On the 7th of October 1959, in a quiet clinic in the hills above Rome, the greatest natural tenor voice of the 20th century fell silent forever. He was only 38 years old. 155 days later, his young wife would follow him into the grave, leaving four small children, the eldest just 11, the youngest only five, suddenly orphans in a world that had once thrown roses at their father’s feet.
His name was Mario Lanza. He inspired a young Luchiano Pavarati to dream of the opera stage. He inspired a boy named Joseé Carreras watching a film in Barcelona to decide that singing would be his life. He inspired the young Placido Domingo. He even inspired a poor truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi named Elvis Presley, who kept his recordings close to him for the rest of his days.
And yet, by the time he died in that Roman clinic, the world had almost forgotten him. Tonight, I want to take you back, back to a warm September evening on a quiet street in the Paroli district of Rome. Back to a man standing at an open window in his shirt sleeves holding a small note from one of his children in his hand.
Back to a story that Hollywood tried to bury that family members kept quiet about for decades and that even now is told most often in halftruths and worn out legends. I want to tell it to you the way it actually happened, as carefully as the surviving documents allow. And where the documents fall silent, where only memory or rumor remains, I will tell you that too, honestly, so that you and I can sit with the same questions together.
So pour yourself something to drink, settle into your chair, and come with me back to the beginning of everything to a small kitchen in South Philadelphia where a child was once held up to the light of a window and pronounced by his proud immigrant grandfather to be a gift from God.
His name at birth was Alfredo Arnold Kootza. He was born on the 31st of January, 1921 in a narrow rowhouse in the Italian quarter of South Philadelphia. The neighborhood smelled of fresh bread, of strong coffee, of cigars wrapped in damp leaves, of cured pork hanging from hooks in the back rooms of family grocerers. The voices on the street rose and fell in the music of the old country.
Italian was the first language he heard. English came later slowly from the children he played with on the stoops. His father, Antonio Kootza, was a wounded veteran of the First World War. He had served in the United States Army and had been hurt badly enough that he could no longer work as he once had.
He was a quiet man by every account. He read his newspaper in the evenings, smoked his pipe, listened more than he spoke. The household income in the early years came from a small disability pension and from whatever odd labor the family could find. His mother, Maria Lansza Kootza, was the engine of the family. She was a strong, darkeyed woman, the daughter of immigrants who had come to America from the small mountain town of Filignano in the Maise region of central Italy.
She worked as a seamstress, often late into the night, sewing dresses for women in better neighborhoods. She was, by every account from those who knew her, deeply ambitious for her only child. She had musical feelings of her own. She sang in the kitchen as she worked. She had wanted perhaps to be a singer herself in a world that would never have allowed it.
And so when her boy Alfredo opened his mouth for the first time at the age of three or four and produced a sound that made the women on the street stop and turn their heads, she made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. She decided he would be the singer she had not been allowed to become.
The story of the windup photograph in the groceryer shop has been told many times and the details vary depending on which family member you ask. But the heart of it is this. There was on one of those streets a small Italian grocery store run by family friends. The shop kept an old handc cranked photograph in the back room and the men of the neighborhood would gather there in the evenings, drink a little wine, play cards, and listen to records of the great Italian teners.
The voice they loved most was the voice of Enrico Caruso, the legendary Neapolitan who had died in 1921, just months after little Alfredo was born. According to family recollections passed down through the years, the boy first heard those Caruso recordings when he was barely old enough to sit up by himself.
And the story goes when the needle dropped on the famous Arya from Paliachi vest Juba the clown’s lament the boy sitting on the wooden floor of the grosser’s back room opened his own small mouth and tried to sing along. We can imagine the moment the man around the table mid-con conversation suddenly turning the card game pausing the shopkeeper setting down his glass of wine and looking at the child on the floor.
Whatever exact words were spoken that evening, we cannot know. But one thing is certain, the men in that room understood at once that something unusual had walked into their lives. By the time Alfredo was 10 years old, he was already known in the neighborhood as the boy with the angel’s voice.
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Maria put her son to work. He sang in church on Sundays. He sang at family weddings and at funerals. He sang in school plays. He sang for visiting priests and for cousins arriving from Italy. There was no formal training in those early years. There was no money for it. There was only the boy and the records of Caruso playing in the back of the groceryer shop and the mother who listened to every note her son sang and corrected him in the kitchen afterwards.
He grew up to be a strong thick set teenager. He was not tall. He was already, even as a boy, carrying more weight than was good for him. The Italian household ran on pasta and bread and rich sauces. Food was love, and there was a great deal of love in that kitchen. By his late teens, his appetite had already become legendary among his friends.
So had his temper, his generosity, his impatience, and his refusal to sit still for any long stretch of time. He was, by every description, a boy who lived at full volume. School was a struggle. He did not enjoy sitting in a classroom. He was bright enough, but restless. He left high school before finishing. He took up work helping his father, helping his uncles, helping in the small businesses of the neighborhood.
He drove a truck for a while, delivering groceries and pianos around the city of Philadelphia. It was that piano delivery job, in fact, that changed everything. The story, as it has been told for more than 70 years, runs like this. The young man, around the age of 19, was sent to deliver a piano to the home of a local music teacher named Irene Williams. Mrs.
Williams asked the strong boy in the delivery overalls to help her move the instrument into the proper position in her studio. He did. Then, the way the family always told it, she happened to mention that she taught singing. And the boy on impulse asked if she would listen to him for a moment. He opened his mouth. He sang.
By the time the Arya was finished, Irene Williams, an experienced teacher who had heard a great many students in her career, was reportedly in tears. She told the young man that he had a once- in a generation voice. She offered to teach him for free. She told him, in essence, that he must at all costs take this gift seriously.
