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Actually, young Cocozza lived in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood, where his parents, Antonio and Maria Cocozza, had a six-room house and brought up their only child with pampering indulgence. The elder Cocozza, a decorated World War I combat veteran on a total disability pension, is a semi-invalid; his wife worked as a seamstress in the Army quartermaster depot. Freddy, as everyone called their son, was a spoiled, reckless kid: one of his teachers still remembers him with a shudder as "one of the biggest bums that ever came into the public-school system."
"I must have been a little bastard," the grownup Freddy candidly admits, "but I was always the leader." What bothered his teachers more than the way he flunked courses was such extracurricular activity as yelling obscenities from the auditorium balcony, or commandeering textbooks from other pupils and selling them back for two bits apiece, "way below wholesale cost," as one of the old gang puts it. Conscious even then of his big voice, he liked to sneak up behind victims in the school corridors and blat a loud note into their ears. Southern High expelled him within two months of graduation. As Mario tells the story, it was because he socked a teacher for slurring his Italian extraction. By then, Freddy weighed 250 Ibs., a blubbery fact that did not prevent him from cutting a wide swath among the local girls.
Breakfast in Bed. From his earliest years, living near a record shop that blared Italian opera into the street all day, Freddy was an opera fan and a tireless listener to his father's own large collection of records. At seven, he once played a Caruso record 27 times at a single sitting. But it was not until he was about 19, after dabbling unsuccessfully with piano lessons, that he began to take his own voice seriously. One summer day, listening to records in his room, he burst into a duet with Caruso. His father was a thrilled eavesdropper. After talking it over, the family decided that Freddy must go to a voice teacher and develop his talent.
He went to Irene Williams, a former operatic singer, who gave him a lesson every other day for two years. Teacher Williams, who is now suing Lanza for breach of contract, was convinced that he had great possibilities, but she found him a lazy pupil, unwilling to train seriously. Since his mother had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to go to work, Freddy's father would serve him breakfast in bed. "Sometimes," recalls the teacher, "he'd be barely awake when he came for his lesson at 2 in the afternoon. I used to chide him for being so lazy while his mother worked so hard. 'Well,' he would answer, 'she likes to.' "