Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (3 page)

She was eighteen and a half when she left Meligala for Athens to give birth to Jackie, her first daughter, on June 4, 1917. Three years later came a son, Vasily, who, for more reasons than simply the special place traditionally assigned to sons in Greek households, stirred in both parents a deeper love than either of them had ever felt before. For a time it even seemed as though Vasily would resurrect the love Evangelia and George had briefly shared, but three years later typhoid fever broke out at Meligala and Vasily was one of the first victims of the epidemic. “My heart seemed to die with him,” wrote Evangelia years later, “and I thought I would never live again.”

If Vasily alive had nearly brought his parents together again, Vasily dead made communication between them almost impossible. Locked in their separate fortresses of grief, they could find no way of building a bridge between them, until George Kalogeropoulos could bear it no longer. Secretly, he conceived a plan of release which showed more daring and imagination than his wife ever gave him credit for. Within a few days, he had sold both the pharmacy, his proudest achievement, and their home, and had bought three passages to America.

Not until the day before they were due to sail did he inform his wife that they were leaving their home. She never forgave him: it was 1923, she had no money or qualifications, she had a five-and-a-half year old child and was expecting another. So she felt that she had no option but to swallow more poisonous resentment, stifle her pain at leaving her country and her family and follow across the Atlantic a husband she would willingly have drowned in it. Evangelia could not easily have been in a more bitter and heartbroken state than she was during that pregnancy. And on top of everything, she was continuously seasick. “All the way across the Atlantic,” she wrote, “I was wretched.”

They sailed into New York Harbor on August 2, 1923. The country was in mourning for President Warren Harding and the flags all flew at half-mast when Evangelia, five months’ pregnant, arrived in the United States with her husband and daughter. The first American newspaper that was thrust into the hands of the perplexed Greek couple bore great black headlines which neither of them could read, for they spoke no English. Waiting for them on the quay was Leonidas Lantzounis, who had left Meligala for New York a year earlier. The sight of New York City, as well as the presence of a friend from home, evoked in Evangelia feelings of excitement and adventure that for months had been stifled under layers of grief and despair. George, who had been at school with Leonidas’ older brother, was relieved to see someone who could help him through the faltering first steps in a new land.

With Leonidas’ help, George found a job in a pharmacy, and while her husband was adjusting to working for someone else, Evangelia threw herself into decorating the apartment they had rented in Astoria on Long Island. Greek carpets, Greek cushions and Greek icons under which a little candle burned all day in the bedrooms made the impersonal New York apartment feel much more like home.

At the same time, both parents were getting ready for the arrival of their new son. Neither of them seemed prepared to consider even for one moment the possibility that their newborn child might be a girl. Their yearnings and primitive logic had convinced them that the new baby would be a son who would take the place of Vasily and, so far away from where he had lived and died, make their life complete. All the little clothes Evangelia knitted were blue, and everything they bought for the baby’s bedroom was for a boy. “Ever since Vasily’s death,” Evangelia said, “I had prayed for another son to fill the empty place in my heart.”

On December 2,
*
1923, the expected son failed to arrive. Instead Dr. Lantzounis brought to the mother a baby girl weighing twelve and a half pounds. The baby clothes would not have been right even if they had been pink: “You made clothes for a baby like a doll,” Dr. Lantzounis told Evangelia, sitting by her bed, laughing and patting her hand, “but they are too small for this baby. The nurses can’t get them on her. She is like a young lamb, she is so large!”

The first words Maria heard from her mother were “Take her away.” And her mother’s first gesture was to turn her eyes from her daughter and fix them on the snowstorm raging outside the hospital window. As for her mother’s thoughts, she later admitted, they were all loving, tearful thoughts of Vasily. When the nurse asked the mother what name to put on the bead hospital bracelet, there was silence. Neither she nor her husband had thought of a girl’s name. Plucking a name out of the air, she said, “Sophia.” Her husband interrupted, “No, Cecilia.” In the end, they managed to agree on Maria. When, three years later, Maria was christened in the Greek Orthodox cathedral on East Seventy-fourth Street, she was, like a young princess, given all three names and one more: Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria. Leonidas Lantzounis, the first man to greet her parents on American soil, was her godfather. The man who first put her into her mother’s arms became not only her godfather but, right to the end, her loyal supporter and her beloved confidant. About the same time as her christening, Maria was also given a different surname. Her parents changed their name by court order from Kalogeropoulos to Callas—a symbol of their intention at that time to make America their permanent home. Their Greek friends, though, continued to call them by their original name, so Maria grew up accustomed to both.

