Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (2 page)

Naturally I began by reading all the existing literature on her—the books, the reviews, the profiles and the interviews. Then, for nearly two years, I traveled the world talking to friends, colleagues and sometime enemies who had been part of Maria’s life during her fifty-four years. The invaluable advantage of talking to people so soon after her death was the immediacy, the freshness, of their responses before the analyzing and assessing had begun. The danger, on the other hand, was that some of her friends, though mercifully very few, were determined to preserve the mask of La Callas—a Maria composed entirely of her public image and her public statements, a blameless waxwork free of all untidy contradictions. But the Maria who resisted this shrinking process in life will, I have no doubt, resist it in death.

As Maria’s relationship with her mother was at the scarred heart of her life, I knew I had to start with her. It was Christmas 1977, at the time when Battista Meneghini and her mother were fighting over the $12 million Maria had left without a will, and Mrs. Callas’ lawyers would not let her talk to anyone. I went to Athens, determined not to return to London until I had seen her. One afternoon, a bunch of flowers in my hand, I arrived at her apartment in a primly respectable part of Athens. She cautiously opened the door, took the flowers, thanked me, but would not let me in. Then something happened to remind me that miracles happen on suburban doorsteps quite as often as in sacred books, and perhaps more so. A frail old lady came out of the apartment next door, exchanged a few words with Mrs. Callas and suddenly collapsed in a faint. We carried her into her house, rubbed cologne on her forehead and stayed for a while after she had come around. “You need a drink after that,” said Mrs. Callas.

I emerged from her apartment six hours later, only to return the next day, and the next, and the next. The help she gave me and the knowledge I gained from the hours we spent together provided the foundation of understanding on which I began to build the book. What she told me is woven through these pages, together with what was said over the following eighteen months by many, many others who fleetingly, or for years, had been close to Maria. Some of them, like her mother, Franco Zeffirelli and Tito Gobbi, I had planned to see from the moment I embarked on the book. Others, often people who were by her side at important moments of her life, I was led to as the months unfolded.

The most extraordinary of these meetings was with her godfather, Leonidas Lantzounis, a Greek doctor who emigrated to America a year before Maria’s parents and there established himself as a successful orthopedic surgeon. I knew that he had been close to her, but nothing I had discovered so far had given me any indication of the strength of the bond between them. We talked for hours in his New York apartment on the Hudson River, and then he suddenly produced a thick pile of letters spanning twenty-seven years from 1950 to the year she died. Maria, who, as her closest friends had assured me, hated writing letters, had consistently and in all her vulnerability opened her heart to this man; it was immediately clear from her letters that he provided the family love and warmth she always longed for. “I love you and admire you,” she writes in one of the letters, “and you are like a blood relative for me. Strange how blood relations are really not strong. My people have given me nothing but unhappiness. You have always been a source of pleasure and happiness.” She often addressed him as dear “noné,” the Greek for godfather, and signed her letters, “your godchild.” Her language is a curious mixture all her own: the grammar and syntax borrowed heavily from Greek, French and Italian, and the words, though always in English, are often overliteral translations. The letters I have included in the book are printed as she wrote them—misspellings and all. I owe Dr. Lantzounis an immense debt for entrusting me with these precious documents that he himself treasures so much.

There were others who were not part of her professional or public life, but who provided much of the personal knowledge and intimate detail that I needed to bring Maria, and not just Callas, to life: Mary Mead traveled with her from hotel to hotel in the desperate, fugitive months that followed Onassis’ decision to marry Jackie Kennedy; Peter Diamand was backstage with her after some of her greatest triumphs and a few of her greatest disasters; Nadia Stancioff was by her side all through the filming of
Medea
, and with her during that intimate summer on the private island of Tragonisi in the Aegean; François Valéry became her semiofficial escort and close friend in the last lonely years. There were colleagues such as Jon Vickers, Nicola Rescigno and Sylvia Sass, friends like Vasso Devetzi, Gaby van Zuylen and Christian Bischini, and those linked to her through their work—her agent, her hairdresser, her decorator—who inevitably became part of her everyday life and sometimes her friends. I saw all of them during these two years, often going back to talk to them again and again as my own understanding of her grew.

In instances where our talks were not tape-recorded and where my notes on our conversations might contain inaccuracies, I rechecked with each of them before the book went to press. Whenever I write about thoughts or feelings, they are not speculation but based on firsthand interviews; when the person referred to is dead, his thoughts and feelings are as described by close friends or relatives.

The most important source of information and understanding was Maria herself, though rarely through her public statements, which often give little or no indication of her real state of mind. In fact she regularly declared in public the exact opposite of what she felt. She would talk about how happy and content she was when she was in private torment; she would insist on the stability of her marriage and her devotion to her husband a few months before she left him. But we have the letters to her godfather in which she writes as though she is talking to herself, and the occasional intimate letter to a friend. And we also have her talks with John Ardoin, which provide the most direct, the most honest and the most tragic record of her feelings that we have on tape. Only part of these conversations has ever been published, and I am deeply grateful to John for making the complete transcripts available to me.

Every now and then, chance, fate or whoever arranges these things singles out an individual to be not just the greatest in his or her field but unique, setting new standards by which everyone who follows will be judged. Such was Callas. Her genius was that, although she was
interpreting
, she made her audience feel that she was
creating
. However many great artists had imposed their personalities on the roles Maria was singing, her uniqueness lay in making the audience forget them. She continues to haunt all the productions of the roles she made her own; there is no higher praise for a Norma, a Violetta or a Tosca today than that “she is the best since Callas.” By bringing to life operas many had forgotten existed, by going to the heart of the drama in the music and conveying it through her body no less than through her voice, and by inspiring directors such as Visconti and Zeffirelli to create the productions in which her dramatic truth could flourish, Maria revolutionized opera in our time. And by making audiences more discerning and thus more demanding, she went further and revolutionized the art of opera going too. But over the last two years, as I listened to every commercial recording she made and every pirate recording and rehearsal tape I could lay my hands on, I came to the conclusion that even more important than her revolutionary influence is the fact that she lived and sang, and by breathing drama and power and life into the music, she held a mirror to our most secret passions.

