Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (24 page)

What happened in Chicago on the last night of
Butterfly
cannot easily be defined as misrepresentation: for Maria it was a tragic ending to her frenzied love affair with Chicago; for less reverent souls it was simply knockabout farce. The third performance of
Butterfly
on November 17 was an unscheduled one. Lawrence Kelly and Carol Fox pleaded with Maria to give one last performance, and in a glow of goodwill she agreed. One of the critics had said on the opening night that “ . . . anything short of a disaster was bound to be a triumph,” and this was ten times as true of the closing night. The applause seemed to go on forever and by the end Maria was visibly drained. Then the real drama began. Marshal Stanley Pringle and Deputy Sheriff Dan Smith, looking in their felt hats and off-white raincoats as though they had stepped out of an early Bogart movie, had managed to penetrate the cordon the Lyric’s management had thrown around Maria. They burst triumphantly into her dressing room and Maria, still in Cio-Cio-San’s kimono, was at first struck speechless with anger and bewilderment. When she found her voice, she spoke with the wrath of a goddess, proudly and indignantly declaring herself above earthly laws. “I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel! No man can sue me.” The marshal, unflustered and unimpressed, proceeded to carry out what the law required: the physical transfer of the document. He thrust Bagarozy’s summons into Maria’s kimono and, his business completed, turned to leave. She was hysterical with fury, as immortalized in a photograph that marked the turning point in the public image of Maria. Her garish Cio-Cio-San mouth twisted with anger, her black eyes distorted with hate, Maria in one instant became the image of the tigress.

Her pain at what she experienced as Chicago’s betrayal came out as bitter anger. The precise nature of the abuse she hurled on the process servers, the Lyric’s management and the inhabitants of Chicago is irrelevant. The eyes and the mouth said it all. Dario Soria and Walter Legge were both present, and with the help of Meneghini and Lawrence Kelly they smuggled Maria out through a side door. She spent the night raging in the apartment of Lawrence Kelly’s brother, reviling everyone in and out of sight. Meneghini fanned the flame with his usual enthusiasm. At dawn, having had no sleep at all, she bathed, dressed and was driven, together with Meneghini, to the airport to catch the first plane out of Chicago. In Montreal she changed planes for Milan. Back home, she still felt just as victimized as on the fateful night itself. “I couldn’t have been betrayed worse,” she wrote to Dario Soria’s wife. “When I write you the details you will freeze in horror.”

The question of how the process servers had slipped through the cordon remained unanswered, although speculation and conspiracy theories abounded. Lawrence Kelly remained convinced until he died that Carol Fox had deliberately let the process servers backstage to guarantee her position in the power struggle by alienating Maria from him. As it turned out, the incident ultimately bound Lawrence Kelly and Maria closer together than ever before.

She left Chicago utterly convinced that she had been betrayed by the Lyric’s management and swearing that she would never,
ever
return to Chicago. The end of her year of triumphs found Maria in a desperate state. Her dark view of life and the world was once again confirmed, only this time, coming so soon after so much success and so much glory, it was more deeply painful than ever before.

To compound her bitterness, she was greeted on her arrival in Milan with advertisements in the newspapers claiming that “La Callas” had lost her weight by a steady diet of Pantanella’s “psychological macaroni.” She was in no mood to be amused, especially as the ingenious pasta company had produced a certain Dr. Giovanni Cazzaroti—complete with medical certificate—to lend support to its claim. Prodded by Meneghini, and with the reports of the Chicago incident still echoing in her mind, Maria did the one thing even a novice public relations man would have advised against. She issued a writ against Pastificio Pantanella, and this became the second link in the heavy chain of her legal entanglements. Thus began what the headline writers were soon to call “the battle of the spaghetti.” It dragged on for nearly four years and turned Maria into the heroine of a ludicrous saga that became all the more newsworthy when it was revealed that the head of Pastificio Pantanella was Prince Marcantonio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII’s cousin. The suit was settled in her favor in August 1959, when the Rome Court of Appeals awarded her damages. By then the press had largely forgotten about the Prince, the Prima Donna and the Macaroni, and Maria had other more pressing things on her mind than a four-year-old lawsuit. The spaghetti victory turned out to be a rather hollow one, though at the time Maria issued the writ it had seemed essential for her to win. Together with the bitter aftertaste of Chicago, the legal battle blighted the celebrations of her thirty-second birthday. It also intensified her already acute sensitivity to any demonstrations of hostility. Such demonstrations by the “hissing snakes,” as Maria had taken to calling them, had by now become an expected ingredient of a Callas night. And the bigger the night, the more likely the demonstrations.

