“That’s neither here nor there. No need to identify him until charges have been filed.” After some persuasion the law accepted that viewpoint and handed over the shoe. Mario got it back the following morning, along with a lecture from his agent.
Lanza was contrite and, as always, willing to pay. The inspector with the missing teeth received a $4000 job of expert dentistry. Both he and his colleague were given $200 cashmere suits by the agent as balm to their wounds. To this day they don’t know what hit them—or who.
Mario may have been on to something with his claim that his voice was a gift of God; he certainly didn’t owe a thing to formal training. He simply taught himself by listening to his father’s collection of opera records, including one Caruso disk that he once played twenty-seven times in succession, matching his voice to the great Enrico’s. He was a blubbery fat boy, an only child, spoiled rotten by his mother, who was the only working member of the Cocozza family. She was up at five-thirty every morning, to sew uniforms in an army quartermaster depot as the sole support of Mario and his father, a pensioned veteran of World War I.
The studios later had a hard time inventing jobs that Mario was supposed to have held down as a young man. The handouts pretended he’d been a piano mover or a truck driver. But he used to sprawl in bed until lunch time, hadn’t done a lick of real work until he was drafted in the Army.
He had one other hobby in his Philadelphia era besides singing, and that was girls. “I can’t help it if I was born in heat,” was the way he put it. “I am always the lover—I never stopped. I spend ninety-nine and ninety-nine one hundredths of my time in a romantic mood. That accounts for my high notes.”
Women mobbed him every step of his career. Wherever he showed his face in public, they ripped at his clothes, grabbed him, hugged him, smothered him in lipstick from the top of his curly head down. It was impossible for him to escape them. They followed him to his home, rang his doorbell in the middle of the night, and some of them were the biggest stars in our business.
As an army private, Mario got to Los Angeles on furlough. A lot happened to him there. A fellow soldier in the same outfit, Bert Hicks from Chicago, introduced him to his sister Betty, who became the one and only Mrs. Lanza after Mario was discharged. They were married in Beverly Hills Municipal Court, with neither of their families knowing anything about it. At a Frances Marion party loaded to the doors with stars, with Father Murphy up from New Orleans, and myself, Mario sang clear through from eleven o’clock one night until the birds started giving him competition at seven the next morning. At another party, Frank Sinatra heard him and invited him to stay at his home.
After I’d heard Mario sing, I asked him over to my house. There was a big, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace in the den. “I could break that with the power of a single high note,” he boasted. Like a fool, I told him: “I’d like to see you try.” Like a little boy, he had to prove it. When he had gone, the house seemed oddly quiet. I was sweeping up bits of glass for days.
Walter Pidgeon and I both became Lanza boosters, but it was Ida Koverman, true to form, who took him to Louis B. Mayer. Mario had been cutting some tests for RCA-Victor to see whether his voice would be right for commercial recording. Ida, who was a board member of the Hollywood Bowl, laid hold of some of those disks to play for her boss.
To Louis, that tenor sounded like a symphony orchestrated for cash registers. Mario was presented with a seven-year contract, starting at $750 a week, with a bonus of $10,000 payable on signature. I begged him not to sign, because his voice wasn’t ready to be exploited the way Metro was sure to exploit it. But he was beating his chest so loudly he couldn’t hear me. He was twenty-six years old. He had twelve more years left to him.