Whether those exact words were spoken, we cannot prove. But what is documented is that Irene Williams did become his first serious teacher, that she trained him without charge, and that she introduced him within a couple of years to people who would change the entire course of his life. The most important of those introductions came in 1942.
Alfredo Kotza, by then 21 years old, was brought to the attention of Sergey Kusovitzki, the legendary Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Kusovitzky was at that time organizing the summer program at Tanglewood, the great music festival in the hills of western Massachusetts.
He auditioned the young man from Philadelphia, and he was, by every reliable account, astonished by what he heard. Kusovitzky offered the young singer a scholarship to the Tanglewood program. There in August of 1942, in a small role in the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nikolai, Alfredo Kotza made his professional debut.
The reviews were extraordinary. The critic for the New York Times wrote that the young tenor possessed a voice of uncommon quality. Other reviewers used phrases that would normally be reserved for veteran singers of established reputation. It was at this point, by most accounts, that Alfredo Kotza began to use a new name.
He took his mother’s maiden name, Lanza, and added a slight Italian variation of his given name. He became from that summer onwards, Mario Lansza. But the timing of his triumph was cruel. America was by then deep in the Second World War. Within weeks of his Tanglewood debut, the young singer was drafted into the United States Army Air Forces.
The career that had just begun, would have to wait. He spent the war years in uniform, mostly stationed at bases inside the United States. The Army, recognizing that they had a remarkable voice on their hands, eventually assigned him to a special services unit. He performed in a touring service show called On the Beam and later in the Moss Heart production Winged Victory, which traveled to military bases and theaters to raise morale among troops and civilians.
He sang an army uniform to crowds of soldiers and their families. The reviews continued to be remarkable. Word began to spread even during wartime that there was a young Italian-American serviceman with a voice unlike anything heard in years. It was during this period in the spring of 1945 that he met the woman who would become his wife. Her name was Betty Hicks.
She was a young woman from a middle-class American family in California, the sister of one of Mario’s army friends, a soldier named Bert Hicks. According to the way the family always told the story, Bert spoke so often and so enthusiastically about his musical army buddy that his sister became curious.
A meeting was arranged. Betty traveled from California to meet the tenor. The introduction took place and within a remarkably short time the two were engaged. They were married in April of 1945. He was 24, she was 22. It was by every account from those who knew them in those early months a real love match.
He was warm, funny, generous, completely without pretention. She was elegant, wellspoken, and devoted to him from the first moment. They could not have imagined in the spring of their wedding year what the next 14 years would bring. They could not have imagined the studios of Hollywood or the cameras of Rome, or the long, slow unraveling that was already in some hidden way beginning.
For now, they were simply a young couple in love. The war was ending. The world was opening and the voice that had been waiting since 1942 was about to be heard at last by everyone. After his discharge from the army, Mario Lonza returned to civilian life and resumed his musical training. He studied with new teachers in New York.
He took small concert engagements wherever he could find them. He worked with the celebrated Greek American conductor Constantine Kolinos, who would become one of his closest professional partners and one of the most reliable witnesses to his life. Money was tight in those first post-war years. Betty kept the household running on a careful budget.
Their first child, a daughter named Colleen, was born just before Christmas of 1948. And then on a warm late summer evening on the 27th of August 1947 came the night that changed everything. The night at the Hollywood Bowl. The Hollywood Bowl on that August night in 1947 was one of the most prestigious outdoor stages in all of American music.
To sing there as a young, almost unknown tenor was already an extraordinary opportunity. To sing there well in front of a sophisticated Los Angeles audience was to step in a single evening from obscurity into the bright center of the American musical world. Mario Lonza was 26 years old.
He was still technically a young man at the very beginning of his career. He walked out onto that vast open stage in a dark suit, his hair carefully combed, his dark eyes already showing that nervous, eager intensity that would become familiar to millions. He stood under the white shell of the bowl in front of an orchestra and a packed audience of thousands and he opened his mouth and he sang.
The reviews the following day were unlike anything written about a young singer in years. Critics reached for words they did not normally use. They spoke of a voice that seemed to come from another century. They spoke of size, of warmth, of a natural beauty that in their experience simply did not appear in young American singers.
The word that began to attach itself to him almost from that night onwards was the word Caruso. He was being compared openly to the legendary Neapolitan tenor who had been dead for 26 years. For an unknown 26-year-old singer from Philadelphia, that comparison was by every measure of the music business almost unbelievable.
Now, there is a famous story that has been told for decades about that Hollywood Bowl evening. The story goes that Louis B. Mayor, the legendary head of Metro Goldwin Mayor Studios, was present in the audience, was overwhelmed by what he heard, and personally signed the young tenor to a film contract on the spot, sometimes with tears in his eyes.
It is a beautiful story. It has been printed in dozens of books. But I have to be honest with you here because the historical record is more complicated. There is no reliable evidence that Louis B. Mayor attended the Hollywood Bowl concert that night. The most careful biographers of Mario Lanza, men who have spent decades sifting through studio archives and private letters agree that this version is almost certainly a Hollywood embellishment.
What actually happened, according to the documented record, is something a little less dramatic, but still remarkable. MGM scouts were aware of the young tener’s growing reputation. Following the bull reviews and other early concerts, arrangements were made for him to audition at the studio itself.
There, in front of the studio’s musical leadership, and eventually for mayor himself, the young Mario Lonza sang. And it was after those studio auditions, not at the Hollywood Bowl, that the seven-year contract with MGM was offered and signed. I tell you this not to ruin the legend, but because the truth is, in its own way, more interesting.
Because what it means is that the young man from South Philadelphia, walking into the offices of the most powerful film studio in the world, in his only good suit, with his palms damp and his heart pounding, opened his mouth in a small audition room and convinced one of the toughest businessmen in American history to give him a movie career.
