By BRAD WEISMANN
“ . . . the house had been hit in a
raid, and among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I
still have . . . I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have
to go for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down
again.” Spike Milligan, Adolf Hitler: My
Part in His Downfall
Sitting
in my head for decades is a root musical memory of the vinyl disc RCA Victor
LM-1837. It’s got the ungainly title of “Mario Lanza sings the hit songs from The
Student Prince and other musical comedies.” On the album’s cover there floats
Mario’s big, ripe, grinning head, cut out and set against a blood-red
background. Inside, a flood tide of rich phrasing and incredible vocal
pyrotechnics. My father, an operetta aficionado, played it all the time. My
mother, normally allergic to this kind of thing, shared an affection for it
with him. They had been carting it around all their married life. By the time
we kids got to it the vinyl was scratched and pitted with affectionate use.
Why was
Lanza so important to both of them? What did he mean to them?
Between
1945 and 1955, you couldn’t buy a beat in pop music. Somewhere between swing
music and rock and roll, a great wave of sentimental balladry took hold in
America. As soldiers came home from World War II and inaugurated the Baby
Boomer generation, big bands faded and singing stars – Perry Como, Vaughn
Monroe, Vic Damone, Frankie Laine, Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Patti Page, Nat
“King” Cole, Pat Boone, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, Jo
Stafford, Andy Williams, the Chordettes, the Ames Brothers, the McGuire Sisters
– took over the airwaves and jukeboxes. The county was awash in violins and
vibrato.
Now, in
1940, big bands were riding high. The Swing Era was inaugurated by Benny
Goodman’s breakthrough concert in Los Angeles’s Palomar Ballroom in 1935. Ten
years later, it was over. Many factors contributed – the drafting of many
musicians in World War II, the crippling ASCAP strike of 1942-1944, and most importantly
the phenomenal explosion of interest in Frank Sinatra, who went from being one
of Tommy Dorsey’s juvenile singers to a number-one sensation. Suddenly, instead
of a vocalist serving as one component in the ensemble, he or she was pushed
into the spotlight. Song choices and musical arrangements were now shaped
around a vocalist’s range and persona.
Into this
setting stepped the ambitious 26-year-old Lanza. His slowly developing career
took off after his performance at the Hollywood Bowl on August 28, 1947. The
4,000 in attendance included many people from the film industry, including MGM
mogul Louis B. Mayer. Mayer quickly signed Lanza to a contract. Three films
later – “That Midnight Kiss,” “The Toast of New Orleans,” and “The Great
Caruso” – he was the first to sell a million copies of an operatic recording,
1951’s “Great Caruso” soundtrack, one that has never gone out of print.
Of
course, this did not happen. In fact, this is precisely the opposite of what
happened, and that flicked the switch on the tragic nimbus that still hovers
behind Lanza’s memory. The singer, the only child of a passive, shell-shocked
WWI veteran and a domineering, frustrated-musician mother, was spoiled as a
child. His lack of discipline and impulse control as an adult, mated to
childish willfulness, led to a lifetime of self-destructive behavior.
Lanza
seemed bipolar, swinging abruptly between extravagant spending, womanizing, and
boasts that he was greater than Caruso, and long periods of crippling stage
fright, depression, isolation, paranoia, and compulsive bouts of eating and
drinking. (He repeatedly went on sometimes-successful crash diets to reduce his
weight for filming – yo-yoing between 180 and nearly 300 pounds.) He would
sabotage his voice by singing loudly all night before a concert – then cancel
the concert due to a sore throat. (Like Pavarotti, he was famously called out for
lip-synching in public; his sloppy erotic divertissements with Judy Garland and
others are on record.) In the end, he stormed and strutted like the stereotype
of the preening Italian tenor.
MGM
announced that Mario Lanza would play the lead in Sigmund Romberg’s “The
Student Prince” in 1951. However, this marked the point at which Lanza’s
diva-esque behavior would drive the studio to suspend him, cancel the film, and
sue him for damages. After pre-recording his songs for the film shortly before
his conflicts with the studio became unworkable, Lanza found himself frozen out
of the production. Finally, Lanza submitted to the ultimate insult – his vocal
tracks would be lip-synched by a slimmer and more cooperative actor, Edward
Purdom. The authorities finally divorced Lanza's wonderful voice from his troublesome self.
The movie
was released two years after Lanza’s recording sessions. By that time, he had
made one more film in the U.S., “Serenade,” and would be off to Italy, from
where he would not return alive.
Lanza was
possessed of the finest natural tenor voice many have ever heard. It is full,
ringing, clear and expressive. When Lanza was focused and disciplined, his
breath control, diction, tone, interpretive skill, and sense of dynamics was
unsurpassed. However, when in distress or out of shape, these abilities would
lapse and audiences would hear some of the qualities complained about by many
critics – a forced, metallic quality, pushing for effect, poor breath support,
and an impulse to constantly go for “toppers” – stunning bursts of volume
and flashy high notes, whether the material warranted it or not.
Being an
overnight sensation meant that Lanza was pushed into recording lots of
forgettable pop. However, while his health permitted his versatility and
sensitivity to the material meant that he recorded many fine interpretations of
ballads. Too, his renditions of many romantic and lyrical canzone Napoletana (Neapolitan songs) are considered
definitive.
