Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (58 page)

From Hamburg to Berlin, to Düsseldorf, to Munich, to Frankfurt, to Mannheim, to Madrid, to London, to Paris, to Amsterdam, to Milan, to Stuttgart, the world watched the drama of a tragic decision unfold. It was as if Maria had decided to destroy Callas in public, choosing to make her comeback with a partner who should have stopped singing years earlier, with a past eighty, semiretired accompanist, in a repertoire which her voice could no longer handle and, most important, without the support and the excitement of a full orchestra, which she needed now more than ever. It was as if she had dared the audience to hear her and then go on believing in the legend that had brought them to the concert halls. And they did go on believing.

Once, when Maria had been ill for one of the
Tosca
rehearsals at Covent Garden, John Copley, who was assistant resident producer, took over her exits and entrances so that the rehearsal could go on. “Mario, Mario,” cried Mr. Copley from the wings—Tosca’s first words before she makes her entrance. “What a voice!” exclaimed a lady reporter who was covering the rehearsal and had somehow missed the news that the great Callas would not be there.

It was only the ghost of the great Callas on tour. Yet it was an unbroken succession of ovations, an hour-long program stretched to over two by the applause. In London, at the end of the performance, the audience thronged to the stage to shake hands with Maria, to throw her flowers, their eyes moist or glazed with emotion. But the tour both in Europe and around America—where Robert Sutherland finally replaced Ivor Newton—had, as John Ardoin put it and as many critics implied, “tarnished the artistry of her greatest years.” For Callas, the perfectionist, the
prima donna assoluta
of the twentieth century, it was a tragic ending to a glorious career. For Maria, growing increasingly isolated and fighting the desperation threatening to engulf her, it was, despite the terror of each performance, a much needed confirmation that she was loved. “Why do they love you?” she had asked once. “Not because I sang a beautiful aria or note; there must be more to it than that.” And the tour convinced her that there was. “She has long commanded our attention, our gratitude, our awe,” wrote Richard Dyer after her concert in Boston. “Now in her struggle and in her exhaustion she asks and earns, at cost to herself and to us, what she had never before seemed to need, our love.”

Her second concert in London was on December 2, 1973, Maria’s fiftieth birthday. In the middle of the prolonged applause at the end of the concert, Ivor Newton returned to his stool and di Stefano started to sing “Happy Birthday.” The audience went wild, and it was love, not just admiration or enthusiasm, that filled the auditorium. Afterward Maria told Ivor Newton, “I thought you were trying to force me to do an encore. . . . I could have killed you. . . . Then I forgave you everything.”

The tour had bolstered her confidence and momentarily banished the sense of futility that had filled the last few years. At first she had tried to convince herself that it was all going as well as it could. She wrote to her godfather from Frankfurt:

Tonight I’m singing my fifth concert—God willing. I’m quite happy, dear Leo. People love me—of course they know I am not as I was 15 years ago, but they are extremely happy so why should I complain . . .
   Well working does me good anyway.
   I love you—keep well—
my very special person
—
   Your
   Maria

But as the tour went on, and even without the critics’ comments which made her feel as though she was being pecked by the hard, strong beaks of a flock of predatory birds, she knew that as an artist she had failed. “Don’t tell me anything,” she said to Peter Diamand when he went to see her backstage at the Festival Hall. “I
know
. Go to Pippo. Tell him something, anything to pep him up. Do it for me. . . .” She knew, but in a television interview with David Holmes, she tried hard to fight the knowledge. Its five minutes twenty seconds provided one of the most painful scenes ever shown on television. You can hear in her voice, you can see in her eyes, the anguish she is pushing back. Yet what really catches at the heart is the almost surreal contrast between the truth we see and the words she speaks. “During the concerts I will improve even more the whole status of the voice. . . . In a year’s time I’m sure that I’ll be much better than what I am . . . what I actually am now, because I have not worked certain muscles for eight long years. . . . Every evening is an improvement.”