It took Evangelia four days before she could look at her daughter again, but it is not easy to resist a four-day-old baby. She finally succumbed to her daughter’s big, black eyes, and set herself to giving her baby the love she had at first denied her.

Perhaps it is in the nature of babies to inspire legends—from knocking the cat out the window to finishing off all the garden strawberries and being sick for days. When the baby itself grows into a legend, there is no end to the childhood stories that are recollected, repeated, embroidered or invented. There was the doctor who delivered her, taking one look at her and predicting that “she will break many hearts”; there was Maria herself, three months old and not yet weaned, standing up in her crib and munching zwieback; Maria’s baby war-blings; and then, at the age of four, Maria crouched under the Pianola, pressing the pedals with her hands and, her little mouth half open, listening ecstatically to the first music she ever made.

By the time Maria was four the Callas family had moved from Astoria to Manhattan and were living in Washington Heights on 192 Street. George Callas had his own drugstore again and was well on his way to fulfilling the dream he had nurtured ever since they had left Greece: to reestablish the business status he had enjoyed in his small community back home. The Pianola was one of the first symbols of their new affluence, but it was much more than that. Evangelia, prompted by memories of her father’s glorious singing, the dim stirrings of her own ambitions and her daughters’ chirpings around the house, was, still only half-consciously, taking steps that would stimulate her children’s musical inclinations. Although Maria’s earliest childhood ambition was to be a dentist, Evangelia was not easily discouraged. A Gramophone followed the Pianola; the first record that she bought was “
Vissi d’arte
” from
Tosca
, and the next, soon after, excerpts from
Martha
and
Aida
. Meanwhile George Callas bought record after record of Greek popular songs. At regular intervals ritualistic fights broke out between the parents over whatever record was on the Gramophone, and Evangelia, her big eyes flashing like a jaguar’s, would shout to George to take off his lousy Greek records
this instant
, for fear of corrupting her daughters’ tastes.

George and Evangelia understood each other now no more than they did the first day they met. Evangelia’s quaint description of her husband was: “Like a bee to whom every woman was a flower over which he must hover to seek the sweetness.” But he was certainly not permitted to hover in peace. The Gramophone became the lightning conductor of the Callas’ marriage; the fights over whether it would be “
Ritorna vincitor
” or the Greek version of “Hold me tight, O my love, while I’m dying!” masked some of the much deeper and more dangerous tensions in their marriage.

Despite their relative affluence, these first few years in America were not easy. Life was a continuous process of adjustment. Their friends, most of them earlier Greek immigrants, were solid, worthy citizens marked by financial comfort, a certain decent Orthodox godliness and an ardent concern for the God of Opinion. Considered collectively, Mr. and Mrs. Callas and their friends belonged to what one might call the lower middle classes. Evangelia was an expert on the minutiae of social position. She never allowed her husband to forget for long that she came from a better family than he, a state of affairs symbolized for her by her family’s private cemetery in Stylis.

For a woman of her pretensions, the thought of so quiet a life stretching indefinitely before her was quite unbearable. She had been forced to give up her dreams of a career on the stage and she had had to accept that she would never transform her husband into the exciting, important figure she had once imagined. She had, in effect, to come to terms with the fact that she would never be distinguished in her own right, nor would she ever be the wife of a distinguished man. But resignation was not natural to Evangelia, and she obsessively transferred her ambitions and drives to her daughters.

