Date sent: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 12:32:00 EST
Subject: Caruso's daughter
To: vocalist
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

Dear List,

I found this on the Opera Oasis--those that are interested in the great
singers of the past might like to know about this footnote in vocal history.


December 18, 1999


Gloria Caruso Murray, Artist and Daughter of Tenor, Dies at 79
By WILLIAM H. HONAN

Gloria Caruso Murray, a visual artist who was the last surviving child of
Enrico Caruso, died Dec. 5 at St. Luke's Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. She
was 79 and had briefly tried to live up to the musical world's sentimental
fantasy that she had inherited her father's vocal abilities.

She died of cancer, said Aldo Mancusi, curator of the Caruso Museum in
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Only hours after his daughter's birth on Dec. 18, 1919, at the Knickerbocker
Hotel just a stone's throw from the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York,
Caruso, then the most famous operatic tenor in the world, exuberantly tossed
the girl into the air, peered into her mouth and announced, "Ah, she has the
vocal cords, just like her Daddy!"

A year and a half later, Caruso was dead at 48 -- a loss that nourished a
popular fantasy that his child would also have an extraordinary voice.

At age 7, when she and her mother returned to New York from a vacation in
Europe, a New York newspaper ran the headline "Gloria Caruso, Here With a
Voice" and pronounced her "a potential opera star of the first magnitude."

The next year she made her first record. At 11, she made her first public
appearance, delivering a radio address on behalf of a charity headed by
President Herbert Hoover. Later that year she made a test recording for RCA
Victor, and John McCormack, another renowned tenor, gave her singing lessons
and announced that she had promise.

The press had an immense appetite for even the slightest tidbits of news
about the great Caruso's daughter. But it gradually became apparent that she
did not have the voice to follow her father.

In 1942, Ms. Murray told a reporter that she was studying art at the Art
Students League in New York and that she had come to prefer the visual arts
to music. "I've always been torn between art and music," she said. "Daddy
drew and sculptured as a hobby. And Mommy draws. Art is as much in the family
as singing."

In marrying Caruso, her mother, an American named Dorothy Benjamin, created a
tumult in 1918. Her father, Park Benjamin, a wealthy patent lawyer and New
York society figure, fiercely opposed the match between his daughter, then
25, to Caruso, who was 45. After the couple eloped, Park Benjamin disowned
her. When he died in 1925, he left her $1 from his substantial estate.

In 1943, Gloria Caruso married Ensign Michael Hunt Murray, who had left
Harvard to become a naval aviator in World War II. The couple had two sons
but later divorced.

Ms. Murray set up a studio in New York City where she painted both portraits
and landscapes. Later she lived in Miami and, for the last 10 years, in
Jacksonville.

Andrew Farkas, co-author with Enrico Caruso Jr. of "Enrico Caruso: My Father
and My Family" (Amadeus Press, 1990), said that Ms. Murray's paintings were
"of good quality, although she sold very few."

"She became rather reclusive," Farkas said, adding, "She had been answering
questions about her father for a long time." Eric D. Murray, one of Ms.
Murray's sons, said his mother had become occupied with managing the family
estate after her mother died in 1957.

Matters were complicated because Caruso had left no will. In 1928, a court in
Trenton, N.Y., had ruled that Gloria Caruso was entitled to two-thirds of the
royalties on her father's phonograph records, sold by the Victor Talking
Machine Co.

Gloria Caruso attended Miss Hewitt's Classes in New York City, the Ozanne
School in Paris, the Bishop School in La Jolla, Calif., and Miss Nixon's
School in Florence, Italy.

In addition to her son Eric, of Maryland, she is survived by her other son,
Colin D. Murray of Jacksonville.

Farkas wrote that Enrico Caruso had four children from a relationship with
Ada Giacchetti, a soprano who had left her husband to live with the tenor
before his marriage to Miss Benjamin. Only one, Enrico Caruso Jr., attempted
a career as a singer. All are deceased.