Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (38 page)

The next day, August 17, at nine o’clock in the evening, Onassis turned up at Sirmione. “I could hardly believe my ears,” remembered Meneghini, “when I heard his voice singing ‘Maria, Maria’ under our window.” He had come to inform Meneghini that he intended to marry his wife, and that no obstacle would be allowed to stand in his way. Meneghini felt completely powerless, not only in the face of his wife’s decision, but more particularly before the confidence and assurance that Onassis radiated. “This man has billions, you must understand,” he said to one of the many journalists who flocked to Sirmione in the next couple of months. It was the rich man’s impotent envy of the superrich, the stingy millionaire’s resentment at the extravagant multimillionaire who knows not only how to make multimillions but also how to spend them.

Meneghini warned Maria that this would be the end of her career; he accused her of ingratitude; he pleaded with her. But threats, accusations and pleas were all in vain. At four o’clock in the morning, Maria left for Milan with Onassis. Her life, as she had instinctively sensed a month earlier, walking among the tulips outside Amsterdam, was about to change dramatically. Onassis himself, having removed Maria from the not-so-firm clutches of her husband, now had to decide what he was going to do about his own marriage. Soon after he arrived with Maria in Milan, he flew to Venice, where Tina was waiting for him on the
Christina
.

Meanwhile, on Via Buonarroti, Maria kept out of the way of as many people as possible. “She avoided us all,” said Biki. “She was almost ashamed at what had happened. She was too direct and honest to enjoy false situations and compromises.” There is no doubt that the Greek matron in Maria greatly disapproved of what the other Maria had done. After all, it was only two years earlier that she had proclaimed to the world that decorum was the essence of her life. Her morality, though never clearly thought out or articulated, was narrow and often intolerant. The role of the mistress did not come easily to her—it was one of the many indications of the depth of her love for Onassis that she was prepared to play it for so many years.

The doubts and the judgments of the matron in Maria added up for the moment only to a small, nagging voice rarely listened to and most of the time silenced by the upsurge of excitement and hope that had flooded through her. “I had the feeling of being kept in a cage for so long,” Maria was to say later, “that when I met Aristo, so full of life, I became a different woman.” The transformation was less visible but no less dramatic than the weight shedding that shook the world. Maria had lost so many of her sharp corners and so much of her defensive aggressiveness that when she met Ghiringhelli in the course of making the arrangements for her recording of
Gioconda
at La Scala, the icy superintendent, confronted with all this unexpected softness and charm, thawed like a snowman in the spring sun. In less time than anyone would have thought possible, he had asked Maria to come back to La Scala to sing anything she chose and on her own terms. All that remained was to find the appropriate time to make the reconciliation public. La Scala was delighted. And so was Maria. On September 2, 1959, she arrived at La Scala to start rehearsing for the recording. “One really had to protect her physically from the press and the photographers,” remembers Peter Diamand, who accompanied her when she tried to walk across to the Biffi Scala for lunch. “And then anyone who was with her was torn away and interrogated: ‘How do you know Madame Callas?’ ‘What did she say to you?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am her Egyptian hairdresser,’ I said to one Italian reporter who proceeded to print it in his newspaper, under the title
Parla il parrucchiere della Callas
, together with all the details I gave him about how her hair goes all soft and smooth when she’s singing Violetta and all crisp and wild when she’s Medea.”

On September 3, Maria and Aristo were discovered dining tête-à-tête, with violins softly playing in the background, at the Rendez-vous in Milan. At three o’clock in the morning, with Maria carrying a bouquet of red roses, they were photographed arm in arm going into the Hotel Principe e Savoia. The next day Via Buonarroti was under siege, but reporters and photographers alike waited in vain. Two days later, Maria issued a statement: “I confirm that the break between my husband and myself is complete and final. It has been in the air for quite some time, and the cruise on the
Christina
was only coincidental. The lawyers are working on the case, and will make an announcement. I am now my own manager. I ask for understanding in this painful personal situation. . . . Between Signor Onassis and myself there exists a profound friendship that dates back some time. I am also in a business connection with him; I have received offers from the Monte Carlo Opera, and there is also a prospect for a film. When I have further things to say, I shall do so at the opportune moment, but I do not intend to call a press conference.” The only excuse for this naively insincere statement is that her lawyers had demanded it to increase the chances of divorce by mutual consent.

