Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (14 page)

Finally it came time for Robert to stage that spread-eagle scene, and I was watching from the corner. And wouldn’t you know it, Jessye turns around to me and says, “Well, do you think the cover can show me what you’ve been doing?”

In other words, she wanted me to do it for her. I don’t know where I got the guts, but I looked at her and asked, “Well, are you ill?”

“No, why?

“I was told I should only do this if you are ill.”

Some balls I had! But I just can’t stand a diva! She got up and did it. But every single night after that, she complained there was a draft onstage and made noise about canceling.

I never went on, though. I found out later she was known to be a very delicate diva—she could feel every breeze. Apparently the Met had set up a private dressing room for her on the second floor, not with the rest of us mortals on the main floor, because she had a mysterious allergy to the carpeting. Or something. Her lungs were very, very sensitive, I discovered, when I was covering her in the role of Ariadne some time later. There was one performance (finally!) when she was too ill to go on, and at the last minute I got my chance.

When I heard the call “Miss Voigt to the stage”—my cue—and quickly made my way from my dressing room to the stage, bursting through a pair of double doors, I was accosted by two hulking guys on the other side with spray tubes who started misting me with vapor.

Aaaargh! What the . . . ?

“Oh,” they said, putting their tubes down. “You’re not Jessye Norman.”

“No, I’m not!” I sputtered, wiping my face—while trying not to smudge my makeup—and racing to the stage so I wouldn’t miss my entrance.

“Who the heck were those guys?” I asked my dresser, who was running next to me.

“Oh, them. They’re Jessye’s ‘misters.’ They mist in front of her as she walks to the stage to get the dust out of her air.”

SOME DIVA STORIES
have become legend around the opera houses.

When I first got to the Met, soprano Aprile Millo was the reigning diva, and I understudied her all the time. She’s American, she came up through the Met’s Young Artists’ Program, and the rumor in the house was that she was born April Mills but changed it to be more exotic. I couldn’t fault her for that, I’d done the same thing. My birth certificate has me as “Debbie,” and when I went professional I was worried my name sounded too
“And now, live from the Grand Ole Opry!”
and decided “Deborah” sounded more operatic, more sophisticated, more like I wasn’t just plain ol’ Debbie from suburban Illinois who hadn’t been anywhere or done anything.

I WAS A
team player, so I usually got along with everyone. In my career, I was only to have big conflicts with two major divas.

I butted heads with one of them when I went to Israel for the first time to sing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. We were doing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, also known as the Symphony of a Thousand because of its enormous orchestral and choral requirements, in addition to its eight soloists. All the soloists were living together in a kosher “guesthouse,” and while we each had our own room and bathroom, we were expected to take all our meals together. When you accepted a gig there, you knew it was going to be a little bit like camp—a very communal, dormlike atmosphere.

But there was one mezzo-soprano, let’s call her “Mezzo X.” She was a stunningly gorgeous woman who was having a lot of success based on the fact that she looked the way she did. She had a lovely voice, too, but it was limited to essentially one role, which she sang all over the world. She was very sexy, and I admit I may have been jealous of her to a certain degree.

During our time in Israel, Mezzo X had all her meals brought up to her room and never ate with the rest of us. There was just one practice room in the house, and you had to walk past the kitchen table in order to get to it. We’d be sitting in the kitchen, eating, and Mezzo X would walk right by us without saying hello.

Every day, they’d pick us all up as a group in a van and take us to the concert hall to rehearse. Strangely, there was only one room to warm up in at the hall, so with eight soloists that’s tricky. Most of us would warm up in our rooms back at the guesthouse and then do a little something before the concert. To be “proper,” they’d set up a screen running down the middle of the room so that the men would be on one side and the women on the other—sort of like an Orthodox Jewish wedding.