That is the real story, and it is, if anything, even more impressive than the Hollywood Bowl version. The contract was signed in 1947. By 1949, Mario Lonzo was on screen. His first film was a modest, romantic musical called That Midnight Kiss, released in the summer of 1949. He played essentially a version of himself, a young singing truck driver discovered by a wealthy patron.
The film was not a masterpiece, but it did exactly what MGM hoped it would do. It introduced The New Face and The New Voice to audiences across America. The studio sent Prince to smalltown cinemas, to military bases, to the immigrant neighborhoods where his name already carried weight. Audiences responded with affection.
The Voice on Screen was as remarkable as the legend that had preceded it. His second film, The Toast of New Orleans, followed in 1950, and that film changed everything. Not because of its plot, which was light. Not even because of its co-star, the lovely Katherine Grayson. The film changed everything because of one song.
A new song written specifically for the film by the lyricist Sammy Khan and the composer Nicholas Broaddsky. A song called Be My Love. When the film was released, Be My Love became one of the most successful recordings of the entire decade. The single sold more than a million copies.
It became the first record by Mario Lonza to be awarded a gold disc. It went out across radio stations, into living rooms, into juke boxes, into wedding receptions, into dances at the local parish hall. For millions of ordinary Americans, this was the song that introduced them to Mario Lansza, even if they had never seen a single one of his films.
And then in 1951 came the film that made him the most famous tenor in the world. The Great Caruso was the project that Mario Lonzo had been waiting for his entire life. It was a technicolor biographical film telling the story of the legendary Enrio Caruso, the very man whose recordings the young Alfredo had first heard on the windup photograph in the back of the Italian grocerers shop in South Philadelphia.
The role was a dream come true and an almost unbearable pressure all at the same time. He was about to play on screen the man whose voice had shaped his own childhood. He threw himself into the part. He lost weight for the role under the strict supervision of the studio. He worked with his vocal coach Constantine Kalinos.
He recorded Arya after Arya from the great operas. By the time the cameras began to roll, he was in the best vocal and physical condition of his life. The film was released in May of 1951, and it was a phenomenon. It earned in $151 more money than almost any film MGM had ever released. It introduced opera in a real and serious way to millions of people who had never set foot in an opera house.
The soundtrack album sold in numbers that no classical recording had ever achieved. Children in workingclass neighborhoods who had never heard of Verde or Puchini came home from the cinema humming areas their grandparents recognized. Old Italian immigrants wept in the dark of small town picture houses. Letters poured into MGM from around the world.
Mario Lonza in the spring and summer of 1951 became one of the most famous men on Earth. He was 30 years old. It was around this time that one of the great quotations of 20th century music attached itself to him. The legendary Italian conductor Arturo Tosskanini was widely reported to have said that Mario Lonza possessed the greatest natural tenor voice of the 20th century.
The phrase has been printed in countless articles and books. But I want to be careful with you because the truth is no signed letter or recorded interview from Toscanini himself has ever been found containing those exact words. The phrase appears in publicity material from MGM in the early 1950s and spread from there.
It may very well be that Toskanini said something close to that in private. It may also be that the studio publicity department helped the sentiment along. The most we can honestly say is this. Many serious musicians of the time, including conductors and singers who had no reason to flatter him, did speak of his voice in the most extraordinary terms.
Whether or not those particular words came from Toscanini, the underlying recognition was real. But behind the public triumph of 1951, the private life of Mario Lonza had already begun to wobble. The first problem, the oldest problem, was food. The studio in preparing him for the great Caruso had forced him to drop a great deal of weight in a short time through a punishing regimen of crash diets, injections, and exhausting workouts under his trainer and longtime friend Terry Robinson.
The body that emerged on screen was leaner than he had been in years. But the moment the cameras stopped rolling, the weight came rushing back and then more and then more again. For an Italian American man raised on his mother’s kitchen, food was not just food. It was identity. It was love.
It was the warm center of every memory he carried. He could not eat moderately. He had never been able to eat moderately. By the end of 1951, he was already heavier than he had been before the great Caruso. By 1952, he was heavier still. The second problem was alcohol. The third was temper. The fourth was money. The fifth was the studio system itself, which was rigid, controlling, and by his standards, suffocating.
He fought with directors. He fought with producers. He sometimes fought openly and loudly with Louis B. Mayor himself. He demanded changes to scripts. He missed call times. He arrived on set in a state that made shooting impossible. He apologized. He promised to do better. He failed to do better. He apologized again.
Through all of this, Betty stood by him. By 1952, they had two daughters. Colleen, born just before Christmas of 1948, and Alisa, born on the 3rd of December, 1950. The household in Bair on the west side of Los Angeles was already a busy and complicated place. Servants came and went, trainers, vocal coaches, agents, journalists, hangers on, all moved through the rooms at every hour.
Betty managed somehow to keep the family at the center of it. She made sure the children had bedtimes. She made sure there were birthdays. She made sure there was a Christmas tree, however chaotic the rest of the year had been. And then came the project that, more than any other, broke him. In 1952, MGM announced that the next major Mario Lonza film would be The Student Prince, a romantic opereta based on a beloved 19th century story set in Old H Highleberg.
The score included some of the most famous songs of the period, including Serenade and I’ll Walk with God. The studio had high hopes. The publicity machine began to crank up months in advance. Mario Lonza recorded the entire soundtrack first. This was standard practice for MGM musicals. The singer recorded the songs in the studio under controlled conditions and then on the film set mimed the words while the recorded voice played back.
He completed the soundtrack recordings in the early months of 1952. Those recordings were by every account magnificent. Some of them are still considered among the finest things he ever sang. But when filming began, things fell apart. He clashed bitterly with the director who had been originally assigned to the picture, Curtis Burnernhard.
