Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (60 page)

She did begin to accept a few invitations. Frederick, who did her hair, would arrive at Georges Mandel to prepare her for the evening: “I would be putting her hair up and then many times, as I was getting near to finishing, the anger would begin mounting inside her. ‘Why go? Why go anyway? Take it down, Frederick. I’m not going.’ Frederick would take the chignon down; Bruna would telephone to explain that ‘Madame is indisposed’; and Maria would get into bed and watch television until late into the night.” She wrote to Leo to explain:

I received your very dear letter and smiled I admit—I too would
love
to find a wonderful companion—like you were for Sally—but my dear Leo, such men are impossible to find . . .
   In my condition he has to be
intelligent
, well-off, someone I can lean on with devotion and faith. He has to be
honest
, generous and not try to change me, like our dead friend.
   Where are such men? I know that if I don’t go out frequently I cannot meet them—but I go out and I find superficial, presumptuous men that are not interested in all the lovely things that make our life livable. I don’t think they exist today but I would
love
to find such a man. That would be the solution to my psychological problems.

With the exception of her letters to her godfather, her lifelong reluctance to express any emotion on paper had become almost absolute. Even when Lawrence Kelly, one of the few people she ever became intimate with, was dying of cancer in Kansas City, she could not face writing to him. Mary Mead phoned, first to urge her and then to implore her to write to him.

“I can’t, Mary. I really can’t,” Maria kept replying. “Let me talk to him on the phone.”

“But, Maria, you don’t understand, he can’t talk. He doesn’t have more than a few days to live.”

But she did not write.

She was feeling terribly alone. Sometimes in the middle of the night, longing for some warming contact, she would call a friend. “What’s new?” she would ask. “What else?” They would chat for a few minutes, and she would hang up, but sleep still would not come. “I’m used to working at night,” she said. “I’m used to thinking. It’s my job, my chemistry. . . . At night you get lots of funny ideas, pessimistic ideas, and I’d like to shake them off. Can you go for a walk, really walk your feet off, get really tired, do something? A woman can’t do it. I’d be picked up by the police. I’m beginning to think I should get a big dog and have him around. . . . Can you take a train, go some place when you get desperate? What does a woman do?”

She was feeling trapped, but would not see that she was mistaking convention for necessity and clinging in her desperation to the very beliefs about what a woman can or cannot do and what a legend should and should not do that were keeping her imprisoned. Yet she did want to understand. In her need to make sense of what had happened, she even talked of writing her autobiography. Sometimes lying in bed, but more often in the Blue Room, she started putting fragments of thought on tape. Most of the time it is Callas speaking but there is a fascinating moment when Maria takes over only to have the microphone snatched from her by Callas seconds later: “I would like to be Maria, but there is La Callas who demands that I carry myself with her dignity. I’d like to think that the two are really one, because Callas too was once Maria and I have put all of myself at all times into my music. All that I have been has always been authentic. I have worked with all possible honesty, and Maria too. If anyone really wants to understand me, he will find me entirely in my work. . . . Perhaps, after all, we can’t separate Callas, the star, fram Maria—the two are in harmony.”

