Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (46 page)

At the beginning of October, Jackie arrived in Athens and a couple of days later the
Christina
set sail from Piraeus for Delphi. Onassis told the swarming reporters: “We’ll go where Mrs. Kennedy wishes to go. She is in charge here. She’s the captain.” Maria read what he said in Paris. The world press was full of the First Lady’s Greek cruise. In addition to the Radziwills, the president had asked Franklin Roosevelt, the undersecretary of commerce, and his wife Sue to accompany Jackie. “Your presence will lend respectability to the whole thing,” he told Roosevelt. Other guests were Princess Irene Galitzine and her husband; Accardi Gurney, a bachelor friend of Lee’s; and Onassis’ sister Artemis with her husband. “Onassis is no more conscious of his wealth than Rock Hudson is of his good looks,” Jackie was to say later, looking back on the cruise. Just for her, the
Christina
’s crew of sixty had been augmented by two hairdressers, a masseuse and an orchestra for dancing in the evening; just for her the
Christina
had been stocked with eight varieties of caviar, fresh fruit flown in from Paris, rare vintage wines and buckets of red mullet packed in ice.

The first stop was Lesbos and the second Crete, but the photographers looked in vain for Onassis among the party disembarking from the
Christina
. To avoid too much adverse publicity, Ari had offered to stay on board whenever they were in port. But he knew very well that the next port of call was Smyrna, nor was he surprised when Jackie, Lee and everybody else aboard insisted that they could not go sight-seeing around his birthplace without him as their guide. So four years after he had, brimming with emotion, shown Maria around the landmarks of his childhood, Ari found himself revisiting his past once more, this time with Jackie at his side and the world’s press in full pursuit. The picture of a radiant Jackie next to a relaxed Ari was flashed around the world. In the House of Representatives, a Republican congressman questioned the conduct of the president’s wife, while in Paris, Maria was asking herself questions about Ari’s motives and, much more important, Ari’s love. The president called Jackie to plead with her to return to Washington, and Maria called Ari to ask what exactly was going on. But the
Christina
sailed serenely on her way. On the last night of the cruise, Ari showered his guests with parting gifts: for Lee, a string of pearls; for Jackie, however, there was an array of gifts crowned by a massive diamond and ruby necklace. There was no longer any doubt as to which of the two sisters he preferred.

“Jackie has stars in her eyes—Greek stars,” said a member of the White House staff when Jackie returned home on October 17.

Maria’s eyes were full of angry fire. It took all of Maggie van Zuylen’s ingenuity to mollify her and reconcile her with Ari. Once they were reunited, Maria could allow herself to feel all the joy of having him back—and to show it. But they were not together for long; Ari was soon off doing business around the world. On November 22, just over a month after he had come back from the cruise, he was in Hamburg launching a tanker. It was there that he heard the news of Jack Kennedy’s assassination. He flew immediately to Washington, and William Manchester remembers him in the White House the night after the funeral. “Rose Kennedy dined upstairs with Stas Radziwill; Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister, and Robert Kennedy were served in the sitting room. The rest of the Kennedys ate in the family dining room with their house guests, McNamara, Phyllis Dillon, Dave Powers, and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipowner, who provided comic relief of sorts. They badgered him mercilessly about his yacht, and his Man of Mystery aura. During coffee the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy] came down and drew up a formal document stipulating that Onassis give half his wealth to help the poor in Latin America. It was preposterous (and obviously unenforceable), and the Greek millionaire signed it in Greek.” It was like an Irish wake. A desperate gaiety had seized everybody, including Jackie, who could not be alone for a second. In this atmosphere Ari the comedian came to the fore, his repertoire ranging from subtle jesting for the tragic court to crude, red-nosed buffoonery.

He flew back to Paris in time to celebrate Maria’s fortieth birthday. The shuttle between the two women had begun.