He clashed with the costume people. He arrived on set significantly heavier than the studio had approved. He could not or would not fit into the tailored uniforms designed for the slender young prince. There were arguments. There were walkouts. There were missed days of shooting. There were threats from the studio and counter threats from his agents.
In the end, in one of the most painful episodes of his career, Mario Lonza walked off the production of The Student Prince. MGM, furious, suspended him. The legal battle that followed was bitter and public. The studio filed a lawsuit against him for several million dollars. His career in the space of a few months came crashing down.
But here is the strange and almost unbelievable twist. MGM had already paid for those gorgeous soundtrack recordings. The studio did not want to lose them. And so in one of the most unusual decisions in Hollywood history, MGM hired a young English actor named Edmund Purdum to play the role of the prince on screen.
While Mario Lonza’s recorded voice continued to come out of Purdum’s mouth, the film released in 1954 was a strange hybrid. The face was Purdum’s. The voice was Lanza’s. Audiences who knew the truth found it heartbreaking. Audiences who did not simply enjoyed the songs. For Mario Lansza himself, watching the film from a distance, it must have been one of the most painful experiences of his life.
The voice was his. The role should have been his. Another man stood in the costume that had been tailored for him. He had lost a part of himself, and he could not get it back. He sank in the months that followed into one of the darkest periods he had ever known. He drank heavily. He ate without restraint.
He gained an enormous amount of weight. According to those who were close to him in this period, including his trainer, Terry Robinson, there were nights when he could not sleep, nights when he wept openly, nights when he raged through the rooms of the Bair house in a fury at the studio, at himself, at everyone.
The lawsuit dragged on. The money pressures mounted. He had been one of the highest paid performers in Hollywood. He was now, on paper, in serious financial trouble. It was during these years between 1953 and 1955 that the great unraveling truly began. Two more children arrived in this difficult period.
A son Damon born on the 12th of December 1952 and a second son Mark born on the 19th of May 1954. The family was now complete. four children, all small, all watching, all loving the father they were beginning to find harder and harder to understand. And the voice, the great voice that had carried him from a grosser’s floor in Philadelphia to the top of the world was about to be tested as it had never been tested before.
To understand what happened next, you have to understand something about American television in the middle of the 1950s. Television was new. It was live. It was watched every week by tens of millions of families in their own living rooms. And appearing on a major live television show in those days was very different from appearing in a film.
There were no second takes. There was no editing. Whatever happened in front of the cameras went straight into the homes of America in real time with no possibility of repair. In the autumn of 1954, after the disaster of the student prince, Mario Lonza was offered an enormous opportunity. CBS, in partnership with the Chrysler Corporation, was launching a major new variety program called Shower of Stars.
The producers wanted Lanza to be one of the featured performers on an early broadcast. The fee was reported to be the largest ever paid up to that point for a single television appearance by any musical performer in American history. It was a chance to return to the public to remind the world that The Voice was still there and to begin paying off some of the mountain of debt that had been growing around him.
The broadcast was scheduled for the 18th of November, 1954. And what happened that night has been argued about ever since. When the moment came, Mario Lanzo walked out under the bright lights of the live television stage. He was heavy. He was nervous. He had not performed in front of an audience in a long time.
The orchestra began to play. He raised his hands. He opened his mouth. And the voice that came out did not seem to match the movement of his lips. Viewers across the country watching at home immediately sensed that something was wrong. Within hours, telephone lines at CBS and at the local affiliates were jammed.
By the next morning, newspapers across the United States were running the story. The accusation was simple and devastating. Mario Lonza, the great natural tenor, had not been singing live. He had been miming to a recording of his own voice. Now, this is one of those moments in his life where I want to slow down and be careful with you because the story has been told many ways.
The official position of CBS at the time and the position later supported by some of the people who worked on the show was that there had been a technical problem with the sound system. that Lonza had in fact been singing live, but that because of the way live television sound was mixed in those days, his voice and his lip movements appeared on home television sets to be slightly out of synchronization.
There is another version told by other witnesses that Lonza had been so frightened of failing in front of a live national audience that he had agreed at the last minute to mime to a pre-recorded track of his own voice. To this day, the truth has never been finally established beyond doubt. What we can say with certainty is this.
The damage to his reputation was enormous. The public believed he had been faking. And for a singer whose entire identity rested on the natural authenticity of his voice, that public belief was almost as damaging as if it had been true. He recovered professionally more quickly than anyone might have expected.
He returned to live performance. He recorded new albums. He even appeared the following year on another Shower of Stars broadcast, this time clearly singing live, in part to prove that the voice was still entirely his. But something inside him had shifted. The confidence that had carried him through every previous setback was beginning to crack.
By 1956, Mario Lonza and his family had made the decision that would shape the last years of his life. They would leave the United States. They would move to Italy. They would, in his words, go home. It was on the surface a decision made for several practical reasons. There were enormous tax pressures in America.
There were lingering legal complications with MGM. Even though the great lawsuit had eventually been settled out of court, there were new film opportunities being offered in Europe, where the post-war Italian and British film industries were booming. And there was for him the deep emotional pull of the country his grandparents had left two generations earlier.
The country whose language he had heard in his cradle. The country whose music had defined his life. In May of 1957, the family arrived in Rome. They settled eventually into a beautiful apartment on the Via Brucell in the quiet leafy Paroli district. The children were enrolled in international schools.
Italian housekeepers came in. The cooking returned to the rich, heavy dishes of the south. Visitors came and went. Italian neighbors hearing whose family had moved in upstairs sometimes lingered in the entrance hall just to catch a sound of the voice through the door. For a time in the first months in Rome, there was a real sense of renewal.
He worked on new films. He sang in concerts in Italy and across Europe. He met by special arrangement with Pope Pius I 12th. The audience with the Pope was by every account from those who were there a deeply moving experience for him. He came from a religious family. His mother had said her rosary over his cradle.
