Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (22 page)

THAT SUMMER OF
2002, which Jesslyn refers to as “Debbie’s summer of catatonia,” I rented a magnificent villa for two months in Salzburg to prepare for my debut as Danae in Strauss’s
Die Liebe der Danae
. It was a new production for the fiftieth anniversary of the Salzburg Festival, to be directed by famed opera director Günter Krämer. It was a very big deal and had created a buzz in the opera world months in advance.

I arrived a mess, and in need of a drink, or five.

Jesslyn came with me, and the first night we arrived we immediately got to work making martinis—badly needed after the long flight—but found no ice in the freezer. “Oh, God, no ice?!!” we yelled in unison.

But God always hears our prayers, it is said, especially when you least expect it. Maybe He doesn’t answer the big ones, like, “Oh, please, don’t let him leave me,” but who are we to pick and choose which ones should be answered? A few minutes after Jesslyn and I moaned aloud about our tragic ice situation, the clouds grew dark and it began to hail—giant chunks of ice fell from the sky. Laughing, we ran out into the backyard with buckets and collected the ice, then rinsed them off for our drinks.

The next few weeks were decidedly unmiraculous. The new role didn’t suit me well vocally, I felt, and it didn’t help that I’d arrived unprepared. We bought an icemaker, and I sat on my bedroom
balcony overlooking a sunflower field every morning and prayed that the pain would go away.

Soon, in a miracle of sorts, I was laughing and twirling in that very same sunflower field—literally.

A few weeks after we got there, a
Vanity Fair
photographer and reporter arrived to interview me and shoot a two-page spread. Because we were in Salzburg, I had a great idea for the shoot—why not dress me up as Maria von Trapp in
The Sound of Music
? I could never get enough of that singing nun. This time, I was imagining myself in a pretty, gauzy dress, reenacting the romantic scene in the gazebo, where the Captain kisses Maria. But no, the editors had another visual in mind. They wanted me to dress up like Maria in that very first scene, when she wears that unglamorous pinafore nun-dress, and spin around and around like Julie Andrews does with the Alps behind her. It was the iconic shot, after all, so I agreed. We spent an entire day with me twirling around, huffing and puffing, and getting dizzy. It takes a lot of work to spin 300-plus pounds around like a top. By the time we were done and they got the shot, I could barely stand upright.

I wasn’t about to deny myself my gazebo moment, though. As soon as I’d recovered my equilibrium the following week, I went with my mother—who came to visit—on the Official Sound of Music Bus Tour. Mom, Jesslyn, and I had made a unanimous decision that I needed lots of merriment and happy musicals that summer to cheer me up. What could be peppier than a sardine-packed busload of Aussie tourists singing “The Lonely Goatherd” for six hours?

“Sing, Debbie, sing!” Mom kept elbowing me whenever I stopped. I couldn’t help it. I’d never heard such bad singing in my life and I had to stop and listen, I told her. We burst out laughing, and soon I was singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” with the rest of the sweaty, obsessed fans. The bus made stops at the movie locations, including the church where the Captain and Maria got married and the lake where the kids fall out of their rowboat. The last, and my
favorite, was the gazebo, where the Captain and Maria sing their love duet, “Something Good.” Mom and I got out and walked inside it, debating whether Christopher Plummer was a good kisser or not (yes, we decided) and wondering where we could find a man like that for me. The summer had begun in the depths of despair but ended on bright notes. I stood in Maria’s gazebo, singing the hopeful lyrics to one of my childhood classics—
somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good
. And while I may have been easy to forget in Mitch’s mind,
New York Times
chief music critic Anthony Tommasini thought otherwise. He wrote in his August review of
Die Liebe der Danae
:

AFTER WE GOT
home from Salzburg, I went to pick up little Steinway at the breeder’s kennel. He was the littlest thing I’d ever held, and on the car ride home he threw up all over me. But just like it’s good luck when a bird poops on you, I considered Steinway’s barfing in my lap an omen that the upcoming year would bring good fortune.

And it did. Remarkably, my career stayed on the upswing despite the downward spiral of my love life. In April of 2003 I took Jesslyn and little Steinway to Vienna for a new production of
Tristan und Isolde—
my first completely staged performance of it—and we arrived six weeks before opening night for an unusually long stretch of rehearsal time.

As a side note, people often wonder how much opera singers are paid. I’m not going to get into numbers, but I will say that singers’ fees are standard for each specific opera house and all of the top-tier singers are paid the same. But in Vienna, an exception is made if you sing
Isolde
. It’s the only role and the only opera company as far as
I know where this is true, but for
Isolde
you get more money than the usual rate. Why? Because it’s a “long song.” So considering the salary bump, I wasn’t about to complain about the insufferable heat, not really.

We arrived during a stiflingly hot spring (when it came to the weather in Vienna, I was truly cursed), and the Vienna State Opera house didn’t have air conditioning. Thomas Moser was set to sing Tristan, and Günter Krämer was again my director. We had a great group, but the heat was making us all nuts.

For one big scene we had to wear heavy rain jackets over our already bulky costumes for a scene on a ship, and I had to lie on the floor at the edge of the stage with my head hanging over the orchestra pit. Every time I did it, one of the string bass players inches away from me would dart his eyes up at my dripping face, shooting me a look that said,
Hey, lady—don’t you dare sweat all over my instrument!

My costume was tight; I was bone-corseted to within an inch of my life because they were trying to make me look smaller.
Sigh.
How do you make a woman over three hundred pounds look smaller? My dress had a fifteen-foot-long train made of black tulle. When you wear a dress like that, you have to choreograph precisely how you’re going to work in it, how you’re going to move, because it’s so easy for you to walk one way and the dress to go another. So the costumers made a replica for me to wear during rehearsals so that I could coordinate my movements and staging with the dress, which upped my body temperature at least a few degrees.

