Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (26 page)

So musical—and fashionable—New York had paid a lot of money to come and defy Maria to move them, impress them, convince them that she was all that legend insisted she was. And she did. The first act was difficult, nearly impossible. The heat of a New York Indian summer was exhausting, the tension was unbearable, and Maria, visibly nervous, was not in her best voice. So frightened was she that she stood in the wings literally unable to move until the stage director, Dino Yannopoulos, had to shove her forcibly onto the stage, saying, “I promised to deliver a prima donna and so I will; after that it’s up to you.” In the second act, the miracle happened. The magic that had been only intermittent and fleeting in the first act broke through and took complete command of the audience. Maria Callas the opera singer who was rude to deputy sheriffs and unkind to her mother disappeared under the force and majesty with which Maria invested
Norma
. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the audience surrendered. Ten years later, when Maria’s voice was nearly in shreds, Harold Schonberg of
The New York Times
summed up the reason: “Something in the woman hits nearly every member of the audience right in the viscera. While she continues to have that something, people will tear down the doors and yell themselves hoarse and what you or I or anybody else may say will make no difference.” On that long-awaited and much-feared night, the audience did yell themselves hoarse through sixteen curtain calls. The curtain calls were a performance in themselves, culminating in a solo bow in defiance of Bing’s instructions when Mario del Monaco and Cesare Siepi withdrew and left Maria alone. A minute earlier she had picked a bouquet of flowers from the stage and offered them each a rose with a smile impossible to resist.

And still the performance was not over. The Trianon Room at the Ambassador Hotel had been taken over by Angel Records for a large party in Maria’s honor. The guests, according to Dorle Soria, Dario Soria’s wife, who had organized it, were a cross section of the musical, social, diplomatic and press worlds—from the Greek and Italian ambassadors to Marlene Dietrich and Elsa Maxwell, the notorious socialite and gossip columnist. Dietrich, worried about Maria’s health during rehearsals, had spent hours boiling down eight pounds of beef to a quart of purest broth. “It’s wonderful,” Maria said gratefully. “Tell me, what brand of cubes do you use?”

Exactly an hour after midnight, Maria finally arrived with her husband, Dario Soria and a man whose eyes never left her throughout the party. He behaved like the most ardent fan but was really a private detective employed by the famous jewelry firm of Harry Winston from whom Maria had borrowed, for the night, jewelry worth more than a million dollars. She looked like a queen, behaved like a queen, was treated like a queen.

The party was given to celebrate Maria’s debut at the Met but, looking back, we can see that it marked a different kind of beginning. Still almost imperceptibly, Maria was being absorbed into the world of the Beautiful People; or rather, she was choosing to be absorbed. It was she, after all, who had asked Angel Records to give this party for her. The morning after the Great Night, hostilities were resumed—at first quietly in the rather lukewarm reviews. The emphasis was on Maria’s vocal limitations, with all the usual comments about the veiled middle register and the deficiencies of tone. But one of the reviewers, Howard Taubman in
The New York Times
, made a statement that revealed as much truth about Maria’s character as about her voice. “It is a puzzling voice,” he wrote. “Occasionally it gives the impression of having been formed out of sheer will power rather than natural endowments.”

A few days later came
Tosca
. Dimitri Mitropoulos, the other great musical Greek, was conducting, and George London was Scarpia. When many trusted colleagues were lining up to dispense their venom on Maria, George London remained totally loyal. “When I learned that I would sing Scarpia to Callas’s Tosca,” he wrote in a magazine article, “I must admit I had a few forebodings. So much had been printed about this ‘stormy’ star that I was prepared for almost anything. The first rehearsal reassured me. Here was a trouper, a fanatical worker, a stickler for detail. Remembering my first season at the Met and the forlornness one can feel, I crossed the stage before curtain-time and, knocking at Maria Callas’s dressing-room, said a quick
‘in bocca di lupo’
[‘in the mouth of the wolf’—an Italian charm for good luck]. She took my hand in both of hers and seemed deeply moved. She later told me that this insignificant courtesy had meant a great deal to her.” And the general feeling of competitiveness and enmity around her made it all the more special.

