Word: motherism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that prevented her from walking until she was six (even today her right leg is still weak, which sometimes hampers her onstage). The polio attack and her father's absence (he returned when she was ten, left again when she was 18) left Renata desperately dependent on her mother. One of the bitterest shocks of her childhood, she remembers, was going to see Giuseppina after a mastoid operation. A surgeon had sliced through a facial nerve, paralyzing one side of her mother's face. "She went in a bella donna" says Renata. "She came out disfigured. I cursed...
During the months just before and after the end of World War II, Tebaldi and her mother shuttled from one small town to another. During that period, Tebaldi made her operatic debut (as Helen of Troy in Boito's Mefistofele) in Rovigo; on the way there, fighter planes strafed her train. After Toscanini hired her for the Scala opening in 1946, she smoothly embarked on the international operatic circuit. In her rise to the top she has experienced only one real failure-a performance of Traviata at La Scala in 1951 in which her voice broke twice on high...
...Carabiniere. Until she died last winter, Renata Tebaldi's mother accompanied her on all her tours, acted so effectively as a backstage buffer for her daughter that fellow singers affectionately nicknamed her "The Carabiniere." She handled Renata's mail (weeding out the occasional poison-pen letters from over-zealous Callas fans), took care of her clothes and costumes, stationed herself in the wings to minister to Renata with a Thermos jug of warm tea and an emergency flask of brandy when she came offstage. She was quick to resent any affronts to her daughter. Backstage lore...
Neither success nor the passage of time has reconciled Tebaldi to her father, whom she resents almost as fiercely as she adored her mother, for having deserted his family. He has written Renata hundreds of letters but has never received a reply. Several years ago, when Renata was scheduled to sing in Reggio Emilia, where her father now lives, he wrote her how much he looked forward to seeing her again. Renata cabled the manager of the local theater that she would walk out if her father were in the house...
...last season's wagonload of "adult westerns" had moved on, leaving 21 oldtimers right where they were, and for two of them-Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel-that means a cushy rating spot on the top of the Nielsen Rating's top ten. TV producers recognize a mother lode when they see one, and they have moved with mule-skinner determination to pile it even higher: by last week a nerve-shattering total of eleven new westerns was slogging along the TV trail. And no one was slogging with more enthusiasm than a tall, balding journeyman writer-producer...