To kneel as an adult before the bishop of Rome in the Vatican itself must have felt like the closing of an enormous circle. In 1957, he undertook a major concert tour across the British Isles and continental Europe. He sang at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He sang at the London Paladium. He sang in Germany, in Belgium, in Scandinavia.
The audiences were enormous and emotional. In some cities, the crowds outside the theaters were so dense that police had to clear a path for his car. He performed before Queen Elizabeth II at a royal variety event. The Voice, on the best of those nights, was as glorious as it had ever been. But on the worst nights, it was beginning to fail him in new and worrying ways.
He canceled concerts. He developed strange illnesses that no one could quite identify. He suffered from high blood pressure. He had episodes of what doctors of the time called phabitis, painful inflammations of the veins in his legs. He had heart palpitations. He continued, despite warnings from every doctor who examined him, to eat enormous meals and to drink heavily.
He attempted again and again the cycle of crash dieting that had damaged his body for years. He gained weight. He lost weight. He gained more. The cycle was killing him slowly and almost everyone around him could see it. There is in this period of his life one story that I want to share with you carefully because it has been told for decades and it touches on some of the darker corners of mid-century life.
It is the story of his alleged refusal in Naples to perform for a private gathering connected with the American gangster Lucky Luchiano. Lucky Luciano was by the late 1950s living in exile in Italy after his deportation from the United States. He was a powerful and dangerous figure in the criminal world.
The story as it has circulated for many years runs something like this. Luchiano or people connected with him supposedly asked Mario Lansza to sing at a private event in Naples. Lonza, the story goes refused. He refused in some versions very rudely. He may have insulted Luchiano in the process. And from that moment, according to a certain stream of rumor and speculation, Lonzo was a marked man.
I have to be very plain with you here. There is no proof, no documentation, no court record, no firsthand testimony that has ever placed this story on solid historical ground. It is a rumor. It has been repeated in books, in articles, in late night conversations among people who knew the family, but it has never been confirmed.
The most careful biographers of Mario Lonza treat this story with great caution, and so should we. It is at most a piece of folklore that grew up around his death. Because the death itself was so sudden and so painful that many people including some who loved him found it difficult to accept that ordinary human causes could have taken him so quickly.
I share it with you not because it is true but because it is part of the legend and because honest storytelling means telling you when something is a legend and not a fact. What is documented is this. By the late summer of 1959, Mario Lonza was in serious physical decline. He had returned to Rome from another exhausting attempt at weight loss.
He had been admitted more than once to a clinic in the hills above the Borgaz Gardens, a small private facility called Valet Julia. He was being attended by an Italian physician named Dr. Guido Morika, a respected internist who had been working with him for some time. The treatments at the clinic in those days included a regimen sometimes referred to as the twilight sleep diet.
Patients were kept in a state of near constant sedation. Their food intake was severely restricted. Their bodies were forced to lose weight through what was in essence a medically induced fast. Today we would consider such treatments deeply dangerous particularly for a patient with high blood pressure, a history of flabitis and underlying heart problems.
In 1959 they were still considered acceptable for wealthy patients desperate to lose weight quickly. He went in and out of the clinic in the late summer of that year. He was tired. He was frightened. According to those who saw him in those weeks, he spoke openly about his fears. He spoke about wanting to live to see his children grow up.
He spoke about wanting more than anything to return to the kind of singing he had done in his very best years. On the 7th of October 1959, he was back inside the Valet Julia clinic. He had been admitted again for further treatment. Betty was nearby. The children were at home in the Via Brucell apartment.
What exactly happened in that small room on that afternoon has never been entirely clear. The official medical conclusion was that Mario Lonza died of a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot that traveled from his leg to his lung and stopped his heart. Given his history of flabitis, his weight, his blood pressure, and the conditions in which he had been treated, such an outcome was tragically plausible. He was 38 years old.
The news traveled around the world within hours. In South Philadelphia, on the streets where the boy with the angel’s voice had once sung in the back of the grosser shop, women crossed themselves in their kitchens. In Naples, in Milan, in Sicily, in the villages of Maleise, where his grandparents had been born, church bells were rung.
In Los Angeles, Hollywood reporters scrambled to confirm the story. In London, in Berlin, in Buenosirees, on every continent where his films had played, ordinary people sat down by their radios and wept. In the apartment on the Via Brucell, Betty Lansza was given the news that her husband, the father of her four small children, was dead.
She did not, by every account from those who were with her in those days, fully understand at first. She moved through the rooms in a kind of stunned silence. She gave instructions to the housekeeper. She made telephone calls to family in the United States. She held the children and told them gently that their daddy was not coming home. Colleen was 10, almost 11.
Elisa was 8. Damon was 7. Mark was only five. The body was prepared for travel. There was a funeral service in Rome. The crowds outside the church were enormous. Italian fans, many of them old immigrants whose grandparents had come from the same villages as his own grandparents, stood in the streets with their hats in their hands and tears running down their faces.
The casket was eventually placed aboard a transatlantic flight and returned to the United States. There were further memorial services. He was buried at last at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, in the heart of the city where his Hollywood career had risen and fallen.
Betty returned to Los Angeles with the children, and from that moment, the story takes a turn that even now is difficult to tell. Betty Hicks Lanza was by the autumn of 1959 37 years old. She had been married to Mario for 14 years. Almost her entire adult life had been spent in his orbit. She had married him as a young woman in 1945 before the fame, before the films, before the wealth, before the chaos.
She had borne him four children. She had managed his households in California and in Italy. She had stood beside him through every triumph and every disaster. And now suddenly she was alone. The people who saw her in those first weeks after his death describe a woman in genuine shock. She had lost weight.