In December 1955, La Scala’s gala opening night was even more of an occasion than usual. Maria had automatically once again been given the honor of opening the season, this time with
Norma
. President Giovanni Gronchi was in the audience, Pierre Balmain had created the elaborate floral decorations, and so spectacular was the jewelry worn that, even with the lights out, the auditorium still seemed to glitter. The noise level of the anti-Callas demonstrators heightened the sense of excitement and anticipation. The hissing was irritating, even hurtful, but it was balanced by the unprecedented ovations that greeted Maria’s curtain calls. What was much more painful for Maria and much harder to bear was the way in which, since the turning point of the Chicago photograph, every rumor that was started about her was unquestioningly accepted and passed on.

At the beginning of January, del Monaco, who was singing Pollione to Maria’s Norma, was quoted in the Italian press bitterly complaining about her: “As I was preparing to leave the stage at the end of
Norma
I felt a hefty kick on my calf. I stopped for a moment in surprise to rub my leg and when I could finally walk again Maria had taken all the applause.” Maria kicking a fellow singer on the calf in order to steal a solo bow! Hardly believable, and it certainly would not have been believed before that fateful Chicago photograph made
anything
about Maria believable—and the more outrageous the more convincing.

As for del Monaco’s story, what seems to have made him explode against Maria was Meneghini’s reaction to the torrential ovation he had received during the first act of that January
Norma
. It was still the time of officially recognized claques which, apart from the unofficial ones organized by devotees or enemies of a particular singer, were sanctioned by the opera house to raise the general level of enthusiasm. At the intermission, Meneghini went up to Ettore Parmeggiani, who had been a tenor at La Scala and was now the official claque chief, and admonished him for what he considered excessive and partisan display of enthusiasm toward del Monaco. Parmeggiani went straight to del Monaco to enlist his support in proving the allegations false. It was as if some malevolent spirit kept pushing Meneghini to intervene, almost invariably at the wrong time and in the wrong way. On this occasion it was spectacularly the wrong time. “You and your wife,” stormed del Monaco, “don’t own La Scala, you know! The audience applauds whoever deserves applause.” And throughout the performance, whenever they were both offstage, he went on yelling at Maria.

By this time Maria aroused stronger feelings than any living singer. The mere mention of her name induced paroxysms, favorable or unfavorable according to taste. Was she a goddess for whom there was no worthy place in our second-rate world or one of the most extravagant megalomaniacs ever to walk upon a stage—or was she, perhaps, both? For many who could not fit her into a neat musical category, her voice was alien, disturbing; and for those who identified beautiful singing with a smooth, contained line and tone, no amount of vocal color and dramatic authority would compensate for the unsteadiness in the top notes, the occasional shrillness and the veiled quality of her middle range.

It was hoped that Maria’s triumphant return appearance as Violetta, in an extraordinary total of seventeen performances during the season, would silence some of her enemies. In fact at the end of one of these performances they showed rather dramatically that, far from relenting, they were growing more enterprising. In the middle of all the bouquets and the rain of flowers at Maria’s feet, a bunch of radishes fell on the stage. The audience saw them before the nearsighted prima donna, and they gasped with embarrassment on her behalf. Maria the consummate actress rose to the occasion. She picked the radishes from the stage and clasped them to her bosom as if they were the choicest orchids. The story made headlines in Milan and within hours had crossed the Atlantic.

