The (Many) Loves of Enrico Caruso
Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, Part 5
Welcome to Part 5 of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ll be exploring opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off. Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for full effect.
As The Great Caruso lays it out, Enrico Caruso met Dorothy Park Benjamin shortly before his Met debut. The heavily-fictionalized 1951 biopic presents the introduction as a comedy of errors between Caruso, what’s seemingly a teenaged Dorothy (though the sailor dress school uniform doesn’t do much to make 23-year–old Ann Blyth look so young), and her father, the aristocratic and autocratic Park Benjamin. After a tepid Met debut in Aida, Park tells Giulio Gatti-Casazza that it was a mistake to have hired “the peasant,” and Caruso (in the room at the time) declares he will never sing again in America.
Dorothy convinces Caruso (played by Mario Lanza) to sing again that night in La Bohème, and to reconsider his threat to leave America (it should be noted that, in 1951, many of MGM’s musical movies carried subtle, and not-so-subtle, pro-American sentiment). “Thank you, piccina,” Caruso says to Dorothy, before clarifying, “that means ‘little girl.’”
Caruso’s Rodolfo is a success, and as he’s whisked off to set sail on a world tour, he calls out to Dorothy, “Please don’t forget me!” When they next meet, at a Met Christmas party (Caruso plays Santa for a gaggle of children), Dorothy is grown up, wearing a chic fur-trimmed suit and her hair coiffed. “The little piccina has grown up,” says Lanza, dressed as Caruso, dressed as Santa.
That afternoon, he takes her to a rustic Italian restaurant and asks her to marry him. “How do you know your mind so quickly?” Dorothy asks.
“I think I know it since you were a piccina in school,” Caruso replies in accented English. “So I wait til you grow up, and now you are grown up.” Dorothy is won over.
It’s a wholesome portrait of the Caruso marriage, albeit one that trends more towards Lolita than La Bohème when you consider that the real-life Dorothy Caruso was only 10 when her future husband made his Met debut. (Caruso was 30. To further fact-check MGM, he sang Rigoletto, the performance was a success, and the general manager of the Met at the time of his debut was not Gatti-Casazza, but Heinrich Conried.)
But it was a different inaccuracy that landed MGM in court when Caruso's sons, Rodolfo and Enrico Caruso Jr., successfully sued the studio over an “offense to their honor and private life.” In presenting a wholesome biopic of one of the most famous people of the early 20th Century, MGM had ignored the existence of Rodolfo and Enrico, Jr. One possible reason was because the two were born to Ada Botti Giachetti, who wasn’t married to Caruso at the time — and who had left her husband to be with the tenor.
She was just one of the many women whose names would be attached to Caruso before he married in the final years of his life, only to be discarded in the afterlife of his legacy.
While described by journalists and biographers as a “significantly” older woman compared to Caruso, Ada Giachetti was born in Florence in 1876, three years after the father of her children.
“She was vivacious, always exuberant, and, according to her sister and others who knew her, temperamental and prone to occasional hysteria,” wrote Enrico Caruso, Jr. in his chronicle of his father’s (and, in many ways, his own) life. It’s a description that echoes the era that led to his mother’s birth, building on the foundations (as we saw in Beautiful Singing, Hysterical Women) of Freud and gendered psychology, and echoing the descriptions of Elvira Puccini.
Ada and Enrico met in 1897, when she was 21 and he was 24 and both were contracted to sing La Traviata and La Bohème at Livorno’s Politearna. At this point, Ada was already married to the merchant Gino Affortunato Paolo Botti, and the Gazzetta dei Teatri had already heralded her as a “most worthy artist who takes giant strides toward becoming a celebrity.”
Enrico, meanwhile, had begun his career just two years earlier and was still struggling to make ends meet (one legend involves him having publicity photos taken while wearing a bedsheet as his one clean shirt was in the wash). The previous year, he had become engaged to Salerno impresario Giuseppe Grassi’s daughter Giuseppina, while under contract at Giuseppe’s opera house. Both engagements soon ended, with Caruso breaking it off with Giuseppina due in part to an affair he’d had with a ballet dancer in Palermo. When he was leaving for his performances in Livorno, the conductor of that production warned Caruso: “Look here, rapscallion. You are going to sing with the most beautiful woman I have ever known. Be careful not to fall in love with her.”
