Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (40 page)

Five days later, Renata Tebaldi returned to La Scala in
Tosca
after an absence of nearly five years. It was a triumph. The applause continued for over ten minutes and there was a rain of flowers while the audience chanted her name. “A state of delirium,” was how
La Notte
described it. The following morning, as Maria read the ecstatic reviews, she could not escape the uneasy awareness that, by her own choice, she had no fixed operatic engagements of her own in view. The career that had been everything was, for the moment, nothing. The feeling of relief at having escaped from what had become a prison was mixed with fear of the emptiness that loomed ahead of her, with Aristo embroiled in his own divorce; but her reaction to Tebaldi’s return was yet another indication of a new mellowness and a new maturity. When asked whether she would be present at the opening night, she replied: “Now that Renata Tebaldi returns to La Scala, public attention should be focused on this important event without direct or indirect interferences of any kind. I have closed many chapters this year; it is my sincere wish that this chapter too be closed.”

She had indeed come to terms with many things, including Rudolf Bing and the Met. She had initiated the reconciliation herself, even though she had no plans or even the wish in her present state of mind to sing there. She wanted the reconciliation for its own sake, for personal rather than professional reasons. “The return of a prodigal daughter,” ran Bing’s polished public response, “is no less welcome than the return of a prodigal son.” So there was Bing once again in the role of forgiving father.

Maria needed all the inner peace and outer harmony she could get if she was going to cope with the concentration of unpredictable energy that had entered her life in the form of Aristotle Onassis. The Italian papers were full of reports of his activities, and the innuendos were unmistakable. “Mrs. Jeanne Rhinelander, who was cited in Mrs. Onassis’ divorce suit, was seen dining in Monte Carlo last night with Mr. Onassis. He had invited her to the nightclub of the casino. They stayed there until the early hours of the morning. . . .” He would call to explain. Then he would not call for days. Then he would send flowers. She would call. He had gone. He would suddenly arrive or send for her. The pattern of the next eight years had been set. “A man can’t really change himself,” she had said a year before she met Onassis, “but a woman can change herself.” We may smile at the old-fashioned statement, but there are plenty of women in Greek villages today who still believe it; and when she fell in love with Onassis, Maria showed that she both believed it and acted on it. Their nine years together, instead of being a series of battles between two giant personalities, turned out to be the willing surrender of one to the other. Occasionally she would rebel, but with a rebellion deeply rooted in dependence.

In just over three months, Maria had left her Italian husband and manager, and was on the way to abandoning her Italian identity, in search of a new self in her Greek origin, a Greek lover and a fashionably rootless cosmopolitanism. But a shift, even more significant, had begun. For years she had lived on willpower, determination, courage, audacity—even aggressiveness. From now on, having chosen to make someone else the center of her life, she would need qualities she had never before developed: empathy, patience, understanding—qualities that could all too easily be turned, self-destructively, into resignation, passivity, even submissiveness.

11

I
T WAS AS IF MARIA HAD SAID TO
herself: “First you must become the great Maria Callas. Then you can become a woman.” She set about the second task with as much determination and single-mindedness as she had brought to the first. When, at the beginning of 1960, rumors began to spread, and were soon confirmed, that Maria had no singing plans at all for the months ahead, the general feeling was that she had thrown herself into Onassis’ arms so violently that she had lost her balance. The truth was far more complex. On a BBC interview in 1958, she had expressed bitter resentment at the terrible weight of her career and had declared her intention of retiring within a year. In a subsequent interview she spoke about the growing fear of going onstage: “The more I grew in reputation the more frightened I got.” Underneath Maria’s prodigious capacity for work, her forceful personality, her unique ability to take risks and her superhuman will, lay a profound insecurity. Her strength was, and had always been, rooted in weakness. And now, hard work, tensions, fears, condemnations and relentless self-criticism had all become too much. She longed to break free. And some part of her knew that singing was not the whole purpose and meaning of her life. Onassis made her aware of her sensuality, and he was her first real lover. Maria discovered sex at thirty-six and she discovered it through Onassis. That alone would have been a strong bond. “It was a definite sexual passion,” said Zeffirelli, who had frequently stayed with them on the island of Skorpios. “She found real, sexual fulfillment with him.”