She could not sleep. She drifted from room to room in the Los Angeles house in a way that frightened the children. She had been for years dependent on prescription medication for her own nerves. It is no secret, and it has been confirmed by family members in later interviews, that she had been struggling with her own physical and emotional health for some time before her husband died.
Now, with him gone, that struggle accelerated. There were practical problems, too, and they were severe. The financial situation that Mario Lonza had left behind was a tangle. There were enormous unpaid tax bills in the United States. There were lawyers in two countries trying to sort out the estate. There were royalties and contracts and recording rights spread across different studios and record labels.
The Barehouse had been kept on through the Italian years. Servants had been retained. Lifestyle had not been adjusted to match income. Mario had earned in his lifetime sums that would be the equivalent of many millions of dollars in modern money. By the time the lawyers and accountants had finished their work, very little of it remained.
Friends gathered around her. Terry Robinson, Mario’s loyal trainer and one of his closest friends, did everything he could. He moved into the household in a sense as an unofficial guardian and helper. He took the boys to the park. He drove the girls to school. He cooked simple meals when Betty could not get out of bed.
He was by every account from the children themselves in later years one of the most important figures in keeping them grounded during those terrible months. But the heart of the family was failing. On the 11th of March 1960, only 5 months and 4 days after Mario’s death, Betty Lansza died in her bed in the Los Angeles house.
She was 37 years old. The official cause of death was given as a combination of factors related to her long-standing health problems. There has been speculation in the decades since about the exact circumstances. Some of those closest to the family have said openly that her heart was simply broken, that she had lost the will to continue without him.
Whatever the precise medical explanation, the human truth was unmistakable. She had loved him completely. She could not live without him. And four small children were now, in the most literal sense, orphans. Colleen was 11. Elisa was 8. Damon was seven. Mark was only five. The decisions that had to be made about the children in the days and weeks after Betty’s death were enormous.
There was no obvious single guardian. Both Mario’s parents were still living in their home in Philadelphia. So were Betty’s parents in Chicago. Both sets of grandparents loved the children, but neither set was young, and neither was in a position to take all four. In the end, the children were divided between the two families.
Colleen and the boys went to live initially with their Kokosa grandparents in Philadelphia. Elisa went to live initially with the Hicks grandparents in Chicago. They would be brought back together for visits, for holidays, for the long stretches of school summer. But they would not all grow up under the same roof. That part of their lives was over.
I want to pause here for a moment because it is easy in a story like this to keep moving from event to event without quite stopping to imagine what those children went through. Try to picture it. Four small children used to being driven around Rome in their father’s car. Used to housekeepers and tutors and constant visitors.
Suddenly placed on long aeroplane journeys sent to live with elderly grandparents in two different American cities. They had lost their father. They had lost their mother. They had lost their home in Italy, their schools, their friends, their language teachers, their daily routines.
They had lost in a few months almost everything that had defined their lives. And yet in time they would grow up. Colleen Lanza, the eldest, became a beautiful young woman with her mother’s elegance. She married. She had a child. She lived by all accounts an essentially private life away from the entertainment industry.
Her later years were difficult. She suffered from health and personal problems that those close to her have said were the lingering effects of the early traumas of her life. She died young in 1997 at the age of 48 from injuries sustained after being struck by a vehicle in Los Angeles. The exact circumstances were quietly mourned by the family.
Elisa, the second daughter, also lived a relatively private life. She married, raised children, kept the memory of her parents carefully. In recent decades, she has spoken occasionally in documentaries and interviews about her father, almost always with great warmth and great pain at the same time. Damon, the elder of the two boys, had perhaps the most public struggle.
He grew up tall and handsome. He had in his youth real musical ability of his own. Friends who knew him said that when he sang, you could sometimes hear an echo of his father, faint but unmistakable, but he carried a heavy weight. the loss of both parents in childhood. The burden of an enormous surname, the recurring whispers in every room he entered that he might somehow restore his father’s voice.
All of it pressed down on him for years. He died in 2008 at the age of 55 of a heart attack. He had been like his father, troubled by weight and by health problems. The parallel with his father’s life was painful to those who loved him. Mark, the youngest, the little boy of five who had been told on a Roman afternoon in 1959 that his daddy was not coming home, lived the longest of the three brothers and sisters who passed before him.
He carried the memory and the legacy of his parents with quiet dignity for many decades. He was active in keeping his father’s musical heritage alive. He gave interviews. He spoke at events. He guarded the family story with patience and grace. He died in 1991. By the early 21st century, three of the four small children of that warm October afternoon in Rome had passed away.
Only Alisa remained, carrying the family story forward with the same quiet dignity she had shown all her life. But the voice itself did not go. Here is something I think you will find remarkable. From the very moment of Mario Lonza’s death, the world began to discover in a serious and lasting way what it had lost. Record sales surged.
Films were re-released. Compilation albums were issued. The recordings made in the studios of MGM and RCA Victor, recordings he himself had been increasingly dissatisfied with in his final years, became sacred treasures to a global community of listeners that has never stopped growing. There’s a small but important museum dedicated to him in his home neighborhood of South Philadelphia.
The Mario Lonza Institute and Museum was founded in 1962 by a group of devoted fans and former friends just 3 years after his death. It exists to this day. It contains memorabilia, photographs, recordings, personal items. It is in its modest way the kind of place that allows ordinary people to come and touch however lightly the story of the boy with the angel’s voice who once played on the stoops of those very streets.
And then there is the influence. I want to take a few minutes here because this is in some ways the most extraordinary part of the whole story. the men who would dominate the world of oporadic tenor singing for the second half of the 20th century. The so-called three teners who would in 1990 sing together at the World Cup in Rome and become a global phenomenon.
All of them, every single one named Mario Lansza as the most important early inspiration of their lives. Eugiano Pavaroki has said in [singing] numerous interviews that as a boy in the small town of Modina in northern Italy, he watched Marioanza films again and again.
