Word: carusos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...