Part 25

It doesn’t require the prompting of Emily Post or that other authority on etiquette, Polly Adler, to cause me to write a note of appreciation.... As I dined and sat beside two of my beloved women, I forgot my white hair and certain other elements of my physical decline. For the moment I was once again in the saddle (figuratively of course) and Life seemed new. Upon shaving this morning, I _had_ to see the realities once again, and I must confess that I abhor all mirrors.

He gave the years a run for their money, slowed down sometimes by illness but stopped only once, by a final massive heart attack.

I am in fine shape, [he concluded,] except for a faulty motor. I have led such a clean life that I can’t understand it (I mean I can’t understand the clean life).... But I still carry the torch for you. The torch, alas! is becoming an ember, but it is all I have.

Did anybody ever write such letters?

He spent an evening with Gene Buck, a true friend of ours, dating back to the days when I commuted from Long Island to play on Broadway in _Six-Cylinder Love_ in the evenings and make a movie in New York with Jack Barrymore by day. A letter from the Fowlers’ home in Los Angeles told about the two Genes’ meeting:

He tried to get hold of me for four days, a thing that Sheriff Biscalis always does within an hour, and if it hadn’t been for you, the mighty squire of Great Neck would have gone without paying his disrespects to me.

I suppose there are just as many great people now as there ever were, but it does not seem so to me. Possibly I am thinking of my own youth when I recall the wonderful troupe who were knocking down bottles during the early part of this century. Jesus Christ, Hedda! What a wonderful tribe it was!

Gene and I enumerated them all and drank a toast in milk (not toast and milk) to the many memories. I do not want to classify you as an aged alumna, for you were just a baby ... I wish to God you had been there. We would have called you, busy as you are, but you were at some damned glamorous but uninteresting party to a movie magnate....

If this sounds like a love letter, make the most of it; but, note well, you will have to hurry, for Forest Lawn is sending me literature.

Gene used to say: “The important thing is to see that friends, big or little, famous or otherwise, have a sincere send-off.” He wrote the send-off for Red Skelton’s son Richard, for Jack Barrymore, for Fred MacMurray’s first wife, Lillian, and a dozen other people. “Maybe you will do this kind of thing for me when my own time comes--and may I not keep you waiting too long at that,” he told me.

After his last heart attack two years ago, I did my best, such as it was, in my column: “He was as near heaven as any mortal can get. I feel the loss more every day and will for the rest of my life.”

If, nostalgically, I learned something about how to love from Gene Fowler, I got some advice on how to live from Bernard M. Baruch. I was visiting Hobcaw Barony, his South Carolina plantation, hundreds of acres of pines and live oaks, draped in Spanish moss with the King’s Highway running through the middle of it. The soil’s so rich you can throw a seed down one day and have a plant two inches tall the next. Only a handful of servants were left when I was there; the rest went north years ago. I urged Bernie to hand over the estate to the Negro people as a memorial, to see what they could make of it by building schools, churches, a community center. But he says no: “They’d think I was showing off.” He’s left it to his daughter Belle and built a small house some fifty miles away, where he spends his winters with his devoted hostess-companion and nurse, Elizabeth Navarro.

I was running up Hobcaw’s great sweep of stairway when Bernie stopped me. “Let me show you how to do it,” he said. “I know you’re not sixteen any longer. Do what I do. Go up to the first landing, take five deep breaths. Then go up to the next landing and take five more, and so on until you’re at the top.”

I’d arrived bone-weary from a lecture tour. Jimmy Byrnes, former Secretary of State to Harry Truman, was there with his wife to dinner. I’m a sort of middle-class Republican, while Bernie’s an intellectual Democrat. He’s fond of conducting his own private polls of politics, and I’m counted on to give him an opposition point of view. So while Baruch, Byrnes, and other guests stood in a group in front of the fireplace debating the affairs of the nation, Hopper sat on a sofa, ears tuned in until my head began to nod. The next thing I knew was Bernie’s tap on my shoulder. “Come now, it’s time for you to retire.”

“But you haven’t finished your discussion,” I protested.

“No, but you have.”

I fell asleep hours later in a huge bedroom with four picture windows in two of its walls. Through each of them I could see and hear the breeze ruffling through the moss on the live oak in the moonlight so that it danced like a _corps de ballet_. Bernie believes in plenty of rest, including a nap between the sheets every afternoon. The next morning I had breakfast in bed, served by Bernie. He’d been up long enough to have read all the newspapers, so I got bulletins along with my coffee.

