Neapolitan

Last week Enrico Caruso's only daughter was married in Rockville, Md. to Ensign Michael Hunt Murray, U.S.N.R., of Garrison. N.Y. Enrico Caruso's dark-haired, 23-year-old Gloria (by his 1918 marriage to Dorothy Benjamin Caruso, then and now of Manhattan) shares at least one thing in common with the rest of her generation. She is too young to remember her father's voice--the voice which millions have never forgotten. She was less than a year old on that operatic night in Brooklyn when blood suddenly spurted in Enrico Caruso's throat and his career was at an end. But last week, as the United Nations took Naples, hosts of people older than Gloria Caruso could vividly recall the man who was not merely the most famous Neapolitan of recent times, but also a world figure of the first magnitude.

Enrico Caruso made his dazzling international reputation in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera. The son of a wine-swilling Neapolitan mechanic, he started as one of the many bush-league Italian tenors of the '90s with a voice so deep that he was accused of being a baritone. Not for several years did he discover his golden tenor range and enormous volume. And even with these assets, his Metropolitan debut in 1903 was no smash. Critics found his acting inferior and his vocal style coarser than that of his great, aristocratic predecessor, Jean de Reszke.

But soon Caruso's full-blooded Italian outpouring had won his severest critics. For nearly 20 years he was a world idol. His greatest performances have never since been equaled. He netted as much as $300,000 a year from the Met and fabulous recording royalties estimated as high as $3,000,000. He gave away huge sums to public charities and private friends.

Enrico Caruso remained a highly informal character. Once when Lillian Nordica was about to lift her voice in a love duet with him, he deposited a hot potato in her hand. In Tosca, when Antonio Scotti stooped to pick up the paint brush beneath Cavaradossi's easel, he had to yank at it for minutes--Caruso had nailed it to the floor. Caruso's most celebrated peccadillo led to his arrest on the complaint of a Mrs. Hannah Graham who had run into him at the Central Park Zoo and testified breathlessly: "He insulted me. He brushed against me three times, maybe four times. He . . . He . . ." Caruso was tried for disorderly conduct before an adoring throng in a Yorkville court, found guilty and fined $10.

For years Enrico Caruso carried on a feud against his native Naples. In 1901, after his early European successes, the Neapolitans hissed him. Caruso vowed he would never sing in Naples again, would visit his home only "to eat a plate of spaghetti." He kept his vow. During World War I he was begged to sing at Naples' San Carlo opera house for a Red Cross benefit. Caruso wrote a check for 50,000 lire, but refused to sing.

In December 1920, while singing L'Elisir d'Amore at the Brooklyn Academy, a blood vessel broke in Caruso's throat. A seasoned trouper, he insisted on going on with the show. While stagehands and fellow singers stood in the wings passing handkerchiefs and towels, he finished the first act though bleeding profusely from the mouth. The audience, noticing that something was wrong, demanded that he stop.

Later, apparently fully recovered, Caruso sang four performances, the last on Christmas Eve. The next day he collapsed. His trouble, diagnosed as acute pleurisy, worsened. He had several operations for abscesses of the lungs. Early in the summer of 1921 he sailed for Naples. There, a few weeks later, in a waterfront hotel room from which he could look out on Mt. Vesuvius, Enrico Caruso died. His body, embalmed and buried for two years, was subsequently disinterred, carried in state through the Naples streets to its final resting place in the Campo Santo di Poggioreale cemetery. For several years thereafter the cemetery's gatekeeper was reported to have done a rushing business in tips showing Caruso's body to visiting tourists. In the late '20s the Caruso family put a stop to the tourist traffic, caused a stout slab of marble to be placed over the tomb, locked up the chapel and sequestered the key.

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