans when they die, and that
all wise ones come while they are living. You are very wise,
_ma chère_....

He signed off “Mississipiously, Edward F. Murphy, SSJ.” Letters over the years carried fifty-nine varieties of sign-off greetings: “Emphaticallergically” ... “Con amore-and-more” ... “Your sancrosanctly devoted friend” ... “Deltavowedly” ... “Turkishbathetically.”

His first letter deserved a prompt reply:

Now you can brace yourself after that beginning. You’ve won me,
hands down. Don’t confuse that with the Church, however, as I’m
still a Quaker. You go ahead and make your contacts for our
voodoo meeting down there, even if you have to hold it in the
church, because Frances Marion and I are-a-comin’ ... God bless
the Irish!

He promised to “put the curse of the seven wet-nosed orphans on the weatherman if he doesn’t behave himself while you’re here.” Somebody must have had influence, because the February weather was fabulous, and Mardi Gras turned out to be a long, nonstop ball. I didn’t miss anything. We lunched with Mayor “Chep” Morrison, teaed with Frances Parkinson Keyes, nibbled chicken legs alfresco with total strangers squatting on the asphalt in the middle of Canal Street.

We had a magnificent four-hour luncheon at Brennan’s restaurant where every dish had been prepared in wine, champagne, or brandy sauces. Father Murphy religiously abstained from anything that came by the bottle but ate heartily and conscientiously spooned up every last drop of the sauces. “I’m not drinking,” he observed blandly, “but there’s no rule against my not _eating_ these things.”

At six-thirty one morning I was up and off to see King Coal, the colored monarch of Mardi Gras, land at the docks with his court off a barge and parade their way through the streets on trucks. Their first stop for a drink was at a celebrated local undertaker’s parlor, which was always jammed with guests for the ceremony. One year a visiting New York newspaperman discovered to his terror how they made room for all the celebrants. In the middle of festivities he opened the door of the men’s room. Three corpses, which had been stood inside upright behind the door, tottered out at him, and he fled, screaming his head off.

My faithful new N’Orleans correspondent was writing more than some of the liveliest letters I’d set eyes on. He has a long string of book credits to his name, from _Yankee Priest_ to _Mary Magdalene_, which was bought years ago by David Selznick, who retitled it _The Scarlet Lily_ as a vehicle for Jennifer Jones. But by the time he gets around to making it, I suspect we may all be ringing St. Peter’s doorbell.

The good father, too, is a fast gun with a news item.

And how about this front-page violent calm into which you and
Louella-la have flown? [he wrote during one Hollywood armistice
between us.] By what female magic has yesterday’s equine
_derrière_ become a bosom pal of today? Are you quite sure
that the embrace is not an _osculation de mors_ or a mutual
search for the most vulnerable places in each other’s anatomy?
Well, whatever the mystery, the moral shines clear: _Anything
can happen_. After this, I shall not flicker an eyelash if
Peace descends on the human race as a certified dove--not an
unmistakable bucket of bricks.

In his early days he used to serve as weekend assistant at St. Michael’s in New York, where he met Eddie Dowling, and a bit of grease paint rubbed off on Father Murphy’s Irish heart. He’s been an avid follower of stage and screen ever since.

New Orleans was set on its ear when Elia Kazan went down for Fox to make _Outbreak_, with Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Richard Widmark, on location there. As supporting players, Gadge rounded up six hundred local characters, from B-girls to skid-row derelicts, from detectives to three extras whom police spotted in the crowd and dragged off to prison.

My faithful correspondent kept his eyes peeled.

Well, [Elia Kazan] went the aesthetic limit the other day,
[he wrote,] using some genuine Orleanian streetwalkers. Of
course, the ladies were paid for their posing and the wear and
tear on their delicate constitutions. A bit later, when a
policeman was about to pull them in for loitering (what a name
for the world’s oldest profession!) they haughtily gave him the
brush-off. “We’re working for Twentieth Century-Fox now,” they
said, swishing their skirts.

He had a new sign-off for that note: “Kazanimatedly.”

