Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (16 page)

I was particularly drawn to a framed photo atop the piano of two little boys, around age five, wearing shorts and sitting side by side at a piano, playing together.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked. I shook my head. “It’s me and Jimmy Levine.” Soon enough I would get to know Maestro Levine’s face very well.

WINNING THE GOLD
medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition was a major turning point in my career and attracted a lot of attention. What followed for Lucky Number 13 was a lucky break that sealed the deal for my destiny.

That November I was covering Amelia in
Ballo
for Aprile Millo at the Met—I was already cast in the role for the New York Metropolitan Opera Parks Concerts the following summer—when I got a call from my agent one Friday night. Susan Dunn was singing Amelia in San Francisco and had taken ill and wasn’t sure if she’d be able to do the upcoming Sunday matinee. San Francisco wanted to know if I’d fly over, just in case she couldn’t go on.

Well, the San Francisco Opera was like family to me after my years there, but I didn’t want to go all that way for nothing. I had flashbacks of my Margaret Price and Carol Neblett situations a few years earlier when I’d rushed over thinking I was going on, only to be left standing there in wig and makeup, like a stood-up bride at the altar. I went to bed, restless over what to do; around two a.m. I noticed the light
flashing on my answering machine. My agent had called: Dunn was definitely canceling the Sunday matinee, and probably several more after that. Early next morning, John and I were on a plane, and shortly after landing I was shuffled into a quickie two-hour stage rehearsal, a one-hour rehearsal with the conductor, and a rushed costume fitting for my full skirt and heavy cape.

John was traveling with me steadily now, in the role of “taking care of the family business.” But it was really because he had no other work—his job with my agent didn’t last and I was tired of traveling alone. Mostly what he did on the road was feed me. We’d go out to fantastic dinners after performances and cap the evening off with a huge dessert at two a.m. Or John would cook incredible, fattening meals if our lodging had a kitchen. Both of us always made sure that, wherever we were, our hotel room was well stocked with munchies for late-night snacks. I was a closet eater and never overate in front of other people. Judging from what I ate in public, you’d think I’d be half my size. By now my five-foot-six-inch frame was carrying about 290 pounds.

It could have been emotional eating. Three months after we got married, I found out that John had carried on a year-long affair back when we were living together. Even though I knew we weren’t madly in love with each other, it still broke my heart, and I’d like to think that had I known before we got married, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I’d like to
think
that—but I also believe part of me did know it, sensed it on an unconscious level, and that that was why I’d felt such a panic to marry him quickly.

I called Mom from the opera house and she alerted the whole family: Debbie was going onstage! They all planned to be there—Mom, Dad, their spouses, my brothers, Grandma Voigt, Jane. I was thrilled and terrified, and was surviving on no sleep and plenty of adrenaline. Which may have contributed to what happened next.

Onstage at the next day’s matinee, all was going great . . . until the singer playing the role of the fortune teller shoved me a bit too eagerly
during one scene as I left the stage. I could feel myself hurtling toward the floor, half onstage half off, falling in slow motion. The words shot out of me like an unstoppable cannon shooting a
ballo
:

“Oh, SHIT!!!!”

I was hoping only the first few rows heard me. My family and friends were in row ten, so they were safe. But everyone for sure saw me fall flat on my face just offstage, and the critics were none too kind:

But my hometown audience knew me and they were rooting for me. It was the first time my parents saw me in an important role and I caught a glimpse of them from the stage; they looked happily astonished. And, thankfully, the local newspapers focused on my voice, not my weight.

Sometimes, I have learned, people are in the right place at the right time. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it coincidence—but making the right move at just the right moment can change a person’s life.

Two months after Amelia, I was making my debut in the title role of Ariadne in Strauss’s
Ariadne auf Naxos
for the Boston Lyric Opera, a small opera company that was paying me very little, but they were giving me an apartment for free, and it was a great role for
an anti-diva like me. The story is an opera-within-an-opera, and in the first half my character is an operatic prima donna who displays wild, diva-esque behavior. In the second half, she becomes Ariadne, a woman stranded on an island, pining for her lover who deserted her, before she is finally rescued by Bacchus—the god of wine.

JOHN AND I
arrived in Boston in December, and it was, of course, one of the worst winters Boston ever had.

Our apartment was half basement, half aboveground, and it was freezing because the furnace kept breaking down. Since we were going to be in Boston for a month, we’d brought our cats with us—Tiffy and Ballo—and in our wisdom, had drugged them for the flight. Well, the flight was less than an hour from New York and the drugs had kicked in when we got to Boston; once we let them out of their cages, they were bumping into walls and rolling their eyelids like drunken sailors.

Taking a cue from the cats, we threw a wild party at the apartment and invited friends from the cast and in the process of our riotous revelry, we accidentally set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night and could not figure out how to turn the damn thing off. I teetered on a skinny metal folding chair and ripped the thing out of the ceiling.

Since I was at my all-time high in weight at that point, my costuming was becoming a problem, just as Jane’s vodka-swilling colleague back at Cal State had predicted. Nothing they had in the wardrobe department fit me—there’s only so much a seamstress can do—and they couldn’t find a size 26 Ariadne costume for rent. An angel came to my rescue when one of the financial patrons for the company, a really wonderful (and wealthy) woman named Lee Gillespie, donated the money for costumes to be specially made for me. Lee had just had back surgery, but was such an opera fan she’d come by rehearsals and lie down on the floor under the piano, close her eyes, and listen to us.

