Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (39 page)

On the
Christina
, Maria found herself living entirely in the present, in a state of healing timelessness. Onassis, who could see the effect it was having, wanted to preserve it for her as long as possible. His friends in the Greek navy did their best to help him. Half an hour before the
Christina
was spotted on the horizon, twenty white-clad Greek sailors cleared the people off the jetty at the bay of Glyfada near Athens on “the harbor master’s orders.” At the same time, naval patrols were hauling swimmers and skin divers out of the water. When the
Christina
’s launches reached the jetty, only Onassis’ brother-in-law came ashore and announced to a navy officer in a loud voice that “Madame Callas left the
Christina
at Brindisi.” But the reporters who sailed out in a fishing boat knew better. There she was on the deck of the gleaming white yacht, and there he was beside her.

The launches brought the directors of Olympic Airways back to the
Christina
, and Onassis interrupted his holiday for a meeting of the board. For Maria, the timelessness continued until the next day when she had to fly from Athens to Bilbao for a concert; she had never given a performance from which she felt so detached, and she had never received a chillier reception. It was as if she had arrived in Bilbao in a daze, had given her concert in a daze and, on her return, had talked to the waiting reporters at Athens airport still in a daze, describing Bilbao as a “silly little engagement.” Her words did not enhance her popularity in Spain, but by the time the Spanish press had gone on the attack, she was back with Ari on the
Christina
. She left them both at Monte Carlo and flew straight to London for a concert at the Festival Hall on September 23. She was in great form and her new softness and lightness were there for all to see and hear. It was her first concert appearance without all that massive jewelry—just a simple necklace and Ari’s TMWL bracelet—and the
Daily Mail
described it as “one of the most dramatic and memorable nights in London’s music.”

But professional engagements were now squeezed into the gaps of an increasingly hectic and emotionally demanding private life, and when they could not be squeezed in, they were canceled or postponed. Her television concert was postponed because she had to be in Milan for a conference over the settlement of joint property. Also, Nicola Rescigno was ill, and Maria was increasingly loath to sing with any but her own conductors. In the end, the program was televised on October 3 with Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting. “The great Callas,” he said, with arms outstretched toward her as he introduced her to the orchestra.

A few days earlier Meneghini had filed suit for legal separation. The hearing, after a postponement, was finally scheduled to take place in Brescia on November 14. In between were Maria’s engagements in Kansas City and Dallas. For a short while it seemed as though nothing had changed, except that there were even more reporters than usual who seemed to have one question only: “Will you marry Mr. Onassis?” The penalties incurred by the new superpersonality that she had become included a bomb scare at the Midland Theater in Kansas City which turned out to be a hoax, but only after the entire bejeweled audience—an audience that included ex-President Truman—had vacated the theater.

To coincide with Maria’s arrival in the States, Elsa Maxwell broke, after a fashion, the silence about Maria that until then she had affected in her column. “That much-heralded diva arrives in America,” the column began. There followed a report of a conversation between Maxwell and Leonard Bernstein.

The rest was silence.

The news from Dallas was worse than silence. On November 6, Maria sang the penultimate
Lucia
of her career in Zeffirelli’s new production borrowed from Covent Garden. “I’ve only come because of you,” she told Lawrence Kelly. She was nervous and unprepared, but her dramatic sense was as unerring as ever. She had refused to wear the bloodstained dress designed for Joan Sutherland; she opposed, as always, any garishness that would seize the audience’s attention and distract them from the real drama. Vocally, though, she was in such bad form that she nearly broke down in the Mad Scene. “It was painful to hear her miss the high E-flat so cruelly,” said a lifelong fan who was in the first-night audience. It was infinitely more painful for Maria. “I had the note. I had the note. What happened? What happened?” she kept repeating to herself all the way to her dressing room, as though the Mad Scene was still going on. She suddenly stopped, took a deep breath and sang five consecutive E-flats. She could sense that she was losing her fight with the Voice. Two nights later, for her second performance of
Lucia
, she left the E-flats out. She would go on fighting but there were to be fewer and fewer trapeze acts. They were no longer worth the agony. “You cannot serve two masters,” she told Zeffirelli. “All she wanted,” he remembers, “was to be with Onassis, to be his wife, his woman, his mistress. If he had not pushed her to go on singing, as a kind of showcase for himself, she would have probably stopped altogether.” On November 9, Maria, having canceled her appearance in
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
, flew from Dallas to Milan. The court hearing in Brescia was only a few days away.

Very early on the morning of November 14, a large crowd began to assemble outside the courtroom of this small industrial city. Meneghini arrived first. For the previous couple of months, he had been receiving letters congratulating him on “finding his peace at last” and “being well rid of her.” “Get a nice Italian girl next time,” one correspondent had advised him. Now the Brescia crowd loudly applauded him. There was complete silence when Maria arrived. Whatever the crowd may have thought of doing or shouting before they saw her, there was something regal and contained in her presence that commanded respect.

Maria and Meneghini emerged six hours later. Judge Cesare Andreotti had made the ritual attempts at reconciliation before getting down to the serious business of dividing the spoils. There was remarkably little rancor as the settlement was being reached. Maria kept Via Buonarroti, most of her jewelry and both ends of the poodle. Meneghini kept Sirmione and all the real estate they owned; the paintings and all other valuables were equally divided. Meneghini’s original writ had spoken of Maria going to nightclubs and other places with a man “whom she described as her lover” and “behaving in a manner incompatible with elementary decency.” He had applied for the separation to be granted in a judgment against his wife, but by the end of the six-hour hearing he had agreed to separation by mutual consent.

