Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (21 page)

His legs are going to go up and he’s going to fall backward and smash his head on the tombstone! Doesn’t he see what’s happening? Doesn’t anyone see this?

“Luciano! Luciano!” I whispered to him. “Luciano”—I was standing behind him—“pull in your feet!” He didn’t hear me. I tried again, this time louder, as the floor began to move. It was like one of those scenes in
Batman
where someone’s about to be crushed in some sort of device, and at the very last minute . . .

I reached over and quickly pulled Luciano’s legs around just before he would have lost balance.

That scared me. When he realized what almost happened, I think it scared him, too.

When you sang with a star like him, you never knew what big celebrity might show up backstage to say hello. A week after he was out of office, President Bill Clinton attended a performance and came backstage after Act II. He was with Chelsea and her boyfriend at the time, who wanted to be an opera singer. We all stood in an informal receiving line to meet the former president; I was at
one end and Luciano was at the other. On Luciano’s side, the area lit up with camera flashes and hummed with motor drives, courtesy of the press, who were snapping President Clinton and Luciano posing together. When it looked as if the president’s Secret Service guys were going to pull him away before reaching me, I had to do something.

He’s
my
president, after all! And the name of the opera is
Aida,
and
I’m
Aida!
I jumped out of line and rushed toward Mr. Clinton like a wide receiver making for the end zone, zigzagging through the throng of Secret Service guys and intercepting him before he exited stage right.

“Mr. President, would you pose in a photo with me, too?”

He gave me one of his eye-crinkling megawatt smiles. “Why of course, Miss Voigt!”

My hair was in cornrows, I was in blackface because I was playing an Ethiopian princess, and I was wearing a muumuu that made me look humungous . . . not my first choice for a photo shoot with the most recent Leader of the Free World. That didn’t bother the president. As I’d heard, he liked women with a little meat on them. And I swear to God, the entire time we posed, and as the cameras snapped away, the president was rubbing his hand up and down along my hips, my waist . . . and under his breath, he’s saying:

“Miss Voigt, you sang beautifully tonight”—
rub, rub, rub.

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“You were really
on
. And that muumuu is fabulously flattering on you”—
rub, rub, ruuuub.

“Thank you, Mr. President. I
so
appreciate it.”

It was almost as good as kissing Plácido.

TOSCA
THAT SPRING
came with plenty of drama. By this time, Mitch’s behavior had worsened, though I suppose I’d gotten used to it. My new assistant, Jesslyn, however, was shocked and furious
at the way he treated me. Jesslyn Cleary was a feisty, whippet-smart New Englander who didn’t suffer fools gladly. She was an opera lover with years of experience working for conductors at the Opera Company of Boston and at the Santa Fe Opera, and working as a personal assistant to a long string of “demanding Park Avenue matrons and trophy wives,” as she described them. Hers was the perfect pedigree for me.

Which is not to say that anything in her background had prepared her for Mr. Mitch. She’d spent months on the phone with him trying to sort out the administrative mess he’d made of my paperwork when he’d served, briefly, as my assistant. During those calls, Mitch acted the prima donna, evading her questions and being unhelpful. That spring, Jesslyn came to Miami with me for my first stab at
Tosca
at the Florida Grand Opera, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt if she met Mitch, who lived north, just up the coast from Miami.

I had bought a condo in Fort Pierce, near where Mitch lived, and the plan was for us to have a nice introductory dinner with Mitch, and then Jesslyn and I would say our good nights to him and go back to my condo to watch the television broadcast of
Tristan und Isolde
, starring a colleague I was fond of, Jane Eaglen. I had just signed to sing my first Isolde with the Vienna State Opera in 2003, and I wanted to watch this Metropolitan Opera broadcast to see Jane in the role. I didn’t even consider inviting Mitch to join us since he loathed opera.

When we arrived at the restaurant a little late, Mitch was already on his way to being sloshed. As soon as we sat down, he began to grill Jesslyn on opera. Ha! He barely knew enough to ask a proper question. Jesslyn answered him politely, but the more he drank, the nastier he got. After I mentioned that we were going to watch
Tristan
together later—a big mistake—Mitch picked up the bread basket and hurled it across the table at us, barely missing Jesslyn’s head and hitting me with a flying croissant. Well, the bread was softer than his boot.

“That’s
it
,” Jesslyn said, slamming her fork down onto the table and standing up. “I’m outta here.”