When a member of the actor’s union led a cavalcade of stars to New Orleans and they were tendered a banquet at Arnaud’s, Father Murphy outdid himself. He gave an invocation to end all invocations. It went something like this:

O Lord God, Creator of the Cohens, the Kellys, and the Murphys;

Author of the scenario of reality, from which we all play our
parts, some of us so badly that we get hell for our performance
and others brilliantly enough to achieve stardom;

Director of the drama of the ages, which begins with the
sublime curtain-raiser called Genesis, unfolds with the dreams,
sighs, and sins of mankind, culminates with the Atonement on
Calvary and ends endlessly with the unspeakable visions of the
Apocalypse;

Source of the silver screen of existence, which Hollywood
ingeniously reflects with a silver screen of its own on which
appear the animated shadows of thespians, whose fine art
makes fiction seem truth, so differently from many of us poor
preachers who succeed only in making truth seem fiction;

We thank you, O Lord, for this occasion that brings some of
the best representatives of Cinemaland into our midst. Help us
to honor them fittingly. Bless them for shedding the gleams of
their gifts into our darkening times. Save them--tonight--from
Bourbon Street. Inspire the mighty industry that sponsors
them. And, in fine, smile beneficently on the box offices of
the land, breathe into them a second spring and let there be
the financial flow that is so vital to the maintenance of an
enterprise without which our daily lives would be so definitely
drabber. Amen.

The one man who could hold a candle as a letter writer to Father Murphy was Gene Fowler, another friend of many years. I loved him as much as I loved Agnes, his wife of nearly half a century. Gene and I knew each other well when the urge remained, but the ability in both cases had departed. I doubt whether he put a dull word on paper, whether it was a book, a three-thousand-word letter, or a post card.

After a dinner party for Gene and Agnes, for instance, he wrote:

My dear Handsome:

It doesn’t require the prompting of Emily Post or that other
authority on etiquette, Polly Adler, to cause me to write a
note of appreciation.... As I dined and sat beside two of
my beloved women, I forgot my white hair and certain other
elements of my physical decline. For the moment I was once
again in the saddle (figuratively of course) and Life seemed
new. Upon shaving this morning, I _had_ to see the realities
once again, and I must confess that I abhor all mirrors.

He gave the years a run for their money, slowed down sometimes by illness but stopped only once, by a final massive heart attack.

I am in fine shape, [he concluded,] except for a faulty motor.
I have led such a clean life that I can’t understand it (I mean
I can’t understand the clean life).... But I still carry the
torch for you. The torch, alas! is becoming an ember, but it is
all I have.

Did anybody ever write such letters?

He spent an evening with Gene Buck, a true friend of ours, dating back to the days when I commuted from Long Island to play on Broadway in _Six-Cylinder Love_ in the evenings and make a movie in New York with Jack Barrymore by day. A letter from the Fowlers’ home in Los Angeles told about the two Genes’ meeting:

He tried to get hold of me for four days, a thing that Sheriff
Biscalis always does within an hour, and if it hadn’t been for
you, the mighty squire of Great Neck would have gone without
paying his disrespects to me.

I suppose there are just as many great people now as there ever
were, but it does not seem so to me. Possibly I am thinking
of my own youth when I recall the wonderful troupe who were
knocking down bottles during the early part of this century.
Jesus Christ, Hedda! What a wonderful tribe it was!

Gene and I enumerated them all and drank a toast in milk (not
toast and milk) to the many memories. I do not want to classify
you as an aged alumna, for you were just a baby ... I wish to
God you had been there. We would have called you, busy as you
are, but you were at some damned glamorous but uninteresting
party to a movie magnate....

If this sounds like a love letter, make the most of it; but,
note well, you will have to hurry, for Forest Lawn is sending
me literature.

Gene used to say: “The important thing is to see that friends, big or little, famous or otherwise, have a sincere send-off.” He wrote the send-off for Red Skelton’s son Richard, for Jack Barrymore, for Fred MacMurray’s first wife, Lillian, and a dozen other people. “Maybe you will do this kind of thing for me when my own time comes--and may I not keep you waiting too long at that,” he told me.

After his last heart attack two years ago, I did my best, such as it was, in my column: “He was as near heaven as any mortal can get. I feel the loss more every day and will for the rest of my life.”

