Word: lanza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
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...
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...
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...
...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...