With a chauffeur and one other servant, the three of us went off on a fishing expedition in a station wagon loaded to the hubcaps with equipment. At the selected spot at the mouth of a narrow river lined with oyster beds, the two helpers set out folding chairs and steamer rugs for Bernie and me and wrapped us up like mummies. Then they baited our hooks and left us to it, while the chauffeur took himself with his line off to his own favorite fishing spot.

Bernie and I waited and waited for a nibble. At last he snagged a hard-shell crab. I followed suit. “Do you want to go on?” he asked.

“Sure, I love it,” said I. Only crabs were biting that day. I went on hauling them out like sixty, but Bernie turned his back on the whole undertaking, got up, shook himself, and sat in the sun. “FDR came out to this same spot,” he noted dryly, “but he managed to catch fish.” So did the chauffeur perched out on the pier.

If he’s in town, Bernie is the first man I call when I visit New York. I took myself one day to his house on East Sixty-sixth Street, and there hanging over the mantelpiece in his drawing room was a new portrait of him. I gave it one good, hard look, then asked: “Have you a stepladder, please? I want to take that down.”

“Ah, it’s not that bad,” he protested.

“Have you really looked at it? Whoever painted it has made your head too small, your shoulders too narrow, and stuck you on a park bench outside the White House. Whose idea was that?”

“Well,” he explained, “Clare was having her portrait done....” He has the greatest regard for Clare Luce; years before he arranged with a single telephone call to have her play _The Women_ staged on Broadway after the script had been lying around producer Max Gordon’s office for months. And this for a play that Bernie told her was “the most cynical satire on your sex ever written.”

I said no more against the picture, but on my next visit a year later, the portrait had been replaced by another, by Chandor, a wonderful likeness, complete to Bernie’s hearing aid. He autographed a reproduction of it for me. With pen in hand, he looked up: “How do you spell gallant--one ‘l’ or two?”

“Never could spell,” I said. “Use a different word.”

“No. Gallant is the word for you,” he said, and waited until the butler found a dictionary. Bernie is a loyal friend. If our top governmental officials had listened to him, we shouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.

I once worked for another Democrat, not in politics, to be sure, but making two silent pictures at the studios of the old Film Booking Offices of America, called FBO for short, before it was acquired by Howard Hughes and renamed Radio-Keith Orpheum, or RKO. Joseph P. Kennedy, father of our President, had just arrived from Boston as a sharp, up-and-coming businessman to see if he could make a fortune in Hollywood.

He signed up a scad of stars--Joel McCrea; Constance Bennett; Fred Thompson, the cowboy Adonis who’d been a Presbyterian pastor in the Valley until Frances Marion married him on a bet with Mary Pickford. Heading Joe Kennedy’s contract list was Gloria Swanson, who was always quite a gal.

She’d been married to Wally Beery and Herbert Somborn, who started the Brown Derby restaurant chain, when producer Mickey Nielan entered her life. He rapidly hired Somborn to go off on a nationwide promotion tour plugging a movie Nielan had made. To make sure that his wooing of Gloria would not be interrupted, he had Somborn telephone him every evening at eight California time from whatever city he was in that day. When Somborn hung up, Nielan would have the operator check back to verify where the call had originated.

I met Joe’s wife, Rose, at a luncheon Frances Marion gave, where Polly Moran stared at Colleen Moore’s straight boyish bangs and said: “Look at her--makes $10,000 a week and has a lousy haircut.” Rose adored her husband.

Gloria was Joe’s number-one star. He hired Laura Hope Crews as her coach, and she practically lived day and night with Gloria, including sessions at Laura’s home overlooking the beach at Santa Monica. He made some good pictures before he started _Queen Kelly_, with Gloria as star, which began as a silent, then ran into the monster called Sound. He never forgot he was a businessman. He had notes for $750,000 signed by Gloria to help finance the picture. The question was: What to do? Finish _Kelly_ as a silent, scrap it, or take time off to see if Sound became important?

He suggested a trip to Europe for Gloria, accompanied by Joe and Mrs. Kennedy. It must have been a mighty trying trip for all three of them. The picture was never completed, but on their return Joe sold his FBO holdings for a $5,000,000 profit, to make the first big financial killing of a career that later sent him to London as a wartime ambassador. Mrs. Kennedy’s father, the legendary “Honey Fitz,” onetime mayor of Boston, had a hand in getting Joe out of Hollywood.