The Giachettis owned an apartment in Livorno, and Caruso rented a room from them for the run of his contract. But it wasn’t necessarily Ada that first caught Caruso’s eye; instead, it was her seventeen-year-old sister Rina. Living with Ada and their mother in the apartment, Rina took pleasure in washing his shirts and ironing his pants, which in turn charmed Enrico. The feeling was apparently mutual, but Rina rejected his advances if he wouldn’t first go to the altar. Caruso, still smarting from the break-up with Giuseppina, had no interest in this.
Rina Giachetti, photographed by Mario Nunes Vais (date unknown).
Ada was less impressed with her costar, reportedly telling the conductor of their Traviata: “If you think I am going to ruin my reputation singing with this little tenorino, you must be out of your mind!”
Something must have softened between Traviata and La Bohème, however. While Rina traveled to Florence, Ada and Enrico took their onstage love affairs offstage, and Rina returned to Livorno to subsequent heartbreak. Ada reminded her sister that she was still a teenager and told her to forget about Enrico, but it was just the beginning of a tumultuous and torturous relationship that would involve all three singers for the next decade.
Enrico and Ada’s affair follows a pattern similar to that of Giacomo and Elvira Puccini’s some decades earlier. Ada became pregnant with Caruso’s child, a pregnancy that Botti believed to be his own. When Ada, at the end of the pregnancy, told her husband it was not his and asked for a separation, he threatened to keep her from seeing their own son, Lelio, ever again. The encounter also turned violent, with Botti beating the eight-months-pregnant Ada. As Caruso later wrote to Puccini, Ada left with nothing but the clothes on her back. (Divorce in Italy, as noted in Maria, Medea, and Midsommar, would take a long time to catch on.)
For his part, Botti made good on his promise, keeping Lelio away from his mother. And while he continued to harass Ada and Enrico, the tenor — approaching world fame — purportedly gave him a cash payment to leave them alone for good. Enrico Jr. says, if this story is true, as it has been considered in his family, then “Botti in effect sold his wife to Caruso.”
Miniatures of Ada Botti Giachetti and Enrico Caruso (via the Villa Caruso in Lastra di Signa)
In July of 1898, Ada gave birth to Rodolfo Caruso, named for the poet in La Bohème, the work that kindled their romance. However, since Ada was still technically married to Botti, she was prevented from being listed on the birth certificate of a child with Caruso listed as the father. Rodolfo’s birth certificate therefore shows a “n.n,” or “not known,” in the space where the mother’s name normally went. As Caruso’s career began to eclipse Ada’s, she became less known as a soprano making giant strides toward becoming a celebrity, and more as the woman behind a great man.
When Caruso was arrested in 1906 for allegedly groping a woman in the Central Park Zoo’s monkey house, Ada would be alluded to in press reports detailing one defense claim that Caruso had only been to the Park twice before, and one time was with “his wife.” When it was claimed in Caruso’s ensuing trial (which left the tenor convicted and fined the equivalent of $275 today) that he had been thrown out of Central Park for misconduct the year before, a New Jersey man came forward, claiming he was the singer’s “brother-in-law” on the Giachetti side and that it had been him who was thrown out of the Park once before. Considering the family trees, this appears to be patently false.
Caruso wired Ada, still in Europe, and urged her to ignore the Monkey House press. But by the time he returned to Europe the following year, their relationship dynamic had changed even more significantly than it had over the last decade of their courtship. Even if Caruso in that incident was innocent, it wouldn’t have been an unbelievable charge to Ada, who had seen her partner with other women, including what Enrico Jr. described as the “predictable if not inevitable” affair he would have with her sister Rina, whose star had been on the rise in 1906 just as Ada’s was retreating.
“Consummating their long-time love for each other must have had enormous emotional meaning for them both. Enrico had many love affairs, for women were only too eager to be seduced by Caruso,” wrote the tenor’s son, adding a line that somewhat echoed The Great Caruso’s love story: “But Rina was someone very special: Rina represented a suppressed desire, a great, unfulfilled passion held in check for nine years.”