Those who went to
Tosca
to hear “
Vissi d’arte
” and other famous set pieces left feeling short-changed. Where was the full, generous outpouring of a Tebaldi or a Milanov? Elsa Maxwell, cheerleader in chief for Tebaldi—and a close friend—had decided to launch a personal vendetta against Maria. She attacked the “devious diva,” as she had termed her, on practically every ground she could think of; she even managed to detect jealousy of George London in the way she stuck the knife into him at the end of the second act. But there were others in the audience besides Elsa Maxwell and the vocal purists for whom Maria was a great—the greatest—Tosca. Some would even say that she was a much greater Tosca than
Tosca
deserved. Her understanding of the part illuminated even the smallest gesture and movement. And there were many in that first-night audience at the Met who realized that the brilliance of the Callas Tosca would linger in the public’s mind long after scores of other much more vocally accomplished performances had been forgotten.

Ten days after that first night, Tebaldi officially joined the Callas opposition. In a letter that
Time
magazine published on November 26, that was to reverberate throughout the musical world, Renata angrily replied to the accusations Maria was reported to have leveled against her. “She’s got no backbone. She’s not like Callas,” Maria was supposed to have said. “The signora says that I have no backbone,” Renata snapped back. “I reply I have one great thing that she has not—a heart.”

Maria was approaching her thirty-third birthday in an atmosphere of excitement, controversy, adulation and animosity. She had only to appear somewhere—even in a department store—for cameras and microphones to materialize in front of her. On December 3, 1956, the night after her birthday, Maria opened at the Met in
Lucia
. The praise of her dramatic art was qualified once again by the criticisms of her vocal performance and by the venom of Elsa Maxwell: “I confess the great Callas acting in the Mad Scene left me completely unmoved. . . . I was intrigued by the red wig she wore through the first two acts but in the Mad Scene she came on as a platinum blonde. Why this change of color? What did it mean to this egocentric extrovert?”

During her second New York
Lucia
there was another explosion. At the end of the second-act duet, Enzo Sordello, who was singing Ashton, held onto an unwritten high note long after Maria had abandoned her high D, which made her appear embarrassingly short of breath. “
Basta!
” [“Enough!”] she cried, giving rise to the legend that the audience heard her and gasped, thinking that she had called her colleague a bastard. Sordello’s contract with the Met was instantly terminated—at Maria’s demand, according to the press and Sordello himself. “Him or me” was the ultimatum she was supposed to have sent to Bing. The front pages featured Sordello tearing up her picture while Bing’s denial of Maria’s interference was politely ignored. Sordello, said Bing’s press statement, was dismissed because of his continuous lack of cooperation and his persistent clashes with conductor Fausto Cleva. The ladies and gentlemen of the press were amused but not convinced, or at least they were not prepared to allow details and qualifications to water down a vintage Callas scandal.

Maria’s nine-week stay in New York was coming to an end, but not before an extraordinary reconciliation. A few days before they left for Milan, Maria and Battista were guests of the Greek film tycoon Spyros Skouras at a dinner dance given for the American Hellenic Welfare Fund at the Waldorf-Astoria. Among the other guests was that ever-present barometer of the international social weather, Elsa Maxwell. Some time between Maxwell’s first attack on her and the night at the Waldorf-Astoria, Maria decided that Maxwell had to be conquered. Not an easy thing, Maxwell cognoscenti warned her. Elsa was notorious not only for ruthlessly pursuing vendettas in her column, but for proudly owning up to it. “I look like a bulldog,” she said, “and I have a dog’s persistence.”

Undaunted, Maria asked Spyros Skouras to introduce them, and at that point she donned a mask that had never been and never became part of her personality. “I esteem you,” she said to Maxwell who printed it verbatim in her next column, “as a lady of honesty who is devoted to telling the truth.” Here was the great Callas suddenly transformed into an insincere flatterer for the sake of winning Madame Maxwell’s favor. She achieved this and much more besides: “When I looked into her amazing eyes, which are brilliant, beautiful and hypnotic, I realized she is an extraordinary person.” It was not so much love as attachment at first sight. Elsa Maxwell attached herself to Maria with an embarrassing persistence which she found increasingly uncomfortable. She always made sure that she was not left alone with Elsa, even for a few minutes, but at the same time, she was childishly delighted at having so unexpectedly replaced Renata as Mamma Maxwell’s favorite child.