The following morning Maria flew to New York on her way to Dallas and the last engagement fixed by Meneghini. When she boarded the plane, she discovered that the seat next to hers had been reserved for the most enormous arrangement of red roses. There was nothing on them but TMWL. It was the kind of gesture which Meneghini would have thought “disgusting”; that is how he had described Onassis’ gesture of putting 50 pounds into the hands of the band leader at the Dorchester to play tangos for Maria all night. “And she was impressed,” Meneghini had added, puzzled. He had been just as puzzled by her anger on the fated cruise when he had so ludicrously under-tipped the water carriers from one of the islands that Onassis had to interfere and add a handsome sum himself. Meneghini had expected Maria to be angry with their host for the subtle and public humiliation of her husband. Instead she had exploded against
him
—against his cheapness, against his petty, calculating mentality. Maria, who had to fight this tendency in herself all her life, suddenly could not bear seeing it in such stark colors in someone else. “I am always careful,” she said once, “always afraid that I will die, or live the end of my life, in poverty.” Every now and then the old money terrors would hit her and, even though she knew that her alarm was baseless, she would castigate herself for her extravagance; at such times any expense, including one as modest as a television set, seemed reckless. Peter Andry, head of the classical division of EMI, remembers Maria calling him shortly after she had let him down at the last moment over a recording of
Traviata
, to ask if he could get her a discount on the new television set she wanted to buy.

Despite all her success and the fulfillment of so many of her dreams, Maria never really trusted her achievements and the income they generated. But being near Aristo, with his boundless trust in life’s abundance, made her fears seem absurd and the behavior they gave rise to odious. She wanted to escape those fears; Meneghini was not even aware that he had them. Maria could see the exaggeration and the extravagance in many of Onassis’ gestures, but she enjoyed, even loved, his expansiveness, especially after her husband’s penny-pinching.

With the two
Medeas
in Dallas over, the twelve years of Meneghini management were over too. As soon as the breakup of their marriage became public, the offers flooded in from agents wanting to represent her. Meneghini, for his part, was inundated by requests from hopeful sopranos, and even tenors and baritones, to take their careers in hand. “Just bring me,” he said, “one who sings like Callas, who has a mind like Callas, a heart and temperament like Callas, an ambition and fierce dedication like Callas, and leave the rest to me.” It was probably the last word on the Pygmalion-Meneghini myth, which, in his less honest moments, Meneghini himself did a lot to keep alive.

Maria had been legally separated for eleven days when Tina Onassis sued her husband for divorce in the New York State Supreme Court on the ground of adultery. The marriage that had been described as “the happiest between Cannes and Palm Beach” was coming to an end. On November 25, Tina called reporters to her Sutton Square home in New York and issued a statement:

It is almost thirteen years since Mr. Onassis and I were married in New York City. Since then he has become one of the world’s richest men, but his great wealth has not brought me happiness with him nor, as the world knows, has it brought him happiness with me. After we parted this summer in Venice, I had hoped that Mr. Onassis loved our children enough and respected our privacy sufficiently to meet with me—or, through lawyers, with my lawyers—to straighten out our problems. But that was not to be.
   Mr. Onassis knows positively that I want none of his wealth and that I am solely concerned with the welfare of our children.
   I deeply regret that Mr. Onassis leaves me no alternative other than a New York suit for divorce.
   For my part I will always wish Mr. Onassis well, and I expect that after this action is concluded he will continue to enjoy the kind of life which he apparently desires to live, but in which I have played no real part. I shall have nothing more to say and I hope I shall be left with my children in peace.

Maria was with Onassis on the
Christina
in Monte Carlo when Tina’s statement appeared in the newspapers. They were expecting and fearing the worst: the citing of Maria as the adulteress. But Tina had other, older scores to settle, so the lady with whom her husband was supposed to have had an affair “by land and sea” was cited as Mrs. J.R. It did not take the gossip columnists long to discover that Mrs. J.R. was Jeanne Rhinelander, an old school friend of Tina. In 1954, when Tina was staying in the south of France, on an impulse she had driven over to her friend’s home in Grasse, only to discover her husband there in what are commonly known as “compromising circumstances.”

Tina waited five years to take her rather spectacular revenge, at the same time preventing the divorce from escalating into an even bigger scandal, as it would have if she had cited Maria. While in Monte Carlo Maria could hardly believe her narrow escape, in Grasse Jeanne Rhinelander was fighting off reporters. It was her turn to issue a statement: “I am astonished that after so many years of friendship of which everybody knew, here and in the United States, Mrs. Onassis should try to use it as an excuse to obtain her freedom.”

It was a difficult time for Maria. His pending divorce was emotionally much more wrenching for Onassis than he cared to admit. That in itself was a source of agitation to her, but it was not the worst of it. While Maria wholeheartedly wanted her divorce, Onassis never really wanted his, despite his protestations to Meneghini about his determination to marry Maria. He spent weeks and months away from Tina, but he would ritually call her from whatever part of the world he happened to be in, every day at 6:00
P.M
. her time. He was not the first man, nor would he be the last, who wanted both his mistress and his wife.

In Monte Carlo, he had suddenly decided to behave discreetly. Maria was nominally booked into the Grand Hotel, and the night Tina’s statement appeared he dined alone with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. The next day his own statement appeared, much shorter and much less revealing than Tina’s: “I have just heard that my wife has begun divorce proceedings. I am not surprised; the situation has been moving rapidly. But I was not warned. Obviously I shall have to do what she wants and make suitable arrangements.” In fact he was hoping for a reconciliation and he began working toward it—phone calls to Tina, phone calls to the children, talks to friends who could intercede. Maria retreated to Milan and, in one of those ironies that filled her life, she spent her thirty-sixth birthday, the first since her separation, in the company of the man she had just left. Feeling rather abandoned by Onassis and uncertain of her new status, she turned momentarily to Meneghini, as if to an old friend.