That night, we watched
Tristan
in silence, and before she left to go back to her hotel, she asked: “Why do you stay with him? Why do you put up with this?”

I didn’t have an answer for her. All I could hear in my mind was the sound of my own voice twenty years earlier, like a tape recorder on a loop, playing over and over the words I wanted to ask my mother when she went back to my father.

Why are you putting up with this? How many times are you going to go through this?

HAVING JESSLYN WITH
me during my first Tosca was a blessing, because even apart from the Mitch toxicity, I was having difficulty. Everything started out great—Tosca is a dream role for a soprano because she’s so fiery and diva-esque. And I was being directed by Renata Scotto, herself a very famous Tosca in her day before giving up the stage to teach and direct. Like Leonie Rysanek, when I played Chrysothemis, Renata didn’t try to impress her portrayal of Tosca on me but encouraged me to find my own.

“If I had had the voice you have,” she said to me, on our first day of rehearsal, “my God, what I could have done with this role.” It was one of the most sublime compliments I ever received.

Still, I grew miserable because my weight had zoomed up and I was bigger than ever. It was difficult to be onstage playing a beautiful diva in love with a handsome, romantic painter who adores her madly when my real life was so the opposite. Would the audience believe someone my size in this role? It was a seemingly impossible acting challenge, even Meryl Streep might have hung up Tosca’s signature tiara if she were me.

Behind the scenes, the makeup artist James Geyer was trying his best to make me look thinner with makeup tricks. In an attempt to give my round, chubby face some contour and give me the
illusion of a chin, James painted slashes of dark triangles underneath my cheeks where my jawline would be. The slashes were so dark, I looked like I was wearing a beard. To top it off, I was sweating like a sumo wrestler in a sauna onstage, and so the black makeup started melting and trickling down my neck.

At the end of the opera, Tosca has her big, spectacular moment and one of opera’s most dramatic finales when (spoiler alert!) she jumps from the parapet of the Castel Sant’Angelo to her death. It’s a brilliant scene. You say this tremendous line—
Avanti a Dio!
(“In front of God!”)—and then you jump and go to Him. There have been past Toscas so brave that they literally fall backwards in this scene, to make it as dramatic as possible.

I was supposed to leap from a height of four feet onto a big, soft mattress, and I was terrified. On the first day of “jump rehearsal” Renata gave me clear instructions:

“Okay now, Debbie. Run up the stage, run up the stairs, and then step onto the parapet, and then turn around and . . . jump!”

I did as she said—almost. It was so hot, but I ran up the stairs, stepped onto the parapet, took one look down at the mattress and . . . started to cry. I was overwhelmed by the thought of doing this little jump. After all, at 320 pounds, this “little jump” amounted to a lot of woman plummeting to the earth. Legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt injured her knee so badly doing the jump, she eventually had to have her leg amputated. And the idea of “leaping to my death” was disturbing me, too. It felt so art-imitates-life, and too prophetic. To Renata, I blamed the set.

“I think what’s making me nervous,” I explained to her, in tears, “is that I run up the stairs to the landing, then have to step up onto this tiny little box before I jump. The box feels so unstable. Can’t I just jump from the landing?”

A bunch of stagehands showed up at the snap of Renata’s fingers and—
saw, saw, saw
,
hammer, hammer, hammer
—soon enough, they took away the little parapet, so now it’s time for me to try again. I
run up the stairs—say the line,
Avanti a Dio!
, turn around, and . . . again burst into tears.

“I can’t do it!”

Next thing I knew, Renata was bounding up the stairs herself. She was about sixty years old, petite but sturdy.

“Darrrrrrling,” she says, standing on the edge of the platform, “you wanted to sing Tosca? You have to jump!” And with that, she took flight—and shamed me into it.

At the first dress rehearsal, they’d added a thick foam pad to the mattress at my landing spot. I was sweating bullets because of the heat, and because I was so nervous. I ran, I reached the platform, and without hesitation I made an absolute swan dive and landed on my stomach, my face smashed deep into the soft foam. The cast and crew gave me a round of applause. The next day, when I arrived at my dressing room, the crew presented me with a little memento of my leap. They’d cut out a big square from the foam where my darkly contoured, sweaty face had landed, leaving an indelible imprint. You could even see the shape of my lips (formed in an “O,” like in Edvard Munch’s
Scream
) and the lash marks from my eyelashes.