In her own way, Maria returned Elsa’s attachment. The rebel daughter in search of a surrogate mother seemed to have finally found one. The fact that, at seventy-three, Maxwell could more easily have been Maria’s grandmother made it all the more secure and attractive. What is more, she could open for Maria a new world of yachts, grand soirees, exiled princes and reigning millionaires, at a time when Maria, having conquered the world of opera, was fascinated by new, still unexplored vistas.

Elsa Maxwell had captivated café society before Maria was born and seemed determined, with her flamboyant parties, to reclaim it at least three times a year. Whether in Paris, New York, Venice or Monte Carlo, she spent other people’s fortunes on parties designed to defy prediction and exceed expectation. “I have been called a parasite for accepting the largesse of the wealthy,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but I contributed as much, at least, as I received. I had imagination and they had money, a fair exchange of the commodity possessed by each side in greatest abundance.” By the time Maria was ten, back in the thirties, Maxwell was already identified as the world’s number one party-giver. She gave a Come as Your Opposite and a Come as You Are party in which ladies arrived without skirts and gentlemen without trousers; she gave a
fête champêtre
where Serge Lifar, one of Diaghilev’s last discoveries, appeared naked, painted gold, on a white horse; she gave a treasure hunt party at which guests stole Mistinguett’s shoes and a black swan from the Bois de Boulogne; she gave a party at the Ritz in Paris where the Diaghilev ballet danced on a specially constructed stage; and she gave a party for her seventieth birthday at Maxim’s at the end of which Albert, the headwaiter, informed “Mademoiselle” that the bill had been “lost.”

That was three years before the night at the Waldorf-Astoria when the “Mademoiselle” fell in love with Maria. “I discovered when I was sixteen,” Elsa wrote, “that I could not permit myself even to be kissed by a man. Maybe egotism or false idealism prevented me from letting any man know me well enough for such intimacy.” Whatever Maxwell’s predilections, for the next three years, Maria became for her the object of an almost adolescent passion. For Maria, Maxwell was clearly her champion and her expert guide to a new world.

Before she threw herself fully into the world of international café society, however, Maria found herself exploring the world of lawyers, courtrooms, judgments and settlements. The morning of the day she was leaving for Milan she spent at the New York Supreme Court giving evidence in the Bagarozy lawsuit. Two weeks later she had to return to Chicago, this time for the actual hearing of the case. As if there had not been enough of a circus in the previous few days, Maria arrived at the airport to find that Enzo Sordello, the fighting baritone, had booked seats on the same plane. He approached her all smiles. Maria ignored the offer of a handshake and refused to address a single word to him, but she did speak to the waiting reporters.

“I don’t like that man taking advantage of my publicity.”

“What then did you think of your New York publicity, Madame Callas?”

“I think it’s been wonderful. But this is lousy.”

Enormous mink hat, short, pithy answers for the eager reporters, Toy, the perfect poodle, in her arms—the trappings of the public personality were complete. And yet the journalists sensed, and the public sensed, that here was an original—vivid, utterly unique—a woman who resembled no public personality they knew.

As the new year began, Maria was testing her power and enjoying her social victories as much as her musical ones. After a two-week Christmas holiday at her home, she was back in New York. On January 11, 1957, there was a glittering ball, again at the Waldorf-Astoria, with a glittering theme: a regal pageant. Maria put as much energy into her fancy dress as she would have put into her costumes for La Scala or the Met. She arrived dressed as the exotic Egyptian queen Hatshepshut, covered in emeralds worth $3 million dollars. “Everybody” was there—and so, of course, was Elsa Maxwell, not quite impenetrably disguised as Catherine the Great.

Then came Chicago, the city that Maria had forsworn forever. She had forgotten her oath and her anger at the city as easily as she had in the case of all those tenors and baritones she had once sworn never to sing with again. Still adamant, however, that she would not sing under the Lyric Opera’s management, she gave only a concert in Chicago; in a vivid red velvet gown she looked as regal as she had a few days earlier as the Egyptian queen. Two days later, back in Milan, she appeared at La Scala in a chinchilla coat and diamond-encrusted glasses. She was not singing, but the occasions when she was the center of attention without singing were fast multiplying. This time the occasion was the first night of Francis Poulenc’s
Dialogues des Carmélites
, and the evening was to honor Poulenc himself.