Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (44 page)

The tragic irony was that the man with whom she wanted to turn this world into a permanent reality could not imagine life except in the center of the world of envy, gossip and nonsense. There was essentially a deep seriousness in Maria. By nature and inclination she was an enemy to the world where all is sacrificed to the amusing. Surrounded by people from the world of the yacht and the private jet, with more than their share of joyless affairs and loveless marriages, she often felt lost and lonely. She was attracted to its glamour but frightened by its emptiness, and the novelty and the glamour were already beginning to fade. She never really smoked, though she did have an occasional cigarette when others were smoking around her; she was never a drinker, though with Onassis she began to have more than a token glass of wine; and she disliked dancing except, as she said once to Princess Grace, “with my husband or the man I love.” She hated nightclubs, and yet in 1962 and in 1963, she spent many more hours in nightclubs than in opera houses and concert halls. And during these years more column inches were published about her nightclub appearances than about her appearances in opera houses. Sometimes the headlines were fully interchangeable. “Callas walks out,” read one of them. The story was that she had walked out when a dancer was announced as “
La Callas du Striptease
.” “The truth,” said Maria later, “was that at the end of the number I had asked to be taken home simply because I found it rather boring.” News of Maria’s celebrated ferocity had reached even the farthest outposts of the beau monde. It was well known that she had claws and could bite. “Why are people nervous about meeting me?” she asked Derek Prouse when he went to see her in Monte Carlo for the London
Sunday Times
. There is, however, no record of any member of the beau monde having been mauled by her. “Ours,” said one of the more perceptive among them, “was the kind of immunity accorded to exotic tribes.”

Maria rarely felt part of Onassis’ world, and it certainly never became her own. When he left her, she left it. In a sense, Onassis never belonged to it either. He was too full of life, too close to the earth, the sea and the elements not to feel the emptiness and even the desperation that so often fueled the way that he and those around him lived. He idealized the lives of simple fishermen and often spent hours talking with them. Every now and then, he would go across to Nidri, two miles from Skorpios, to have an ouzo with Niko, whom everybody knew as the “Gelastos Psaras” (“the Laughing Fisherman”). He had even fixed on the stern of his fishing boat a wooden plaque of a happy face with an open smile. “Ah, Niko,” Onassis would tell him, “there are only two happy people in the world, you and that face.”

At times Ari displayed an almost monkish loathing of the international socialites flocking to Monte Carlo and was glad to exchange the lot of them for an invitation to spend a weekend with Churchill at Chartwell—which he finally received. There is no doubt that he was much happier as Churchill’s court jester than the beau monde’s king. Both Ari and Maria were romantic snobs, impressed by power, by names that had made history or that were old when history was young, but Maria’s snobbery was highly theoretical. “One” was “normally” impressed by such people; therefore she must be too. Yet she would not sing for Churchill if she did not feel like it, nor would she take even a few steps out of her way to befriend the powerful and the great. Onassis, on the other hand, would turn his life upside down, and often did, especially when there was a chance of impressing, upsetting or irritating Niarchos. The vanity and rivalry of these two men, both parachutists into the established Greek shipping community, overshadowed any recorded rivalry between warring prima donnas. At times it seemed that they bought their ships, chose their friends, closed their deals and married their wives for the sole purpose of impressing each other.

Maria, who had no trouble identifying with most of Aristo’s rivalries and enmities, never really understood this one. It was too personal, too irrational, too paranoid, and it threw a shadow over his life right to the end. A month before he died, knowing he was dying, he made Tryfon Koutalidis, Olympic’s lawyer, swear that the fight against Niarchos would go on after his death. Maria, who knew Onassis as only love can know, could see how destructive this obsession was and begged him to put an end to it. Even his children, and especially Alexander, had been infected by it. They had been brought up to think of Niarchos as “the other side,” and, considering that he was married to Eugenia, their mother’s elder sister, this made things emotionally rather confusing for them.