The room at the concert hall had only one piano, and as soon as we’d arrive, Mezzo X would go over to that piano and warm up. And warm up. And warm up. Incidentally, she had the easiest part in the whole performance. Two lines, to be exact—which she could have burped out and she would have been fine. But she rehearsed these two lines over and over again, and did these funny tongue-twister exercises (
Round and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran
. . .)—to the point where the other mezzo-soprano in our group was ready to bite her head off.

After several days of this, a few of us went to administration and complained: “Look, isn’t there another room with a piano so that if
someone
feels they need to warm up
extra
long, they can go there. And the rest of us, who would like fifteen minutes of quiet before the performance, could have it?” The next day during rehearsal while Mezzo X is hogging the piano, someone comes in and announces that they’ve set up a second room for those who want longer rehearsal times.

But Mezzo X stays at the piano, going on and on, running her ragged rascal round and round . . . until I finally had enough.

“Mezzo X, did you not hear the announcement that was made a little bit earlier?”

“Announcement? What do you mean?”

“About there being another room to warm up in.”

“Oh, do you need the piano?” Mezzo X was born and bred on the East Coast, but she talked with a trace of an affected British accent.

“No, I don’t need the piano, but I would like to have a little bit of quiet before the concert, and there’s another room where you can—”

BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She slammed the piano shut, picked up her music, and stormed out of the room.
Oh shit
. Two days later I got a call from my manager.

“How are things going in Israel?”

“Fine, why?”

“Well, I got a call from guess-who’s manager saying you were picking on her.”

She never spoke to me again—until we worked together a year or two later and she was absolutely forced to. We were doing several concerts together with two other vocalists, and as luck would have it, she and I were set to share a dressing room. When I arrived on the first night, her stuff was everywhere—makeup all over the counter, hair all over the sink, clothes taking up all the hooks. And she had a camera crew following her around all week, even in our dressing room as she kept popping in and changing her outfits. We did a week of performances, and every night her dresses got more revealing until the last night when her breasts were barely covered by a skimpy halter top. The audience ate it up.

Apparently, certain figures
can
be held against you on the opera stage. But if you have the right sort of figure, it can work to your advantage.

THE OTHER DIVA
I had a conflict with was a mezzo-soprano from Germany—Mezzo Y, I’ll call her.

Skipping ahead several years, I was singing Isolde in Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
and she was singing the part of Brangäne, Isolde’s handmaiden. For the entire run in this midwestern city she was a troublemaker.

In rehearsals, she started off by saying “there was something in the air” that was making her sick. She was faint, she was nauseous, and it was “something in the air” that was doing it to her.

We managed to get through rehearsals, for a while, until she began challenging me on the staging.

“You shouldn’t be doing that there,” she’d say, “the line says to do this.”

After a few more days of her comments, I finally blew a gasket.

“Listen, we have a director. When you sing Isolde you will make decisions you want to make, but for the moment I’m making mine and I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

I went off to the side of the stage and broke down in tears and . . .

“Break time!” the director called.

A few minutes later I was in my dressing room and the general manager, who knows me well, knocks on my door.

“Look, I know what you’re dealing with, I’ve heard it from other departments. I’m very sorry that this is happening, and we’ve had a talk with her and told her she can’t behave this way.”

For a while, Mezzo Y’s behavior did improve. But she could not sustain it. A few days later we were performing the final scene in the opera that ends very dramatically. She was already onstage and I was to come running into the scene to perform the final aria, “Liebestod” (it means, literally, “love-death”), which I sing over the dead body of my love, Tristan. I ran in and begin to sing the sad, sad aria, and she looks at me and laughs! In the middle of the performance! I ignored her as best I could and carried on, but as soon as we took our bows and the curtain went down, I turned to her.

“What were you laughing at?”

“Oh, your lipstick. It was so red, it was silly.”

The next performance, we went out onstage for Act I, which is primarily between me and her, in which I sing Isolde’s “Narrative and Curse”—a powerful, rage-filled aria—and I nailed it. It was one of those nights when I was really “on,” and I knew it, and so did the audience. At the end of the act, my character faints in her handmaiden’s arms and then the curtains close. Mezzo Y immediately pulled away from me roughly.