Once off the stage, Maria let the cool mask drop and the tears flooded her eyes. The acclaimed, adored prima donna, gaily spending millions on her houses, jewelry and wardrobe, endlessly smothered in flowers and adulation, experienced demonstrations of hostility deeply and painfully as a direct assault on herself—especially when Meneghini kept focusing on them and inflating them. “One indignity upon another,” is how he described such hostility, making it even more likely that Maria would allow it to disturb her out of all proportion to its real significance. But there was little time to brood.

In between singing seventeen
Traviatas
, Maria was rehearsing her second comic role, Rosina in
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
. It was a revival of an old stock production put together with no flair or imagination. If one compares Maria’s Rosina with her Fiorilla in
Il Turco in Italia
, it becomes clear that in comedy she needed light-handed and inventive direction such as Zeffirelli provided in
Turco
. If in tragedy an inspired director was important in drawing out her special sensibilities, in comedy he was essential, especially when the comic heroine has to be fresh, feminine, guileful. There was something earnest in Maria which made her gauche and heavy when she was trying to be light and delicate, and when she tried to portray wily womanhood, her dramatic instincts let her down and she ended up appearing vulgar. She did not trust herself, and to compensate she both oversang and overacted. She, who normally achieved the maximum effect with the minimum of movement and gesture, used, according to Luigi Alva who was making his debut as Count Almaviva, “too much pepper, exaggerating gestures. This, coupled with her horrible costumes, made everything she did seem ridiculous.” Also
Il Barbiere
is not a prima donna vehicle, and Maria tried to turn it into one. “She was aggressive, a viper, acting as though Rosina had the whole situation wrapped up in her hands,” said Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who was Basilio. “But no single artist can shift the emphasis from Figaro and all the other colorful characters so beautifully balanced by Rossini.”

The opening night was a fiasco. It was a fiasco of production, direction, design and characterization. As Giulini put it: “It was an artistic mistake, utterly routine, thrown together, with nothing given deep study or preparation. . . . I conducted every performance with my head down so I wouldn’t see what was happening onstage.” It was everybody’s fiasco but it was treated as Maria’s. At La Scala, especially La Scala of the fifties, just as in the Circus Maximus, blood had to be shed; and the bluer the blood, the greater the thrill. The victimization was hardly subtle: some hissed and whistled; many talked while Maria was singing; others conspicuously walked out during the performance.

It was a night to delight the philistines, but also to destroy some of the more pretentious illusions about high opera and high culture. It was a night that made Maria raise the barricades around herself even higher. And it was the night that gave Giulini what he described later as the worst memory of his life in the theater and led to his giving up conducting at La Scala. “The audience is jaded, annoyed, bored, so it prays for a scandal. When Maria’s Rosina was whistled and hissed, people went home content. This even though Maria was the prize of the theater, greatly admired, even to the point of idolatry. As such, she became a target. In some ways she provoked such reaction. Her bows, for example, showed a certain insolence, her iron will to vanquish. With
Alceste
, Maria and I earned respect, esteem, probably because the audience was afraid to expose its ignorance about the work. I feel certain, however, that Maria’s greatest triumphs at La Scala—even her incomparable Violetta—left something of a bitter taste in her mouth.”

This bitter taste, even after her triumphs, is the key to understanding why she became increasingly weighed down by the anguish her work was causing her. There was the work itself and the impossible demands she kept making on herself; there was the accumulated resentment when colleagues, designers, directors and opera staff did not live up to her own perfectionist standards; there was the drain of always wanting, and expecting, to be first; finally—and this is the key Giulini hinted at—there was the disappointment, the bitter taste, left after her achievements and despite all the acclamation. This was partly caused by the intensity with which she felt the hostility, and partly by the merciless way she judged herself even when everyone else clamorously celebrated her triumphs. “Only on very rare occasions do I feel I have given a really marvelous performance,” she once said. “Here is one of the things that nearly drives me out of my mind. I can never tell absolutely when I
have
given a great performance. For this is the paradox. What an audience feels is a great performance does not necessarily mean the same thing to me. It sometimes happens that I think I have not been doing justice to a role. And yet after just such an evening, people come crowding in to congratulate me, and all compliments embarrass me. Then at other times, when I feel I have really given of my best, the audience’s reaction is not the same. So the mystery remains. It haunts me.”