Maria was, without doubt, the most controversial, the most disturbing, singer of our century. Even in her prime, her voice was ridiculed as unmusical, ugly, a blasphemy against all ideals of vocal beauty. Those who know nothing about the musical controversies know about her temperament and tantrums, her abrupt cancellations of long-awaited performances and her limelit walkouts from performances already in progress. What emerged time and again while I was working on the book were valid, often tragic reasons for behavior that at the time and in later accounts was explained purely in terms of bad temper, impossible demands and vanity. Still more important, these discoveries revealed the conflict within Maria, a split which she unceasingly yearned to heal.

Through the interviews, the public statements and the private truths, her portrait gradually acquired focus and color, revealing new clues and new details. It was a bit like watching a Polaroid print develop. Forgetting who had set up and taken the photograph, I simply watched, fascinated, as it came to life.

I began by holding her up to the light of close scrutiny. And just as she was in danger of disappearing into a shimmer of ordinariness—of insecurities, of snobbery, of fears, of common humanity—I rediscovered her without illusions in all her real rather than her public greatness. By then she had become part of my daily life and had even begun to invade my dreams.

Only when I suspended theoretical interpretation did I begin to know her, and only when I suspended judgment did I begin to feel the full force of the passion that fueled her life. It is this passion for life, for her art and for something unknown beyond both that compelled her and drove her forever on. And it is this passion that I have tried to communicate in the pages that follow.

To sing is an expression of your being,
a being which is becoming
.

Maria Callas

1

P
ETROS
D
IMITRIADIS SAT ON THE
porch of his home on his name day surrounded by his seven children and as many guests as the porch would hold. He was humming an old Greek ballad, mostly to himself, under his upturned mustache, through the buzz of talk and gossip. But it wasn’t long before his was the only voice to be heard. He had hardly stopped when his audience, which had been gradually swollen by the passersby, started chanting: “Give us a song, Petro” . . . “Colonel Petro, give us a song” . . . “Sing to us, Daddy.” He smiled and looked over the little square which was by now full of people. With the confidence of an old trouper, he let his eye rove around and take in all the newcomers, including the visiting Italian tenor who had sold out the bigger of the two village halls for his concert the following evening. Petros ceremoniously rested one arm on the ledge of the porch and burst into “
Questa o quella
,” one of his most beloved Verdi arias. He had never heard
Rigoletto
from beginning to end and had picked up this aria by ear, which is how he had picked up everything he sang.

The audience was spellbound—so absorbed that they didn’t even notice the Italian tenor tiptoe away halfway through the aria. They only knew that all was not well with their famous operatic visitor when the following morning the concert was canceled, the money returned and the tenor found shut up in his room, consumed with envy and self-doubt. Petros Dimitriadis’ star had never shone brighter than it did that evening. In Stylis where he lived, across the Gulf of Lamia from Thermopylae, his was unanimously regarded as the finest voice. The Italian tenor’s withdrawal was another confirmation and the ultimate accolade. Petros needed no excuse to burst into song. He was always singing or humming—even, they said, when he was fighting. An army officer all his life, he was known during the Balkan War as the “Singing Commander.” Fifty years later his granddaughter Maria would be known as La Divina, the
prima donna assoluta
, the Golden Voice of the century.

Her mother, Evangelia (known in the family as “Litza”), was Petros’ favorite daughter. She had his flair, his showmanship, his strength and quite a lot of his magnetism—but none of his talent. She longed to be an actress, but in a family of army officers in a remote part of Greece before the First World War the mere idea of a theatrical career seemed preposterous. So she followed instead the well-trodden path of marriage to a graduate in pharmacy from the University of Athens, George Kalogeropoulos. Everybody approved except Petros. “Don’t marry him, Litza,” he insisted. “You’ll never be happy with him.” But a few months after Litza and George met, Petros Dimitriadis died of a stroke brought on by the injuries he had received in the Balkan War. Sixteen days later, in a Greek Orthodox church in Athens, Litza and George were married. They made a strikingly good-looking couple. George, with his wide brow, thick auburn hair and full mustache, could have been called a beautiful man, looking particularly imposing and dignified next to his lustrous-eyed bride in her plain white dress.

They moved to Meligala in the Peloponnese, where George opened a drugstore, the only one in thirteen counties. His customers came from miles away, and soon he had made enough money for the newlyweds to move to what was known as “the best house” in Meligala. But within six months, Evangelia knew—or rather, decided—that her father had been right. She should never have married George Kalogeropoulos and she was never going to be happy with him. She realized very quickly that his debonair looks were deceptive; he had no thirst for glory, and certainly no drive to match her longing for luxury, action and distinction. She determined, however, at least for the moment, to play the role of a good wife; but even before her first child was born, a year after their marriage, she had given up hope of making her marriage more than a convention.

Whether George took to womanizing before or after his wife had reached her unstated conclusion that the marriage had been a mistake is not easy to determine. What is clear is that the more his pharmacy thrived and his status as an affluent and respected citizen increased, the more enthusiastically, in his quiet way, did he pursue his casual affairs. And Evangelia, following in the time-honored tradition of Greek womanhood, swallowed her resentment and took what satisfaction she could from playing the silent but occasionally explosive martyr. At the same time, what with her cook and her maids, she kept sufficiently busy with the routine of married life to forget that there was little substance and precious little joy in it.