Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (55 page)

Talking about him in public, Maria would always come up with statements which, although true, were such a pale echo of the truth that they were nothing more than cautious evasions for public consumption. “I have great respect for Aristotle, and there is no reason for us not meeting here since Mr. Embiricos is a mutual friend.” Or, with a touch more truth, “He is my best friend. He is, he was, and he always will be. When two people have been together as we have, there are many things that tie you together. He knows he will always find cheerfulness, mutual friends and honesty when he sees me.” In private, Maria referred to her best friend’s wife as “the gold digger,” but in public, whenever asked about Jackie, she was always on her best behavior. The tension and resentment can only be heard simmering in the pauses between words. “The scandal comes about because I have never met his wife. It’s not wished on the other side. Frankly, I don’t understand why she doesn’t come into my life. . . . No, I didn’t know about the wedding, and frankly I don’t think
he
knew about the wedding. You’ll have to ask her.”

Maria saw 1971 in at a party in Paris given by André Oliver, Pierre Cardin’s partner, but parties and nightclubs no longer held much attraction for her. Her days were acquiring a new pattern. In the morning she never got up before midday, unless she absolutely had to. At night, she would do anything to postpone going to bed. Watching Westerns on television was becoming her second favorite occupation; her first, almost an obsession, was listening to herself on the many pirate records and tapes her fans sent from around the world. If she had friends in for supper, they would more likely than not be asked to listen to one of these unofficial recordings: perhaps it would be her Berlin
Lucia
, or on another night a concert in Dallas, or her Mexico
Aida
, or her
Tosca
from Rio de Janeiro. Maria, reclining on a couch with one of the poodles in her lap, would listen intently, absorbed, almost in a trance, coming out of it only to offer a comment, self-contained, waiting for no reply, and then return to her own world until the tape was over. “Didn’t she sing well?” she would say sometimes, totally detached at Georges Mandel from the Callas of Berlin, Dallas or Rio de Janeiro. At other times it rained reminiscences. But most of the time, Maria was listening on her own, the Callas triumphs trooping by in their old glory, the panorama of her life sweeping past her.

Maria’s life was increasingly dominated by the past, a past transfigured by selective memory and imagination. She was living in that past and doing no more than existing in the bland present, and yet she would never, not even once, talk of retiring, let alone admit that she had. Would she dare sing again? The last major singing project she had seriously considered was a new recording of
Traviata
, due to take place in the second half of 1968. It is still known around EMI as the “Great
Traviata
Fiasco.” It was to be recorded at the Hall of Santa Cecilia in Rome with Giulini conducting and Luciano Pavarotti as Alfredo. The negotiations were strewn with Maria’s prevarications, but finally all was ready, the hall booked, the artists contracted. At that point, Peter Andry got a phone call at EMI from a distraught Maria saying that she could not possibly go on. It was immediately after her breakup with Onassis, and it was true that she could not possibly go on, but it was nonetheless a great blow. “It took until October 1970,” remembers Peter Andry, “to clear up all the various claims from artists. When finally I brought myself to call her again it was ‘What’s new?’ and ‘What else?’ as though nothing had happened.”

“What’s new?” “What else?” were Maria’s favorite, automatic questions. She had no doubt that her legend could compete with and outdistance anything new. But could she? She had to find out, but cautiously, like an invalid taking his first uncertain steps after a long illness. In February 1971 a two-week master class at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia seemed a safe beginning. On the way there, she stopped in New York for a question-and-answer session at the Juilliard School. The excitement that accompanied everything she did had attracted a star-studded audience to pack Julliard to see and hear her. Rudolf Bing and Göran Gentele, who was to replace Bing as general manager of the Met, were in the audience listening to Maria expound on love, on drama, on directors, on becoming a singer, on her favorite roles and, above all, on resuming her career: “I developed some bad vocal habits, so I retired to start again. Now I am ready. I’ve never stopped learning. Do you know what that means? It’s a lifetime job. I’m planning to announce, and probably soon this year, my plans for singing again. I’ve never asked for anything. I’ve been asked. I know how to wait. And I’m always ready when the chance comes.” It all added up to the typical Callas response: a touch of earnestness, a touch of homespun philosophizing and plenty of bravado.

