Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (47 page)

On the morning of her third
Tosca
, the
Guardian
carried a sensational open letter to Maria from Neville Cardus—doyen of English music critics—reviewing her entire career and proposing a dramatic change for the future. “Really, dear Madame Callas . . . your admirers are your worst enemies. They actually protest overmuch that your voice is ‘better than ever.’ For my own part I could almost wish that it had worsened. Then there would be some hope of your liberation from more or less brainless parts in Italian opera. A high shriek is fatal to a singer appearing as Norma, Elvira, Lucia, or any of that kind. But a high shriek could be a histrionic asset if you are acting with body, eyes, temperament as well as voice, Kundry in
Parsifal
or Elektra or Salome in Strauss’s operas. . . . Opera for you now is the ranging world of Wagner, Strauss, Berg and other composers who could give your intelligence something to get its teeth into and kindle the Callas imagination, flammable now surely from hot kindling of personal experience. . . . There is still time left to you to fulfil this destiny . . .”

Time there was: what was lacking was the commitment and the passion needed to embark on a new career. “What willpower must have gone into your career,” an interviewer exclaimed once. Maria corrected him: “Not willpower. Love . . .” And now love was driving her elsewhere. For another eighteen months, Maria would draw on her reserves of willpower, the echoes of the love she had put into her work and the deep faith that Michel Glotz and Georges Prêtre had in her; the result would at times look like a new beginning based on a new maturity. In the spring of 1964, at the EMI studios in Paris, the future looked very different. With the triumphant
Toscas
behind her, she wanted to do more, to prove to herself and the world that her vocal problems belonged to the past, that somehow they had been “solved.” With Nicola Rescigno conducting, she began recording Rossini, Donizetti and Verdia arias, but some were only released years later, while others have never been issued at all.

In the middle of the recording, she received a telegram from New York informing her that her father was critically ill at Lenox Hill Hospital and that before he was admitted, he had at last married Alexandra Papajohn, who for years had been his wife in all but name. Maria’s concern at her father’s critical condition was overshadowed by her outrage at his remarriage and at the way she had found out about it. She sent a telegram to her godfather:

RECEIVED CABLE FROM PAPAJOHNS ABOUT FATHER BEING OPERATED AGAIN AND CRITICALLY ILL PLEASE FIND OUT AS I AM RECORDING AND CANNOT MOVE WAS SHOCKED AT HIS MARRIAGE PLUS TRIP TO NEW YORK BOTH ABSOLUTE SECRETS TILL YOUR LETTER MOST DISGUSTED AND UNHAPPY SORRY TO BOTHER YOU BUT AM IN FULL WORKING SEASON LOVE MARIA

The news added to Maria’s nervousness and anxiety during the recording sessions, and, as always, it showed in her voice. At one particularly rough session, she was so nervous that Michel Glotz called a break to calm everyone down. During the break he played a tape of “
Ritorna vincitor
” from
Aida
, which Régine Crespin had recorded for EMI the previous day. Nicola Rescigno recalls the transformation that then took place. “ ‘This is not Verdi or
Aida
,’ Maria said. ‘It’s like a funeral march. Come on, Nicola, let’s do it.’ ” And just like that, with all Maria’s fire and passion, they did it in a single take.

The incident holds a key to Maria’s gradual withdrawal. Her passion, her mind, her experience and her genius—they were all still there, but most of the time Maria herself was not there with them. “Maria,” said Zeffirelli once, “found in her art an outlet for all her problems.” As her problems with Onassis grew, she needed the outlet all the more. She needed it, but she did not want it. Zeffirelli, who at the beginning of May arrived in Paris to start rehearsing with her for a new production of
Norma
, knew that. “Artistically she had traveled the full road, so, at a certain point, she tried to do the same in her personal life. She was simply reaching up.” Neville Cardus had urged her to fulfill what he saw as her destiny, but Maria knew that her artist’s destiny was not the only one, and she was reaching up for that other destiny that embraced so much more than her art.