It was so steamy that as soon as we got a three-day break, Jesslyn and I drove south to Baden and stayed at the Grand Hotel Sauerhof, built in the twelfth century and once a haven for such guests as Beethoven and Antonio Salieri.

There, we took midnight dips in the hotel pool to cool off. Steinway was such a mama’s boy that he followed me right into the water the first night, stepping off the concrete edge with a little yelp. It
was a sink-or-swim moment for my little guy, and I’m glad to say he learned to doggie paddle quickly. His mama, on the other hand, impressed Jesslyn with the number of laps I could do and how long I could hold my breath underwater. She’d pull out her watch and time me:

“. . . three minutes . . .
four minutes
. . . do all Wagnerian sopranos have this kind of lung capacity? Four minutes and thirty seconds. Debbie?
Debbie!
”

In the mornings, I’d let Steinway out on a little patch of lawn outside my first-floor hotel room to do his business, and I’d invariably end up chasing after him in my short nightie with my bare ass in the air.

During breakfast one day as we ate on the outdoor patio, Jesslyn was giving me a detailed history lesson on the hotel when I shushed her.

“Did you hear that bird?”

We held our breath and heard a song coming from the leafy sequoia tree nearby. If we both hadn’t heard it, I’d never have believed it; the bird was whistling the unmistakable first five notes of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” I kid you not.

BACK IN VIENNA
, opening night arrived and I was scared out of my wits, and rightly so. I was an American singing Isolde—and in Vienna! I woke up that morning with the same mixed feelings I often have when making a role debut—thrilled and totally confident, alternating with a self-doubt so debilitating I’m paralyzed. To keep my feelings under control, I go on autopilot: wake up, coffee, pray, breakfast, a little walk, pray, lunch, pray, look at the music, pray, nap, a light dinner, go to theater, pray,
pray
,
PRAY
. . . makeup, costume, a last-minute prayer during the overture, and then—GO!

Once I’m onstage, I let myself feel something besides the fear I woke up with. I let the character inside of me. Playing Isolde that night my staging began with a loud emotional outburst as I knocked
the armor of Morold, slain by Tristan, to the ground. It was a great way to channel my nervous energy built up during the day. Then, I put one note in front of the other and took it scene by scene. I can’t go into these marathon Wagnerian evenings with my thoughts on the final note, or focused on what I have to do over the next few hours; that would be too overwhelming. I imagine it’s how a mountain climber feels standing at the foot of Everest. If they look up too high, they’d probably think,
How the heck will I ever get all the way up there?
Instead, it’s one step at a time.

Opening night was a huge success: a twenty-three-minute standing ovation reported on CNN live in a ticker-tape newsflash. Then came the second performance. I got laced up into my bone-corseted dress like a plus-size Scarlett O’Hara, walked onstage, began to sing, and . . . found I couldn’t move properly. What was going on? Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what. I looked down at my dress and saw that six feet of my train had been hacked off and no one had bothered to tell the leading lady wearing it. I spent the second half of Act I fuming. As soon as I got offstage, I confronted the costumers and asked in my not-so-great German: “
Vas
the
fück
happened to my dress?!”

Herr Holender, they told me, had decided he didn’t like the length and had ordered them to cut it off.

Opera House Manager Herr Ioan Holender, a.k.a., “the Shark.” That was his nickname in opera circles because of his perpetual tan, snow-white hair, and oversized, sharp, bleached teeth. I wanted to rip the nuts off Herr Holender, and I wasn’t (and still am not) the only one in the world to feel that way.

“I want it back on my dress for the next show!” I told the costumers, and they nodded. Sure enough, it was back on the next day. The Shark took note of this.

“I see you’ve got your train back.” He flashed his big teeth.

“Yes, my train, which should never have been taken away in the first place without my being told.” I felt diva-ish responding like
that because it was so not me, but the truth was my reaction was absolutely justified. It was unprofessional and detrimental to the entire production not to inform a performer of such a major costume change.

I didn’t hear another word from the Shark after that, and especially after I got a glowing review in the
New York Times
a few days later. Anthony Tommasini, who attended that second, trainless, performance, and whom I was beginning to love from afar, wrote:

My cup runneth over that week. The opening-night standing ovation was another turning point in my career, albeit a bittersweet one. A few weeks before opening night, my stepsister Melinda—Lynn’s daughter—had mysteriously fallen into a coma while in remission from mesothelioma cancer. The whole family had been set to come to Vienna to see me in this important role, but Dad and Lynn, of course, stayed behind to be with her. A few days before
opening night, I got a call from Lynn and Dad from Melinda’s bedside at the hospital.

“Debbie, we just turned off Melinda’s respirator and she only has a few minutes left,” Lynn said. “Would you sing to her?”

She held the phone to Melinda’s ear and I told her goodbye, that I loved her, and I sang the first melody that came to my lips:

I sang to her again on opening night. I had managed to set my grief over Melinda’s death aside for most of the evening, until I got to the transcendent “Liebestod”—that intense aria of “love and death”—in the final act. In the scene, Isolde is saying goodbye to Tristan as she sings, and I couldn’t help but tear up about Melinda. But the special beauty of this aria is that it is filled with as much joy as sadness. It’s about beginnings as well as endings, and about life going on beyond this place.

That’s probably why I felt “Amazing Grace” welling up inside of me the moment Melinda passed.