At the time of the breakup of their parents’ marriage, Alexander Onassis was twelve and Christina nine. They had instantly and instinctively turned against Maria. She was “the other woman,” “the singer” as Alexander would call her to the end, who stole their father from their mother. They would not forgive her, and even after Tina had remarried they went on hoping their parents would reunite. In their minds “the singer” was always the obstacle. Maria, who had no problem conquering a hostile audience, was quite lost when it came to winning over Aristo’s children, even though she knew how much it meant to him. The first time she was in London after the beginning of their relationship she went to Harrods and spent a long time choosing cashmere sweaters and scarves for the children. Scornfully, Alexander and Christina left the presents unopened. Maria went on trying, but nothing changed. Christina was merely cold with her, but Alexander went out of his way to upset her, irritate her, if possible provoke an explosion. Zeffirelli remembers one hot August afternoon on the
Christina
: “We had finished lunch and most people were getting ready to have a siesta. Maria always had an hour’s siesta and all guests on the boat were expected either to do the same or to make sure they made no noise. Then suddenly in the middle of this marvelously peaceful afternoon there came a thundering noise and the boat began to rock. Alexander had chosen this moment not only to water-ski around the
Christina
, but also to create an artificial storm with his speed boat.”

It was only one of a series of practical jokes played on Maria by Alexander. Ari thought them all very funny, and not once did he take her side against the children. At first Maria complained, but gradually she stopped, feeling that more might be achieved if she said nothing. Onassis, far from reconciling the children and Maria, used their dislike of her to his advantage; for at least as long as it was necessary to go on providing reasons and explanations, he would put forward the emotional upheaval it would cause the children as the main reason for not going ahead with their marriage.

His children, and especially his son and heir, were extremely important to Onassis, even though he often treated Alexander as an extension of his own outsized ego rather than as his child. There was equally no doubt in anyone who saw them together that the children had closed their hearts to Maria long before, and had determined to dislike and resist everything about her—especially her clumsy attempts to win them over. Of course, if Onassis had really wanted to marry Maria, his children’s wishes would have been firmly set aside, which is exactly what happened when he decided to marry Jackie, even though by then the children were of an age to make their wishes much more clearly understood. Christina referred to her stepmother as “my father’s unhappy compulsion,” and the kindest thing that Alexander had to say about Jackie was: “My father needs a wife, but I don’t need a mother.” In 1962 he did need a second mother, but he did not need and certainly did not want “the singer” in this role.

Meanwhile, on February 27, the singer was singing again, at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Included in the program was “Ocean! thou mighty monster” from
Oberon
. It was the first time Maria had sung in English in public and it was also the first time that the English musical press turned against her. There were the complaints about the atmosphere that night, with the fancy lighting and so many fancy unmusical people—an atmosphere reminiscent of pop singers and nightclubs and, according to
The Times
, “unworthy of Miss Callas.” Then there were the comments on her voice, which rankled for days afterward. “It has been clear for some time that her voice has been sinking in pitch,” said the
Sunday Telegraph
. “Her voice is now quite ugly, and even out of tune,” said
The Times
. But the audience was ecstatic. The orchestra stood up and joined in the applause and the social press gushed endlessly: “Her voice is the magnet that has inexorably attracted a high-society audience from their planes, trains and cars which normally on the Friday before Whitsun would be rushing them out of the capital,” wrote the
Daily Express
. Some magnet had certainly attracted them, but it had very little to do with Maria’s voice. At the intermission there were many more references to the absence of Onassis than to Maria’s middle register. After the concert Vergottis gave a supper party for Maria at the Savoy. The table was decorated with flowers shaped into an M and the guests around it included a fair proportion of the entries in
Debrett
: a duke and his duchess (Bedford), two marquesses and their marchionesses (Camden and Tavistock), a knight and his lady (Renwick), Dame Margot Fonteyn and assorted esquires and their wives.

“I had the great joy,” said Maria later of Vergottis, “of considering him more than my father because I never really had a father or a mother. I was very happy and he knew it, and he considered me his greatest joy. He was very proud to travel around with me and participate in my glory.” In many ways Vergottis was more than a father for Maria; very soon he became a surrogate husband, filling the gaps that Onassis left, frequently traveling with her wherever she was singing, always supportive, always ready to discuss everything with her, whether financial, artistic or personal, and always happy, as Maria put it, to “participate in my glory.” All these were things that Maria needed but that Onassis was prepared to provide only intermittently and on his own terms.

