Tito Schipa

Italian singer, the leading operatic tenor for 13 years after joining the Chicago Opera Company in 1919. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Opera, 1932, and a noted recording artist, with singing that was almost conversational in its intimacy. He composed songs and an operetta, conducted orchestras, spoke a number of languages and wrote an autobiography. Schipa left a legacy of records and ten full-length feature films.

In the U.S. he was lionized like a Hollywood matinee idol and, although married with children, made love to a legion of women. His obsessively jealous wife became an alcoholic and they separated. At 57, Schipa had a second family with a woman 35 years his junior, and continued his merry ways, having another child with still another woman.

Schipa's fees were as much as those of any other opera star but he squandered much of the money and with women and bad debts, losing the rest. After the war he was dogged in the U.S., Europe and South America by accusations by Walter Winchell, among others, that he had been "Mussolini's tenor." Schipa suffered a fatal heart attack on 16 December 1965 in New York.