But they were not. Maria was suffocating under the weight of La Callas. Even in these few sentences, at one moment we hear Maria speaking, complaining of the demands made on her by Callas, and the next, Callas taking over, trying to convince an imaginary audience that her art was her whole life. The tapes are in French throughout, which may be significant; it was easier to retreat into self-deception in a language that was not the one most natural to her. “
Cher public
,” she says at another moment on these tapes, “
je vous demande de me voir comme une musicienne qui a consacré sa vie à la musique
” [Dear public, I ask you to see me as a musician who has consecrated her life to music.] “Do not believe all the lies they have told you. I suppose it’s my fate that they say all sorts of things about me. The only thing that counts is that the public is impartial, that they know that I have totally devoted my life to my art.” The High Priestess was addressing the faithful, denying her humanity—denying Maria, who carried in her not only the needs and weaknesses that Callas despised, but also the seed of a mystery and a fulfillment of which her art could only be a part. “I wish I had more religious fanaticism,” she said once, the very intensity of her longing for a thread into a higher reality reflected in her unexpected use of “fanaticism.” She longed for honesty, for authenticity, but at this point in her life, she was mired in disillusionment, focusing on all the falseness she saw around her. John Tooley, who right to the end would go to see her whenever he was in Paris, remembers her falling increasingly into this bitter mood: “Whenever we talked about any new singers, conductors or directors, she would attack them all, convinced that there was nothing good around any longer. If I was on my way to see an opera, she would always say, ‘What do you want to go there for? Why don’t you stay here with me?’ Her loneliness was sometimes unbearable.” She had even stopped asking “What else?” and “What’s new?” Alan Sievewright went to see her to ask her to narrate
The Soldier’s Tale
, for a recording that he was producing. “I’m not very keen on Stravinsky,” she said. “I don’t really like modern music.” And when Alan pointed out that, written during the First World War,
The Soldier’s Tale
was hardly modern, she confessed: “I don’t really even approve of Puccini. Mine is the nineteenth century.” When she was in such moods, her opinions often seemed arbitrary, as if she were determined to isolate herself from those around her.

Toward the end of 1975, she wrote to her godfather:

 . . . I don’t know what to do. I know I have to work but what. Maybe start practising again and recording
on my own
. I might love singing again—but I have to sing alone—and with orchestra. The offers are a lot—but I have to look into myself deeply—and know what I want.

“To sing alone—and with orchestra . . . ,” “
on my own
.” It is clear from this letter that she had, by now, stopped trying to hide from herself the disastrous misjudgment of the last tour, singing without orchestra and with someone she had to carry both professionally and often emotionally. It is equally clear that she no longer knew what she wanted, and therefore, she no longer knew what to do. In the same letter she agonizes once again about di Stefano:

 . . . Di Stefano is deeply in love with me—but I’m cooling off because—well—who knows—only I want him to realize it little by little. His daughter’s death gave him a terrible blow. He already knows that I’m not the same with him—but—patience. If we had fallen in love 15 years ago—when he gained a great fortune—and sang like a God—things could go well but he himself says that I am rather well off—he has nothing but love to offer me—because neither I or he would want him to divorce. So it’s become an unhappy love affair.

She closes the letter by asking her godfather for advice, but as she already knew how strongly opposed he was to the relationship, it is more as if she is asking him for the strength to break off what she herself had called “an unhappy love affair.”

It was in this mood of uncertainty and dejection that she received, in November 1975, the news of Pasolini’s murder. His body had been found on a beach road near Rome, where the boy he had picked up had clubbed him and then run over him in Pasolini’s own car. It was yet another shock at a time when she felt she could take no more. “I’ve only known one Pasolini,” she said shortly after his death, “so sensitive, full of concern. He was passionate about politics, which I never was, but we never tried to force our views on each other. His ideas on art, on life were so powerful and original that you could not remain unmoved by them. If there was another Pasolini, I never knew him.”

She began shutting herself off more and more from everybody. All the people in her life knew by now that any arrangement they made with Maria was more likely than not to be canceled at the last moment. “She would call,” remembers Gaby van Zuylen, married to Maggie’s son, “and say, ‘Gaby, shall we meet tomorrow to go shopping?’ Then she would call back, ‘Shall we go to the movies instead?’ The next day, she would call again and cancel altogether. You had to be endlessly available.” And most people were not; many stopped calling altogether.