So she said, but by the time she got to New York in February 1974, the tour seemed endless, without purpose or achievement. The fears had increased and the despair had deepened. Dario and Dorle Soria went to see her at the Stanhope where she was staying. “The television was on,” remembers Dorle Soria. “We offered to switch it off. ‘No, I never turn it off,’ she said sharply. ‘Do you?’ ”

The night before her concert she went on taking one sleeping tablet after another, without counting, hardly knowing what she was doing. The following day she could not get out of bed, let alone sing. Dr. Louis Parrish arrived at her hotel to try to reduce, according to the official announcement, “the acute inflammation of Miss Callas’s upper respiratory tract.” In the state medical directory, Dr. Parrish was listed as limiting his practice to psychiatry, but as the executive director of Carnegie Hall put it, “Well, if it’s psychosomatic, she’s still sick.” An hour before the concert was due to start, the large, fashionable New York crowd milling around in the lobby was told by Dario Soria that the performance would now be held on March 5. A man tried to rip down a five-foot-high poster advertising the concert; another shouted, “She’s done it to me once, she won’t do it again.” Police on horseback were trying to clear the traffic jam as chauffeur-driven cars kept pulling up to deposit their passengers for the concert and then sped off when they heard the news, with the passengers still inside. Maria had asked Robert Sutherland to go to Carnegie Hall to observe the reactions. An excited fan summed them up: “It may be a cancellation, but this is the biggest event of the season.” The isolated outbursts of anger did not affect the general feeling of resignation and compassion. The audience knew, or sensed, that the cancellation had nothing to do with tantrums and whims.

It is very doubtful whether di Stefano, the man who was supposed to be her source of strength at this time of trial, ever understood her. He was under tremendous strain during the tour, because his daughter whom he adored was, in her early twenties, slowly dying of cancer. As the tour went on, his quarrels with Maria were becoming more and more violent. At first he had a way of saying things, sometimes absurd things, that made her laugh, giggle and feel like a young girl. Now the periods of rows and unpleasantness in between these good times became longer and longer.

From New York they flew to Boston where they had a concert planned for February 27. On the day itself, they had a fight, at the end of which di Stefano stormed out. Maria called Sol Hurok in New York: “Ask Vasso,” she said, “if she’s still in New York.” Vasso Devetzi, a concert pianist, herself Greek and a close friend of Maria, was at the Regency with her suitcase packed ready to leave for Paris when the order was issued: “You are going to Boston. I’m sending you the press lady to help you get ready. A helicopter is waiting to take you there.” In Boston, Maria was furious: “Imagine him leaving me alone . . . ,” she told Robert Sutherland. “And in Kennedy country!” That day the only rehearsal took place while she was having her hair done. Robert played the piano in one room and Maria sang in the other while the hairdresser was putting her hair up in a chignon. When Vasso arrived, Maria still was not too sure what she was going to sing. She never knew until the last moment what she would choose from the large selection included in the program. Vasso Devetzi played Handel, Schumann and Chopin. After di Stefano’s roaring and crooning in falsetto, it must have come as a relief.

“Mr. di Stefano is indisposed,” had been the announcement. By the time they returned to New York for the postponed concert, he had stopped being “indisposed,” and on March 5, they were ready to face together their select audience at Carnegie Hall. A few hours before they were due to leave their hotel, Maria heard of Sol Hurok’s sudden death. He had organized her American tours since the 1950s, but the effect of the shock went far beyond the unexpected death of an old friend. His death on the afternoon of her concert was for Maria in her present highly susceptible state an omen of ill luck. She was overcome by an irrational but overwhelming feeling that from now on anything she undertook would be a failure. She was finally persuaded to go on with the concert that night to avoid a second cancellation for the same audience, but she was in a distraught state.

