Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (53 page)

And then, to everyone’s surprise, she agreed to take part in Pasolini’s film of
Medea
—not Cherubini’s opera or Euripides’ tragedy but the
myth
of Medea. “When Franco Rossellini,
Medea
’s producer, and Pasolini proposed this one, I had no doubt. I immediately knew that this was the occasion I’d been waiting for, and I determined not to let it slip by.”

It was an inspired choice. Had the film been a success, it could have led her not only to dry land but to a fresh start in her career and an opportunity to translate the forces raging inside her into art. Pasolini had sensed these forces and he hinted at them when he talked about why he wanted Maria for his Medea. “Here is a woman, in one sense the most modern of women, but there lives in her an ancient woman—strange, mysterious, magical, with terrible inner conflicts.” These forces and conflicts fascinated him. He had once described himself as drunk on reality, and he could see the drama in Maria’s life reflected in the drama of Medea. “I’m aware of her professional abilities,” he said during the filming, “but they are really of very little interest to me. It’s from personal qualities in Callas that I realized I could make Medea.” Before they started shooting, he made some notes and showed them to Maria: “Medea watches Jason, enchanted, lost in him. It is a true and complete love; in this moment it is Jason’s virility that prevails. Medea has lost her dazed manner, like a disoriented animal. Suddenly she finds in love which humanizes her a substitute for her lost religious sense. In the sensual experience she finds the lost rapport, the sacred identification with reality. So the world, the future, her well-being, the meaning of things, all take shape again suddenly for her. It is with gratitude, like one who feels reborn, that she lets Jason possess her, she in turn possessing in him the regeneration of life.”

Maria recognized the parallels, and through Medea she could relive her own story: the love that made her tap into the woman in her and in some sense humanized her, the sensual experience of oneness, the new meaning, the new vitality like a rebirth. And in reliving her story through Medea’s, she could exorcise some of her bitterness; she could see that it was not, after all, as it had seemed in the dark months that had passed, “nine years of meaningless sacrifice.”

In the spring, Maria arrived in Rome to settle the details of her contract and discuss her costumes. Franco Rossellini met her at the airport. With him was Nadia Stancioff who in the past had done public relations for the Spoleto and the Venice festivals and whom he had now asked to handle Maria’s public relations. In her contract, though, Maria had stipulated a secretary, not a public relations agent, and indeed this is what Rossellini had told her she was getting. It did not take long for the misunderstanding to surface. Once in her suite at the Grand Hotel, Maria took the cards from all the flowers that had been sent to welcome her and handed them to Nadia, asking her to type some thank-you notes. “And there are also all these bills to be paid,” she said, handing them to her together with the cards. “I’m not your secretary, Madame Callas,” Nadia said, and she went on to explain what she thought she had been hired for.

“Do you realize that you are talking yourself out of a job with Maria Callas?”

“I do, but I am a free spirit and I like to choose. Besides, I’ve heard some terrible things about you, and in any case, I don’t like working with women.”

“You don’t! Neither do I,” said Maria, completely won over by Nadia’s directness. “Well, you can stay for a few days and help me choose a secretary.” The next day, the parade of secretaries began: most of them froze at the typewriter at the prospect of working for the great Maria Callas. “I’ll do without a secretary,” Maria finally said. “Nadia, you stay, you can help me with my lines, get rid of people and generally relieve me of things I don’t want to do.”

That was the beginning of a real friendship between the two women: one dark and striking, the other tall and fair; Nadia, half-American and half-Bulgarian, complementing Maria’s own Greek-American upbringing. Ironically, after ten days, Nadia, as well as being Maria’s friend and barrier against intruders, was also doing everything a secretary would have done. One of the things that made Nadia reconsider the “terrible things” she had heard about Maria was her attitude toward Bruna and Ferruccio. Maria had brought them with her to Rome, and when she discovered that they had been put in two rooms in the attic, she became furious. She asked the manager to move them instantly to two of the hotel’s best rooms. “And if the production,” she added, “does not pay the difference, then I will.”

