Word: lanza
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Eight-Hour Shift. From On the Beam, Private Lanza went into Moss Hart's Winged Victory, but the big success of his Army career actually took place during a furlough in Los Angeles. At a party loaded with Hollywood celebrities, he sang from 11 o'clock at night until 7 the next morning. A growing number of influential admirers were fascinated by Lanza and felt a sense of mission to play some role in bringing his voice to the world. Among them was Frank Sinatra, who invited Mario to stay at his house during the furlough. Hedda Hopper...
...some radio shows and smalltown concert dates, but his voice would not work the way he wanted it to, nor pay the bills he was piling up in high living. Lanza, was broke, hoarse and dispirited, but his luck was just about to 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...
...have waited for you for 34 years-ever since Gigli!" sobbed Maestro Rosati. For 15 months, under Rosati and with help from Teacher Grant Garnell, Lanza buckled down to work. He even learned something he had always shirked: how to read music. Finally, he could sing concerts again without nervousness tightening his throat; his reputation and fees began to rise. One of his first big dates was at Chicago's Grant Park before a summer crowd of 55,000. The next night, after the Chicago Tribune headlined, "LANZA BORN TO SING," on its front page, he drew...
Gold in the Hills. Meanwhile, Lanza was making test records for RCA Victor to gauge when his voice would be right for commercial recordings. The records found their way to Ida Koverman, Louis B. Mayer's executive secretary, a power at M-G-M and a board member of the Hollywood Bowl. She played the discs for an impressed Mayer, then persuaded the Bowl to book Lanza. In the late summer of 1947, Lanza interrupted a concert tour to appear at the Bowl; it was his 200th concert. In one of his own favorite phrases, he fractured...
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...