For anyone who cared for Maria, or even for anyone who knew where the next note was meant to be, it was sheer agony to watch her struggle through with a voice in ruins and to wonder just how far off target she would be. Before the concert began, she had made a speech dedicating it to Sol Hurok’s memory and apologizing for her overwrought emotional state. At the end of the concert she nearly had a complete breakdown on the stage. She suddenly launched into a long, bitter and largely incoherent attack on the way opera houses, and especially the Met, were being run. Once again she saw herself as the victim of managements which would not give her adequate rehearsal time and proper artistic conditions in which to work. It was rambling, painful and with practically the entire Met establishment there, intensely embarrassing; it was impossible to miss the agony under the aggression. The audience froze as the mask fell away. No one knew how long she would go on, or whether she would ever stop. Suddenly, very revealingly, she changed tack. Singing at the Met, she said, with the support of the orchestra, chorus and scenery, was a game compared to what she had done tonight. It was partly self-justification but, even more, a bitter judgment on herself; she could no longer refuse to see the hopelessness of the way she had chosen to come back to the stage after eight years.

She did finally stop. There had only been one interjection: “
You
are Opera,” someone had shouted from the balcony in the middle of her attack on opera managements. Otherwise there was hushed, anxious, astonished silence. It was like a parody of the great moments when she had dared to step out of character and use the words and the music to make a personal point against Ghiringhelli, against a hissing audience, against her enemies at large. These moments had magnificence; her speech at Carnegie Hall was a desperate act by a broken, exhausted woman, not so much daring as driven to humiliate herself in public. Almost catatonic within concentric rings of fear and despair, she had cried across the barrier for help, but the cry had been disguised as an attack, and even those who heard and understood hardly knew how to respond. As she stepped out of the stage door at the end, hundreds of people were waiting, applauding. Holding in her arms the roses Sol Hurok had sent her for the concert, she began to weep. Suddenly she threw one of her roses to the public, then another, then the whole bunch. In the scramble to get one of the Callas flowers, a way was opened, big enough for Maria to walk across to her car.

Di Stefano was increasingly uncomprehending, and the strain between them made it seem unlikely at times that they would complete the tour together. Four days after New York, in Detroit, Pippo was “indisposed” again, and three days later, in Dallas, he was “indisposed” once more. Finding pianists to fill the gap had become an important side activity of the tour organizers: Ralph Votepek stepped in in Detroit and Earl Wild in Dallas. By the time they got to the West Coast, there was cause for real alarm. Maria phoned Gorlinsky: “I’m finished. I’m through. It’s impossible to work with this man. I’m leaving. I’m going home.” It is true she had been “through” before, but this time she seemed in earnest, and no amount of coaxing and cajoling would make her change her mind. So Gorlinsky had to turn on the heat. “Okay, Maria, let’s cancel the whole tour. It doesn’t matter to me, I’m insured. But it’s going to cost
you
a million dollars, because Pippo is bound to sue you for breach of contract.” Maria finally agreed not to storm off but to talk it over with di Stefano. She did, and they decided that they would go on that night, but that their first concert on the West Coast would be positively their last concert together. “
Caro
Pippo” rose to the solemn occasion. “If we’re not going to sing together anymore,” he said, “let’s have some fun.” So, when it came to the
Carmen
duet, instead of singing “
Carmen, je t’aime, je t’adore . . . ne me quitte pas
,” he sang “Good-bye, Maria, it’s been nice knowing you.” To which she sang back: “
Cher
Pippo, go to the devil.” According to Maria, the audience never caught on. After that they could not possibly part, at least not yet.

The last stop was Montreal, where they were joined by di Stefano’s wife. From the start she had accepted with equanimity her husband’s relationship with Maria. Ironically it was the same kind of equanimity with which Maria accepted di Stefano’s casual affairs during the tour. “I can’t compete with twenty-one-year-olds,” she told Robert Sutherland. And she certainly did not want to compete with his wife; her presence made Maria increasingly nervous and insecure. One night when both Pippo and Robert Sutherland were in her suite, she asked Robert to take her hair down. Throughout the tour this had been di Stefano’s privilege. Now he sat staring at them in heavy silence for the duration of the ritual.

Maria summed up their relationship a few months later in a letter to her godfather: “Pippo, of course, is in love and I also up to a certain point. Maybe three years of habit—and nothing else as temptation. Men—real men, are difficult to find. Imagine the kind of man to be my companion.” Aristo was still the only “real” man, or at least the only man she really loved.