“Okay,” said Mario. “Leave it to me.”
His solution was simplicity itself. By now, shooting was concentrated on a New Orleans quay, bright with fishing nets and boats at anchor. Mario didn’t bother hobbling to the washroom. The water in the quay was more convenient. So was a bucket half filled with a still photographer’s used flash bulbs.
The whole company was in an uproar, most notably David Niven, whose voice was raised in indignation on behalf of Ann Blyth and other women in the cast. Mario was called again to Schary’s office. But now his temper had changed. He shouted down every word that Schary tried to utter, until the producer cowered in fright behind his beautiful desk, watching Mario pound it to a battered wreck with his cane. But Schary wasn’t one to nurse grudges. After the first preview of The Great Caruso he showered Mario with hampers of fruit, bouquets of flowers, and cases of champagne.
When I first heard his mighty voice, I wrote: “If Lanza can act, he’s the man to play Caruso.” I still have Caruso records, along with a framed caricature he drew of DeWolf Hopper to celebrate the birth of our son. Caruso’s eloquent title for his sketch of Wolfie, scribbled on the back of a Lambs Club banquet menu, was The Bachelor!!!!!!!
Nick Schenck was opposed to The Great Caruso, whose chances of box-office success he rated at zero. Mayer, prompted by Ida, pushed it along toward production. It was completed in thirty-one days of shooting; it ran for ten weeks and earned $1,500,000 at New York’s Radio City Music Hall alone; around the world it piled up $19,000,000 the first twelve months after release. Mario’s pay check was $100,000.
His finances were already tangled like knitting wool tossed into a cage full of tigers. On the face of it, he was earning from movies and records about $1,000,000 a year. But there were complications. The greatest singing attraction in the world was a monumental spendthrift. After Caruso he bought two dozen gold watches, had them engraved “With love from Mario,” and handed them out like lollipops. He insisted on having 14-karat gold fittings on his brand-new Cadillac, which was upholstered in tiger skin. He ran up delicatessen bills so huge he was leery about showing his face in the shop.
And there was Sam Weiler, who collected a cut of everything Mario made. Weiler was a nondescript little man who owned a boys’ summer camp in Pennsylvania and yearned to be a singer. Soon after the Lanzas went to New York to spend their honeymoon in the Park Central Hotel, he heard Mario singing at the studio of a voice teacher, Polly Robertson, and decided on the spot that managing this talent was a much better bet than trying to make it to glory on his own larynx.
When he offered to pay off Mario’s debts—$11,000 or so, by Weiler’s account—and subsidize his career, Betty and her new husband calculated they could get along on $70 a week living expenses. In return, Weiler was to collect five per cent of all Lanza’s earnings for the next fifteen years. Eighteen months later the manager’s share was increased to ten per cent. A third contract pushed up his cut to twenty per cent, and when Mario signed for a radio show later, Weiler was in on the ground floor at $500 a week. According to his protégé’s reckoning, Weiler advanced $70 a week for seven months and drew a subsequent total of more than $350,000 in commissions.
Cash money and Mario were almost strangers. He never saw the tens of thousands of dollars he made every week. Nobody actually put cash into his hands until he was in the middle of a man-killing concert tour that took him and two or three followers clear across the nation, singing his heart out at every performance.
His life had come down to a deadly dull routine: sing every night, come off stage and drink a case of beer, sleep, drive on to the next town. Even his thick-skinned followers felt sorry for him. “Why not give him something for himself?” they asked each other. “Let him have the money from the programs.” Those souvenirs of the concert sold at one dollar apiece, cost no more than twelve or so cents to produce. So while the tour was bringing in $30,000 a week in Oregon, which is silver-dollar territory, Mario was permitted to store up five hundred of those dollars, which he squirreled away in a canvas bag.