Metro had a sad history with its tenors and baritones. There’d been Lawrence Tibbett, a baritone of large frame and a big voice, who was hauled out of the Metropolitan Opera to do The Rogue Song, music by Franz Lehar, screen play by Frances Marion. He did New Moon with Grace Moore, then faded like the morning dew.
Igor Gorin was hustled out to Culver City, too, under Mayer’s strategy of always keeping an understudy in the wings to prevent any star from getting too big-headed. Gorin was kept hanging around doing nothing in particular for two years, though Louis admitted he had a better voice than Nelson Eddy, who was piling up the profits for the studio as a team with Jeanette MacDonald.
But Louis grew tired of Nelson, so he was handed the Impossible Script treatment—given stories so remote from his abilities that he was bound to turn them down. This continued until he cracked and announced: “I’m through.” That was the day his bosses had been banking on and waiting for.
Food was always a delight to Mario right from the teen-age days when his invalid father used to serve him breakfast in bed. He swore by “Puccini and pizza—greatest combination since Samson and Delilah.” Also by spaghetti, ravioli, meat balls, a steak and six eggs for breakfast; thirty and forty pieces of fried chicken at a sitting, rounded off with a whole apple pie and a quart of eggnog.
His studio bosses watched his weight go up and down like the stock market. There were times when they put him in a drug-induced coma for days on end; he would have to lose twenty pounds before he was allowed out of bed. They peeled him down to 169 pounds for his first picture, That Midnight Kiss, and kept scales on the set to weigh him every morning like a prize bull readied for market.
He hadn’t started picture number two, The Toast of New Orleans, before he took to the bottle as enthusiastically as to the knife and fork. He recognized no authority, no discipline, no frontiers except his own gigantic appetites for food and drink and women. One afternoon on the set he fell into a brief, blazing argument with Joe Pasternak, the producer. But he resumed work in the scene, a lavishly decorated New Orleans restaurant, replete with crystal chandeliers, velvet draperies, snow-white tablecloths adorned with glass and silver.
In the middle of one take, he spotted a friend who had come onto the set, so he stopped cold, still raging from his quarrel with Pasternak, to take the visitor to his portable dressing room. Inside, Mario launched into a tirade against the producer, the studio, and the lousy picture he was making. From the little clothes closet he pulled out a fifth of Old Granddad and yanked out the cork. In two gargantuan gulps he emptied the bottle.
Suddenly he was calm as a lake. “I think I’m making too much of little things,” he said, and, steady as a rock walked back before the cameras. There were two steps leading down to the restaurant floor. He negotiated the first without difficulty, but on the second the bourbon hit him. He gave a thundering roar, then burst on the set like a bomb. Tables collapsed as he crashed into them, chandeliers shattered into fragments, curtains were torn to rags, while above the chaos sounded the screams of his co-star, Ann Blyth. He made his way across the set leaving havoc in his wake, then subsided to the floor, unconscious.
The Toast of New Orleans presented a special problem to Mario, who had been introduced to the pleasures of coffee and brandy by J. Carroll Naish. Starting before breakfast, Mario was taking thirty cups of coffee a day, with disastrous effect on his kidneys. The picture was being shot on the old lot back of Culver City, a long block away from the nearest washrooms. He spent the better part of his working day in transit, until production had slowed to a crawl. He made poor time walking, anyway—he had broken his foot, which was in a cast, and he was forced to limp along with a cane.
His director, Norman Taurog, and Joe Pasternak appealed for help to Dore Schary, who, with Mayer on his way out, was now in charge of production. Schary luxuriated in an impeccable office furnished in old-English fashion, with a mahogany desk that reeked of class and the antique showroom. The first time Mario was summoned, he sat nursing his cane in patient silence. “We can’t have the picture held up by your bladder trouble,” said Schary. “We must find a solution.”