12

M
ARIA WAS APPREHENSIVE
. S
HE
could feel the most precious thing in her life, her relationship with Aristo, slipping away from her. Back in Paris, Ari was elated. At a time when the world’s eyes were on the White House, he had maneuvered himself into its innermost circle; and Ari the self-dramatist was enjoying the recounting of the tale as much as the experience. Maria was not surprised by his elation. She knew well by now that when it came to the famous, Ari was like a dipsomaniac with the bottle, so she simply listened patiently to his detailed account of the Kennedy wake. But she desperately needed something to clutch onto, something to bolster herself with. In her mind’s eye the old triumphs trooped by in all their glory, helping her to make her decision. She wrote to David Webster at Covent Garden. Yes, she was ready to do
Tosca
, but she would only do it if it was
now
. It was now that she needed the healing absorption in her work. Zeffirelli was already at Covent Garden directing
Rigoletto
. He was the man Maria had phoned before she sent her letter to Webster: “Franco, I’ll do it if you’ll help me.”

Zeffirelli had six weeks in which to mount a brand-new production as well as carry on with
Rigoletto
. At first everyone at the opera house thought it was madness, and were violently against giving in to the caprices and last-minute decisions of La Callas, but Webster’s and Zeffirelli’s enthusiasm soon became infectious. No detail was too small for Zeffirelli. In an Indian shop in London he found the sensational stole—six feet long and six feet wide—that Maria was to wear in the second act, and he spent hours in Covent Garden’s paint shop, overseeing costumes being sprayed and backcloths painted. It was there that the critic Clive Barnes found him when he went to interview him: “Do you always do two productions at once, Franco?” The boyish smile was even more disarming than usual: “No . . . sometimes it’s three.”

The rehearsals were pure joy. Zeffirelli, Maria and Tito Gobbi—perhaps the greatest Scarpia ever—had come together to create a masterpiece out of one of the most popular operas in all music.
Tosca
, which has been described, not altogether unfairly, as “a shabby little shocker,” was transformed in their hands into an unforgettable dramatic experience. So total was the absorption of Gobbi and Maria in their roles that when, during a full dress rehearsal, three days before opening night, Maria’s wig brushed against a lighted candle and caught fire, she went on singing, and continued to do so even as smoke poured from behind her head and Tito Gobbi rushed across the stage to put the fire out. At another rehearsal, the blade of the retractable knife that Maria was using to kill Scarpia did not slide back into the handle, but she was so totally enveloped in Tosca that she noticed it only after she had drawn blood, and only just in time to avoid plunging the knife right into him. It was Gobbi’s turn now to remain in character; he gasped a horrified “My God,” and continued with the scene.

Maria would ring Tito every morning to discuss what new ideas she had had, what changes she felt they could make, what to concentrate on in the morning’s rehearsals. Even after she had stopped singing, right up until the time she died, Maria would ring Tito: “I don’t have anything to say,” she would tell him. “I just need to hear your voice.”

There was a deep, instinctive understanding between them and Zeffirelli, who had determined not to do
Tosca
until he could find the soprano with the dramatic personality to bring to life his vision of the role. He had found her in Maria. “I wanted her played as an exuberant, warmhearted, rather sloppy, casual woman, a kind of Anna Magnani of her time. . . . Well, Maria carried it off, creating this magnetic, temperamental creature. From her entrance to her exit, she held the audience absolutely breathless.” In the first act Tosca rushes to the church to see her lover Mario Cavaradossi who is painting an altar there. She erupts with jealousy when she suspects he has been unfaithful to her, and only when he convinces her that he has not does she begin to calm down. “Even though she is in church,” said Zeffrelli, looking back on Maria’s performance, “she begins to talk about making love with Cavaradossi. She giggles and laughs and hugs and kisses him, then pulls herself together, saying, ‘No, don’t touch me in front of the Madonna.’ . . . They might have had it right there in the church. Tosca was ready.”

As opening night approached, panic began to grip her again. For the first time since Onassis had become the main focus of her life, she was rediscovering the exhilaration she used to find in her work. She was living an existence utterly remote from Aristo and his world, and she was feeling almost grateful that she could still use her art as a shield against being totally submerged by him. But she could not, hard as she tried, keep the panic at bay. She developed a high temperature and all the symptoms of bronchitis. When Tuesday, January 21, dawned, her temperature was still over a hundred. She knew by now that the symptoms began in her head, her nerves and her fears, and she refused to give in to them. She even refused to let David Webster make an announcement before the performance asking for the audience’s understanding. As it turned out, it was the last thing she needed. The opening performance was an unqualified triumph.

