A Cadenza for Caruso

by Barbara Paul

  Amato and Caruso exchanged an uneasy glance. They went on. The next time Emmy sang with Amato, she deliberately sang her part a half-tone sharp—with the result that Amato was made to sound flat.

  That was what did it. That was what finally caused the explosion in the orchestra pit. Toscanini simply blew up. The conductor outdid himself. Such an outpouring of invective and sarcasm and vitriol the Metropolitan had never heard before. Toscanini was democratic in his condemnation; he denounced singers, orchestra, stagehands, Gatti-Casazza, and the President of the United States alike.

  Getting bawled out by Arturo Toscanini was never a pleasant experience, but just the same Caruso breathed a small sigh of relief. This was the old Toscanini they all knew and loved! That other Toscanini—the kind, patient one—was a stranger. With a yelling Maestro, Caruso always knew where he stood.

  Toscanini called them imbeciles and ignoramuses and—worst of all—amateurs. Emmy Destinn, whose deliberate off-key singing had proved the final straw, stood impervious to the barrage of fiery abuse emanating from the pit. Gatti-Casazza was on the stage, trying to calm the conductor down. But Toscanini wouldn’t be calmed. He broke his baton in two, hurled the pieces at the stage, and turned on his heel and stomped out.

  “I think rehearsal is over for today,” Amato said shakily.

  Belasco was again dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief. “Do you think the audience will stay for the second act?” he asked no one in particular.

  Gatti-Casazza was looking at his watch. “Well, it is getting late—almost time to quit anyway. Oh, dear!” he lamented, pulling at his beard. “I hope he comes back tomorrow!”

  “Of course he will, Mr. Gatti,” Caruso said. “The Maestro always comes back.”

  The general manager didn’t look so sure. “I’ve never seen him this angry before.”

  “Because he has been keeping it held in for so long. Like a pressure valve building up steam inside a bottle cork.” Caruso knew that wasn’t right but couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

  “He gave me his word,” Gatti-Casazza complained. “He promised me he would not lose his temper even once while we rehearse Fanciulla.”

  “He did?” Caruso was surprised. “Why would he make a promise like that?”

  “Because I asked him to.” Gatti-Casazza glanced over to where Puccini was standing and lowered his voice. “Out of consideration for our composer and his troubles. You understand.”

  So that was why Toscanini had been such a sweetheart up until now. Because Mr. Gatti had made him promise to behave, the same way he’d made Caruso promise. “Perhaps it was too much to ask,” the tenor suggested.

  Everyone was leaving—rather rapidly, in fact. The usual cheery goodbyes were missing. Nobody invited anybody to dinner.

  Caruso hurried the two short blocks to the Hotel Knickerbocker. Even before his bath and massage, he called Ugo into his bedroom for a private talk. “I have decided upon a course of action,” he announced, “and I need your help.”

  Ugo sat down, all eager attention. “What do I do?”

  “The police are keeping it secret that Davila was blackmailing Puccini, at least until the inquest. The only other ones who know about it are you and I.” Caruso thought it best not to mention that he himself had spilled the beans to Pasquale Amato. “Since the police think Puccini killed Davila and we know he did not,” stressing the we, “then it is up to us to find the real killer,”

  Caruso’s emphasis on the pronoun didn’t work. “Are you so sure Mr. Puccini is innocent, Rico?” Ugo asked. “You want him to be innocent, but—”

  “He is innocent, and we will have no more talk about it! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Rico,” Ugo sighed.

  “So. Now if Puccini did not kill him, then someone else did. Correct?”

  “Yes, Rico.”

  “So who is this somebody? Another blackmail victim! Correct?”

  Ugo looked dubious.

  Caruso scowled at him. “Why no ‘Yes, Rico’? Can there not be another blackmail victim? Or two? Or a dozen?”

  The valet began to look interested. “A whole lot of people?”

  “Why not? Luigi Davila may have forged many other letters besides the ones Elvira Puccini is supposed to have written.”

  Ugo thought about that. “Then why do the police not find these other letters when they search Luigi Davila’s office?”

