Robert Merrill, Luciano Pavarotti, Jan Peerce, Eleanor Steber, and Richard Tucker

Although seemingly indifferent to his own celebrity, Robert Merrill has been the subject of accolades from Jussi Björling and Lauritz Melchior to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. On one occasion, however, Merrill admitted finding himself speechless when he was introduced to another artist he had long admired but had never seen in person. The chance introduction occurred in Italy in the early 1950s, when Merrill visited Florence with Joseph A. Gimma, husband of soprano Licia Albanese. A self-made business magnate with an international reputation as an investment banker and patron of the arts, Gimma was on a first-name basis with power brokers on both sides of the Atlantic. (When he passed away in 1990 at the age of eighty-three, former presidents Ford and Nixon were among the pallbearers at his funeral.) After taking Merrill to a race track in Florence, Gimma was soon speaking Italian with a well-dressed older man while Merrill, a few feet away, was waiting for the next race to begin. As the conversation continued, Merrill noticed that the distinguished-looking older man's attention was occasionally diverted by apparent strangers who approached him respectfully and wished him well, which the man would acknowledge with a nod of his head. After several more minutes of animated dialogue, Gimma glanced at Merrill and realized that he hadn't introduced him. Wanting to rectify that, Gimma put his hand on Merrill's shoulder and said apologetically, "Oh, Bob, I'm sorry—let me introduce you to my dear friend, Titta Ruffo." Years later, when he relayed the incident to me in a 1983 interview, Merrill maintained he had no idea what he said to the legendary baritone. "I sputtered 'hello' or something, but mostly I remember just staring at him. I kept trying to find the words, but all I could do was gawk." Later, when I confirmed the incident in a telephone conversation with Gimma, he recalled it with a laugh. "Bob Merrill looked like a deer in the headlights," he said. "He couldn't seem to talk, so I finally said to Ruffo in Italian, 'Bob's a little shy.'"

* * *

Having had the benefit, not once but twice, of working briefly with Luciano Pavarotti for the forewords he contributed to two of my books, I had momentary glimpses into the complex life he led. What I found particularly intriguing about him was his almost total lack of pretense. Although I had seen him in Rigoletto at the Metropolitan in the 1972-73 season, I didn't meet him until the late 1970s, when his likeness was beginning to adorn the covers of Time, Newsweek, People, and almost every other magazine of the decade. Through Herbert H. Breslin, whom Pavarotti unfailingly introduced as his manager and friend, and with the assistance of Pavarotti's then-secretary, Anna Maria Verdi, I arranged to interview the tenor after a concert he sang in Philadelphia. While I expected him to be fatigued, especially after four encores beyond his printed program, he seemed neither tired nor edgy when his secretary phoned my hotel room to say he was ready for our session.

Although the executive suite in which he was staying was a dozen floors above the small room I had reserved in the same hotel, he offered to come to mine for "a change of scenery," as he put it. Despite the fact that the cramped room had no furnishings other than two double beds, a chest of drawers, and a nightstand, Pavarotti made himself comfortable on the edge of one of the beds while Ms. Verdi and my wife and I sat opposite him on the other bed. In the ensuing interview, most of which focused on his Olympian regard for Rosa Ponselle, he spoke candidly about his own voice compared with hers. "She has the brown voice, the voice we all want but we can't...