After a ten-day tour of Germany, she was back in London for a recording of mezzo arias. “Is Callas becoming a mezzo?” many critics wondered. Because of the distinct breaks between her three registers, Maria had always sung with three “voices” and even talked of “my three voices.” She had worked hard all her life to produce seamless lines of sound in a constant struggle with technique, an unending battle to overcome the natural limitations of her voice. Now, when her upper register was becoming more difficult to control and the shrillness at the top more pronounced, Maria had to rely on her middle voice, which had always been full and mature. She contemplated the mezzo repertoire that could open in front of her. She saw herself as Dido, as Carmen, as the fiery Eboli; she recorded mezzo arias in London; two years later she even recorded the whole of
Carmen
. But imprisoned in her legend, and by now afraid of the hard work such a new career would involve, she dared not take the step that might have added years to her artistic life. At that moment she was too full of other hopes and later she would be too beaten.

That spring, while she was in London, Maria heard of her mother’s attempted suicide in New York. On the table in Evangelia’s hotel room were a note to Maria, a note to the public and small gifts for her friends. A few days after she had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital, the doctor who had treated her wrote to Maria:

Your mother, Mrs Evangelia Callas, was brought to The Roosevelt Hospital on Thursday, April 26, 1962. She stated that she had taken an indefinite amount of hypnotics in an attempt to injure herself. . . . Her hospital course was good, and it was felt that she could be discharged on April 29, 1962. She was seen by a psychiatrist in consultation, Dr. William Boyce, who felt that while she is an unstable personality, it is reasonably safe to return her to her present environment.

Evangelia later spoke of her suicide attempt as another effort “to rouse Maria.” Maria was roused, but even her concern was cold. A year later she was writing to Dr. Lantzounis: “If she is sick (mentally) tell me if it is necessary to put her in some good home—maybe in Europe where things are cheaper. I don’t know—but please help me.”

In May, Maria was in New York, but her godfather’s attempts to persuade her to go and see her mother were in vain. On May 19, 1962, at New York’s Madison Square Garden, her life touched for the first time that of the woman who, six years later, was to take her place at the side, though never really in the heart, of Aristotle Onassis. The occasion was a star-studded celebration of President Kennedy’s forty-fifth birthday. Maria sang the Habanera and the Sequidilla from
Carmen
. She was wildly applauded by a packed crowd of 18,000. The next day she left for Milan and one of the greatest ordeals of her career.

She was due to sing two more performances of
Medea
, but even at the rehearsals her sinus trouble made singing high or long notes intensely painful. On the first night, nerves and fears meant that she was in agony even before she opened her mouth, and when she did sing her first line, “
Io? Medea!
” (“I? Medea!”), suddenly, and to the horror of everyone present, her voice cracked. The rest of the performance was a superhuman effort. The next morning the unfavorable reviews were tinged with a note of sadness for a voice in shreds. The second
Medea
was the last time she ever sang at La Scala, but discussions and negotiations continued on all sorts of fronts and the list of might-have-beens grew with each month that passed:
Les Huguenots
with Sutherland; the Countess in
The Marriage of Figaro
; Monteverdi’s
Poppea;
even
Tristan und Isolde
. More realistically a new Visconti production of
Trovatore
for Covent Garden, with Giulini conducting, was discussed again and again.

The mere thought of committing herself to a new production filled Maria with anguish, but it was psychologically important for her to keep the negotiations going and to close no more professional doors. She became the mistress of delaying tactics. “Madame Callas,” wrote Sander Gorlinsky to David Webster, “has pointed out to me that until now her fee at Covent Garden has been very low, considerably less than she receives in other opera houses, and this time she really wants a fee in acccordance with her reputation and box office draw.” Negotiations over her fee would certainly keep the dialogue going for a little longer; then there could be negotiations over the tenor, the conductor or rehearsal time. Only the most loyal opera managers—and David Webster was one of them—would play her game, having sensed that behind it lay anxiety rather than prima donna tactics and tantrums.