Music: Emotionated Singer

Enrico Caruso, probably the most popular singer of all time, lived a life as tempestuous, verbena-scented and romantic as any Verdi libretto. He was already a mature (45) and wealthy idol (and the father of two illegitimate sons) when he met convent-reared Dorothy Park Benjamin, courted her under the disapproving eye of her blue-blooded U.S. father, married her and made her one of America’s most toasted women. With operatic fervor, he plunged into his new role: the impassioned husband and father.

This week Mrs. Caruso, a handsome, white-haired woman in her early 50s, will publish the story of her three-year marriage to the bombastic Italian opera king (Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death; Simon and Schuster, $2.75). Wisely, she made no changes in the picturesque, Italian-English in which Caruso brought her his daily dramas.

“A newspaper [in Montreal] published a critic and not so nice like every one else. . . . Immagine, this said that I … am lower of … Julia Culp!” From Havana he wrote: “… A newspaper say a good thinks and in the same day say bad thinks.” His love letters might have been a literal translation of an aria: “My Big Piece of Gold,” he wrote from tour, “you make me feel so emotionated that I start to cry again! I reed you and skratce my head because it seams that all my breans . . . is full of you.” Of five-month-old Gloria: “Then she look like me? I dont like because I am offly ogly and always . . . hope to made another yourself!” From Mexico City he promised: “. . . Never more I will leave you. When I came back I will bring you to a plumber and let him put a ring which will enchain your leg to mine.” When he learned that his wife’s $500,000 case of jewels had been stolen, he wrote cheerfully: “Think if they had stoled Gloria!” In Fort Worth he refused to commit himself on exactly where he was: “. . . In an editorial . . . they criticise me as I never know that there was a State calling Texas … I am not obliged to know the name of all the United States states.”

The fastidious Caruso, who bathed twice daily and sprayed himself and his surroundings with verbena scent, said of a not-so-fastidious diva: “Ai me! It is terrible to sing with one who does not bathe, but to be emotionated over one who breathes garlic is impossible. I hope the public observe not my lack of feeling ”

For Dorothy the light opera turned to tragedy in December 1920, when Caruso sang L’Elisir d’Amore at the Brooklyn Academy and a blood vessel burst in his throat. On Christmas eve he sang La Juive at the Metropolitan, on Christmas day he was ill with acute pleurisy. By spring he seemed to recover, and Dorothy took him home to Naples, where he died on Aug. 1.*

When she agreed to do a book, the publishers sent a girl ghost writer to Mrs. Caruso’s Florentine drawing room in Manhattan. Caruso’s grand piano, his 16th-Century Madonna and Mrs. Caruso’s story were too much for the girl ghost: she kept weeping over her work for two weeks. Finally Mrs. Caruso said: “I decided to write the book myself. While I wrote I could smell the verbena just as though he were here. . . . Those failures [her two marriages since Caruso’s death] were no one’s fault. . . . Death had not ended my marriage to Enrico.”

* Caruso’s body was displayed under glass in a white marble sarcophagus for eight years until Mrs. Caruso appealed to the Italian Government, had the casket closed.