“We call it ‘The Shroud of Tosca,’” said James. We all laughed about it. But, honestly, every night I dreaded that jump.

I HATED THOSE
jumps because they reminded me of endings, of giving up, of pain so great that you can’t stand being yourself one minute longer.

My ending with Mitch coincided with the entrance into my life of a new male who would prove to be unconditionally loyal, loving, and sweet to me always—my Yorkshire terrier puppy, Steinway. In June of 2002, I went to a breeder and picked him out of a litter of three newborn pups. He was still too young to take home, and I had to go to Europe, anyway; so that would give him time to be with his mother and grow a bit. But I was excited that I
would have his sweetness to come home to, sensing the ugliness ahead.

Mitch and I had been spending a lot of time together in Florida at his place when, after five alcohol-drenched, abusive years together, he suddenly dumped me for someone else—a mortgage broker who collected Coca-Cola memorabilia. Once he’d realized that I wasn’t going to be his sugar mommy and bankroll his bad, expensive habits anymore, he went elsewhere to find someone who would. I wish I could say that I was the one who did the breaking up. I also wish I could forget the last bit of stinging dialogue he spat out as I begged him in his house one day, as if in a scene from a daytime TV drama: “Please don’t do this, please don’t leave me. You can’t do this!”

“Look at that bed”—Mitch pointed toward the bedroom, where I’d had the edgiest sex of my life thus far. “Look at that bed and get it through your head that you and I will never be in that bed together—
ever again
.” Now he pointed to the ceiling. “Do you hear those men working on the roof? I’ve got roofers who are better-looking than you.”

Right about then is when I morphed into the Glenn Close character in
Fatal Attraction
. After he told me he didn’t want me anymore, I grabbed a very valuable porcelain Lladró off a nearby shelf—it was a figurine of a wedding couple that had topped John’s and my wedding cake years earlier. Mitch had seen me throwing it out once, recognized it as a Lladró, and wanted to keep it himself.

I grabbed it, ran to the bathroom and smashed it into a zillion tiny little smithereen pieces on the floor. Then I stormed out of the apartment and sat in my car out front and called Mitch’s cell a dozen times in a row, like a madwoman. My key was in my hand but I couldn’t make myself put it in the ignition and drive away. I was paralyzed. And I was in hysterics. Both! I dialed my therapist’s number.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Mitch’s driveway.”

Mitch had come out and was now standing a few feet from my
car, yelling at me and threatening to call the cops because I wasn’t leaving, because I was breaking things, because I was acting like a crazy lady. I bet his ego loved it. I bet he loved that this woman who had taken him around the world and to whom he owed $20,000 was now in hysterics because he’d dumped her.

“You have to leave,” said the therapist.

“I can’t move.”

She talked me through it, step by step, like I was a baby. First she told me to take a deep breath. Then she took me through the mechanics of leaving.

“Put the key into the ignition. Okay, it’s in? Okay, good. Now put your foot on the gas. Is it on the gas? Good. Put the car in reverse.” She stayed on the phone with me until I arrived safely at my own condo.

I was out of my mind with grief, sorrow, and regret that night. Lying awake, I thought about Tosca’s despair, and I thought about hurling myself off my tenth-floor balcony. This time, maybe I wouldn’t be afraid to leap. I often wondered if killing oneself was an act of courage or cowardice, and I’m still not certain what I think. But I do believe that God ultimately determines when it’s our time, and that in His wisdom that even includes suicides.

I called back the therapist—she was earning every penny I paid her.

“I’m on the balcony,” I said. “The pain is too much.” I was weeping and starting to hyperventilate.

“Debbie, I want you to put the phone down and go get a glass of water.”

“No! No!”

“Debbie, put the phone down and go get a glass of water. What lights do you have on in the room? What color is the couch?” She was trying to talk me back into myself, trying to reattach me to the concrete world around me by asking me questions and making me answer them. Slowly, patiently, she calmed me down enough that I
stepped away from the balcony. But for weeks afterward, the pain of his rejection was so unbearable that I was still in
Fatal Attraction
mode. I checked his voice mail on the hour because I knew his password. I’d call dozens of times a day and if I heard a voice mail from a woman—
beeeeep!
—I erased it. I kept on doing this until a friend finally stood next to me at a pay phone, made me dial his number, and made me change his passcode without looking at the numbers so that I wouldn’t know it. Mitch wouldn’t either, but, hell—that was a bonus.