There is no doubt that if Maria had had her wish she would by that time have been nursing a baby, with Aristo at her side. But what she was doing instead was rehearsing
Norma
for her first full opera in Paris and the last new production she would ever do. During the rehearsals she received demands for $4338.37 in payment of her fathers hospital bills. Before an opening, Maria’s housekeeper Bruna had orders to hide from her any letters or telegrams that might disturb her, but, on this occasion, the letter got to her. “Tell my father not to give my address to people,” she wrote to her godfather. But what came out much more strongly in her letter was her bitterness at the thought that another—a “stranger,” as she put it—was now closer to her father than she was: “So dear Leo, make it quite plain to him. He chose others. He can keep them. I’m out for good. . . . I hate to offend the Papajohns but as friends all is well. As my stepmother etc, I do not care to have any relation of any sort. I’m too old for such nonsense. . . . I hope the newspapers don’t catch on. Then I’ll really curse the moment I had any parents at all.” And there was a P.S.: “Please keep me informed and don’t let him die where I might be criticized.”

When she was under pressure, Maria lived only for herself. Every event, even the most dramatic, she saw through calculating eyes. And the time leading up to the opening night of
Norma
was full of tension. She gave everything of herself to the part. Zeffirelli remembers how he begged her to be prudent, to avoid unreasonable vocal challenges. “I can’t, Franco,” she kept saying. “I won’t do what Anna Moffo does in
Traviata
. I won’t skim through my music. I have to take chances even if it means a disaster and the end of my career.”

If she wanted to, she knew that she could avoid the danger of the high notes altogether; she also knew, as Zeffirelli kept telling her, that most people would not have known the difference, and those who did, if they really understood what Callas was, would not have cared in the least. But when Maria left out a high note, as she did in Kansas City in her Lucia, she could not help feeling that she had cheated, and her pride, her conscience, would simply not accept it. She may not have followed Zeffirelli’s vocal advice but being around him was exhilarating for her. “During
Norma
,” remembers Zeffirelli, “I felt her great beauty constantly. I tried to feed this great beauty back to her in every way I could. I admired her, contemplated her. Everything I did was to make her look better, to reflect to the public what I saw in her, what she was for me.”

At this time, when Onassis constantly triggered her insecurities and feelings of unworthiness, she needed Zeffirelli’s reassurance more than ever. Everything in Zeffirelli’s
Norma
was designed to enhance the beauty and the new, deep softness that Maria brought to it. It was an exquisitely romantic production, all four acts taking place in a great forest in which the foliage changed with each season. Maria was swathed in silk and chiffon, and in the second act she seemed to float—a vision of a thousand shades of cream, pink, apricot and lilac. The reviews varied widely depending upon which of the eight performances the critic saw, and which act he was focusing on. “Sublime from the second act onwards,” wrote Claude Samuel about her first
Norma
; “The best first act since 1952,” wrote Harold Rosenthal about her fifth; but it was the fourth
Norma
, on June 6, that was soon to become part of the Callas legend. The excitement that had surrounded her first full-scale appearance at L’Opéra reached its climax that night. Onassis, who had missed the first night, arrived for the fourth with Princess Grace and the Begum Aga Khan. Their presence, together with that of Charlie Chaplin and most of his large family, Rudolf Bing, Yves St. Laurent, members of the French government and numerous socialites, turned a fourth night into the big
Norma
night with all the trappings of a gala. From the first notes the faithful in the audience knew that a battle between Maria and the Voice was being fought in front of them. Every phrase was rife with danger. The gala trappings, the all-pervading sense of being judged, Aristo’s presence—they had all brought out the tremulous Maria lurking inside the grandeur and aloofness of the great Norma.

Her most passionate admirers and her most implacable detractors seemed to have made L’Opéra their meeting place that Saturday night. Up to the beginning of the last act, although Maria had missed a few of her high notes, there had been no opportunity for a real showdown. It came during the final scene when Maria broke on a critical high C. Most people present had never heard a professional singer break in public. While the bulk of the audience was suffering with her, there was uproar from the anti-Callas faction: whistling, booing and shouts of “Take her back to her dressing room.” Maria raised her hand and motioned the orchestra to start again. It was an extraordinary risk. And she won. The note was perfectly placed and the audience went mad. But it was by no means the end of it. This cracked high C unleashed passions that overflowed into the corridors of L’Opéra after the performance. Someone shouted, “It’s a disgrace!” “You know nothing of art!” yelled a Callasite in reply. A respectable old lady was seen pulling the glasses off another of the enemy faction. Yves St. Laurent actually kicked the shins of yet another. Eventually, the Republican Guard had to be called in to break up fistfights. While Maria was being embraced and congratulated by Princess Grace, the Chaplins, Rudolf Bing and, of course, Aristo, the fighting continued. And it was still going on when she left the opera house in Onassis’ Rolls-Royce, with a few hundred admirers showering first her, and then the car, in flowers.