Two or three persevered. François Valéry, the French ambassador to UNESCO, was one of them. He was a bachelor, charming, cultivated, and with a great love and knowledge of music. The first time he had set eyes on her offstage was in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. He called the waiter and asked him to take to her table a plate on which he had put a personal check with “
un million d’admirations
.” Then they had met again at Maggie’s. Callas felt very good with him—an ambassador, civilized, dignified-looking, meeting all the worldly standards that mattered to her. But their relationship included Maria as well as Callas. “She could totally relax with me. She asked me many intimate questions, and she talked freely herself. Almost provocatively, she wanted to stress how normal, how female she was—she talked about not feeling too good when she had her periods, about what they did to her hair at the hairdresser’s, and she talked a lot, when they were still together, about how much she enjoyed sex with Ari. ‘He really did love me,’ she said once after his death. ‘You can’t lie in bed.’ ”

Toward the end, François Valéry was her main escort, but the pattern persisted :

“Will you take me to the cinema, François?”

“Of course, Maria.”

The following day: “No, I can’t make it tonight, my hairdresser is coming. No, not tomorrow; tomorrow I’m practicing. Wednesday?”

Wednesday dawned: “François, can we change tonight? I’m not feeling too good today.”

But François Valéry would call again and in the end they would meet. What she loved doing most was going to the movies, sometimes seeing one after another. One night they went to see the latest de Sica film and then a thriller; she had an ice cream during the first film, an ice cream during the second and two Toblerones in between. Not surprisingly, when François Valéry asked where she wanted to go to dinner, she answered that she was not at all hungry. “Shall we go home instead?” she said. They went, and sat in her bedroom talking. “It’s one o’clock in the morning,” she suddenly said smiling, “and here we are in my bedroom alone . . . very compromising.” “I felt she wanted me to stay. For the first time in my life I was embarrassed. I wanted to kiss her and at the same time, like a boy on his first date, I didn’t know how to go about it. In the end I told her what I felt: ‘You scare men, Maria. They respect you too much.’ She was really angry, and yet it was true.”

And Maria knew that it was true. “There are not very many men who can be near me,” she had said once. “It’s a sort of handicap to be famous. Also I have a very active mind, a strong personality, and I might frighten real men away.” It was not her mind or her personality that were daunting so much as the famous Callas aura she could assume at will. “We would be sitting talking,” remembers Vasso Devetzi, “and suddenly the telephone would ring, and in front of my very eyes, her voice, her whole demeanor, would change. She had instantly switched to Callas; as soon as she hung up, I was back with Maria again. It was automatic.”

It was so automatic that it had become a straitjacket in which Maria was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe. Yet she went on desperately believing that Callas was her only protection; caught up in this illusion, she never discovered her real strength. In the summer of 1976, this obsessive concern with protecting her image, so that the image could in turn protect her, became almost farcical. Maria, desperately needing a holiday, had gone with Vasso Devetzi to Halkidiki in the north of Greece. After eight days there, swimming, sunbathing, teaching Vasso to swim and sunbathing some more, Maria, for the first time since Aristo’s death, was beginning to feel alive again. “The difference between the ancient Greeks and me,” she had said, “is that I don’t cry about tragedies until they happen. And if they happen, again I don’t cry; I cope with them.” And she
was
coping.

Then on the eighth day they went to dinner at Ouranoupolis. Somebody recognized her, and the next day reporters and photographers swarmed into the little village where they were staying. For the next four days, Maria stayed locked in her room, with the shutters closed in the suffocating August heat, terrified that if she stepped out she would be photographed in her bathing suit or her beach robe. Even Vasso did not dare go swimming in case they photographed her and stuck Maria’s head on top. So, to protect the flawless unreality of the image, Maria stayed cooped up in her room, getting more and more depressed, and eating chocolates and “vanilla,” a Greek sweet that she loved, to make her forget the sea waiting outside.

Callas had once again, almost literally this time, imprisoned Maria, and the holiday that should have been a much-needed restoration became a further torment. The fragile equilibrium she had reached during these eight carefree days was once again disturbed. Anxious and dejected, she returned to Paris. Old friends seeing her again were shocked by the changes that had come upon her in the last months. She looked stooped and the lines around her eyes seemed full of tension. Since Ari’s death, she had stopped watching what she ate for the first time in over twenty years. “I’ve gained weight,” she wrote to Leo, “and I’ve lost my will-power to diet—isn’t it terrible?”