  “Aha!” Caruso pounced. “Because the killer takes all the other letters away with him after he kills Davila!”

  “All but Elvira Puccini’s?”

  “All but those. Perhaps he overlooks them, perhaps he leaves them behind on purpose. To throw suspicion on Puccini.” Caruso sat back in his chair, pleased with his line of reasoning. “Well? What do you think?”

  Ugo mulled it over a long time; then a slow smile began to spread over his face. “I think you are a very smart man, Rico! So what do we do now?”

  “I want you to start asking questions among the other valets and the stagehands at the opera house. But do it subtly. Listen to conversations, try to find out if anyone knows of a dark secret in somebody’s past. See if you can discover anyone who might be vulnerable to blackmail. Servants know these things, and they like to talk about them, yes? The stagehands might know something, but concentrate on the other personal servants. Do you understand?”

  Ugo nodded eagerly, pleased with his assignment. “And you, Rico? What do you do?”

  “I do the same as you, but I do it with the other people at the opera house.” He considered a moment. “And I think I start with that very strange man, Mr. David Belasco.”

  8

  David Belasco had risen early. He’d been neglecting his own work of late; that musical madhouse at Broadway and Thirty-ninth had been taking up all his attention as well as most of his time. Not that he would have had it any other way.

  The Girl of the Golden West was not the first of his plays Puccini had turned into opera; there’d also been Madame Butterfly. But Butterfly-the-opera had premièred in Italy, and Belasco had had no say in its staging—although he’d worked on later productions in London and New York. But now with a world première only a few days away, he could no more stay away from the Metropolitan Opera House than he could do without eating.

  He sat at his desk in his private rooms at the new theatre he had built and named after himself. Box-office receipts for The Concert were holding up well, and his new production at the Hudson Theatre—Nobody’s Widow, starring his best actress, Blanche Bates—showed signs of settling in for a good run. The Return of Peter Grimm would be opening at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston next month. He should be writing, though; he’d found a new French play he thought he could adapt to the American stage without too much difficulty. But that would have to wait until after the end of the year.

  Belasco studied the new contract Blanche Bates was insisting upon. Blanche had created the title role in the original Girl of the Golden West, and now was demanding the moon and the stars. But as long as she continued drawing audiences into the Hudson Theatre, Belasco would give her what she wanted. Within reason, of course. All actors were children, not really knowing what was good for them. But if actors were children, then opera singers were babies. Naive and selfish, but ultimately controllable.

  He thought of the opera’s three leads and laughed to himself. Only Pasquale Amato looked the part he played. But Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn—what an unlikely romantic couple those two made! They were both a little too old and a great deal too heavy for their roles—especially Caruso, who needed to lose a good fifty pounds. But on the operatic stage appearance didn’t seem to count for much; it was only the voice that mattered. Belasco didn’t see why opera should not have both, and had bent all his effort toward creating a semblance of reality on stage.

  But the illusion of reality was hard to maintain with a practical joker like Caruso on the loose. Belasco had said nothing at the time, but he’d been shocked when the prank came to l
ight—gluing the pages of the Bible together! The trick was close to sacrilege; one simply did not treat the Holy Book in so disrespectful a manner. Belasco himself was always careful never even to lay another book on top of the Bible.

  Yet really, he told himself, that was only a minor distraction. The one big problem remaining was that chorus. An unruly bunch, hard to tame; but they were at last beginning to show some restraint. By the time of the première, they might even be doing it right. But in one area of endeavor Belasco had to admit total defeat; he’d failed to teach even one member of the cast how to throw a lasso.

  He got up from the desk and walked through the rooms just for the emotional support his surroundings gave him. His own private stage setting. A feast for the eye, a mélange of objets d’art and antiquarian curiosities intermingled with stage properties from his own theatrical productions. This glorious disarray seldom failed to disconcert the first-time visitor. Belasco didn’t mind; he never objected to anything that put him at an advantage. Visitors—and Belasco did not admit many—often became disoriented in the maze-like arrangement of shelf after shelf of books and collectors’ treasures. And in a suite filled with so much richness and so much busyness, the visitor’s eye was naturally drawn to the one clean-lined, austere thing in the place: himself. Belasco knew well the value of playing against one’s backdrop.