Rudolf Bing remembered later that when he went backstage to her dressing room he did not know whether or not to refer to the episode of the note that broke. “It’s like a woman wearing a very low-cut dress, you’re not sure whether it’s more rude to look or not to look. I decided not to mention it and she never mentioned it either.” She never mentioned it but she was haunted by it. “It hurts to feel hated,” she said later. And she did feel hated—hated and humiliated and even more sure than before that what she was hankering after was not going to be found through her work. “Oh, why can’t I sing Norma in a forest all alone, me and the moon, instead of having to go through this,” she said to Zeffirelli when they were alone in her dressing room.

Having Aristo next to her at such a time was like a balm. She needed his strength and his love and she needed him there as a focus for
her
love. He seemed to love her more now than after her greatest triumphs. Her vulnerability stirred in him the urge to protect her, to shelter her from pain. He talked to her of Skorpios, of its olive groves and its sparkling sea, of leaving Paris the moment she. was free. He promised, like a god who has such things to give, to make her happy.

They left Paris as soon as the last
Norma
was over. At the beginning of July she had to go back for her long-awaited recording of
Carmen
with Georges Prêtre conducting and Nicolai Gedda as Don José. She looked tanned, radiant and fleshier, with a few extra Greek-fed pounds. The Salle Wagram, where the recording was being made, windowless and desperately hot, felt like a prison compared to the Mediterranean she had just left and to which she longed to return. As far as she was concerned,
Carmen
could not be finished fast enough. The sessions seemed interminable and, as if the elements conspired to make them even more so, torrential rain with thunder on the last Saturday of the recording made it necessary to repeat the celebrated quintet in the second act about twelve times. A private plane was standing by, ready to whisk her away the minute it was all over.

It was a blissful summer. Maria and Ari spent hours making plans for Skorpios and spinning dreams. He wanted a full moon for every moonlit night; she wanted eternal summer; he wanted to grow tobacco as they did in Smyrna, tall, ungainly plants that flowered and scented only at night and closed up their hoods and withered during the day—they reminded him of himself, he said; she, more realistically, wanted the island always in bloom. They spoke Greek all the time, and by now Maria’s Greek was almost as idiomatic as his. Many friends noticed just how devoted they seemed, and how eager he was to have her share his every thought and include her in all his plans for the future, so much so that rumors began to float about that they had already been secretly married in Las Vegas. They had not been married but they were definitely having a honeymoon.

One of the plans discussed during that happy summer was that of turning Maria into a shipowner. Vergottis, who spent part of the summer with them on the
Christina
, was full of enthusiasm for the idea and he promised to find the perfect ship for her. In September he called them to announce that he had found it: it was a tanker of 27,000 tons, it was called
Artemision II
, and it cost $3.9 million. Shortly afterward, he joined them again on the
Christina
and, over dinner, they decided to go ahead and make an offer. Just over a month later, on October 31, the ship had been bought by Overseas Bulk Carriers, the company set up by Vergottis to operate it. Maria bought a twenty-five percent holding in the company, Vergottis another twenty-five percent and Onassis fifty, the plan being that he would later give Maria twenty-six percent of his share, thus establishing her as the majority shareholder. In time, all these details would become the moldy fodder of the English courts, but on the night of October 31 they were part of the discussion among the three partners during a celebration dinner at Maxim’s to congratulate Maria on becoming a shipowner. “Greek men sharpen their wits over things,” she said later. “I admired their conversation which is not the usual gossip and dress conversation . . . They loved discussing business and I kept pestering them in a nice way, an affectionate way.” She kept pestering them, wanting to find out more, to absorb more, to understand Ari’s world better.