There was more. In Maria’s battle for a greater experience of life and of herself, Onassis opened the door to a wonderland of new adventures, new sensations and new insights—the promise of a whole new beginning for which she had longed. But Maria had no way of knowing what an emotional upheaval it would create. All she really understood was work, and suddenly she was not working. She had been deprived, even though of her own free will, of the one thing that had so far given meaning and direction to her life.

At first Onassis was the center of her new dream, replacing the dreams of glory that had soured into frustration and nightmare; he had done everything to earn this position. But then the affair that had begun with such an impetuous rush lost its momentum. After Tina’s divorce petition he had suddenly withdrawn—not for the first time in his personal life, when faced with the inescapable necessity of making a decision. He kept appearing and disappearing, no longer to be relied on for the support she needed, now more than ever.

The year 1960 began with the first major crisis of her voice. Maria had repeatedly, both in public and in private, stressed the effect of her emotional state on her voice. Although true of any singer, it was especially so in her case after her legend had been established and her fears had begun to grow with it. It was as if each fear, each anxiety and upheaval, had an instant, audible effect on her voice. “Only a happy bird can sing,” she said once. And another time: “It is not my voice which is sick, it is my nerves.” Her nerves were certainly ragged at the beginning of 1960, her blood pressure was distressingly low, and she suffered from sinus trouble that made singing extremely painful. She did not want to sing but she wanted to know that she
could
sing. So she would go into her music room, sit at the grand piano, still piled high with music, and try to sing something, anything. Then the pain—a pain that started in her throat and traveled all the way up to her forehead—would force her to stop.

The newspaper reports about how she was defeated and finished had already begun. At the same time her mother published a book,
My Daughter Maria Callas
, which led to a spate of articles implicitly, and in some cases very directly, accusing Maria of unkindness and ingratitude. Evangelia, with her amber hair drawn up in a chignon, and dressed, as always, with a prim, ladylike elegance, received the journalists in her seven-dollar-a-week hotel room near New York’s Puerto Rican district. At sixty-two she was still handsome, and now looked much more like her daughter than she had before Maria’s transformation. The book was her story of Maria’s life as told to Lawrence Blochman, and in it, as in her life, she continued to portray the injured and abandoned mother. She had explained Maria’s explosive temperament by tracing her tantrums to the concussion she had suffered after her car accident when she was five.

Evangelia, who had left her job at the Gabor jewelry shop, was for the moment living on the advance from her book. She had great dreams about its success, but as Maria refused to rise to the bait, or indeed make any comment on the book, it sank as soon as the first flurry of interest was over. “Where should I find a suitable husband?” Evangelia had said in one of her interviews. “I do not want to marry a man with no money. I’m poor already; why should I want to make myself poor twice over?” Evangelia’s obsession with money and fame, the very obsession on which she had brought up her daughters, showed through unmistakably. Maria, in spite of being determined to keep the door to the past closed, began to realize that she could not so decisively edit her life. She always saw herself as the victim of her mother and her childhood, and so would always be haunted by both. Maria’s relationship with her mother remained, right to the end, at the troubled center of her life. Her spectacular weight loss, her relationship with Onassis and her hostility to her mother were the three facts known about her, even by people who hardly knew her as an opera singer. The last was an emotion with which thousands could identify—among them many of those most indignantly denouncing Maria for her unnatural behavior.

Her godfather wrote to her, urging reconciliation with her mother, but Maria’s recent wish to heal rifts did not extend to Evangelia, and her longing to be a “normal” woman, now stronger than ever, did not extend to wanting a normal relationship with her mother.

