Publication of these highly colored tales so enraged some of his former neighbors that they invaded local stores and smashed every Lanza record they could seize. Rocks were hurled through the windows of his relatives. The mayor was forced to telephone Hollywood: “Please bring Mr. Lanza to Philadelphia for a personal appearance, or I’m afraid we may have a major riot here.”
Mario was always officially on a diet. “I’ve never been fat,” he bragged, “only seductively buxom.” But he was a compulsive eater who ballooned up to three hundred pounds between pictures. Schary was forever plagued with the problem of paring down Mario, who was pure gold at the box office; his four pictures for Metro brought in $40,000,000, a phenomenal figure. He had so many temptations to eat and drink in Hollywood that Schary decided his prize tenor would have to be hidden away somewhere for the poundage to be lost.
Ginger Rogers had a secluded ranch on the Rogue River in Oregon. She would be happy to let Mario use the place for reducing. He couldn’t ride in planes because of a punctured eardrum, so he was driven up there with Betty, his press agent and wife, and a colored butler. Mario wasn’t short of will power when the occasion demanded it. For six weeks he held himself down to eating three tomatoes and six eggs a day. Every morning he puffed half a mile each way up and down the road, sweltering in a specially made latex suit. He had to work out alone. The agent sat on the porch of the ranch house with a .22 rifle. Whenever Mario slowed down, a shot would come singing into the roadway by his feet to speed him up again.
He had one more great record, “The Loveliest Night of the Year,” and one more miserable movie, Because You’re Mine, to make before his feud with Metro took on the proportions of nightmare. Much of the blame has to be loaded onto his wife’s shoulders. She loved her husband in her own shrill fashion, but she no more knew the greatness in him than she could sing Aïda.
She loved the money he made, the house it bought with butler, cook, maids, gardener, chauffeur. She loved the $20,000 mink he bought her, but she couldn’t spare the time to listen to his new recordings when he burst into the house with them like an excited schoolboy.
He was wonderful with his own children and every other child. I’ve seen him romp around his living-room floor by the hour with his family—who are a family of orphans now. He tried to keep one little child alive and failed through no fault of his. Raphaela Fasona of New Jersey was a ten-year-old fan, one of the army of them throughout the Western world whose letters kept Mario’s mother, father, and a staff of three others busy answering them. Ray was in the hospital, a victim of Hodgkin’s disease. Mario had great compassion for the sick, sent out hundreds of his albums to them. He talked to Ray in person or by telephone every week, sang to her, told her fairy tales.
He brought her with her mother to Beverly Hills one Christmas, gave her a party with stars and their children as guests—Kathryn Grayson, the Ricardo Montalbans, Joe Pasternak, David May, Mrs. Norman Taurog among them. The children chuckled over a puppet show and a magician, and I watched Ray’s great luminous brown eyes fill with wonder. When her illness came to its inevitable end, Mario planned a concert in her memory, donating the proceeds for cancer research.
Betty Lanza was a cheerleader in the bleachers that were filled with the stooges who lived off Mario. “You don’t have to go to the studio,” she used to tell him. “You’re too big a name for that now. Make them come to you.”
The studio did come to him once more, to make The Student Prince, though the bosses were panicky about his weight, which had puffed him out to look more hippopotamus than tiger. I went to his house to get his side of the donnybrook that broke out and kept his name in headlines for months. “I was treated cheap while I was Tiffany. Box-office Tiffany. They gave me the little-boy routine, and I’m not a little boy. They took my advice before. Then when I became a big star, they said: ‘We’ll take the reins in on this sonofabitch.’”
I could hear all kinds of people talking through his lips as he spoke: his wife, his sycophants, whole generations of stars and the relatives of stars dating back to the days when Hollywood first made dreams of fame and greed come true.