Word: carusos
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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...
...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...