Five and a half years separated the two Callas girls, and this gap greatly contributed to the younger sister’s idealization of the elder. It was not easy for Maria. She was the younger, the plainer, the fatter, the less charming; and she must have sensed very early on that she was also the less loved. In the competition for mother, Jackie had won outright, and throughout her childhood Maria remained bitterly envious of Jackie. Yet, at the same time, she adored Jackie, longed to be with Jackie, wanted Jackie’s entire devotion.

One July evening when she was just five and a half, waiting with her parents to cross the street to their house, she saw Jackie standing across the road. She pulled away from her mother and ran with open arms toward her sister. A car speeding down the street struck her and dragged her for twenty-five feet before it stopped. George, with Maria unconscious in his arms, and his wife holding the screaming Jackie tightly by the arm, arrived at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital on Fort Washington Avenue to be told that the chances were slim. George was numb with fright and Evangelia nearly hysterical when Dr. Korilos, a Greek brain specialist, arrived to reassure them that Maria, although suffering from shock and severe concussion, was not in danger.

She remained in the hospital for twenty-two days, looked after by the nuns. For some time after she went home, she was more irritable and unpredictable than before and more prone to accidents and misadventures. There was always a good deal of skirmishing between Jackie and Maria; they yelled, hurled abuse and occasionally, very occasionally, came to blows, Maria’s size compensating to some extent for her age. The one thing that Evangelia would not forgive was “tale telling,” and her punishment was based on age-old Greek tradition: she would sprinkle pepper in their mouths and on their lips.

Maria’s car accident was in July 1929. A few months later the world was shaken by the Wall Street Crash; and for the second time in his life George Callas found himself having to sell his pharmacy, this time not by choice. Each year from 1929 to 1933, the family moved to a less and less expensive apartment and money became a real problem for the first time. There remained for Maria only one source of relative affluence and security: her godfather, Dr. Lantzounis, with his presents every Christmas, the traditional candle and silver trinket every Easter and their Sunday lunch outings at Longchamps on Tenth Street. Leonidas, or Leo as more and more people called him by now, had joined the New York Orthopaedic Hospital shortly after Maria was born and, by the time the Crash came, was a successful orthopedic surgeon.

In the Callas home, money was becoming the occasion of incessant complaints, accusations and recriminations between the couple. The main bone of contention was the girls’ piano lessons. George Callas, who had to become a traveling salesman of pharmaceutical products to meet his family’s basic needs, already had had to make considerable psychological adjustments. No longer his own boss with his own business, with little prospect of ever having his own business again, he had to adjust to a large drop in his income; and he had to endure his wife’s constant reminders of their comfortable life in Greece. On top of all this he was forced to pay a substantial chunk of his much-diminished income for his daughters’ piano lessons four times a week.

To George, this was pure frivolity. It was one thing, he would repeatedly argue, to pay for piano and ballet lessons out of their surplus when they could afford such unnecessary luxuries, but a very different thing to take money needed for food and rent and give it to Signorina Santrina for teaching the girls to play the Pianola without using the pedals. He could see no justification for this expense and no reason for it other than his wife’s empty dreaming of musical and theatrical fame, her way of satisfying vicariously her frustrated ambitions. He told her so. And he told her so again. And again. And every week, as he was counting out the dollar bills for Signorina Santrina, he told her so once more.

Nonetheless, in 1930, at the age of seven, Maria began her musical education. For the next thirty years, gradually and imperceptibly at first, but with growing intensity with every year that passed, music and work became the stuff of Maria’s waking life and, as far as anyone can tell, of her dreaming life too—more real than anything else, at once a delight and a torment.

Surely nothing of enduring importance happens at one particular moment, but if there was a symbolic point at which Maria’s destiny was sealed—at least in terms of her mother’s commitment to that destiny—then it would have to be one warm May evening when Maria was ten. She was playing the piano and singing “La Paloma.” Her mother remembers every detail. The windows were open, the lace curtains fluttering and children playing in the street. Evangelia looked out the window and saw the streets full of people, listening and applauding—a great crowd of people who would not go away until Maria had stopped singing. Another moment and another warm evening flooded into her mind: the evening all those years ago when, seated by her father’s feet on the porch, she had listened spellbound to him singing the Duke’s aria.