Word: mario
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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...
...sing. Silver, who was already selected for the show, devised a ruse: he put Lanza's name on a label and pasted it on a homemade recording (taken from a radio broadcast) of the Met's Tenor Frederick Jagel 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...
...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 and Walter Pidgeon also boosted him, and an RCA Victor agent signed him to a recording contract with a $3,000 bonus. Soon afterward, in January 1945, Mario got a medical discharge (reason: postnasal drip). He returned briefly to Hollywood...
...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 finally had to get them out. The ceiling was beginning to shake...
...Baltimore, the fans broke a plateglass window trying to get to Mario. In Pittsburgh, where 2,000 paid just to hear him rehearse, two girls had to be taken to the hospital. Says Lanza: "They go for your handkerchief. They go for your buttons. They rip at your lapels. They try to kiss you. Oh, how they try to kiss you! I love every minute of it." While the police grappled with mobs that tore detectives' badges off in their frenzy to reach their idol, Lanza collected an average of $4,530 from box offices in each...