He has said that the great Caruso in particular was the film that made him decide that the oporadic life was the life he wanted. He spoke of Lonza with great affection and a kind of professional generosity [singing] that in the world of teners is not always common. Placido Domingo has spoken of Lonza in similar terms.
As a young boy in Mexico in a family of Spanish musicians who had immigrated to the Americas, he saw the great Hollywood opera [singing] films of the early 1950s. He too has said that the voice and the image of Mario Lonza on screen helped to give shape to his own ambitions. Joseé Carreras has perhaps spoken about Lonza most movingly of all.
As a small boy in Barcelona growing up in difficult conditions, he saw the great Caruso in a local cinema. He has said in interviews and in his own writings that the experience changed his life. He has said that he went home from that cinema and announced to his family that he would be an opera singer. He has said it again and again throughout his career that without Mario Lonza, there would have been no Joseé Carreras as the world came to know him.
And there is one more name and it is perhaps the most surprising of all. Elvis Presley, the boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, the future king of rock and roll, was a passionate admirer of Mario Lonza. This is well documented. Throughout his life, Elvis kept Lonza recordings in his personal collection.
He talked about Lanza to his close friends. He studied Lansza’s films. The famous song it’s now or never which Elvis recorded in 1960 is based on the old Italian song O solemmo the very song that Mario Lonza had sung in his films and recordings to enormous popularity. The connection is not accidental. Elvis grew up in part listening to Lonza’s voice on the radio of a poor southern household and he took something of that voice with him into his own remarkable career.
It is one of the strangest and most beautiful threads in this whole story. The poor immigrant boy from South Philadelphia who had himself learned to sing by listening to Caruso records in the back of a grosser shop became after his death the same kind of distant magical figure for an entire new generation of singers.
The chain of inspiration that had begun with Caruso passed through Lonza and continued forward into Pavaroti, Domingo, Carreras and even in its own way into Elvis Presley. This is what a voice can do. This is why music when it is honest never quite ends. And yet in his own lifetime, Mario Lansza did not know any of this would happen.
He did not know that his films would still be loved 70 years after his death. He did not know that opera singers decades younger than he was would name him as their first inspiration. He did not know that a fan club in Philadelphia would, in the years after his death, build a small museum to keep his memory alive.
He did not know that every year on the anniversary of his birth, people in his old neighborhood would gather to remember him. What he knew in the final months of his life was that he was tired, that his body was failing, that his career had become a series of contracts he often regretted signing, that his wife was unwell, that his children needed him, that the bills were enormous, and that the voice, his great gift, was harder and harder to summon at full strength.
It is, I think, one of the saddest aspects of the whole story. He died believing himself in many ways to be a man who had failed to live up to his own promise. He died before the great wave of reassessment that beginning almost immediately after his funeral would lift him back into a place of permanent affection in the memory of millions of people around the world.
And it is also why this story even now more than 65 years later still matters. Because the story of Mario Lonza is not in the end just a story about a great voice that died young. It is a story about what happens when a gift is too large for the body that carries it. It is a story about an immigrant family, about the promises of America, about the costs of fame in a particular moment in the 20th century.
It is a story about love and about loss and about how a man can be at the very top of the world and at the very edge of his own destruction at the same time. There are several questions when you sit with this story for any length of time that simply refuse to go away. I want to spend a little time with them now honestly before we come to the end because the easy version of this life the version that says he was a great singer who ate himself to death is not I think the whole truth.
The first question is the question of the studio system. Mario Lonza came of age professionally inside one of the most controlling and demanding entertainment systems ever created. MGM at the height of its power in the late 1940s and early 1950s did not simply employ its stars. It owned them.
It dictated what films they made, what songs they recorded, what photographs were released, what stories were told to the press, what diets they followed, what doctors they saw, what trainers worked with them. Performers were sometimes given amphetamines to keep their weight down and to keep their energy up during long shooting days.
They were given sedatives in the evenings to make sure they slept. They were given alcohol at studio events and parties as a normal part of the social life of the industry. The combination of pills and drink and crash diets and sudden enormous wealth applied to young performers in their 20s and 30s was by every honest reckoning dangerous.
We will probably never know with any precision how much of Mario Lonza’s later physical decline was due to his own choices and how much was due to the regime of medications and crash diets that had been imposed on him for years. The two became by the end almost impossible to separate.
What we can say is that he was not the only performer of his era whose body and health were ruined by this combination. He stands in a long line of mid-century American performers who became in effect casualties of an industry that demanded too much and protected its people too little.
That context does not excuse his own choices. But it does, I think, soften some of the harsher judgments that have sometimes been made about him. The second question is the question of what kind of singer he might have become had he lived. This is the question that surfaces again and again whenever serious musicians sit down and talk about Mario Lonza.
There is in the world of classical music a certain quiet condescension that sometimes attaches to his name because he made his career in Hollywood films because he never sang a full opera on a major oporatic stage in front of a paying opera audience because he popularized aryas rather than performing them in the traditional way.
There are some music critics who have argued that he was not really in the deepest sense an opera singer at all. I think this is unfair and so do many of the most respected oporadic voices of the last 70 years. The truth is that Mario Lonza did sing oporadic roles, but his major experience was in the recording studio and in concert.
He performed Madama Butterfly in New Orleans in 1948 in only two staged opera performances in his entire career. He recorded extensively from the oporatic repertoire. The recordings he left behind reveal a voice of extraordinary power, beauty, and emotional honesty. They reveal a singer who understood the music from the inside, who lived inside the phrases, who breathed with the orchestra.
They reveal in short a singer of the first rank. The tragedy is that he never had the opportunity to develop fully as a stage performer of complete operas. The films, the contracts, the recordings, the concerts, the financial pressures, the chaos of his private life, all of it kept him from the long, slow, disciplined years that turn a great natural voice into a great opera singer. The voice was there.