If, nostalgically, I learned something about how to love from Gene Fowler, I got some advice on how to live from Bernard M. Baruch. I was visiting Hobcaw Barony, his South Carolina plantation, hundreds of acres of pines and live oaks, draped in Spanish moss with the King’s Highway running through the middle of it. The soil’s so rich you can throw a seed down one day and have a plant two inches tall the next. Only a handful of servants were left when I was there; the rest went north years ago. I urged Bernie to hand over the estate to the Negro people as a memorial, to see what they could make of it by building schools, churches, a community center. But he says no: “They’d think I was showing off.” He’s left it to his daughter Belle and built a small house some fifty miles away, where he spends his winters with his devoted hostess-companion and nurse, Elizabeth Navarro.

I was running up Hobcaw’s great sweep of stairway when Bernie stopped me. “Let me show you how to do it,” he said. “I know you’re not sixteen any longer. Do what I do. Go up to the first landing, take five deep breaths. Then go up to the next landing and take five more, and so on until you’re at the top.”

I’d arrived bone-weary from a lecture tour. Jimmy Byrnes, former Secretary of State to Harry Truman, was there with his wife to dinner. I’m a sort of middle-class Republican, while Bernie’s an intellectual Democrat. He’s fond of conducting his own private polls of politics, and I’m counted on to give him an opposition point of view. So while Baruch, Byrnes, and other guests stood in a group in front of the fireplace debating the affairs of the nation, Hopper sat on a sofa, ears tuned in until my head began to nod. The next thing I knew was Bernie’s tap on my shoulder. “Come now, it’s time for you to retire.”

“But you haven’t finished your discussion,” I protested.

“No, but you have.”

I fell asleep hours later in a huge bedroom with four picture windows in two of its walls. Through each of them I could see and hear the breeze ruffling through the moss on the live oak in the moonlight so that it danced like a _corps de ballet_. Bernie believes in plenty of rest, including a nap between the sheets every afternoon. The next morning I had breakfast in bed, served by Bernie. He’d been up long enough to have read all the newspapers, so I got bulletins along with my coffee.

With a chauffeur and one other servant, the three of us went off on a fishing expedition in a station wagon loaded to the hubcaps with equipment. At the selected spot at the mouth of a narrow river lined with oyster beds, the two helpers set out folding chairs and steamer rugs for Bernie and me and wrapped us up like mummies. Then they baited our hooks and left us to it, while the chauffeur took himself with his line off to his own favorite fishing spot.

Bernie and I waited and waited for a nibble. At last he snagged a hard-shell crab. I followed suit. “Do you want to go on?” he asked.

“Sure, I love it,” said I. Only crabs were biting that day. I went on hauling them out like sixty, but Bernie turned his back on the whole undertaking, got up, shook himself, and sat in the sun. “FDR came out to this same spot,” he noted dryly, “but he managed to catch fish.” So did the chauffeur perched out on the pier.

If he’s in town, Bernie is the first man I call when I visit New York. I took myself one day to his house on East Sixty-sixth Street, and there hanging over the mantelpiece in his drawing room was a new portrait of him. I gave it one good, hard look, then asked: “Have you a stepladder, please? I want to take that down.”

“Ah, it’s not that bad,” he protested.

“Have you really looked at it? Whoever painted it has made your head too small, your shoulders too narrow, and stuck you on a park bench outside the White House. Whose idea was that?”

“Well,” he explained, “Clare was having her portrait done....” He has the greatest regard for Clare Luce; years before he arranged with a single telephone call to have her play _The Women_ staged on Broadway after the script had been lying around producer Max Gordon’s office for months. And this for a play that Bernie told her was “the most cynical satire on your sex ever written.”

I said no more against the picture, but on my next visit a year later, the portrait had been replaced by another, by Chandor, a wonderful likeness, complete to Bernie’s hearing aid. He autographed a reproduction of it for me. With pen in hand, he looked up: “How do you spell gallant--one ‘l’ or two?”

“Never could spell,” I said. “Use a different word.”

“No. Gallant is the word for you,” he said, and waited until the butler found a dictionary. Bernie is a loyal friend. If our top governmental officials had listened to him, we shouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.

I once worked for another Democrat, not in politics, to be sure, but making two silent pictures at the studios of the old Film Booking Offices of America, called FBO for short, before it was acquired by Howard Hughes and renamed Radio-Keith Orpheum, or RKO. Joseph P. Kennedy, father of our President, had just arrived from Boston as a sharp, up-and-coming businessman to see if he could make a fortune in Hollywood.

