It was easy to be captivated, though often hard to tell exactly why. His smile, which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak. He was the last of the great romantic performers, born in the wrong century—maybe there could never be a right one for him. “Reality,” he believed, “stinks most of the time. It’s a star’s duty to take people out of the world of reality into the world of illusion, and a motion picture is the ideal way to do that.”
He ate too much, fought too much, drank too much, spent too much. He could no more handle success than a child can be trusted with dynamite. So many of the themes of this story met and merged in Alfred Arnold Cocozza, from Philadelphia’s Little Italy, who borrowed his mother’s maiden name, Maria Lanza, as a ticket to destruction.
He developed a god complex a mile wide. “I’m the humble keeper of a voice,” he used to tell me in all seriousness, “which God has entrusted to me. This is not easy. There are sacrifices you must make. I love champagne—I can’t drink it. Red wine I love—I must refuse it. I must not smoke—it is bad for the voice. I am the fortunate and unfortunate guy it passes through.”
He couldn’t be called a liar, because he found it increasingly hard to distinguish between the facts and the fables he wove around himself. He could boast of his abstemiousness and, a few hours later, wander into a bar on Sunset Strip like The Players, a favorite haunt of his, which Preston Sturges used to run. They could hear Mario coming by the slap of laces in the handmade, elevator shoes he imported from New York to add a couple of inches to his own natural-grown five feet seven. The fancy footwear must have been uncomfortable; the laces were seldom tied.
He turned up at The Players one morning fifteen minutes before the 2 A.M. curfew which California law demands, awash from the red wine he guzzled after dinner. Closing time arrived, but Mario and Sturges lingered at a table with two girls, killing more wine. Two state liquor inspectors stopped by for a friendly, after-hours drink. They were off duty and well acquainted with Sturges, but Mario hadn’t been told that.
One of them walked up behind him, grabbed the bottle, and, as a joke, grunted: “Okay, you’re all under arrest.” That was the last thing he knew until long after dawn broke. Mario snatched the bottle from the inspector. With a fist hard as a rock, with a seventeen-inch biceps behind it he sent him flying against a far wall, cold as a mackerel, with seven teeth knocked out of his head.
The other officer tried to tackle Mario. For his trouble, he was picked up bodily and hurled against the same wall, dead to the world, slumped on the floor beside his companion like a second sack of broken bones.
Sturges was aghast. Before he called an ambulance he shoved Mario out the front door. “Start running and get lost,” he grunted. The now-terrified tenor put on so much speed he shed one of his shoes in his flight to the apartment of a friend, who lived close to the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. At 4 A.M. Sturges telephoned Mario’s press agent to report the massacre. “Keep that maniac away from me,” he said. “He’s likely to kill us all in our sleep.”
The press agent made a beeline for the nearest sheriff’s sub-station, on Fairfax Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard. Standing in full view on the desk was Mario’s shoe, as distinctively his as a fingerprint, but nobody had any idea who owned it. “Have there been any charges filed?” the agent asked. There had not. “Well, my client would like to have his shoe back.”
“Who’s your client?” asked the desk sergeant.