Word: mario
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these labors, plus a summer radio show for Coca-Cola on Sunday evenings (CBS, 8 p.m., E.D.T.), Mario Lanza this year will rake in something between $750,000 and $1,000,00 -roughly twice last season's deficit of the Metropolitan Opera...
...passion for food is only one of Mario's freely indulged appetites. "All my life I liked fun," he explodes. "I'm young and alive. I like people with heart. Even today when people get gloomy around me, I swear in high C and smash a glass against the wall and say, 'Let's get going! You're fracturing me with this misery.' " Once, in a moment of high spirits, he dispelled all the misery in the immediate vicinity by bursting out of his studio dressing room, clad only in an athletic supporter...
Tears of Gratitude. Mario likes the grand gesture, whether he is in a temper tantrum or a mood of warmhearted generosity. When he learned that Louis B. Mayer, cofounder and chief of the M-G-M lot, seemed to be on his way out, Lanza remembered that Mayer had fought an almost lone battle to get The Great Caruso made. He telephoned Mayer to express concern and ask whether he could help the man long ranked as Hollywood's No. 1 executive. Mayer-as Lanza recalls the incident-wept tears of gratitude...
...criticism, Lanza, snorts: "I can't help it if God gave me a big voice. They say I'm pushing and making a tremendous amount of tone. Well, you know what? When I push, it gets ugly, out of focus. I say to myself, 'Watch it, Mario; it's blurred.' I have an ear. I know. Tito Schipa said to me, 'Mario, you have the greatest given throat ever heard in a young man. Take care of it.' I am taking care...
Dead-End Kid. The gift from God came into the world Jan. 31, 1921. Mario (real name: Alfredo Arnold Cocozza) was born and grew up in South Philadelphia. As part of the self-made Lanza legend, he sometimes likes to shock friends or interviewers by painting a lurid picture of his old neighborhood as a hotbed of crime, where stray gangster bullets might have nipped his career at any moment. Outraged by some of the tall tales, South Philadelphians once hurled stones and tomatoes at Lanza's grandfather's home, and made a public ceremony of smashing...