Joe and I saw each other occasionally over the years. If I’d taken all the advice he gave me, I’d be rich today. He was one of the first on FDR’s bandwagon when Herbert Hoover was the man to beat. In the lobby of a New York theater Joe told me: “Beg, borrow, or steal all the money you can and put it on FDR, because he’s going to be the next President of the United States. You don’t have to vote for him, but make sure you bet on him.” Did I? Not on your life.

I saw him last not long before he had his stroke. I was sitting at a table in Van Cleef & Arpels, New York, waiting for a package. He came bustling in, as spry as ever then. “Hi, Joe! Buying _me_ a present?”

He paused in mid-stride. “What--Oh, it’s you. I might have known.”

He threw me a hard look and went on into the back room. The senior assistant in the place came up, shook my hand, and said: “I didn’t think anybody in the world could do that.”

“Why not? I knew him when he was a Hollywood producer and had a stableful of stars,” I said. “Besides, I have a mighty retentive memory.”

_Eighteen_

His voice was the making and the breaking of him, a blessing and a curse. He could melt your soul or shatter mirrors when he set it free. One night, all over the hearthrug in my den, there lay the chunks of broken glass to prove his point. In his fevered love affairs he was a stallion, with a body as strong as an animal’s, and he called himself “The Tiger.”

Mario Lanza roared upward to fortune and fantastic fame like a Fourth of July rocket, then fell back to earth, a burnt stick, lost in darkness. For a moment, while he lit the sky, he brought back to incredible life the archaic days of madness, romance, depravity, and glory. But there had never been anybody quite like Mario, and I doubt whether we shall see his like again.

It was easy to be captivated, though often hard to tell exactly why. His smile, which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak. He was the last of the great romantic performers, born in the wrong century--maybe there could never be a right one for him. “Reality,” he believed, “stinks most of the time. It’s a star’s duty to take people out of the world of reality into the world of illusion, and a motion picture is the ideal way to do that.”

He ate too much, fought too much, drank too much, spent too much. He could no more handle success than a child can be trusted with dynamite. So many of the themes of this story met and merged in Alfred Arnold Cocozza, from Philadelphia’s Little Italy, who borrowed his mother’s maiden name, Maria Lanza, as a ticket to destruction.

He developed a god complex a mile wide. “I’m the humble keeper of a voice,” he used to tell me in all seriousness, “which God has entrusted to me. This is not easy. There are sacrifices you must make. I love champagne--I can’t drink it. Red wine I love--I must refuse it. I must not smoke--it is bad for the voice. I am the fortunate and unfortunate guy it passes through.”

He couldn’t be called a liar, because he found it increasingly hard to distinguish between the facts and the fables he wove around himself. He could boast of his abstemiousness and, a few hours later, wander into a bar on Sunset Strip like The Players, a favorite haunt of his, which Preston Sturges used to run. They could hear Mario coming by the slap of laces in the handmade, elevator shoes he imported from New York to add a couple of inches to his own natural-grown five feet seven. The fancy footwear must have been uncomfortable; the laces were seldom tied.

He turned up at The Players one morning fifteen minutes before the 2 A.M. curfew which California law demands, awash from the red wine he guzzled after dinner. Closing time arrived, but Mario and Sturges lingered at a table with two girls, killing more wine. Two state liquor inspectors stopped by for a friendly, after-hours drink. They were off duty and well acquainted with Sturges, but Mario hadn’t been told that.

One of them walked up behind him, grabbed the bottle, and, as a joke, grunted: “Okay, you’re all under arrest.” That was the last thing he knew until long after dawn broke. Mario snatched the bottle from the inspector. With a fist hard as a rock, with a seventeen-inch biceps behind it he sent him flying against a far wall, cold as a mackerel, with seven teeth knocked out of his head.

The other officer tried to tackle Mario. For his trouble, he was picked up bodily and hurled against the same wall, dead to the world, slumped on the floor beside his companion like a second sack of broken bones.

Sturges was aghast. Before he called an ambulance he shoved Mario out the front door. “Start running and get lost,” he grunted. The now-terrified tenor put on so much speed he shed one of his shoes in his flight to the apartment of a friend, who lived close to the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. At 4 A.M. Sturges telephoned Mario’s press agent to report the massacre. “Keep that maniac away from me,” he said. “He’s likely to kill us all in our sleep.”

The press agent made a beeline for the nearest sheriff’s sub-station, on Fairfax Avenue at Santa Monica Boulevard. Standing in full view on the desk was Mario’s shoe, as distinctively his as a fingerprint, but nobody had any idea who owned it. “Have there been any charges filed?” the agent asked. There had not. “Well, my client would like to have his shoe back.”

“Who’s your client?” asked the desk sergeant.

“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.

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.