“I don’t want to sing anymore,” she said. “I want to live, just like a normal woman, with children, a home, a dog.” Aristo was the key piece in this dream jigsaw of normality, and as the year went on, he spent more and more time with her—with as little explanation as when he had spent less and less time with her. His presence helped soothe her nerves and—even though she was not yet ready to put it to the test—helped her voice more than all the medicines and vitamins the doctors had been prescribing. It was like a new honeymoon, only this time, with Tina adamant about the divorce, it was almost official. The crew of the
Christina
were told to treat Maria in everything as
la patronne
, which they did with pleasure. Aristo never contradicted an order she gave, except once when he ordered that Tina’s portrait be put back after Maria had had it removed from the games room. The staff had warmed to her, especially after she adopted Onassis’ habit of going to the kitchens to taste all the different Greek dishes before meals and make both ecstatic noises and expert comments.

It was just as well she had no singing engagements; keeping up with the thundering pace of the relationship challenged even Maria’s enormous energy. It did not take long for Tina’s and Ari’s friends to accept that it was Maria who would now be at his side, and to welcome her like loyal subjects receiving the new consort. After all these years of obsessive concern with artistic standards—her own and others’—she was suddenly surrounded by people who cared much more for fame than for talent. For them the important thing was success, and their ambition to be on cruising terms with the successful. Here Onassis was unrivaled; nobody could surpass the guest list of the
Christina
. Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill, former King Peter of Yugoslavia, former King Farouk of Egypt, the Begum Aga Khan, the maharani of Baroda, together with assorted barons, bankers and Beautiful People, had all at one time or another sailed on the
Christina
. And they had all sipped their cocktails at the main deck bar, which would be difficult to surpass for ostentation. It was a blatant reminder of Olympic Whaling, which had been one of Onassis’ massive enterprises: the barstools were covered with the skin of the scrotum of a mature whale, and whales’ teeth provided both the footrests and the bar rail, which was in addition engraved with scenes from the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
.

Maria was fascinated by this buccaneering side of Onassis and from now on she too would live his battles with world oil interests, with Prince Rainier and even with the American and Greek governments. “She is the only woman,” confided Onassis to a friend, “with whom I can discuss business.” She loved the business conundrums on which he thrived and the baroque negotiations off which he fed. It was another way of saying that she loved him, because Onassis never really separated his business from his private life. The center of the Onassis empire was wherever he happened to be and the Onassis coterie was made up of his favorite mixture of business, the beau monde and show business. He had offices all over the world, but his own private office he carried in the inside pocket of his jacket—an old notebook fastened with rubber bands. Nobody used friendships and social contacts as effectively as he did to open all sorts of business doors. The Greek publisher Helen Vlachos called him “the top public relations genius in the world, and he concentrates on one client—himself.”

Being part of his life was being part of a whirlwind. Maria spent less time in Via Buonarroti during the first half of 1960 than she had spent even during her busiest working time. It was clear that Milan would very soon stop being her home. Together, they began looking for a new one. His divorce had still not come through, but they talked often about marriage at this time; it was something to be relished in prospect but still safely out of reach. Maria, who wanted a real home with big open fires where she could imagine little children running about, began looking at châteaux in France.

At the beginning of March, Ari left for Gibraltar where he was joined by Winston and Clementine Churchill for a cruise across the Atlantic. They had agreed—or rather Ari had decided—that Maria would stay behind, so as not to embarrass the Churchills who had been close to Tina and very fond of her. Whether he was cruising with the Churchills or going on long business trips to Argentina, America or Saudi Arabia, Maria was often left behind. The life of a sultan’s odalisque was a long way from the life of an international superstar, but Maria slipped into it as though she had been trained for the role.

Shortly after the end of the cruise, Ari arrived in Paris to talk with Tina. It was the last attempt at reconciliation, and one of the more desperate arguments he used was that it would give much pleasure to the Churchills. The last attempt failed, but something important was achieved. Tina agreed to drop her New York divorce suit and instead get one of the quick divorces that could be obtained in Alabama. Soon after the meeting, Aristo and Maria went together to see the Château du Jonchet in Eure-et-Loir. A month later he was divorced, but the château had not been bought.