Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (7 page)

A few months after the occupation began, life in Athens became a little easier. The Germans extended the curfew to midnight and allowed shops, schools and theaters to reopen. Once more Maria found herself at the conservatory, but this time not just as a student. While the theaters were closed, the fairy godmother had toiled long and hard on Maria’s behalf. The result was that when they reopened she could announce to Maria that she was now, at seventeen, a permanent member of the Athens Opera. Maria’s successes in
Boccaccio
and in the student productions of acts from
Un Ballo in Maschera
and
Aida
had made de Hidalgo’s efforts much easier, but they did little to lessen the antagonism, the jealousy and the outright hostility that spread rapidly and bitterly throughout the opera house as soon as the appointment was officially announced.

The chorus of disapproval, naturally enough, was led by the female members of the company and, still more naturally, by the older ones in particular. This hostility, sparked by nothing more than envy and the instinct of self-preservation, was fueled by one real grievance and one real objection. The objection came from those who genuinely believed that Maria’s voice had such physiological flaws that no amount of teaching and practice could produce from it a consistency of sound. The complaints in 1941, about her “unruly top” or “too much metal in her upper register,” were essentially the criticisms of Maria’s voice that persisted throughout her career. In the future they would be elaborated, adorned with musicological jargon and peddled to the multitude by learned critics, but in principle they remained the same objections raised by her Greek colleagues right at the beginning of her career. They could be reduced to one basic observation: Maria’s voice was not, and never would be, beautiful in the classical sense. It was muddy in the lower and middle ranges, and sometimes could turn into a squawk in the upper register. It had “too much metal” in it, too many sharp edges; it could cut as well as ravish. Also Maria would always sacrifice homogeneity of color, smoothness and other hallmarks of beautiful singing on the altar of emotional truth. So those who rated a singer first, second and third by the conventional beauty of her voice, with expression and dramatic truth coming low on the list, had a valid objection to Maria’s appointment.

Much more important was the grievance against Maria herself. According to the rules of conduct that Maria had, largely unconsciously, drawn for herself, she looked on her fellow students and her colleagues as adversaries. Her cynicism about other people’s motives was deep, as though she had been born with it, instead of, like most people, acquiring it through experience. She was at this time going through what was probably her most egocentric and insecure period, so she could see the rest of the world only in terms of rivalry and domination. And the rest of the world obliged her by behaving as she had assumed it would. There was little camaraderie, and still less love, between Maria and her colleagues. And Maria as always, in response to what she felt to be withdrawal, denial and rebuffs, threw herself even more obsessively into her work. She adopted an aloofness that hid the pain from the world and to a large extent from herself.

While Maria became more and more the wholly absorbed artist at work, the war continued. First there was the bombing. Athens itself was not bombed, but whenever bombs fell on its port, Piraeus, the sound of the sirens pierced the air in Athens, and everybody was ordered to the shelters. Maria and Jackie ran first to the canary room, picked up a cage each and followed Madame Evangelia down the 120 steps to the cellar. The other tenants, running down the stone steps, some barefoot, others in their pajamas, would overtake the two young women with their canaries, waving their arms and making loud, reprimanding noises at time-wasting frivolities like canaries. Maria never let her fear of air raids or of Nazi soldiers on the streets affect her actions, but once in the shelter, the cellar door firmly closed behind her, she was always violently sick.

Food was the other great problem. Since Greece had always relied on imports for a large proportion of her food, the Allied blockade and enemy indifference caused great hardship, which the Red Cross tried to relieve without much success. All food was rationed and black markets had sprouted up in odd places. The main black market was up in the mountains, a long, exhausting walk or an almost equally long ride in fragile little cars drawn by temperamental woodburning locomotives. Sometimes Maria went with her mother and sometimes she went alone, walking home laden with whatever vegetables, chickens or rabbits she was able to buy.