“You’re wearing too much perfume!”

“I’m wearing the same amount of perfume that I’ve been wearing every day for weeks and you never said a word about it before.”

I knew what was really going on. I had sung well, very well, and she couldn’t stand it.

“No”—she shakes her head—“something’s different. Maybe it’s your wig. Maybe they put something in your wig, but it’s really affecting me. I don’t know if I can sing. I might have to cancel. . . .”

We’re all onstage—the cast, the crew—and everybody is hearing this entire exchange. I looked at her, amazed that she’d threaten to cancel in the middle of a performance.

“Look, I’m not wearing any more perfume than I’ve been wearing before. You must be coming down with something, I’m really sorry to hear that.” I turned to leave the stage, then turned back—

“—and if you
ever
walk onstage and laugh at me again, we’re going to have a serious problem.”

I marched offstage and went to the general manager’s office. This was all happening during the break between Acts I and II, mind you.

“I just had another incident with her. She threatened to cancel tonight and everybody heard her. Maybe she didn’t mean it, but maybe you want to call her cover, just in case.”

And as I’ve said, the way to get a diva onstage is to call the cover.

Moments later as we were getting ready to go on for Act II, she caught a glimpse of her cover backstage and, of course, she went on with the show.

The end of this diva episode wrapped up with an odd and creative
tour de force
offstage. A few weeks later, on the last day of our run, the assistant stage director, whom I’d known since my early San Francisco days, came to my dressing room, holding something behind her back.

“I have a gift for you, but you can’t tell anybody what it is and you can’t show it to anybody.” I promised, and from behind her back she pulled out a voodoo doll of the diva in character, dressed in her green costume from the show, with the face painted and needles stuck up and down her body.

“She was so unpleasant,” said the AD. Seems no one likes a nasty witch of a diva.

JOHN AND I
awoke to gunshots. It was 1990 and we were now living in a little apartment in New York—in Inwood, the northern most part of Manhattan, and the last stop on the number 1 train. I hated it. I was making no money at the time, and I’d gotten John a job working in the office of my new agent. The neighborhood was scuzzy and our stairwell was a hangout for drug dealers. In our first few weeks on Dyckman Street, there’d been one mugging and, as we were soon to discover, a murder in our building.

We’d heard the BOOM! in the middle of the night, but had no idea what it was. At seven a.m. someone pounded on our door: “Police! There’s been a murder on the fifth floor. Didja hear anything, ma’am?” We answered a few questions and they were on their way, saying, “Thanks for your time, Mr. and Mrs. Leitch.”

After fourteen years of “dating,” John and I took the plunge and got hitched a few months earlier, in California, and then relocated to New York. Why New York? Well, just as the TV world has “pilot season,” when actors audition for all the new TV shows in production, the opera world has a season in New York when managers and artistic directors from opera houses all over the world come to audition singers.

And now our first abode as husband and wife was a dump that looked like a
Law & Order
murder scene. But it served me right, because I had gotten married for all the wrong reasons and I knew it. I was getting ready to go to Moscow to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition and I was in a panic—not about the competition, but about John. I sensed I was losing him, and that made me want to cling.

That I was prepping to go to the Soviet Union, which was like a distant planet to me, only made me cling more. I suddenly decided, I have to marry him, there’s not going to be anyone else, I’m too fat. I might be talented but I’m not smart, I’m not pretty . . . who else would want me?

There was no romantic proposal or anything like that. I basically told him it was time and I sold some of my jewelry and we combined our meager sums together to buy a diamond wedding ring. But there was one detail I wanted to do right, and traditionally, and that was to get married at our Evangelical Free Church. After all, my family had been members of the congregation since we’d moved to California, sixteen years earlier. It was the house of worship where I’d been the pianist and soloist, where my mother had been the Sunday school and vacation Bible school teacher, and where my dad had been a deacon. My entire family had a deep and longstanding relationship with this church.