The dapper, slightly-stooped man who stood with a little black bag in his hand, ringing the elevator bell on the tenth floor of Manhattan's Hotel Vanderbilt one afternoon last week was nervous. Everything was in order in the room he had left. Trunks were packed with costumes, photographs, stacks of letters bound with rubber bands brittle with age. There remained to distinguish the hotel room from hundreds of others ready to be abandoned only a photograph of big-chested Enrico Caruso in a white-piped vest and a little bronze head which Caruso had made of himself. The man who waited nervously for the elevator had the hardest afternoon of his life ahead of him. He was Baritone Antonio Scotti, one of the last of the old-time opera-singers. That afternoon after 33 years at the Metropolitan he was singing his farewell.
Passing through the Metropolitan's narrow stage door Scotti managed a smile for photographers who waylaid him. He shook hands gravely with hulking Giulio Gatti-Casazza who had made his debut as manager of the Scala in Milan the night Scotti first sang there 34 years ago. Then he went upsteps to a dingy dressing-room, locked the door, took pictures of his long-dead father and mother from the little black bag and sat them down before a mirror. Slowly he smeared his face with yellow paint, donned a snakey-cued China-man's wig. For that last afternoon he had chosen to sing in Franco Leoni's L'Oracolo, a one-act opera, second rate to be sure, but one which only he had sung at the Metropolitan, one which exhibited his talent for acting and made no strenuous demands on his voice.
La Boheme was given first. Scotti paced the floor, adjusted his wig, peered closely into the mirror. The makeup concealed the signs of his 67 years, the pouches under his eyes, the two deeply chiseled lines which, under the paint, linked his beaklike nose with the corners of his tired mouth.
Intermission came with its clutter and shuffle of scenery. While he waited for the callboy's knock, Scotti tried to smoke one of his long, monogrammed cigarets, but his mouth was too parched. He had never been so nervous, he decided, not even on that first night in Malta 43 years ago when it had seemed fantastic that he, son of a Neapolitan grocer, intended for the priesthood, should be singing in opera. Finally the knock came. . . .
The curtain went up on a twisted street in San Francisco's Chinatown. Scotti slunk down the steps from a rickety frame house and the performance could have stopped then & there. People started cheering. Orchestra musicians rose to their feet. Scotti, who through all his long career has remained an artist, took one brief, graceful bow, reverted quickly to Chim-Fen, the opium dealer. People forgot that the dark hollow voice was only a shell of what it used to be. Chim-Fen's sinister shadow filled the stage while he crept up on the child he wanted to kidnap, buried a hatchet in the neck of the man who found him out. When his own sleek cue was finally twisted around his neck, his murderer bolstered him against a lamp post, talked to him casually until a policeman approached on his rounds. The policeman passed. The body fell to the ground with a gruesome, final thud.