When Onassis was besieged by reporters on the same day at Harry’s Bar in Venice, he was much less discreet. “Of course, how could I help but be flattered if a woman with the class of Maria Callas fell in love with someone like me? Who wouldn’t?” It was, unintentionally, one of his most revealing statements; the little Smyrnan refugee with his tankers and his billions needed women “with class” to confirm his own worthiness. He needed these shots of flattery like an addict, and with time and his advancing age, he needed bigger and bigger doses for the same effect. The most celebrated singer of the day was a potent enough fix until something even more powerful was needed in the shape of the world-famous widow of an American president. There is no doubt that he was in love with Maria, but her fame was one of the most important ingredients in the inflammable mixture which, ignited by some spark—perhaps their first meeting, perhaps her Medea—had blazed into love. “He just wanted to add luster to his tankers with the name of a great artist,” said Meneghini in one of his outbursts. “They love each other like children,” he said at a quieter moment. It was impossible to reconcile these two observations, yet there was truth in both of them.

While Meneghini, having suddenly moved from the wings to center stage, could not stop talking, Tina Onassis was maintaining a dignified silence and at the same time showing the flag at the Maxwell annual ball in Venice, being photographed dancing in the arms of the bronzed Count Brando d’Adda. The press could not get enough. Since, apart from Meneghini, the leading figures were not very forthcoming, they needed supporting characters to keep the drama alive. Evangelia was certainly good for a few column inches. She was tracked down at Jolie Gabor’s jewelry shop in New York where she was working. Evangelia and Zsa Zsa’s mother had appeared together in a television program about mothers and famous daughters, and at the end of it Madame Gabor had offered Maria’s mother a job. “Meneghini was a father and mother to Maria,” Evangelia said, having suddenly discovered all sorts of previously unnoticed qualities in her son-in-law. “Now she no longer needs him. But Maria will never be happy; my soul says it. Women like Maria can never know real love.”

Maria hardly expected support from her mother, but she had expected support from her most loyal and least tactful champion so far, Elsa Maxwell. She did not get it. Throughout, Elsa maintained the dignified silence of a betrayed lover, and when she finally broke it, in her role as a self-appointed watchdog of public ethics, it was to side unequivocally with Tina. While she was seen with Tina often, she deliberately kept out of Maria’s way, and when she was asked at her suite in the Hotel Danieli in Venice whether her friend Ari was going to marry her friend Maria, she emitted only an openly disapproving “I guess not.”

“We are all like personages in a drama,” said Meneghini, always ready with a quote as if he was determined to make up for ten years of public silence in ten days. “They are Maria, a Medea; myself who can be a tough nut; and Mr. Onassis, a multimillionaire.” The theme, which might have appealed to any opera composer from Donizetti to Kurt Weill, instead inspired
Time
magazine to cast its own under the title “Love and Money”

Meneghini may have been cast as the bass, but he had written himself the biggest singing part, covering the entire range of dramatic emotion from joviality to self-pity and resentment. “I created Callas, and she repaid me with a stab in the back. She was a fat, clumsily dressed woman, a refugee, a gypsy when I met her. She had not a cent nor any prospect for a career. I had to rent her a room at a hotel and had to put up $70 so she could remain in Italy. And now I hear that I am accused of having exploited her.”