We had a great cast and we grew very close to one another. One reason was because we were all young and hungry together—relative beginners being paid very little, working really hard, and loving what we were doing. We were in the trenches, the orchestra pit, together. Another reason we bonded was because we could all feel a bit of magic surrounding the production, the feeling that everything was clicking, and that was exciting.

Before I even got to Boston, I had an inkling this role would be important for me. I was studying with a well-known Manhattan pianist and voice coach, Levering Rothfuss, to prepare—he had worked with such greats as Marilyn Horne, Tatiana Troyanos, and Carol Neblett. We’d meet in his apartment and work on Ariadne’s arias. Lev had a jaded side to him, having been in the business for a long time, so I knew if something moved him it had to be really, really great and true.

On the day I sang through the entire opera for him in his living room, I looked over to him after I’d finished and he sat on his piano bench with tears running down his face.

“This is exactly where your voice is supposed to be at this moment in time,” he told me, wiping his face. “This is your role. There is no one—
no one
—right now who sings it as well as you do.” His words made me shiver.

Maybe I sang it so well because I understood her. Ariadne had a melancholy I related to. And yet she was hopeful, too. She sits on a rock, having been abandoned, and suffers great emotional turmoil as she waits for someone to rescue her, but she doesn’t give up.

Playing the other side of the role, the “prima donna,” is some of the most fun I’ve had singing opera. It’s one of the few roles I’ve ever played that allowed me to show my humor and really lampoon the opera diva caricature; it’s so over the top. I even put a little humor and levity to the mournful Ariadne when I played her later in the Met Opera production. In one scene I added my own little stage business that has lived on with other sopranos. There’s a
moment when Ariadne is surrounded by a group of clowns juggling and throwing scarves in the air and she’s upset. In the middle of the scene I reached out, grabbed one of the scarves, and blew my nose in it. It was ad-libbed, and the audience roared.

AS A FLUKE—OR
was it destiny again?—a prominent opera critic, John Rockwell, was in the audience on our opening night, January 16, 1991. He’d come to Boston to write an article for the
New York Times
on the little opera companies that were lately sprouting up in Boston, and he found himself, by chance, in our audience at the Emerson Majestic Theatre. Two days later I got a call from my agent.

“Did you see your review by John Rockwell in the
New York Times
?” he was yelling into the phone. He didn’t wait for an answer; he read it out loud to me:

I had to sit down. This critic had written a love letter to me but I could barely absorb the magnitude of his words. I didn’t know if I deserved such praise, and I had no idea how to embrace the success of the moment. It was my first major, major exposure in something
that really mattered. It was pretty heady for a young singer to be singled out like that in a review, and to have it in the
New York Times
, and written by their chief classical music critic.

My phone rang off the hook after that, with friends and colleagues calling to congratulate me. Of course my family called, too.

“Congratulations, honey, we’re so happy for you!” my mother said over the phone. And she was. But I don’t know if my family understood the enormity of what this review meant, and what it was leading up to. They were still very innocent about the opera world, and still a bit of the mindset like, “Oh, Debbie sings, and it’s so easy for her, and she’s having her fun.”

The two roles I played within those few months—Amelia and Ariadne—would become signature roles for me over the next two decades of my career.

A career that, in one moment on the phone in an ice-cold basement apartment in Boston, took a monumental leap forward.

FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE
showtime and I’m singing under an oak tree in the Bronx.

It was the summer of ’91 and I was about to make my Metropolitan Opera debut as Amelia in
Ballo
in Van Cortlandt Park for the Met’s five-borough recital series, but I had one delicate problem: there was another diva sitting in my makeshift dressing room, prepping to go on and steal my debut.

My very first contract with the Met was to cover Amelia and Ortlinde (one of the Valkyries in
Die Walküre
) in the annual summer concerts performed in various parks in New York. I was the understudy for Leona Mitchell, a Grammy Award–winning soprano who sang for eighteen seasons as a leading spinto soprano at the Met. My contract stipulated that of the six performances I covered, I would get to sing one for sure, and this was arranged to be my night. We’d had a lot of rain dates that summer, and quite a few postponements and cancellations—but finally my time had come. They had sent a glass carriage—a Town Car—to pick me up to ensure I’d be there.

I arrived at seven p.m. to give myself time to change into my dress (these were noncostume concerts) and fix my hair and makeup
in the trailers that were set up as dressing rooms. I walked into the trailer and . . . there’s Leona, warming up.

“Oh!” I said, surprised. “You’re warming up?”

“Yes, of course,” Leona answered quickly, getting back to her scales. Another singer in the recital, Erie Mills, who was singing the part of Oscar, was also in the trailer, getting ready. She exchanged a look with me that said:
You and I know it’s your day to sing, but Leona doesn’t
. But could I have been mistaken? Clearly, if the great Leona Mitchell is warming up, Leona Mitchell is going to sing. I stowed my bag in the corner of the trailer and tippy-toed out, heading two trailers down to find Jonathan Friend, one of the artistic administrators.

“Mr. Friend, am I singing Amelia tonight?”

“What do you mean? Of course you’re singing Amelia tonight. Why are you asking me this?”

“Because Ms. Mitchell”—I pointed to the other trailer—“is in there warming up. She thinks she’s on tonight.”

His face dropped. It was surely an honest mistake on Leona’s part, but this who’s-on-first soprano confusion had to be fixed, and quickly. By now it was 7:45, and time was running out—I had to warm up and get dressed. I moved as far away from the trailer as possible and hid behind a row of trees so that Leona wouldn’t hear or see me do my own scales while Jonathan handled this. I kept my eye on the trailer door, though, waiting to see signs of Leona descending.