Only this bull of a man would have the muscle to tote around that sack of silver like a change purse, but he took it everywhere with him, day and night. In the car, he set it down on the floor between his legs and occasionally, subconsciously, gave it a reassuring chink. At night, he slept with the bag under his bed.
The biggest money came in, unseen by him, from his records. He sold more than 110,000 albums from Caruso before the picture was shown to any public audience. Then he topped this by selling a million copies in less than a year of a single record, “Be My Love.” No classical artist in RCA history had ever equaled that mark. The record was cut in one flawless attempt while he was muzzy with wine and soaking wet from head to foot. When he was awarded his first golden record for selling a million copies of it, he would have nobody but Hedda Hopper present it to him. The studio was furious. They wanted one of their stars to perform that service so all the glory could be kept in the family.
He had gone through a normal rambunctious day at Culver City, drinking steadily but staying out of trouble. At seven-thirty that evening he had an appointment at Republic Studios, where one particular sound stage came so close to acoustic perfection that RCA consistently hired it for cutting its classical-label records, Red Seal. A sixty-five-piece orchestra had been engaged to work with him through the night in a four-hour session, to make an armful of master recordings.
On his way home from the studio Mario thought he’d stop by for another drink or two at the home of a good friend of his, a free-lance writer. The tempestuous tenor was distinctly the worse for wear when he arrived, and his condition did not improve. Phyllis Kirk, a young actress who lived in an upstairs apartment, was invited down to have a drink with Mario. Before he collapsed into alcoholic slumber, he had tried to rip the dress off her shoulders.
Lanza’s long-suffering press agent was eating dinner when he had a call from an RCA representative waiting at Republic: where was Mario? Within minutes another telephone call provided the answer, from the free-lance correspondent: “Will you kindly come over and get your degenerate, unprincipled client out of my apartment?”
The agent had a favor to ask first: “Can the three of you drag him into a cold shower, prop him up, and keep him there? If he drowns, he drowns, but will you please try it for me?” Be happy to, the writer said. When the agent got to the apartment, Mario was fully clad, three-quarters conscious, and half drowned. The idea that he had work to do had somehow penetrated his curly head. But he had a bargain to make first.
“I’ll go out to Republic if you come with me,” he told the agent. “I’ll do one number, then we go and have a bottle of wine together.” Agreed.
The orchestra, impeccably dressed, had been waiting nearly two hours when Mario staggered in, splashing water wherever he stood. He frowned at the conductor, then turned on the musicians. “—— all of you,” he said to introduce himself. “I don’t want any bull. We’re going through this thing once, and it had better be right.”
And that’s how it was done. Half an hour later Mario was sitting with his press agent in a bar in Coldwater Canyon quaffing Ruffino by the quart. A year and a half later the same agent was handed a check for Mario representing his take from nine months’ sale of “Be My Love”—$405,000. The one record earned over $2,000,000. In 1961, Mario Lanza records were still collecting royalties of $275,000. Mario wasn’t around to share in as much as a nickel, but the percentage merchants still had contracts which continued to give them their cut.
“Be My Love” was selling like hot cakes, especially in Philadelphia, when a fan magazine appeared on the newsstands quoting Mario’s reminiscences of his old neighborhood. These memoirs had been concocted between the singer and a writer in the course of another battle of the bottles that began at five-thirty one afternoon in Mama Weiss’s Hungarian restaurant and ended at seven-thirty the next morning when Mario got home to Betty. His imagination had run wild through the night with lurid tales of gang wars in Little Italy and bullets whistling past his ears when he lived on “Murderers’ Row.”