He suggested a trip to Europe for Gloria, accompanied by Joe and Mrs. Kennedy. It must have been a mighty trying trip for all three of them. The picture was never completed, but on their return Joe sold his FBO holdings for a $5,000,000 profit, to make the first big financial killing of a career that later sent him to London as a wartime ambassador. Mrs. Kennedy’s father, the legendary “Honey Fitz,” onetime mayor of Boston, had a hand in getting Joe out of Hollywood.
Joe and I saw each other occasionally over the years. If I’d taken all the advice he gave me, I’d be rich today. He was one of the first on FDR’s bandwagon when Herbert Hoover was the man to beat. In the lobby of a New York theater Joe told me: “Beg, borrow, or steal all the money you can and put it on FDR, because he’s going to be the next President of the United States. You don’t have to vote for him, but make sure you bet on him.” Did I? Not on your life.
I saw him last not long before he had his stroke. I was sitting at a table in Van Cleef & Arpels, New York, waiting for a package. He came bustling in, as spry as ever then. “Hi, Joe! Buying me a present?”
He paused in mid-stride. “What—Oh, it’s you. I might have known.”
He threw me a hard look and went on into the back room. The senior assistant in the place came up, shook my hand, and said: “I didn’t think anybody in the world could do that.”
“Why not? I knew him when he was a Hollywood producer and had a stableful of stars,” I said. “Besides, I have a mighty retentive memory.”
Eighteen
His voice was the making and the breaking of him, a blessing and a curse. He could melt your soul or shatter mirrors when he set it free. One night, all over the hearthrug in my den, there lay the chunks of broken glass to prove his point. In his fevered love affairs he was a stallion, with a body as strong as an animal’s, and he called himself “The Tiger.”
Mario Lanza roared upward to fortune and fantastic fame like a Fourth of July rocket, then fell back to earth, a burnt stick, lost in darkness. For a moment, while he lit the sky, he brought back to incredible life the archaic days of madness, romance, depravity, and glory. But there had never been anybody quite like Mario, and I doubt whether we shall see his like again.