Word: caruso
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This week Mrs. Caruso, a handsome, white-haired woman in her early 50s, will publish the story of her three-year marriage to the bombastic Italian opera king (Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death; Simon and Schuster, $2.75). Wisely, she made no changes in the picturesque, Italian-English in which Caruso brought her his daily dramas...
...fastidious Caruso, who bathed twice daily and sprayed himself and his surroundings with verbena scent, said of a not-so-fastidious diva: "Ai me! It is terrible to sing with one who does not bathe, but to be emotionated over one who breathes garlic is impossible. I hope the public observe not my lack of feeling...
...Dorothy the light opera turned to tragedy in December 1920, when Caruso sang L'Elisir d'Amore at the Brooklyn Academy and a blood vessel burst in his throat. On Christmas eve he sang La Juive at the Metropolitan, on Christmas day he was ill with acute pleurisy. By spring he seemed to recover, and Dorothy took him home to Naples, where he died...
When she agreed to do a book, the publishers sent a girl ghost writer to Mrs. Caruso's Florentine drawing room in Manhattan. Caruso's grand piano, his 16th-Century Madonna and Mrs. Caruso's story were too much for the girl ghost: she kept weeping over her work for two weeks. Finally Mrs. Caruso said: "I decided to write the book myself. While I wrote I could smell the verbena just as though he were here. . . . Those failures [her two marriages since Caruso's death] were no one's fault. . . . Death had not ended...
...Caruso's body was displayed under glass in a white marble sarcophagus for eight years until Mrs. Caruso appealed to the Italian Government, had the casket closed...