While she was in New York, Maria saw a lot of Anastasia Gratsos. One afternoon when she was sitting in her hotel room with Anastasia, talking, she decided on the spur of the moment to accompany her to her eye doctor’s appointment. “And how long is it since you’ve had your eyes examined, Madame Callas?” asked the doctor. The answer was “far too long,” and in the examination that followed Maria discovered she was suffering from incipient glaucoma which, if not arrested, could have led to blindness. From that day on, she had to put drops in her eyes every two hours. She bought a beautiful little Louis Quinze alarm that she hung around her neck, set to go off at two-hour intervals. Wherever she was, sometimes in the middle of a conversation, Maria would excuse herself and go and put in her drops or, if she was with friends, she would put them in then and there.

Armed with her drops, Maria left New York for Philadelphia. She arrived to find eighteen students, none of them remotely ready for the advanced work which interested her. She made them sing one by one, made some suggestions about vocal technique and returned to New York. The Philadelphia experiment had to be decreed a failure, and the American press wanted to know what would follow. In her suite at the Regency, in black trousers and a frilly white blouse, Maria received more journalists. As always, she began by introducing them to the poodles: “Djedda is the brown one and Pixie the white.” Ari had given them to her, and she had named Djedda after the Saudi Arabian town where Ari was doing business at the time. When Maria hugged the little dogs, there was no doubt of her love for them; but when there was work to be done she would send them out of the room like a severe mother with distracting children.

“Shoot,” she said, smiling at the journalists, opening her big, dark eyes wide in mock terror. “Have you given up the operatic stage?” came the question everyone wanted answered. She bridled. “Not at all! I study constantly and I would be delighted to return to New York in a new role in a new production—something in the order of
Anna Bolena
. Everybody wants me to sing
Tosca
but I’m bored with
Tosca
.” It was seven years since she had appeared in a new production and on the final night the curtain did not rise on the last act. That memory still haunted her.

Now, as she felt her energies ebbing away, she needed even more the vitality that she always got from being the focus of attention. It was as if when she was watched, observed, admired, she became more alert, and this alertness in turn became vitality. Back in Paris from New York, she accepted the honorary presidency of the gala of the Artists’ Union. Michael Cacoyannis remembers her on the opening night of the gala, which was a spectacular circus night with everything from acrobatics to lion-taming. “She beamed with pleasure. She needed confirmation that she existed and the limelight provided it.”

On this occasion, however, she had also enjoyed the time before the gala. She loved circuses as she loved Disneyland, but she was never taken to them as a child. She now had an opportunity not only to enjoy the circus, but also to indulge a child’s fantasy by commanding the acts she wanted on the bill. The organization had given her a code name, Germaine, so as to keep the identity of the president of the gala a surprise, and Germaine’s wishes were to be obeyed: “Germaine wants . . . ,” “Germaine prefers . . . ,” “Germaine adores . . . ,” or “No serpent numbers; Germaine hates snakes. . . .” Maria herself called no one by his name. It was “
Mon ange
,” or “
Mon grand diable
.” “We could talk to her about anything,” remembers Dominique Perrin, who organized the gala, “except Onassis. This always caused her pain.”

It was in 1971 that the shadows began to lengthen across the bright surface of Onassis’ life. The man who had fulfilled his dream of being one of the most conspicuous people on the planet, as well as his dreams of power and wealth, was beginning to discover that he was not omnipotent and could not control everything and everybody. On July 19, his “pet,” Christina, was married in Las Vegas to Joseph Bolker, a forty-eight-year-old real-estate man with four daughter’s from a previous marriage. Onassis heard the news of his daughters wedding on Skorpios while celebrating Jackie’s forty-second birthday. He raged for hours, cut Christina off from her trust and for the next six months subjected the couple, according to Joseph Bolker, “to extraordinary pressures,” until finally the following February they started divorce proceedings. Meanwhile Onassis had received a much greater shock—and about this he could do nothing. On October 22 his first wife, now divorced from the marquess of Blandford, was secretly married in Paris to his lifelong rival, Stavros Niarchos. It was eighteen months after her sister Eugenia, who was married to Niarchos, had died on their private island from a combination of physical injuries and a large quantity of barbiturates. After three expert examinations of the body, the investigating magistrate instituted proceedings against Niarchos and called for his arrest. The Piraeus high court decided against charging him, but the gossip and the rumors went on raging, and were still rife when, just over a year after the case had been officially closed, Tina married the man over whom a grim question mark continued to hang.