As her friendship with Nadia grew, another fascinating and much more unlikely friendship was beginning for Maria: with Pasolini. Maria, who, at her most petty, had exploded against both Marxists and homosexuals, had found in Pasolini, a passionate Marxist and a notorious homosexual, not just a friend but, as she was to say after his death, a brother. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man. Unlike the typically expressive Italian he generally locked his hands together when he talked, and his hollow-cheeked, deeply lined face showed little animation. Yet this unobtrusive-looking man had been, whether through his films, his views or his friendships with the criminal classes, the center of colorful scandals which had, by turns, offended orthodox Marxists, orthodox Christians and the middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie.

At the beginning of June 1969 this Marxist mystic and Maria found themselves working together on
Medea
in a forgotten wild corner of Asia Minor. Goreme, in Turkey, with its rocks carved into weird shapes, was exactly the place that Pasolini wanted—a place where it was at times hard to distinguish between myth and reality. From Goreme, they went to Aleppo in Syria, and then to Italy, to Pisa, to the lagoons and islands of Grado, to Tor Caldara and Tor Calbona near Rome. And wherever they were, out of rocks and deserts, blanched dunes and beaches, Pasolini re-created a strange, lost world of mystery and magic, a world where ritual, violence and the supernatural were part of everyday life. Even in the loneliest parts of Turkey, reporters, photographers and television cameras followed Maria to document her first, ambitious step into the world of film. Once, to get closer to her, a journalist dressed up as a local peasant woman, and broke through the cordon surrounding Maria. Another time, protecting her face from the scorching Turkish sun with white muslin, Maria talked to the press about her Medea: “She was a semigoddess who put all her beliefs in a man. At the same time she is a woman with all the experiences of a woman, only bigger—bigger sacrifices, bigger hurts. She went through all these trying to survive. You can’t put these things into words. . . . I began to look into the depths of the soul of Medea.”

There was in fact hardly any dialogue in
Medea
and Maria sings only once—a Greek lullaby to her son. During her last month in Paris she could hardly get up before midday; in Goreme she was up at dawn. She arrived on the set to be dressed and made up before anyone expected her, always carrying a little transistor tuned to some soap opera or other. Piero Tosi, who had designed her costumes, remembers how “she’d follow every word with incredible concentration, participating in the action muttering, ‘What’s that? What did he say? Go! Go!’—all in Veronese dialect. She gets so involved with whatever she’s doing, even if it’s only some trivial broadcast.”

She was almost obsessively involved with Medea. In one scene, she was being taken in long shot, and had to run frantically barefoot on a dry riverbed. She was wearing a heavy gown with huge ropes of pagan jewels, the sun was beating down and she was running, running until she fainted and collapsed on the mud. Pasolini and the entire crew ran toward her, and as she came back to consciousness her first words were, “Please forgive me! I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s cost everyone so much time and money.” Maria, the professional, could not bear to be the one slowing things down. She was full of humility about her new venture, constantly seeking advice, confirmation, reassurance. “Tell me, is this gesture too grand? Too operatic? I know the rhythm of my own movements, but when the camera is moving as well.”

Pasolini, fascinated by her face, kept wanting to shoot her in close-up. It was the one thing that made Maria uncomfortable. She would beg him: “Please shoot from far away, for me!” For the final moments of the film, she refused the stand-in who was available: “Here,” remembers Piero Tosi, “Maria reached the apex of her performance. Medea must build a great fire, and holding the bodies of her dead sons, perish in the flames while defying their faithless father. It was very dangerous, because she had to stand on a high wooden platform with flames soaring before her. It was a sacred ritual and Maria, blind as she was, had to hurl herself into the holocaust, or at least seem to do so for the camera’s eye. Three times she acted out the scene, and during the last take she nearly fell right into the inferno. For Maria, it could have been done no other way.” When she was not filming, she was looking at the rushes again and again. Rossellini remembers getting bored going through the same rushes: “I kept telling her, ‘Come on, Maria, let’s go and have dinner, or let’s go to sleep.’ But she would not budge.”

“Didn’t you find it exhausting to have to shoot the same scene many times?” they asked Maria at the end of July, when the shooting had moved to Italy. “No, it’s futility that exhausts me, not work. . . . There will be a great void when it’s all over.” There
was
a void, but something had happened during these two months of living with Medea and Pasolini that nobody could take away from her. She had reached a deeper understanding of what the last nine years had meant and a quieter acceptance of the way they had ended. She had always called herself a fatalist, and often her fatalism implied resignation, a self-destructive giving up on life. But for the moment, the fatalism was of a different kind: an accepting trust that the patterns, large and small, of every aspect of her life, had some definite, however obscure, meaning. Her relationship with Pasolini, who, through both his poetry and his films, had always sought the meaning and the connections beneath the surface, encouraged this trust.