One day in the early summer of 1941, when Maria returned from the mountains, she discovered that the Germans had issued another of their endless series of proclamations, this time against any kind of noise both in public places and in private homes. She exploded, and this became the order she most loved to disobey, with fervor and bravado. On the very evening that the Germans issued their proclamation, she moved her piano up to the door of the balcony and sat there playing and singing at the top of her voice to the great relish of the passersby who broke into sudden, spontaneous applause. So infectious was the enthusiasm that many of the Italians and some of the Germans in the street joined in.

Throughout the war, Maria’s voice proved to be a magic gift which gained for her friends, food, protection. The first war friend Maria’s voice brought her was a young Italian soldier who heard her sing when he was walking past her open window in Patissiou Street. He waited until she came out on the balcony and talked to her, full of emotion at the memories from home that her Italian singing had evoked. They met a few times after that; they would sit on a park bench, Maria singing his favorite arias from Italian opera, and he unable to hold back his tears. He would give her food from his rations, and Maria would go away and hide in doorways, tear the package open and eat the food then and there. Her mother was furious that she hardly ever brought anything back, but Maria was too hungry, too lonely and feeling too unloved to share.

Her voice had brought her another war friend: Colonel Mario Bovalti from Verona. At first he started calling at Patissiou 61 and accompanying Maria on the piano; gradually, he began bringing little gifts, sharing his rations with the family and giving Maria a great deal of attention and some much-needed love.

In the autumn of 1941 her voice saved her life. One night a Greek air force officer, a friend of the family, came to Patissiou 61 with two disguised British officers who had escaped from prison. Evangelia knew that the punishment for sheltering fugitives from German justice was death, and was reluctant to take them in. In the end, however, prodded by her two daughters, she yielded. The two British officers were installed in the canary room, with strict instructions not to cough, not to use a light at night, hardly even to breathe; their only luxury was listening to the nine o’clock news from London. The secret was so carefully guarded that not even Jackie’s Milton had been told. If Milton was with them in the evening, Maria’s self-imposed duty was to go to the piano promptly at nine o’clock and start singing—anything loud that would muffle the sound of the radio from the canary room. Maria grew really fond of the dark-haired Scotsman and the fair-haired Englishman. They sensed that and also sensed Maria’s daring; they therefore went to her whenever they wanted to break any of the rules of shelter, and she would invariably agree to help them get around her mother. One day they even pleaded with her to take them out into the street so they could walk in the sun. Maria, always very practical, said nothing to her mother until she had found some black paint and with Jackie as her accomplice, had dyed Robert’s hair. When Evangelia saw the quartet that came arm in arm to ask her permission to leave the house, she laughed too hard to be able to say no.

Six weeks after their Greek friend had arrived out of nowhere, bringing the two British officers with him, he came back and with just as few explanations took them away. The day after, Italian soldiers, following a lead, came to search the house. As they pushed through the door, revolvers drawn, Maria, who knew that the letters and photographs the British officers had left behind were still in the apartment, ran to the piano and started singing Tosca—Tosca pleading to save her lover’s life, Maria singing to save hers and her mother’s and sister’s. When Maria started singing, the Italian soldiers forgot about searching the house, put down their revolvers and sat on the floor in a circle around the piano. They came back the next day, this time knocking instead of pounding on the door and heaping loaves of bread, salami and macaroni on the piano as thanks for the music of yesterday and a plea for more music today.

If her voice was the magic weapon, Tosca seemed to be the magic part. It was Tosca that she sang the first day she moved her piano to the door of the balcony to disobey the German ban on noise; it was Tosca that she sang to distract Milton’s attention the first day he heard strange noises coming from the canary room; it was Tosca that she sang when the Italian officers came to search the house. One evening when she was once again singing Tosca on the balcony a man answered her across the rooftops, singing Mario. The next day when Maria got back from the conservatory, she ran to the balcony and started singing. The unseen Mario responded again. And again. And again. The duet across the rooftops continued through July. One July evening when Maria ran to the balcony there was a special joy in her voice. That morning the Tosca at the Athens Opera had been taken ill and Maria was asked to take over. Tosca once again—this time not to deceive the Italian officers or defy the German soldiers, but her first major professional role. Antonis Dellendas, a huge, exuberant tenor and the idol of the Greek operatic world, was her Mario. (The identity of the Mario who sang with her across the rooftops is still a mystery.)