Every now and then self-pity and self-mockery met: “You’ll see, if everything is split and we have to divide our poodle, Maria will get the front and I will end up with the tail!” Meneghini seemed to be walking away with the best lines. At long last the man always three paces behind the first lady had an opportunity to voice the accumulated resentments of the years. Evangelia, a past master at venting her rage, was competing for attention: “I was Maria’s first victim. Now it’s Meneghini. Onassis will be the third.” “Maria would marry Onassis,” she added, “to further her limitless ambition.”

She could not have shown less understanding of her daughter. Ambition was the last thought in Maria’s mind on September 10 when, as soon as the recording of
Gioconda
was over, she was at Milan airport, boarding the private plane Onassis had sent for her. She flew to Venice and together with Toy—tail and all—she went aboard the
Christina
. Onassis mounted the bridge and with a flamboyant gesture set off the siren that indicated the
Christina
’s departure. It was a long, loud, piercing sound. They were off, with only two other guests on board: Onassis’ sister, Artemis, and her husband Theodore Garoufalidis. A few days earlier, Tina had taken her two children and, without letting her husband know, had fled to Paris and her father’s home on Avenue Foch. She had had enough. Onassis had followed her on his private plane (“It’s never flown so much since he bought it,” the pilot was heard exclaiming), half wanting a reconciliation and half dreading it. Tina knew that she did not want one. She had been hurt and humiliated in public and she was not about to believe his halfhearted protestations.

It is true that Onassis was not happy about the breakup of his marriage to the mother of his children and daughter of Stavros Livanos, one of the oldest and most established Greek shipowners. But for the moment, with Tina in Paris, he was free to have what he really wanted: a two-week cruise with Maria. And before setting off, tired of hearing from the Greek shipping community how foolish he had been to treat Livanos’ daughter in this manner, he exploded to a reporter: “My father-in-law hasn’t enough to buy Niarchos’s art collection, let alone my hobby enterprises.”

There were no explosions aboard the
Christina
. The crew could not remember seeing him so relaxed and at peace before. As for Maria, there are no happier pictures of her than the shots on the deck of the
Christina
. It was as if within hours, she had drunk in all that peculiar, languid serenity produced by the ease and abundance of Mediterranean life. A longing to merge herself with another human being had been at last fully awakened, and the end of her cherished isolation was cause for celebration.

It was hard for her public to understand. And as the number of her recordings and performances began to diminish and continued to do so, it would be harder still. To compare her last year before Onassis to her first year with him gives a clear indication of the magnitude of the change in her life. In 1958, she gave twenty-eight performances of seven operas in six cities around the world; in 1960 she gave seven performances of two operas in two cities. The figures become even more astonishing. In 1961, she gave five performances, all of them of
Medea
—two in Epidaurus and three at La Scala. In 1962, she gave two performances of
Medea
at La Scala, and in 1963 she sang no opera onstage at all. There were concerts and some recordings, and in 1964 she returned to opera for her last stage performances ever—a magnificent swan song at the time when she could feel Onassis and her dreams of a family life with him slipping away.

“Onassis destroyed her life,” said Biki, who, apart from designing her clothes, remained a close friend. And thousands of music lovers agreed that she had sacrificed her voice, her art, her career for this man. But it is impossible to look at Maria’s life the year before the cruise on the
Christina
without concluding that Onassis entered her life precisely at the moment when she longed for a reason to stop living and working as she had ever since she was a little girl at the Athens Conservatory. With Aristo, there was for the first time a really powerful counterattraction to her art. Far from being his victim, it was Maria, or rather Maria’s need, that had made him part of her life. “I had become prematurely dull and old. I had got heavy, thinking of nothing but money and position,” Maria said a few years later, looking back. “Life for me really began at forty, or at least nearly forty.”

Maria’s tragedy was to assume that, because Ari was the first to awaken so much life, so many slumbering feelings and sensations in her, he alone could be the source of these newly discovered treasures. Her fear of losing him was compounded by her fear of losing the spontaneity, joy and passion that he had brought into her life.