Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (57 page)

Yet she did have glimpses of how, contrary to what she believed, she had in herself the key to change things and to find the peace that eluded her. “All these things have become reflexes. . . . I look at myself and I say, ‘Well, Maria, you had better start working on your subconscious now, to clean out the bad thoughts or the bad reflexes that have been created.’ ” But this would have meant daring to delve into the depths of her consciousness where she had all these years stored hurt, bitterness, anger and resentment; having truly confronted them and understood them, she could, for the first time, have been free of them—and free of her mother, free of her ex-husband, free of all the assorted enemies she went on carrying on her back right to the end. But she did not dare set out on the journey she had outlined for herself. She was becoming more desperate, more isolated, more bitter with each year. The recording, in the middle of which she had received the news of her father’s death, turned out to be a failure. Despite the most skillful editing, she decided that it could not be released.

It was her last foray into a recording studio, but she needed to work. “Work, work, work, that’s everything,” she said at the time. “The important thing for me is to work. There is, of course, love too. But if I believe in love, I believe also in my art, and art demands discipline.” The mantle of the vestal virgin that she had worn willingly, single-mindedly, even passionately for over twenty years, she now clutched to herself, assuming an old role that she did not want, because she was afraid to fall back on herself.

The woman who as a young girl had crossed the Atlantic alone with a hundred dollars in her pocket, ready to brave everything to build her career, was now scared to take any step without di Stefano to lean on. The Teatro Regio in Turin, which had just been completed and was described by enthusiasts as “the most beautiful theater in Europe,” was to open its doors on April 10, 1973. The management wanted a spectacular opening, so they asked the most spectacular person in the world of opera. They knew that she would not agree to sing, so they invited her to make her debut in a new career by directing
I Vespri Siciliani
, with which they were planning to open the first season. Yes, said Maria, but only if di Stefano can be my codirector. The Turin management agreed—after all, having Maria as an opera director was a spectacular coup, di Stefano or no di Stefano—and Maria began work.

Two months before she started rehearsing she was to be the witness to a deep misery she could do nothing to ease. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis took off from Athens in his father’s Piaggio for a test run to check out a personal pilot before assigning him to the plane. Seconds later, the Piaggio banked sharply, causing the plane to cartwheel for 460 feet and crash. Alexander was recognized only by the monogram on his bloodstained handkerchief. His right temple had been reduced to pulp and his brain was irreparably damaged. Onassis’ son had been the most important person in his life, not because of their relationship, which was by no means a wholly happy one, but because the son represented the future—the only intimation of immortality for a man totally caught up in the world. By the time Onassis and Jackie arrived from New York, Alexander was being kept alive by a life-support system in an oxygen tent. A few hours later all hope had gone. Onassis asked the doctors to wait until Christina had arrived from Brazil and then “to torture him no more.” In his first shocking paroxysm of grief, he refused to have Alexander buried. Nobody quite knew what he wanted instead. In between spells of catatonic pain and outbursts of rage and blasphemy, he wanted the body “deep-frozen.” Then he wanted him buried inside the chapel on Skorpios—a privilege reserved for saints. Finally he agreed to have him buried by the side of the chapel and have the grave covered by an annex later.

After the funeral Maria provided his only hold on life. She herself had been deeply shaken by Alexander’s death. Six months earlier, when the man who had succeeded Rudolf Bing at the Met had died in a car crash in Italy, she had written to Dorle Soria: “I was horrified by the death of Gentele. . . . We think we are here forever, and we plan ahead, but you never know.” When Maggie van Zuylen had died the year before, Maria had been afraid to surrender to her grief, with its inescapable reminder of her own mortality. Now, as she began to understand the depth of Ari’s sense of loss, she was too shaken to resist any longer the full power of her fear of death, and she could think of nothing else. But it was his pain that hurt her most. When he first came to see her after the funeral, she was appalled by the sight of the man who walked in, and after a few minutes with him she was even more frightened. He was not the man she knew, but he was still the man she loved. It was as if a lifetime’s guilt had crystallized around Alexander’s death. If he had only changed the Piaggio for a helicopter, Alexander would be alive; if only he had not asked to have the new pilot tested, his son would still be with him. . . . Maria could see that his grief and rage, unchecked and turned against himself, were destroying him. At such a time his conviction that behind the crash was a conspiracy by his enemies, baseless though it was, served to direct some of the poisonous rage away from himself and toward the imaginary but hated villains. He offered half a million dollars to any informant and half a million to a charity of his choice. “He had built himself,” recalled one of his aides, “a whole edifice of suspicion and paranoia; the number of suspects and supposed motives was almost limitless.” He seemed determined to spend everything he owned and the rest of his life to find out who had killed his son; that someone had, he was in no doubt.

For Maria, seeing him like this—suddenly old and wrinkled, all vigor spent—and listening to his manic outpourings revealed shockingly that the man she had idealized for years was not, after all, the omnipotent hero of her imagination. Suddenly the world seemed a more barren and dangerous place. At no point, though, did she yield to the temptation of being drawn into his web of despair and paranoia; the life in her and her love for him rose to the challenge. It was her existence and, even when he was not with her, the knowledge of her existence and her love that helped pull him through, at least for a time. Yet a vital string had snapped and the signs were everywhere. His business losses during 1973 were enormous. On paper his worth dropped from nearly a billion dollars to half that amount. He was spending less and less time with Jackie and had told her bluntly that he was no longer interested in indulging her luxurious frivolities.