Lanza’s
voice is so compelling and penetrating, he sings with such commitment and
intensity, that it is difficult to be unmoved. Tied in with the conventions of
the day – heavily orchestrated accompaniment, echo, stereo reprocessing – the
result is super-extravagant schmaltz of the highest pitch. It’s a collision of
the high-art operatic and the lowbrow, sentimental mush of the time.
Success
destroyed Lanza. The money, fame, and adulation sudden film stardom brought
were just as addictive as the women he chased and the booze he poured into
himself. To his handlers, Lanza was a machine that printed money. Very few of
the people who did business with or for him had any regard for his sanity or
long-term career. Studio heads, music producers, managers, agents, lawyers – he
quickly grew a protective carapace around himself -- one that required massive
amounts of income to sustain. It was in no one’s interest to say no to him.
So, if
Lanza’s life was a tragedy, whose fault was it? It depends on which biographer
you read. Six different biographies range in their depictions of Lanza from a
suffering saint to a contemptible cur. Some are clearly written for gain,
retailing Lanza’s flaws to sell books. These include books in which the authors
felt no compunction about making up reams of imaginary dialogue, as well as the
inner thoughts of its subject and everyone around him.
Another
pushes the myth that the Mafia killed Lanza. In fact, Lanza’s self-indulgent
lifestyle weakened his heart considerably and contributed to the phlebitis that
killed when a blood clot left his leg and migrated to his heart, causing a
fatal heart attack.
One
reliable source is Armando Cesari’s “Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy,” which
includes a painstaking list of his recordings, films, concert, and radio appearances
as well as a Cesari-curated CD of rare live and home-recorded tracks that
bolster his extensive, solid analyses of the singer’s changing voice.
Roland L.
Bessette’s “Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile” is its equal. Bessette is painfully
honest about many embarrassing incidents in Lanza’s life, but balances them
with equally affecting stories of his kindness and his bouts of
professionalism. At book’s end, Bessette speculates that Lanza’s inherent
character flaws would have prevented him from having other than the life he
did. “He had . . . the best career he could have had.” All who examine his life
declare his voice a natural talent so immense that it crushed the man who had
to bear it.
This is
where my parents come in. My father, raised in a comfortable middle-class household,
was heir to a taste for light classical music and operetta, from Gilbert and
Sullivan through Herbert, Friml, Lehar, and the rest of those composers of
tuneful pleasantry from the turn of last century. My mother, out on the farm,
had no such musical pretensions, and grew up on country music and white (aka
unswinging) gospel. But she was quite imaginative, well-read and had a flair
for the dramatic – thanks to her, we had a well-stocked assortment of musical
comedy soundtracks.
Somehow,
Lanza hit the sweet spot for both of them. It served as a sort of soundtrack to
their courtship. Later, it became a humorous and affectionate reference for
them. Much later, it became something no one wanted to hear around the house.
It had become an unbearable reminder of a romance that played out into a
marriage overwhelmed by alienation and despair.
“The
Student Prince” is powered by a classic romance plot: he’s a student prince,
she’s a barmaid . . . complications ensue.
We kids
played Side One over and over, crooning and swooping about the house, making
melodramatic gestures of cross-eyed devotion in jerry-built costumes we thought
mimicked the elegant finery of the principals. There was nothing more exhilarating
than to imagine that I might one day be as captivating as Mario, with a
magnetic voice that no one woman could resist!
“Overhead,
the moon is beaming
White as
blossoms on the bough
Nothing
is heard but the song of a bird
Filling
all the air with dreaming
Could
this beauty last forever?
I would
ask for nothing more, believe me
Let this
night but live forever, forever and ever more!”
Lanza’s
sound penetrates the thick, warm orchestrations, creating a kind of
gem-scattered brilliance on a velvety background. It’s not hard to see how Lanza and his music
became a metaphor for the world of unattainable, disturbing fantasy the protagonists
of Peter Jackson’s film “Heavenly Creatures” seek. For a while, it was our
fantasy world as well.
Likewise,
after years of contemplating my parents’ emotional dynamic, and sometimes
overcoming its shadow on my own relationships, I have to come to a conclusion
parallel to Bessette’s concerning Lanza – they had the best marriage they could have
had.
As for
me, to the extent that I grew up thinking that love was supposed to be one long
operatic epiphany . . . well, life took care of that. I spent many years
chasing that addictive love high. Complications ensued. Now on much more solid
ground, I can finally detach myself from all the regretful associations and
really hear that voice for what it is.
And
there, distilled in those romantic melodies, is still a kernel of what drew my
parents together. Whether it was illusory, or never meant to last, those songs
embody a majestic passion that must have consumed them, once. It’s comforting
to know that.
SOURCES
Mario Lanza: Tenor in Exile
Roland L. Bessette
Amadeus Press
Portland OR
1999
Amore: The Story of Italian American Song
Mark Rotella
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
New York
2010
Lanza, His Tragic Life
Raymond Strait & Terry Robinson
Prentice-Hall
Englewood Cliffs, NJ
1980
Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods
Derek Mannering
University Press of Mississippi
Jackson, MS
2005
Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy
Armando Cesari
Baskerville Publishers
Fort Worth, TX
2004
The Mario Lanza Story
Constantine Callinicos
Coward-McCann
New York
1960
Mario Lanza
Matt Bernard
Macfadden-Bartell Corp.
New York
1971