He signed up a scad of stars--Joel McCrea; Constance Bennett; Fred Thompson, the cowboy Adonis who’d been a Presbyterian pastor in the Valley until Frances Marion married him on a bet with Mary Pickford. Heading Joe Kennedy’s contract list was Gloria Swanson, who was always quite a gal.

She’d been married to Wally Beery and Herbert Somborn, who started the Brown Derby restaurant chain, when producer Mickey Nielan entered her life. He rapidly hired Somborn to go off on a nationwide promotion tour plugging a movie Nielan had made. To make sure that his wooing of Gloria would not be interrupted, he had Somborn telephone him every evening at eight California time from whatever city he was in that day. When Somborn hung up, Nielan would have the operator check back to verify where the call had originated.

I met Joe’s wife, Rose, at a luncheon Frances Marion gave, where Polly Moran stared at Colleen Moore’s straight boyish bangs and said: “Look at her--makes $10,000 a week and has a lousy haircut.” Rose adored her husband.

Gloria was Joe’s number-one star. He hired Laura Hope Crews as her coach, and she practically lived day and night with Gloria, including sessions at Laura’s home overlooking the beach at Santa Monica. He made some good pictures before he started _Queen Kelly_, with Gloria as star, which began as a silent, then ran into the monster called Sound. He never forgot he was a businessman. He had notes for $750,000 signed by Gloria to help finance the picture. The question was: What to do? Finish _Kelly_ as a silent, scrap it, or take time off to see if Sound became important?

He suggested a trip to Europe for Gloria, accompanied by Joe and Mrs. Kennedy. It must have been a mighty trying trip for all three of them. The picture was never completed, but on their return Joe sold his FBO holdings for a $5,000,000 profit, to make the first big financial killing of a career that later sent him to London as a wartime ambassador. Mrs. Kennedy’s father, the legendary “Honey Fitz,” onetime mayor of Boston, had a hand in getting Joe out of Hollywood.

Joe and I saw each other occasionally over the years. If I’d taken all the advice he gave me, I’d be rich today. He was one of the first on FDR’s bandwagon when Herbert Hoover was the man to beat. In the lobby of a New York theater Joe told me: “Beg, borrow, or steal all the money you can and put it on FDR, because he’s going to be the next President of the United States. You don’t have to vote for him, but make sure you bet on him.” Did I? Not on your life.

I saw him last not long before he had his stroke. I was sitting at a table in Van Cleef & Arpels, New York, waiting for a package. He came bustling in, as spry as ever then. “Hi, Joe! Buying _me_ a present?”

He paused in mid-stride. “What--Oh, it’s you. I might have known.”

He threw me a hard look and went on into the back room. The senior assistant in the place came up, shook my hand, and said: “I didn’t think anybody in the world could do that.”

“Why not? I knew him when he was a Hollywood producer and had a stableful of stars,” I said. “Besides, I have a mighty retentive memory.”

_Eighteen_

His voice was the making and the breaking of him, a blessing and a curse. He could melt your soul or shatter mirrors when he set it free. One night, all over the hearthrug in my den, there lay the chunks of broken glass to prove his point. In his fevered love affairs he was a stallion, with a body as strong as an animal’s, and he called himself “The Tiger.”

Mario Lanza roared upward to fortune and fantastic fame like a Fourth of July rocket, then fell back to earth, a burnt stick, lost in darkness. For a moment, while he lit the sky, he brought back to incredible life the archaic days of madness, romance, depravity, and glory. But there had never been anybody quite like Mario, and I doubt whether we shall see his like again.

It was easy to be captivated, though often hard to tell exactly why. His smile, which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak. He was the last of the great romantic performers, born in the wrong century--maybe there could never be a right one for him. “Reality,” he believed, “stinks most of the time. It’s a star’s duty to take people out of the world of reality into the world of illusion, and a motion picture is the ideal way to do that.”

He ate too much, fought too much, drank too much, spent too much. He could no more handle success than a child can be trusted with dynamite. So many of the themes of this story met and merged in Alfred Arnold Cocozza, from Philadelphia’s Little Italy, who borrowed his mother’s maiden name, Maria Lanza, as a ticket to destruction.