  He stood in front of a full-length mirror in a gilt rococo frame and examined himself critically. The brown eyes were clear, the skin tone was holding up. The silver, sculpted hair looked better than his young-man’s hair had looked. A thickening at the waist was adequately concealed by the ecclesiastical garb he wore. He was still a striking figure, and he knew it. He also knew how to use his appearance and his voice and his mannerisms to create the effect he wanted.

  David Belasco was acting a part. He didn’t know how not to act a part. Even when he was alone, as now, he kept in character most of the time. He’d been accused of posturing once or twice, but he’d brushed the accusations aside. The role he wanted to create was that of a civilized, soft-spoken, wise, self-possessed man of Absolute Authority. A judge to be appealed to. A leader whose orders are followed without question. Belasco liked getting his own way.

  Everyone connected with the theatre—both the legitimate stage and the operatic stage—made a habit of acting offstage as well as on; but few could perform as well as David Belasco. One who came close, Belasco felt, was Arturo Toscanini. Belasco liked Toscanini; he’d sensed a kindred spirit there. He admired the other man’s professionalism, his sensitivity to the music he was conducting, his exercise of authority.

  From the very first rehearsal Belasco had attended, he’d felt that Toscanini too had been acting a part: that of the kindly, understanding father. But while the conductor was calm on the outside, he’d been burning inwardly. So much temperament and passion, kept bottled up like that! But Toscanini had been unable to sustain his role, and the result was the terrible eruption yesterday that had ended the rehearsal prematurely. Belasco’s own control, however, had never slipped, even though he’d been sorely tried at times. Unlike the conductor, he was still in character.

  Belasco was feeling good.

  He ran his hand down one silken panel of a folding oriental screen, enjoying its touch. He’d placed the screen in front of a window seat where he could see without being seen, where he could sit and look out on the world—or at least that part of it that passed by the Belasco Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street. He liked watching the variety of people coming and going beneath his high perch. They were there to be examined.

  One in particular caught his eye. Lantern-jawed, corpulent, ridiculously overdressed. What was Caruso doing here? Belasco stared down at the top of the singer’s curly-brimmed hat as the other man entered the theatre.

  Belasco sat behind his oriental screen and waited for the knock at the door. And waited. And waited. Then he heard the sound of the door handle being turned. The faintest of clicks reached his ear. The door had been opened.

  He looked cautiously around the edge of the screen. There stood Caruso in the entryway, his eyes saucer-sized and his mouth hanging open as he took in his surroundings. Amazement, confusion, admiration, uneasiness, and awe passed in turn across his face as he gazed at all the heaped-up beauty of Belasco’s rooms.

  Belasco smothered a laugh. Was it the Italian temperament to show everything one was feeling, or was it just Caruso’s particular childlike nature? In a moment he would step forward and demand to know why the singer had entered his private rooms without knocking; but for the time being he was enjoying Caruso’s disorientation too much to reveal his presence.

  Caruso didn’t seem to know what to look at first. He cooed and clucked over Belasco’s collection of precious glass. Then he was distracted by a model of the stage setting for The Rose of the Rancho. He looked briefly into the alcove stocked with relics associated with Napoleon—including a lock of the Emperor’s hair. Then he moved off among the maze of shelves. Belasco remembered that Caruso was said to be something of a collector himself; curious, he followed his uninvited visitor.

  Caruso stopped to examine the two dozen different types of daggers he found on display. A chair once used by England’s Henry VIII elicited a long and appreciative ahhhh. The singer avoided a sinister-looking set of black armor and bumped a secret spring with his elbow; a wall panel raised to reveal a lighted recess filled with jeweled rosaries.

