Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (36 page)

Nor did it end with the performance. Maria Seconda (the name Maria had given to Mary Mead) was giving a supper party for her, and when Maria arrived at one o’clock in the morning, a huge television truck was parked in the front yard, and the phone was still ringing. She left Mary Mead’s house at five o’clock in the morning, and after a few hours’ sleep Dallas’
prima donna assoluta
began talking again to the American press, to the Italian press, to anyone who would listen—and everybody did. “I cannot switch my voices. My voice is not like an elevator going up and down. . . . So Mr. Bing cancels a twenty-six-performance contract for three
Traviatas
.” “When I think of those lousy
Traviatas
he made me sing without rehearsals, without even knowing my partners. . . . Is that Art? . . . And other times, all those performances with a different tenor or a different baritone every time. . . . Is that Art?”

Bing had not exactly remained speechless. “I do not propose,” began his press statement, “to enter into a public feud with Madame Callas since I am well aware that she has considerably greater competence and experience at that kind of thing than I have.” Sarcasm, formal eloquence and sardonic wit were only a few of the weapons in Rudolf Bing’s arsenal. He used them all. Maria had taken on a formidable antagonist—a man who thrived on public fencing, a man who early in his career had perfected the art of dealing with awkward customers at Peter Jones’s hairdressing salon, and who toward the end had informed the French press, busy complaining about the performance of a Met singer, that “Miss Peters may have had a bad night but the Paris Opera has had a bad century.”

“Although Madame Callas’s artistic qualifications are a matter of violent controversy between her friends and foes,” continued Bing’s statement, “her reputation for projecting her undisputed histrionic talent into her business affairs is a matter of common knowledge . . . ” He went on in this vein until Maria began to feel grateful for Ghiringhelli’s dismissive one-sentence statements to the press in their feuding days at La Scala. “So, on with the season!” were Bing’s final, fighting words.

Maria continued her concert tour of America from Cleveland to Detroit, from Detroit to Washington, from Washington to San Francisco and Los Angeles; concerts punctuated by an Elsa Maxwell dinner in New York in honor of Karajan, a dinner at the Waldorf with Aly Khan and Noel Coward and a dinner in Washington given in her honor by the French ambassador. Meanwhile the Met controversy smoldered on. It ranged from avowals of total support for Bing’s action to demands for his resignation. Whatever the results of the theoretical argument over Bing’s decision, back in Milan at the beginning of December, Maria was feeling its practical effects. She celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday looking ahead to a winter almost devoid of performances. Almost, but not quite. On December 19, she was at last due to make her debut in Paris. It was a charity gala concert, with the proceeds going to the Légion d’Honneur. The seats were being sold for the highest price ever charged at L’Opéra, and the list of those who were going to be present included Charlie Chaplin, Brigitte Bardot, Emile de Rothschild, Juliette Greco, Françoise Sagan, the Windsors, Jean Cocteau and Aristotle Onassis. Even the twenty-four usherettes were part of Parisian high society, selling programs in their ball gowns to raise money for the legion.

Among the flowers Maria received in her hotel on the morning of the gala was a huge bunch of red roses; the good wishes were in Greek and the signature, Aristotle Onassis. Among the flowers that arrived at lunchtime was a huge bunch of red roses—the good wishes were again in Greek and the signature, Aristotle. And in the evening, just as she was about to leave for the opera house, an identical bunch arrived with the good wishes in Greek and no signature. “How romantic he is!” was Maria’s only comment to her husband. Later Meneghini remembered—or imagined—that there was a strange tone in her voice as she said that.

The concert was to be followed by a sumptuous supper for 450 guests, and the press was full of the event for days before. “
L’impératrice du bel canto
,” as one French paper called her, was reminded on her arrival that when she had passed through Paris at the beginning of the year, she had told the French that if she lived among them, she would never be angry again. “Yes,” repeated Maria at a press conference in her hotel suite, “only the French have sought to understand me.”

On the night of the performance, an Italian paper took a straw poll among the crowd gathered outside the opera house. “Why are you here?” the reporter asked. “To hear Callas,” was one answer. “We hope there will be a scandal,” was another.

But there was no scandal, only a triumph. Maria sang arias from
Norma, Il Trovatore
and
Il Barbiere
, as well as the whole of Act II of
Tosca
, with Tito Gobbi and Albert Lance. The evening was televised in nine countries, so that Maria’s triumph and the delirious ovation she received reverberated beyond the French capital throughout Europe. At the supper afterward she looked glorious. Wearing a diamond necklace worth more than a million dollars (lent to her by Van Cleef & Arpels), and radiating confidence, she gracefully accepted congratulations from a long line of enthusiastic admirers. Aristotle Onassis was among the first. Stocky, black-haired and olive-skinned, he looked like a Greek peasant, and yet in his dinner jacket he radiated a natural elegance many might have envied.

It was as if everyone present that night had one wish, one desire only, to honor Maria. Her affection for the French had been more than fully matched by their devotion to her. She may have been barred in the course of one year from Rome, La Scala and the Met, but before the year was out she had discovered another kingdom and taken it by storm.