In 1908, Caruso once again made international headlines, beginning on August 13 with the announcement in the Times: “Wife Leaves Caruso?; Trieste Newspaper Alleges She Has Gone to England with Young Friend” That “young friend,” as later revealed, was the family chauffeur. The next day, however, Caruso took control of the narrative, telling the press he was “very glad” that Ada eloped, a story that made the front page of the New York Times.
The article opened by calling Caruso “nothing if not a philosopher” in response to his claim that Ada’s abandonment was “the very thing he desired.”
“Life with her was impossible. I told her so several weeks ago,” Caruso explained at the time. “I expect my wife to be a woman who can sympathize with me — a woman of ability, of understanding, of appreciation. A month ago in Italy, I told her how she had fallen below the expectations I had formed of her, and bade her begone.”
Caruso even shook off the idea that this would merit press for him. “I am not to blame. My friends in New York can be sure there is no stain upon my character. Nothing immoral can be laid at my door.”
Another Caruso biopic: Vanessa Incontrada and Martina Stella as the Giachetti sisters in the 2012 Italian miniseries, Caruso: Voice of Love
The fallout of Ada’s relationship with Caruso led to revelation that the pair were not, in fact, legally married. This complicated matters when Ada returned to New York in 1909 to ask Caruso for $50,000 (in 2020 parlance, more than $1.4 million) to take care of their two sons — Rodolfo and Enrico, Jr. The fight that ensued in Caruso’s hotel room made headlines the next day.
That season, Caruso only sang two-thirds of the productions he had been contracted to perform, citing health issues with the implication that they were linked to the stress of his romantic life. Musical America, in reporting on these cancellations, picked up the hint and blamed “the sensational arrival of the woman with whom he had been living for some years” for the tenor being unable to keep up with a performance schedule that could demand up to six shows a week.
Musical America questioned “whether the great tenor will ever be himself again, which would be regretted the world over, not only because Caruso is incomparable in many parts and has a magnificent voice, but because he is a liberal, kindly, well-disposed man, generous to a fault and in that, a great contrast to some foreign singers and musicians, who come here to get every dollar they can and take it away with them to Europe, while they damn this country.”
Ada then sued Caruso, alleging that he had been interfering with her business in Milan, including intercepting her mail and costing her a contract in New York. After cross-examining 100 witnesses, the charges against Caruso were dropped, and Ada now found herself detained in the High Court of Justice, charged with libel.
The parallels between this case and Caruso’s innocence in Italy, compared with how his New York trial played out in New York, are strikingly similar (as are many aspects of the Monkey House Incident) to the transatlantic attitudes towards today’s #MeToo movement. Whether Ada was in fact lying or not, she was — much like the woman Caruso allegedly grabbed in 1906 — now the one on trial. Caruso shrugged. “She has brought it on herself,” he said.
Caruso found himself back in court in the summer of 1912 in the trial against Ada, who herself was in Buenos Aires, telegraphing the court to let them know that she was unable to get a boat from Argentina back to Italy. While his trio of lawyers explained to the court the “poignant suffering he had undergone through this unhappy love affair and the cruel revenge that followed,” Caruso “wept impressively” according to Milan’s Corriere della Sera.
When the trial picked back up in October, he was back on the tearful offensive, breaking down when a witness suggested that Ada had never loved Enrico, but could prove to the court that Enrico still loved her. Very quickly, the reports seem to abandon any discussion of libel or slander and instead the real trial seems to be the end of Ada and Caruso’s affair. When the suit was decided in his favor, he told the press he only sued “to vindicate his honor.” Giachetti was sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of $200. She returned to Argentina in order to evade jail time, and would never return to her homeland.
At this point, audiences were used to seeing Caruso in courthouses, litigating his romantic affairs during the Met’s off-seasons. He had been in the same place one year earlier, when Elisa Ganelli, a shop assistant in Milan sued him for breach of promise — similar to Puccini’s affair with Corinna and the legal trouble she threatened him when he refused to marry her.
Caruso reportedly first met Elisa at the glove counter where she worked. Their relationship escalated to him buying her expensive dresses and even paying for her tuition and introducing her to friends as his fiancée. But when Elisa and her father traveled to Berlin to meet with Caruso (on his dime), he seemed to have cooled.