  The tenor moved on, trying to take in everything at once. He had trouble tearing himself away from a hearth made of tiles stolen from the Alhambra by slaves who’d labored there. He opened a low Gothic door and peered into a tunnel filled with rare pamphlets. He rounded a corner and exclaimed with startled delight—he’d come upon a small fountain flinging its spray over a pool in which violets, sweet peas, and roses were floating.

  But then Caruso abruptly jerked himself into an almost military posture and made a gesture that seemed to reject all the things he so obviously wanted to linger over. Resolutely he marched back to the desk—where he started going through Belasco’s papers!

  Belasco watched in amazement for two full minutes. When Caruso didn’t find anything of interest on the top of the desk, he started opening the drawers to see what was there. Belasco stepped into view, lowered his voice an octave, and said in his best King Lear manner: “What is the meaning of this, sir?”

  Caruso jumped a foot. “Oh, ah, uh, Mr. Belasco! Uh, I did not know you were here!”

  “Obviously,” Belasco said in a way that made Caruso’s hair rise.

  “I knock,” the tenor said hastily. “I knock but—”

  “You did not knock,” Belasco interrupted coldly. “I was here all the time. And you did not knock. You sneaked in—”

  “I do not sneak!” Caruso’s outrage was almost authentic. “I sometimes move quietly, but I never sneak!”

  “What do you want, Mr. Caruso? Why were you going through my papers?”

  “Papers, uh, that is a mistake. Uh, I hear about your marvelous collection and I want to, uh.” He looked around desperately. “I want to see this!” He grabbed up a Japanese sword.

  Belasco blinked. “That is a stage property from The Darling of the Gods.”

  Caruso hastily put the sword down. “I mean this!” He seized a small figurine of Hercules.

  “Yes, I can see how you might confuse the two,” Belasco said dryly.

  Caruso started backing toward the door. “I come at a bad time—I am so sorry I interrupt you. So many lovely things!”

  Belasco followed him, saying nothing but looking icicles.

  Caruso, on the other hand, was sweating buckets. “Someday you must come see my collection. We compare, yes?” His hand found the door handle behind him. “So nice to see you—good day!”

  “Mr. Caruso!” An iceberg speaking.

  The tenor wilted. “Yes?”

  “My Hercules?”

  Caruso thrust the figurine into Belasco’s outstretched hands, opened the door, a
nd fled.

  “Yes, we are doubling the price of admission,” Gatti-Casazza was saying on the telephone. “But that is only for the première, you understand.” He listened a moment to the gentleman from The New York Times on the other end of the line. “No, I do not know what the scalpers are getting … what’s that?… Thirty times the box-office price! That’s outrageous.”

  Secretly, Mr. Gatti was pleased; scalpers’ prices were the most reliable indicator of public interest that he knew. And he did not tell the reporter that if the première was a success, he was planning to quadruple the admission prices for the second performance.

  He brought the conversation to an end and hung up, satisfied. Two days until dress rehearsal! The opera was coming along nicely; now that Toscanini had had his temper tantrum and Caruso had played his practical joke, there should be no more high jinks.

  A slight movement in the open doorway of his office caught his attention. He looked up to see one eye peering at him around the doorframe. “Yes?” he said sharply.

  An embarrassed Enrico Caruso stepped into view. “Uh, good morning, Mr. Gatti. I come to see how you are feeling today.”

  “I am well, Enrico, thank you,” Gatti-Casazza answered, puzzled.

  “That is good,” the tenor smiled, and left.

  The general manager shrugged and got back to work. A note from the printer, saying the programs were ready—good. Mr. Gatti approved payment of a few bills. The bleachers still had to be put up at the carriage entrance on Thirty-ninth Street; the press needed a place to stand where they could note who came through and what they were wearing. He telephoned the florist to find out what time of day the curtain-call bouquets for Fanciulla’s three principals would be delivered. Then he read a memo from the house manager—oh dear, the plumbing again! He’d better see what that was all about.

  He found the plumbers at work in the gentlemen’s washroom backstage. “How bad is it this time?” he asked the man who seemed to be in charge.

  “Not so bad,” the man answered. “Coupla pipe fittings need replacing, thass all. We hadda turn the water off.”