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Reducing Diet. Lanza, who once weighed close to 300 Ibs., peeled down to a svelte 169 for his first movie, 1949's That Midnight Kiss; that time, Director Norman Taurog kept a scale on the set and weighed him in like a jockey every morning. His weight went up in 1950's The Toast of New Orleans, and again in his latest picture. "I gained weight on purpose during those pictures," insists Lanza, who is sensitive on the subject. "I wanted to look like Caruso, didn't I? What do they want to have to do—put a pillow in my middle?"
As long as he eats the way he does between pictures, such mechanical fakery should never be necessary. Lanza's idea of dieting, based on his own theory that proteins can add no weight, is to pile chicken legs, half-pound chunks of rare steak and a mound of barbecued kidneys on his plate, devour them and then heap on a second helping. For breakfast, he holds down to a steak and four to six eggs. He usually skips lunch. With great effort ("I go crazy"), he resists the spaghetti, ravioli and pizza he dearly loves, and the beer he loves scarcely less. In the old days, Lanza once polished off 40 pieces of fried chicken at a sitting, and washed them down with a quart of eggnog.
His passion for food is only one of Mario's freely indulged appetites. "All my life I liked fun," he explodes. "I'm young and alive. I like people with heart. Even today when people get gloomy around me, I swear in high C and smash a glass against the wall and say, 'Let's get going! You're fracturing me with this misery.' " Once, in a moment of high spirits, he dispelled all the misery in the immediate vicinity by bursting out of his studio dressing room, clad only in an athletic supporter, and raced hilariously around the set, while girls fled in all directions. Though Mario's literary preferences lean to body-building and movie-fan magazines, his uninhibited zest for startling pranks sometimes seems inspired by the gustier tales of Chaucer.
Tears of Gratitude. Mario likes the grand gesture, whether he is in a temper tantrum or a mood of warmhearted generosity. When he learned that Louis B. Mayer, cofounder and chief of the M-G-M lot, seemed to be on his way out, Lanza remembered that Mayer had fought an almost lone battle to get The Great Caruso made. He telephoned Mayer to express concern and ask whether he could help the man long ranked as Hollywood's No. 1 executive. Mayer—as Lanza recalls the incident—wept tears of gratitude.
When the mood is on him, Lanza, can gorge his ego as freely as his stomach, and his studio bosses have sometimes tried needling him to deflate his head as well as his hide. Whether such needling does him much good is a question. Lanza hungers for praise of his voice, and, though he gets plenty, from 500 fan letters a day and from the personal entourage of nine which he rules like a comic-opera Latin American dictator, he also supplies it himself. From idolizing Enrico Caruso as far back as his childhood, he has passed through the stages of imitating Caruso's style, impersonating him in the movies and, finally, patronizing him in interviews.