The instrument was there. The opportunity was not. Or perhaps more honestly, the discipline within him to seize that opportunity was not. What he might have been had he lived another 20 years, had he found his way onto the great stages of Lascala, of the Metropolitan Opera, of Covent Garden, we will never know.
It is one of the great unanswered questions of 20th century music and it is I think one of the questions that has kept his memory alive in a way that simpler more complete careers sometimes do not produce. The third question, the hardest question is the question of how to think about a man whose private life contained so much pain.
We have in our own time become more sensitive than people once were to certain kinds of behavior. We are less willing to forgive an artist his tantrums simply because he was an artist. We are less willing to look the other way at heavy drinking, at angry outbursts, at the kind of self-absorption that great fame sometimes produces.
We are, I think, right to ask more careful questions of the people we admire. Mario Lonza was not a perfect man. He could be difficult on a film set. He could be impatient with collaborators. He could at times be impossible to work with. He drank too much. He ate too much. He sometimes spent money he did not have.
He was in the most honest sense a man with many of the ordinary human failings, made larger and more visible by the size of his fame. But the people who knew him best, the people who lived with him most closely, also spoke again and again of his enormous warmth. Terry Robinson, who knew him for the entire arc of his adult life, has described him in interviews as one of the most generous human beings he ever met.
He gave money away, sometimes recklessly, to friends and to strangers. He loved his children with a kind of fierce, immediate, slightly chaotic devotion that those children in their later interviews always remembered with great tenderness. He could be furious at noon and weeping with affection by the evening. He was, in the truest sense, a Neapolitan soul, even though he had been born in Philadelphia.
He loved enormously, and he suffered enormously, and he never, by every account, learned to do either of those things in moderation. It is possible when you put all of this together to see him not as a tragic genius destroyed by Hollywood and not as a self-destructive man who threw away his own gift, but as something more honest and more human than either of those simple stories.
He was a remarkably talented young man raised inside a particular community and culture lifted into a particular industry at a particular moment in history who lived, loved, sang, suffered, and died all at full intensity in a brief and brilliant life. The voice he left behind is part of the permanent musical record of the 20th century.
The story he left behind is part of the permanent emotional record of what it means to be human. Now before we finish I want to come back to one quiet image because for me when I think about Mario Lonza this is the picture I keep returning to. It is somewhere in the late summer of 1959. He is in the apartment on the Via Brousell in Rome. It is evening.
The shutters of the apartment have been opened to catch whatever cool air the Roman night will offer. He is in his shirt sleeves. The children are in the next room. Betty is somewhere nearby, perhaps reading, perhaps already lying down. The whole household is for a moment quiet. He stands at the open window.
He looks out over the quiet street. He can hear faintly the sound of a radio in another apartment. He can hear far away the bells of a Roman church. And he opens his mouth and he sings. Not for an audience, not for a microphone, not for a contract, not for a critic. He sings perhaps a single phrase from an old Neapolitan song that his grandfather used to hum in the kitchen in South Philadelphia.
He sings it because there is no other way to be alive in this particular moment. He sings it because the voice, his voice, is still there inside him even after everything. That I think is the man we should remember. Not the boy on the grosser floor in South Philadelphia, although that boy was real.
Not the young star on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, although that young star was real, too. Not the heavy suffering figure in the Roman clinic at the end, but the man at the open window in the warm summer night singing one quiet phrase into the Roman air, alone with himself and with the gift he had carried since childhood.
The man who whatever else he had lost or wasted or thrown away still had until the very end the voice that the men in the back room of the grocerers shop had heard for the first time when he was 4 years old. The voice that the young Pavarati would hear and never forget. The voice that the young Carreras would hear in a Barcelona cinema and decide on the spot to spend his life pursuing.
The voice that the young Elvis Presley would hear on a poor radio in the American South and carry in his own way into his own music. The voice that more than 65 years after that warm Roman evening, you and I can still hear anytime we choose simply by reaching for one of the recordings he left behind.
He was 38 years old when he died. He had been a star for barely 12 years. He left a body of work that includes some of the most beloved recordings of Arya and Neapolitan songs ever made. He left four children who carried his name into the world, each of them with their own story, their own struggles, their own quiet dignity.
He left a wife who could not live without him. He left a mother in Philadelphia who, when the news came, sat down in her kitchen and never quite recovered from the loss. He left most of all a question for the rest of us. The question of what we do with a gift when a gift is given to us. The question of how we balance the demands of an industry against the truth of who we are.
The question of how we love the people closest to us when our own lives have become difficult to manage. The question of whether at the end of everything we can stand at an open window in the warm summer night and sing for ourselves one honest phrase of the music we were born to sing. Mario Lonza tried. He failed in many of the ways human beings fail.
He succeeded in the only way that ultimately matters for a singer. He left behind on record and on film the truth of his own voice. That voice is still here. It will be here long after you and I are gone. Thank you for sitting with me through this story tonight. Thank you for listening with patience and with care.
For letting the slower moments breathe, for allowing the difficult parts of the story to be told honestly. If you have been moved by what you have heard, I would gently suggest before you do anything else that you find one recording of Mario Lonza tonight. Be my love if you want the song that made him famous.
Vest Lajuba from Paliachi if you want the Arya that first stopped him in his tracks as a child. The loveliest night of the year if you want the lighter, sweeter side of him. or simply o Soleio, the old Neapolitan song that runs like a thread through his whole life. Put it on. Close your eyes. Let the voice fill the room.
That in the end is the only memorial that really matters. The voice itself. Still here, still singing, still after everything, the greatest natural tenor voice of the 20th century. Good night and thank you again for spending this time with me.