Maria had first sung Tosca in Athens when she was eighteen. Now she was forty, and the sensuality she brought to the part was new to her and revolutionary for the audience, used to grand Toscas in massive robes with walking sticks, gloves and large feathered hats. She also plumbed new levels of distress and jealousy that had eluded her even in her memorable
Tosca
recording twelve years earlier. What sounded like a childish tantrum in the 1952 recording became, in 1964, the deep suffering of a woman torn with jealousy: new depths of sensuality, new depths of jealousy, but also new depths of tenderness. Her emotionally charged eighteen months of absence from the operatic stage had brought forth a rich harvest of dramatic truth, and on the first night the audience, fired by that truth, acknowledged her comeback and triumph with a huge standing ovation.

“She has done as much for Italian opera as Verdi,” Zeffirelli has said. That night at Covent Garden, no one would have found exaggeration in his statement. If what art brings to us is in itself only half the experience, the other half being what we bring to art, then part of Maria’s greatness was to
make
the audience bring more to the experience, and give more of themselves to it. And she brought more of herself to the part than anyone else before her. Although throughout her career she lost no opportunity to tell the world how little she liked
Tosca
, it remained the vehicle for one of her greatest dramatic creations. Not only did she redeem the gruesome plot and bring magic to the audience—which others, after all, had done before her—but she broke away from all convention and revealed depths in the role that few suspected were there. She also managed to achieve the near-impossible feat of transforming “
Vissi d’arte
” from a disconnected showpiece into an integral part of the musical drama, a powerful account of what was going on in her soul, mind and body at that moment. Zeffirelli’s production, still unsurpassed in London, Paris or New York, strengthened the music’s menacing undertones, emphasized its violence and made primitive passions and emotions instantly credible. The second act set, with sinister shadows cast on the long wall from the light of a roaring log-fire, evoked thoughts of hell, which is what Zeffirelli had intended. “The action,” he explained, “is exactly like what takes place in the arena during the bullfight. Each of the characters in turn is the bull and the matador.” And the characters remained in character throughout. “Maria,” remembers Tito Gobbi, who loved her and adored working with her, “was Tosca every second of the performance. The way she moved and sang, the way she listened to colleagues when
they
sang. She filled dramatic pauses with her presence, her ability to sustain tension. She was genuine, authentic, without the old clichés. If something unexpected occurred—one night Maria accidentally fell down—it was absorbed into the drama. No one in the audience knew we hadn’t planned it that way. We adjusted, we felt totally free to realize our parts. Better than Callas we will never see.”

The celebrated rape scene that has now become part of the
Tosca
tradition was born in a moment of dramatic inspiration. “I pursued her,” Gobbi recalls, “but she knew she couldn’t get away and in her frenzy instead of running from me, she finally ran towards me, this poor, frail woman, and began beating me on my big chest with her fists. . . . I burst into sadistic laughter . . . then, with all my force, I grasped her hands and opened them up, then spread her arms, crucifying her. Maria knew at once what I was doing and responded with such suffering. It was a totally spontaneous thing that happened between us.” Maria’s palpable suffering and humiliation made it much easier, a few minutes later, to identify with her vengeful fury. Her cries of “
Muori dannato! Muori! Muori! Muori!
” (“Die, damned one! Die! Die! Die!”) were so spine-chilling that, as Dulcie Howard put it, “even if the knife wound had not been fatal, Scarpia could not have gone on living under the barrage of such implacable hatred.”

The reviews of the London
Tosca
seemed to reach new heights of adulation: “A performance of indescribable brilliance and fascination”; “No other living singer could come within a mile of her”; “Her voice has rarely sounded more warm and vibrant”; “How am I to describe the full magic of that performance? . . .”; “ . . . a great artist at the top of her dramatic and musical form.” The last year’s obituaries were forgotten and instead everyone was talking of the turn of the tide.