Onassis’ shock was shared by his children, whose mistrust of Niarchos—a mistrust with which they had both been brought up—had deepened even further since their aunt’s death. For quite a long time after Tina’s marriage to Niarchos, Ari refused even to acknowledge her existence. It was not so much a question of hurt pride; his sense of decency, his very world, with its precious few fixed points, had been turned upside down.

But the greatest blow was even closer to home: it was the realization, which he could no longer hide from himself, that his own marriage had been a calamitous mistake. “Coldhearted and shallow” is how he was now describing Jackie, who had only two years earlier been “like a diamond, cool and sharp at the edges, fiery and hot beneath the surface.” He craved love, but had to settle instead for flattery and attention, for being talked about and stared at. While Jackie was finding this Greek drama, with its ragings and explosions, impossible to cope with, Maria lived through them with him. It was to Maria that he ran for the love that, now that he had everything else, he was beginning to see was the only thing he really wanted. He would fly over to see her or, more often, he would talk with her for hours on the phone.

Throughout this time Maria was in New York, preparing for the master classes she had agreed to give at Juilliard starting in October. From the Plaza, where she was staying, she wrote to François Valéry, one of her closest friends in Paris: “My very dear François—Imagine I’m writing to you! How are you? I’m busy—well—and studying—I already started yesterday! Believe it or not. . . . I wish you would drop me a line every now and then because I will not be back until mid-November. This month is my studying, then my classes start. All my love, Maria.” She was “studying” with Alberta Masiello in a room at Juilliard, and studying is the right word. She was feeling and behaving like a hesitant beginner excited at the slightest sign of progress. “Did you hear?” she would exclaim to Maziello. “I sang a whole phrase. . . .” or, “Did you hear? I sang two phrases today.”

Tito Gobbi remembers seeing her in New York at that time and taking her to dinner with his wife and daughter Cecilia: “After dinner we took her back to the Plaza, where she was staying, and just before going into the lift, she turned to me and said: ‘Oh, Tito, I am so lonely, I am so alone here, I don’t even have my little dogs, why don’t you buy me an ice cream at the corner?’ We went around the block, and bought our ice creams in the street—just a way of postponing the moment she would once again be left alone.” Soon after that Maria, unable to bear the loneliness any longer, sent for Bruna to come to New York with the two little dogs.

The master classes at Juilliard began on October 11. They were classes with a difference, taking place on the stage of the Juilliard auditorium with a gala crowd in the audience which, over the two six-week sessions, included Franco Zeffirelli, Placido Domingo, Tito Gobbi, Gina Bachauer and Grace Bumbry among many other notables from the world of opera.

No applause was allowed, but there was, nonetheless, a loud burst of clapping when Maria walked in from the wings. She waved her hand for silence: this was a class, not a performance. “Are we all settled?” There are pictures of her at Juilliard with her long auburn hair falling in thick waves over her shoulders, her horn-rimmed glasses more on than off (after all Ari is unlikely to be watching), involved, smiling, at ease. The emphasis of the teacher, like the emphasis of the performer, is on reaching the emotional heart of the music, communicating its drama. She listens absorbed, sometimes beating time with her ball-point. Sometimes only her ever-expressive eyes show whether she approves or disapproves; sometimes with a regal wave of the hand she stops them.

To the young tenor singing a duet from
Butterfly
: “Do you know what you are saying to her?”

“Yeah, I’m telling her ‘At last you’re mine.’ ”

“Then
sing
it that way,” she snapped back.