Sour notes: lip-synching, lazy, lewd Pavarotti
Doubleday will publish "The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary," in October. But advance copies have made their way to several media outlets, including The Seattle Times, and it's abundantly clear that Breslin's memoir will be a "must" read for opera buffs and Pavarotti fans.
Written with New York Times critic Anne Midgette, "The King and I" intersperses wicked and occasionally affectionate musings on Pavarotti with general insults on the great singers of yesterday and today. This could only be written by a man with nothing to fear: an impresario at the end of a career that has made him (by several accounts) the most hated man in the music business.
Music lovers' jaws will drop to read descriptions of soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (who looked like "a cleaning woman"), Schwarzkopf's husband and record producer Walter Legge ("really a big jerk"), diva Joan Sutherland ("pretty dopey") and rival tenor Placido Domingo ("In his dreams, Placido never had a voice like Pavarotti").
Breslin knew them all; he was PR agent and/or manager to a client list that also included Carol Vaness, Marilyn Horne, Itzhak Perlman, Leonard Slatkin, Georg Solti and many others. But the man who made him famous — and vice versa — was of course Pavarotti, whom he served (and vice versa) for 36 years. As the book's title makes clear, theirs was often a love/hate relationship, particularly in the later, post-Three-Tenors phase of Pavarotti's career when success had gone to the most famous singer's head. The manager and the tenor officially split two years ago, in a career divorce that made as many headlines as Pavarotti's marital divorce from his long-suffering wife, Adua.
Breslin creates quite a portrait of Pavarotti, claiming that he is writing "the story of a very beautiful, simple, lovely guy who turned into a very determined, aggressive and somewhat unhappy superstar." Once success comes to Lucky Luciano, though, the book portrays him as the ultimate in self-indulgence: so lazy that he insists on being chauffeured one block from his apartment to the dentist, and such a skirt-chaser that he once successfully persuaded an attractive female interviewer to conduct the interview lying alongside him on a bed, with the tape recorder placed on his ample tummy.
Everywhere the tenor went, his own food accompanied him — usually around 32 pieces of baggage with pots, pans, utensils, pasta, Porterhouse steaks, a prosciutto slicer, an espresso machine, containers of olive oil (which once leaked all over the Ritz Carlton's carpet). He packed desk supplies, medical supplies and, finally, music ("Of course, Luciano never actually touched any of that stuff," says Breslin of the music).
Breslin tells us that Pavarotti couldn't read music, lip-synched his concerts when tired, was ruled by superstitions (he dreaded the number 17 and the color purple), and surrounded himself with obliging women he termed "my harem." The manager's physical descriptions of his "beached whale" superstar client are most unflattering: Pavarotti constantly rubbed burnt cork over his balding pate and his graying beard, a temporary fix that rubbed off on every hotel pillow. Mulling over the nude tenor's attributes as they both sat in a steam room, Breslin declares him "hardly the answer to a maiden's prayer."
Among the funniest portions of "The King and I" are those devoted to Pavarotti's ill-fated silver-screen debut in the 1982 romantic comedy "Yes, Giorgio" — a bomb that made most moviegoers say, "No, Luciano." Pavarotti, who yearned to be taken seriously as an actor, didn't want audiences to laugh at his performance, a fact that made filming a comedy considerably more difficult.
Reading Breslin's book is a little depressing, especially when you encounter the final postscript: a lengthy and very kindly commentary by Pavarotti himself, who at least keeps his dignity in his remarks. Both men were money-mad, and together they took the fateful decision to press forward into huge amplified arena concerts that made tons of money but cheapened the tenor's artistic credentials. Breslin, who likens the job of promoting the tenor to selling soap, can rest assured that he helped create a PR phenomenon that made his client a household name — but it looks increasingly likely that both men lost their souls in the process.
Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com
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