Tosca gave Maria her first opportunity to display offstage her fierce passion. The elderly soprano she was replacing happened to be, as fate would have it, the leader of those opposed to Maria’s permanent appointment to the company. When she heard who was to take her place, too ill to get up and stop Maria herself, she sent her husband to block the way to the stage entrance. One does not need to be a tigress to resent such petty behavior, but Maria did not merely resent him—she jumped at him and scratched his face with both hands.

Maria’s explosions would later be magnified and even caricatured by a press that recognized very early that Callas the Tigress sold many more copies than Callas the Opera Singer; still, there is very little doubt that the potential for violence lurked just beneath the surface in Maria, and the world watched hypnotized as she displayed it in public. The aggrieved soprano’s husband, however, did not merely watch, and there was nothing hypnotized about him as, his face speckled with blood, he jumped back and landed his fist on Maria’s face. So when Tosca made her entrance on the stage, one of her eyes, under her wide-brimmed hat, was slightly blacker than the other.

But the critics were ecstatic and the audience, as one of them put it, “electrified.” They were swept along by the passion of this seventeen-year-old Tosca, a woman consumed in turn by jealousy, hate and pain. Maria was famous. And during a war, fame of that kind is not just an ethereal commodity; it has a very practical value, often readily convertible into food. Since the occupation, Maria’s diet, the black market notwithstanding, had consisted mainly of bread and other starches, and as she was allergic to them, she had broken out in boils. By the end of 1941, with the help of better food and an admiring dermatologist, she was completely cured.

For Maria’s mother fame
was
an ethereal—almost a spiritual—commodity. “It was fame I wanted for my daughter,” she said in an interview in New York twenty years later. “Money came second.” That in her mind justified it all; she did not feel she had to pay even lip service to any other values. Seeking money alone might be seen as base, vulgar and mean-spirited, but it had not occurred to her that there was something sad, too, in her relentless pursuit of fame. In her imagination Evangelia saw her daughter rising ever more gloriously in the world with herself at the center of all Maria’s social triumphs. For her mother, Maria’s singing was the key that would unlock the door to those triumphs. She had always dreamed of seeing her children distinguished, at first she hardly knew in what area. By now there could be no doubt. Maria was to be—already was—a famous singer, and Jackie, the singing and piano-playing wife of a rich Greek shipowner.

When Maria returned to her dressing room at the first intermission of
Tosca
, her mother was waiting for her. She was waiting for her at the second intermission too, and had there been a third, she would still have been there waiting for Maria. Wherever and whenever Maria sang throughout the next year, the faithful sentinel was invariably on duty. She was known in the company as Maria’s “Shadow”; she described herself as “a prizefighter’s second,” fanning Maria with a towel before she went back onstage, helping her dress and undress and warding off any overexcitable tenors. And Maria, with her “Shadow,” her size and her absorption in her work, was living the self-denying life of a vestal virgin, without the compensating conviction that she would be rewarded in a future life.

The next summer she repeated
Tosca
, this time not as a replacement, but headlined in her own name. The reports about her became more lyrical and enthusiastic, wilder with every performance, until by the end of the series of performances in August 1942, men and women were walking nearly ten miles from Piraeus to hear her. Others, confronted at a time of rationing and little or no money with the choice of Maria or a meal, chose Maria. After the
Toscas
were over, the commander of the Italian army of occupation asked Maria, together with five other members of the Athens Opera and a pianist, to go to Salonika, in the north of Greece, to sing for the Italian soldiers. Maria’s Shadow asked for permission to accompany her daughter. Maria was only eighteen, she explained, and Salonika was one of the most licentious of Mediterranean ports. The Italians refused and Evangelia instantly withdrew Maria from the company; the Italians succumbed and mother and daughter were feted in Salonika, forgetting for the four days they were there that Greece was occupied and there was a war on.