The misanthrope's corner.

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

AS the culture war heats up and the attacks on Hollywood decadence mount in anticipation of the 1996 election, I find myself remembering the Hollywood that started me off on the road to cultural polish.

The memories are especially poignant at this time of year. On October 7, 1959, I was devastated by a newspaper headline: "Mario Lanza Dies in Rome." My first crush, the man who had aroused my romantic and musical passions in such exquisite tandem that I could not tell one from the other, was dead at 38.

The young now ask: Who was Mario Lanza? Born Alfredo Cocozza in Philadelphia, his powerful tenor voice and extraordinary good looks won him the title role in The Great Caruso in 1951. His success began in the hearts of teenage girls but it went straight to the heart of something much deeper. As a music critic of the time put it: "Mario Lanza is the symbol of America's cultural democracy." Because of him, anyone who was in high school in the early Fifties stands an excellent chance of being an opera lover regardless of background or education.

My own story is typical. I was born into the class that no one admits to: the lower middle. People brag about being poor but nobody brags about punching two holes in a can of Carnation evaporated milk and calling it coffee cream.

My family's musical tastes were what you might expect, only worse. My father, a free-lance musician who had played the banjo in speakeasies during Prohibition, was fixated on the popular tunes of the Twenties. His favorite shaving song was "Don't Bring Lulu," which he sang while conducting a contest with himself to see if he could arrive at his upper lip when he hit the line, "You can bring Rose with the turned-up nose."

My mother, who grew up in World War I, was partial to "We Don't Want the Bacon, We Just Want a Piece of the Rhine," and that anthem to the orally challenged, "K-K-K-Katie." (She also knew the sequel, "Sthop Your Sthutterin', Thimmy.")

But it wasn't all Tin Pan Alley pep. My grandmother favored us with lugubrious Victorian ballads about fallen women who realized, too late, the error of their ways when a letter edged in black was delivered to the brothel: "And sadder she seems/When of Mother she dreams/In the mansion of aching hearts."

I was less than transported, and growing up in the Forties didn't help. When "Mairzy Doats" came out I decided that I hated music.

To people like us, opera was music for rich people, music to laugh at, the subject of cartoons about fat ladies in horned helmets. But then along came Mario Lanza, with his deep dimples, burning black eyes, and crystal-shattering high Cs. His first two movies were musicals containing some opera, but The Great Caruso pulled out all the stops. The film was saturated with the major tenor arias in the Italian repertoire, plus the sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor, the quartet from Rigoletto, and the final duet from Aida.

Lanza hit me like whiskey hits . . . well, you know. I saw The Great Caruso over and over. My favorite part was the Rigoletto aria whose first line sounded like "the doughnut is moppylay." Wanting to know what it meant but having no one to ask, I got The Victor Book of Operas from the library and learned that it was "La Donna e Mobile": woman is fickle.

In this way I pieced out the name of every aria and ensemble piece in the movie, and learned the plots of all the operas. I spent my modest allowance on Lanza's records (among the last 78 rpms), but soon the tenor arias were not enough; I wanted to hear whole operas. Thanks to the craze Lanza had started, they were being recorded on the newly invented long-playing records. We didn't have an LP phonograph so I listened to them in the public library, sitting for hours in the stuffy little audio room, following the librettos. By this time I was in fourth-year French so the Italian made sense; I learned to pronounce it and acquired a small vocabulary.

This sounds like weird-kid behavior, a specialty of mine, but for once I was a conformist. All the other girls had crushes on Lanza too, so everybody was into opera. We sang the easy-to-carry "M'appari" from Martha in the gym locker room, and even tried the famous tour de force from Pagliacci, laughing and sobbing so maniacally that the teacher came running in to see what was wrong.

ARTURO Toscanini called Mario Lanza "the greatest voice of the twentieth century," but he was much more. Those presently engaged in a Diogenean search for heroes should stop and reflect that Lanza was the only person in the history of the world to succeed in elevating teenage musical tastes. He did it, moreover, without creating snobs. Although my generation were products of a decade notorious for status seeking, having a crush on an opera singer pointed us toward the higher goal of self-improvement. Inspired by girlish passion, we earned our status the old-fashioned way: we "bettered" ourselves.

Today I am a fair connoisseur of opera, knowing what to listen for in important spots, such as the end of "Di Quella Pira," and, after sufficient martinis, able to sing "Alerte!" from Faust -- quite a feat, since it's a trio. I've come a long way from "We'll crown Bill the Kaiser with a bottle of Budweiser," and I owe it all to Mario Lanza.

A candle always flares up before it goes out: after Lanza, the next teenage idol was Elvis. Our entertainment is now so debased that it will take more than election-year growls from Bob Dole to set it right. We have carried egalitarianism to such a maniacal extreme that we now regard beauty as an affront. The national anthem must be sung at ballgames by tone-deaf croakers, and actresses with classical faces have been replaced by cross-eyed Karen Black and pop-eyed Susan Sarandon. What is needed is a Minister of Culture --but we're not supposed to say that.