R.I.P. Marguerite Piazza

[Big Magilla]

Ms. Piazza was married four times. She and her first husband, Karl
Kritz, a former assistant conductor at the Met, were divorced. Ms.
Piazza was widowed three times.

I vaguely remember her from the early days of television, but I found this information kind of amusing - sort of like a modern Henry VIII - divorce the first spouse, kill off the rest.

[Reza]

Marguerite Piazza, 86, Versatile Singer

by Michael Schwirtz New York Times, 8/7/2012.

Marguerite Piazza had a voice that could pack a concert hall and a
figure that transfixed television audiences. She was sought out for
ribbon cuttings and commercial endorsements and once performed as
part of a Super Bowl halftime show.

She was a pop star, in other words, just one among the ever-changing
panoply that graces the glossies -- except that she gained fame for
singing opera.

Ms. Piazza, who at the pinnacle of her career in the 1950s performed
with the Metropolitan Opera, died of congestive heart failure on
Thursday at her home in Memphis, her daughter Marguerite Bonnett
said. She was 86.

Her life and career evoke an era when the gap between pop culture and
high art was more easily bridged, when what audiences watched on
television was similar in many ways to what they saw at the theater
or concert hall.

"I can't say that I like television more than opera because I do
opera on television," Ms. Piazza said in a May 1951 interview with
The New York Post.

Marguerite Claire Luft was born on May 6, 1926, in New Orleans. She
attended fine arts programs at Loyola University and Louisiana State
University before taking off to pursue her dream in New York, where
her teacher suggested she adopt her mother's maiden name, Piazza,
because he thought an Italian-sounding name would boost her operatic
credibility.

She began her career on radio, but moved into television in its
earliest days, where both her good looks and her soaring soprano
quickly made her a star. In the early 1950s she performed opera and
other music on "Your Show of Shows," the popular variety program that
made Sid Caesar a star.

Only after she had become a television success did she appear at the
Metropolitan Opera, where in 1951 she had 14 performances as
Rosalinde in "Die Fledermaus."

Then she traded ball gowns for cocktail dresses and joined the
supper-club circuit, performing jazz and pop in spots including the
Plaza in New York, the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles and the Sands in
Las Vegas. She also performed in the nightclubs of Havana before
Fidel Castro came to power.

Along the way she appeared in commercials. "I find Camels have a
mildness that agrees with my throat," a bejeweled Ms. Piazza said in
a cigarette commercial in the 1950s.

Bloomingdale's once invited her to be a celebrity chef for free
cooking classes it offered at its New York location. And she joined
other New Orleans performers in the halftime show at Super Bowl IV
there in 1970. Her career came to an end when she was diagnosed with
cancer in the 1970s. She remained active in charities and as a patron
of the arts, particularly in her adopted hometown, Memphis, where she
had lived off and on since the 1950s.

Ms. Piazza was married four times. She and her first husband, Karl
Kritz, a former assistant conductor at the Met, were divorced. Ms.
Piazza was widowed three times.

Besides her daughter Marguerite, she is survived by two other
daughters, Shirley Condon and Anna-Becky Redlich; two sons, Gregory
and Bill Condon; and seven grandchildren.

Ms. Piazza loved to sing for charities and volunteered occasionally
to sing for prison inmates, Ms. Bonnett said. She also sang at the
funeral of the woman who cleaned her house.

"She sang for whoever asked her," Ms. Bonnett said.