Prior to the legal action, which Caruso initially welcomed as free publicity, he had given the girl payoffs as high as $2,500, and offered her $200 for the return of the 60 letters he had written her over the years, one of the final missives reading, as Caruso summarized it: “I cannot have a woman like you, and if you are a good girl you [will] give me back my letters and I give you back yours, because I cannot be married with anybody.” He denied that he had ever proposed to her and, while the suit was thrown out of court, the judge ordered Caruso to pay all of the legal fees.
A notice of Caruso’s marriage to Dorothy Park Benjamin in Ohio’s Lima Daily News, 1918. The sub-headline notes: “Has Grown Son But Stated He Had Never Been Married Before.” The lede reads: “Enrico Caruso has added another romance to his already long list.”
Prior to his marriage to Dorothy in 1918 (just a few years before his death in 1921), Caruso would be the subject of many rumors of marriage — as well as several legal actions related to alleged promises.
In the Times, he laughed off a 1911 rumor that he had proposed to soprano Emma Trentini (Trentini fired back via the same paper, calling Caruso a “pig” with “the face of a sponge”).
In 1914, Mildred Meffert, whose longstanding affair with Caruso was, in Enrico Jr.’s words, “more lasting and more dramatic than Father's casual dalliances,” sued for $100,000 over a broken engagement. She had left her first husband with the expectation that she would become Signora Caruso.
If the names of Ada Giachetti, Rina Giachetti, Elisa Ganelli, or Mildred Meffert are recalled today, it’s usually in the same breath as their connection to one of the most famous men of the 20th Century. Before the digitization of archives like the Times and Corriere (both of which contributed heavily to piecing this story together), the most likely place one would see these names was the amber-like preservation of biographers like Michael Scott (whose own reliability as a narrator is suspect), or Enrico Jr.
Enrico Jr. is comparatively even-keeled about his father, and to his credit carries a great deal of empathy towards his estranged mother. In one poignant scene, he wonders if Ada ever Enrico’s subsequent performances in Buenos Aires, where she remained until her death. He wonders if she wondered about his career and the progression of his instrument as he became a global icon. Writing about this scene for the London Review of Books, Wayne Koestenbaum likens the image to “the path of mimetic desire: Enrico Jr. imagines his lost mother Ada listening to her lost husband Caruso. For the bereft, fantasising son, the improbable scene is the richest.”
The improbable scene being the richest is an apt shorthand to capture much of the Caruso story, fact and myth. As Ada languished in Buenos Aires, Rina retired to Rome. Neither of them had a media-rich legacy like their former lover’s (who said his recordings for RCA Victor would be “his biography”). Neither of them had the means, the message, or the medium to frame their own biographies, despite both being renowned artists in their time.
The love of Caruso’s life became Dorothy Park Benjamin, a New York socialite 20 years his junior. Their daughter, Gloria, superseded Rodolfo and Enrico Jr. and inherited most of her father’s estate.
Dorothy Caruso with Gloria (right) at the Lido, Venice. Pictured with her second husband, Captain Ernest Ingram, and their daughter, Jacqueline (in the crib).
For later generations of singers, the image of Caruso became largely influenced by his 1951 biopic, with many of his most infamous headlines receding into the background. Among those who have cited The Great Caruso as an early career influence are José Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti, Jerry Hadley, Joseph Calleja, Roberto Alagna — and Plácido Domingo. While Rodolfo and Enrico Jr. won their suit against MGM, even they recognized the film’s merits.
In the interest of not judging a 1951 film by 2020 standards, it’s important to note that this was still the era of the Hays Code, which regulated what films could or couldn't show, including “Man and woman in bed together; Deliberate seduction of girls;… [and] Excessive or lustful kissing.” In this era, it would have been impossible to paint a full picture of the singer that would have been approved for distribution. Much like the art form Caruso took to offstage, it’s not a portrait so much as it is a caricature.
The problem with this is that this caricature has remained one of the most accessible reference points for Caruso’s life, and at times has been taken as photorealistic. Rendering a complex, nuanced, three-dimensional person as a character, much like the operatic heroes he sang, and ignoring his flaws, both reinforces the power that men at Caruso’s level had to control the narrative of their lives, and perpetuates what Marisa Tomei would later describe as a cycle of mutual misperception. with the public.
What we know now is that Caruso used that cycle to his advantage. In 1913, accused of ogling an American woman in a London hotel, he replied: “I am Caruso. I do what I like.”
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