He developed a god complex a mile wide. “I’m the humble keeper of a voice,” he used to tell me in all seriousness, “which God has entrusted to me. This is not easy. There are sacrifices you must make. I love champagne--I can’t drink it. Red wine I love--I must refuse it. I must not smoke--it is bad for the voice. I am the fortunate and unfortunate guy it passes through.”

He couldn’t be called a liar, because he found it increasingly hard to distinguish between the facts and the fables he wove around himself. He could boast of his abstemiousness and, a few hours later, wander into a bar on Sunset Strip like The Players, a favorite haunt of his, which Preston Sturges used to run. They could hear Mario coming by the slap of laces in the handmade, elevator shoes he imported from New York to add a couple of inches to his own natural-grown five feet seven. The fancy footwear must have been uncomfortable; the laces were seldom tied.

He turned up at The Players one morning fifteen minutes before the 2 A.M. curfew which California law demands, awash from the red wine he guzzled after dinner. Closing time arrived, but Mario and Sturges lingered at a table with two girls, killing more wine. Two state liquor inspectors stopped by for a friendly, after-hours drink. They were off duty and well acquainted with Sturges, but Mario hadn’t been told that.

One of them walked up behind him, grabbed the bottle, and, as a joke, grunted: “Okay, you’re all under arrest.” That was the last thing he knew until long after dawn broke. Mario snatched the bottle from the inspector. With a fist hard as a rock, with a seventeen-inch biceps behind it he sent him flying against a far wall, cold as a mackerel, with seven teeth knocked out of his head.

The other officer tried to tackle Mario. For his trouble, he was picked up bodily and hurled against the same wall, dead to the world, slumped on the floor beside his companion like a second sack of broken bones.

Sturges was aghast. Before he called an ambulance he shoved Mario out the front door. “Start running and get lost,” he grunted. The now-terrified tenor put on so much speed he shed one of his shoes in his flight to the apartment of a friend, who lived close to the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. At 4 A.M. Sturges telephoned Mario’s press agent to report the massacre. “Keep that maniac away from me,” he said. “He’s likely to kill us all in our sleep.”

The press agent made a beeline for the nearest sheriff’s sub-station, on Fairfax Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard. Standing in full view on the desk was Mario’s shoe, as distinctively his as a fingerprint, but nobody had any idea who owned it. “Have there been any charges filed?” the agent asked. There had not. “Well, my client would like to have his shoe back.”

“Who’s your client?” asked the desk sergeant.

“That’s neither here nor there. No need to identify him until charges have been filed.” After some persuasion the law accepted that viewpoint and handed over the shoe. Mario got it back the following morning, along with a lecture from his agent.

Lanza was contrite and, as always, willing to pay. The inspector with the missing teeth received a $4000 job of expert dentistry. Both he and his colleague were given $200 cashmere suits by the agent as balm to their wounds. To this day they don’t know what hit them--or who.

Mario may have been on to something with his claim that his voice was a gift of God; he certainly didn’t owe a thing to formal training. He simply taught himself by listening to his father’s collection of opera records, including one Caruso disk that he once played twenty-seven times in succession, matching his voice to the great Enrico’s. He was a blubbery fat boy, an only child, spoiled rotten by his mother, who was the only working member of the Cocozza family. She was up at five-thirty every morning, to sew uniforms in an army quartermaster depot as the sole support of Mario and his father, a pensioned veteran of World War I.

The studios later had a hard time inventing jobs that Mario was supposed to have held down as a young man. The handouts pretended he’d been a piano mover or a truck driver. But he used to sprawl in bed until lunch time, hadn’t done a lick of real work until he was drafted in the Army.

He had one other hobby in his Philadelphia era besides singing, and that was girls. “I can’t help it if I was born in heat,” was the way he put it. “I am always the lover--I never stopped. I spend ninety-nine and ninety-nine one hundredths of my time in a romantic mood. That accounts for my high notes.”

Women mobbed him every step of his career. Wherever he showed his face in public, they ripped at his clothes, grabbed him, hugged him, smothered him in lipstick from the top of his curly head down. It was impossible for him to escape them. They followed him to his home, rang his doorbell in the middle of the night, and some of them were the biggest stars in our business.

As an army private, Mario got to Los Angeles on furlough. A lot 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.”