Their friendship seemed to deepen in the months after the shooting, when Pasolini was editing
Medea
and recording the folk songs and Greek Orthodox music for the background to the film. His editing, though, was hardly of service to Maria. His predilection for the gory and the monstrous meant that at times he made Maria look like Jimmy Durante. Nadia, who saw all the rushes with Pasolini, was appalled at the number of shots of sheer beauty that ended on the cutting-room floor. Maria went to Rome herself in December 1969 to look at the rushes, but, awed by Pasolini’s intellect and trusting his artistic judgment, she said nothing. At the time, she was feeling unusually full of optimism and goodwill. She rang Nadia when she arrived in Rome to arrange to see her: “You can’t come anywhere near me,” said Nadia; “I am in bed with terrible flu.” Ten minutes later Maria was puffing up Nadia’s stairs, with armfuls of the latest books and magazines. And when other friends arrived to visit the patient, Maria opened the door and, in high spirits, introduced herself as the maid. They looked rather puzzled, with that expression that says “Haven’t we seen you somewhere before?” but no one called her bluff.

In the same mood of adventure, Maria left with Pasolini for Argentina to present
Medea
at the Festival of Mar del Plata. Then on January 28, 1970, again accompanied by Pasolini, she arrived at L’Opéra for a first night of which she was doubly the star—on the screen and in the audience. The premiere of Pasolini’s
Medea
, in the presence of Madame Pompidou, was one of the most dazzling galas of Maria’s career. The beau monde was there in force. A box for four had been reserved by Aristotle Onassis, but on the day itself, the reservation was canceled; his wife was not going to be in Paris in time. Nonetheless, he was very much present in Maria’s thoughts. She wanted a triumph that would erase the defeats of the past, a triumph that would convince him and the world—but him most importantly—that the past was done and that this was not merely a new beginning, but a new and glorious one. It was not a triumph; it was at best a
succès d’estime
. The gala audience applauded politely and went to dinner. It soon became clear that commercially the film was going to be a failure; its future lay in art cinemas and film clubs. Maria, who had reached millions through the elitist medium of opera, was going to reach only thousands through the popular medium of film.

In her present fragile state, anything less than a complete success would be a failure for Maria. And this is precisely what
Medea
was. The hopes of the last few months had been dashed, and she felt let down, drained, like a magnet that had lost its charge. Whenever she tried to piece together the splinters of her broken life, she found that the image of Aristo was still glued to them. The picture she presented to the world was very different. “Everything is peaceful with me,” she wrote to her friend Dorle Soria. “I’m working, practising and enjoying life. As for Daddy O, what is over is over, Sagittarians are like that . . .” Bravado was increasingly important as the fears it silenced became louder and more insistent: “You mustn’t go around making a spectacle of your weaknesses. You have to keep your dignity.”

In fact Onassis was back in her life—if, that is, he had ever left it. The day after his wedding, he left his bride honeymooning alone on Skorpios and flew to Athens for a meeting with the head of the Greek junta, George Papadopoulos, over Project Omega, a $400-million, ten-year investment project, the biggest in Greek history. “On that day,” said one of his associates, “Onassis was the Sun King. He had everything.”

A few days later, he flew triumphantly to Athens again, to launch Omega at a press conference. Shortly afterward, Jackie flew to New York and Onassis resumed his old life. It began with a phone call to Maria. “
Madame n’est pas içi
,” was Bruna’s rehearsed reply. “No, Madame has not told us when she will be back.” The phone call was followed by flowers, by more phone calls, by more flowers. And always: “
Non, Madame n’est pas içi
.” It was a familiar game, and he was a master at it. He knew that with the barrier of his marriage it was going to be much harder than before, but he also knew that it was only a matter of time and ingenuity before Maria opened her door and her life to him again. He was not short of either ingenuity or time and, as he longed to see her, he was prepared to take risks. He knew his prey well. He knew that Maria would do anything to protect her “dignity,” to avoid making a “spectacle” of herself, so he chose the quickest route—whistling under Maria’s window at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel. When this failed, he started calling “Maria, Maria”; and when
this
failed, he threatened to drive his car straight through the front door.