At a key moment in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), the title character (played by Klaus Kinski) pacifies a murderous tribe of South American Indians by playing Enrico Caruso records on a portable phonograph mounted on his riverboat. Set in the early twentieth century, the story centers on Fitzcarraldo’s monomaniacal drive to build an opera house in the jungle and have Caruso sing there on opening night. Over the course of the film, both the phonograph and the tenor’s voice act as awesome, transcultural forces, capable of enchanting hostile natives and “civilized” Europeans alike. More than any other vocalist of his era, Caruso enjoyed a reputation for commanding a voice that approached mythical levels of greatness.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) was the best-known singer in the world—both an internationally renowned performer and the standard-bearer of the young international phonograph industry. He embodied, in fact, a new kind of public figure, one whose celebrity grew out of the emerging culture industries and circulated through the modern mass media. But Caruso’s stature as a celebrity depended on his charisma as much as his voice. After working with him, Edward Bernays, the pioneering public relations consultant, described Caruso’s star power in his 1965 autobiography. Caruso, he recalled, was like “a sun god” whose “light obliterated his surroundings,” and for those who came in contact with him, Bernays quipped, the experience was “gilt by association.” The pun was ironic: in addition to his groundbreaking fame, Caruso was the subject of the first celebrity trial of the twentieth century.

On Friday, November 16, 1906, Enrico Caruso was arrested for “annoying” a woman in the Monkey House in the Central Park Zoo. According to the next day’s newspapers, Caruso insisted on his total innocence and pleaded that the police must be making a mistake. According to some accounts, he also wept loudly in his jail cell until his friend and employer Heinrich Conreid, the director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, bailed him out. The woman whom Caruso allegedly molested identified herself as “Mrs. Hannah Graham of 1756 Bathgate Avenue, the Bronx,” but reports noted that she had been reluctant to become involved in a police matter for fear of jeopardizing her reputation as a “respectable” woman, and that she submitted her name and address only under pressure by the arresting officer, James J. Cain. The following day, it became evident that no one named Hannah Graham lived at the address the woman gave, and questions of her identity—indeed, her very existence—became a central issue in the tortuous affair that then began to unfold.¹

The combination of Caruso’s fame with the salacious but pedestrian nature of the...