While Maria’s great love dwindled into a caricature of his former dynamic self, she became engrossed in work as a measure of self-preservation. But everything went wrong in Turin. “Maria knew nothing,” said Zeffirelli, “of moving a chorus or creating a stage picture. As always she went by instinct, but here, something else was needed. She was also very badly served by others. She needed a stage designer who would have taken all the production worries out of her hands so she could concentrate on the acting of the singers.” The designs and costumes of Aligi Sassu were heavy, even ugly, and to compound the problems the conductor, Vittorio Gui, fell ill shortly before the performance and had to be replaced by his assistant. The first night was the big operatic event of the year. The publicity surrounding Maria’s new debut was enormous and expectations stood dangerously high. In the reviews the following day, one could hear the sound of the thud: “The well-intentioned lady did little more than turn the lights on and off.” “Where is the thrilling, tempestuous personality of the singer of the century hiding? Certainly not in this direction . . .”

Her collaboration with di Stefano had so far produced one failure in the recording studio and one in the opera house. It would have been a good time to say good-bye, but she had nothing else, or that is what she told herself. On May 20, they left together for Japan, where they did a master class for the winners of the
Madama Butterfly
competition. Luckily, it is not as easy to fail in a master class.

One dream remained: a comeback singing together. John Tooley, who had succeeded David Webster as general administrator, had suggested a concert just for her at Covent Garden with a full orchestra. Di Stefano wanted a series of recitals around the world with only piano accompaniment. He insisted, encouraged, reassured and insisted again. Finally Maria agreed. Gorlinsky began to book: London, Hamburg, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam . . . As the bookings piled up, Maria grew scared, and when Gorlinsky announced that he would be presenting Renata Tebaldi and Franco Corelli at the Albert Hall in London, she found a reason to call off the tour. “How can you do this before our tour?” she complained. But di Stefano was insistent, di Stefano was persuasive—she was his only lifeboat—and at last Maria signed the contract. There was one fee for both of them and one contract, in Maria’s name: she was agreeing under its terms to supply di Stefano.

Maria’s world tour, the comeback she and everybody else had prophesied, speculated about, gossiped over, was to be launched at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Ivor Newton, now in his eighties, was to be the accompanist, but as the insurance company would not insure the concerts without the presence of a younger accompanist, he asked Robert Sutherland to come on the tour as his number two. They both began practicing with Maria at Georges Mandel. “She could not decide what she wanted to sing,” remembered Ivor Newton, “and kept changing the program. ‘Don’t worry about it being too short,’ she would tell me. ‘Applause will take up most of the time.’ ” But the more the news about the excitement generated around the world was passed on to her by no less excited friends, the more scared she became. And the more she heard about the thousands clamoring for tickets in London, in Madrid, in Düsseldorf, in Amsterdam, some of them the new generation that had never heard her before, the more she panicked. Each day she would alternate a thousand times between flight and advance. She wrote to her godfather on September 1 :

I am preparing for my concert tour and I’m scared stiff but I hope that I will be calm and well by my first one on the 22nd of this month, because the expectation is great and of course I am not what I was at 35 years—let’s hope for the best.
   I send you all my love and please love me as I think I deserve.
   All my thoughts are with you.
   Your god-child
   Maria

It was the first in a series of tender, loving letters written to her godfather during and about the tour, as though at this time of trial she needed even more than before to express her love and draw strength from his.

Her health, as always, suffered under the pressure; this time it was her eyes. As the day of the first concert approached, the pain in her eyes became so bad that she had to stop every few minutes to put drops in. In the middle of September, Maria, di Stefano and Robert Sutherland left Paris for Milan. They spent their days practicing in di Stefano’s studio, but Maria was feeling weak, apprehensive and unable to cope. The Festival Hall concert on September 22 was canceled. Would she or would she not go on with the tour? Without di Stefano to bolster her, to urge her on and to play on her professionalism and her pride, there is little doubt that she would
not
have gone on. But di Stefano was there, and on October 25 at the Congress Centrum in Hamburg, Maria was once again singing in public after eight years of silence. It was instantly clear to everyone who cared for her that the tour was going to be the greatest artistic disaster of her career. It was not the wobble, or the sharp changes of register, or her inability to sustain long phrases, or even the obvious care with which she was husbanding what remained of her vocal resources, holding back on both volume and intensity; it was the way in which her preoccupation with vocal survival had robbed her—and us—of that rare expressiveness, that unique ability to go to the heart of the music and through both the blazing power and the fragile beauty of her voice, to stir, disturb or caress us. “Like a monochrome reproduction of an oil painting,” was William Mann’s summing up of the effect a few months later in the London
Times
.

From Hamburg they left for Berlin. Robert Sutherland, who was turning the pages for Ivor Newton, had already discovered that mouthing the words for di Stefano to hear and giving him his musical entries was even more important for the concert. “The page turner sang along,” wrote a reviewer in Berlin. It was also becoming embarrassingly obvious that Ivor Newton, great accompanist though he had been in his prime, was simply too old for the strain of a major recital tour. He began having dizzy spells in the street and fantasizing about his death: “If I have a heart attack while Maria is singing a high note,” he said to Robert Sutherland, “you are to push me off my stool and take over as though nothing had happened.” While Ivor Newton was dreaming of a glorious death in the middle of accompanying the great Callas, Maria was frightened that if they had told him they did not want him to continue on the tour, it might really have killed him. So Ivor Newton stayed on.