At least this is how it looked at the beginning of 1959, but it would soon be obvious that another kind of conquest was now consuming her. First, however, she crossed the Atlantic again for two concerts—one in St. Louis and one in Philadelphia—organized once more by Sol Hurok. Then on January 27, 1959, came her first appearance at Carnegie Hall in a concert performance of
Il Pirata
under the auspices of the American Opera Society. The following morning the many reviews included one which gave thanks to Rudolf Bing for having left a gap in Maria’s engagement book that allowed her to accept the invitation to sing in
Pirata
. She had worn a long white gown and her only props were a thirteen-foot red silk stole and, of course, her hands, her eyes, her movements and her magnetism. “As the other soloists filed out for the seventeen-minute final scene,” wrote Louis Biancolli, “all the lights but those over the exits and the musicians’ desks suddenly went out. Slowly Miss Callas rose, drew close her red stole, and an eerie glow fell on her face. At that ghostly juncture Miss Callas made the most of her strange and haunting timbres. It was something to be left in the dark with the voice of Maria Meneghini Callas.” Suddenly a concert version had become infinitely more dramatic than the average full-scale operatic performance.

The next day, Maria, banned from America’s foremost opera house, was honored by the city in which it stood, and in which she was born. The citation, presented by Robert Wagner, then New York’s mayor, was “to the esteemed daughter of New York, whose glorious voice and superb artistry have contributed to the pleasure of music lovers everywhere.” A few days later, by which time Maria was back in Milan, Leonie Rysanek was making her debut at the Metropolitan as Lady Macbeth in the production designed for Maria—the most expensive the Met had mounted up to that time. Leonard Warren, the Met’s great baritone, was Macbeth, but disappointment was hovering over the auditorium even before the curtain went up. The audience could hardly be prevented from making imaginary comparisons. Bing, who had forseen this, had hired a claqueur to shout “Bravo Callas!” into the auditorium at the moment of Rysanek’s entrance. His aim was to neutralize some of the heavily partisan Callas feeling in the audience by triggering the American love for the underdog. And so as not to throw Rysanek off her stride, he had briefed the claqueur to station himself at an angle which would minimize the chances of her hearing him. Considering the impossible task she had undertaken, Leonie Rysanek did very well, but the sense of disappointment at Maria’s absence could still be felt in the auditorium as the first-night audience was filing out.

Back in Milan, the rhythm of Maria’s life had completely changed. Her professional engagement book was empty for the whole of February; in fact there was nothing in it until March 16 and the recording of
Lucia
in London. It was as if somehow she knew she needed, and had therefore given herself, a fallow period, to prepare for the much more dramatic changes in store. Meanwhile she was desperately trying to convince herself and the rest of the world that it was business as usual. April 21, her tenth wedding anniversary, provided an excellent opportunity. On the arm of Titta she made her entrance at Maxim’s for a celebration dinner punctuated by the arrival of letters, telegrams, gifts, flowers and still more flowers. “I could not sing without him present,” she said. “If I am the voice, he is the soul.” They cut their almond anniversary cake and all Maxim’s joined in the clapping which ushered in the couple’s second decade together. From Maxim’s, together with a few friends, they went on to the Lido and there, until the early hours of the morning, continued celebrating what the world saw as a great partnership and a happy marriage.

Throughout the previous couple of years, as her doubts were growing more insistent, Maria’s public pronouncements seemed designed to keep them at bay and to feed the image of the perfect marriage: “I dress for my husband. He likes me to look well-dressed
always
. He takes a vivid interest in my clothes, his favorite color being red.” Or “Marriage is a full-time job. Put as much into it as you would into any career,” she said to a girl at a party. When the girl reminded her that she seemed, in that case, to have made a success of two careers, Maria smiled and, patting her husband’s arm, replied: “But this is the one that matters.” She was even heard saying that “If he asked me to, I would stop singing.”

Maria’s public statements, like those of most public figures, were a combination of truths, half-truths and lies. Concerning her marriage, they reflected very dramatically the conflict that was going on inside her, but which for the moment she was determined to silence with overblown expressions of gratitude and overpainted pictures of perfect harmony. There was in Maria a terrible yearning for the perfect marriage—a longing for loyalty, for security, for some backdrop of trust beneath the shifty, polite evasions of the world. She thought she could conjure all that up through words and willpower, but the waves of reality were soon to sweep over the sand castles.

Meanwhile, in her concert tour of Germany, which took up most of May and was a wild success, she used every opportunity to reiterate how much of her career and her glory she owed to her devoted, beloved husband. There was just under a month left before London and
Medea
. Covent Garden had come to a barter agreement with the management of the Dallas Civic Opera; they would send over their new, much-praised Zeffirelli production of
Lucia
in return for the Minotis production of
Medea
. The international musical world was applauding this transatlantic arrangement, and rumor had it that Rudolf Bing was watching anxiously. Maria was to sing in both
Lucia
and
Medea
even though the Covent Garden
Lucia
had originally been designed for Joan Sutherland. Maria had flown over from Milan for Sutherland’s dress rehearsal. Sitting in the Grand Tier, in a sable coat and sable hat, she listened entranced. “I would have been jealous of anyone singing so well, but not of you,” she told the woman who, almost seven years before, had sung the tiny part of Norma’s confidante, vowing as she did so that one day she, too, would be out there like Maria in the center of the stage. “Whatever the press may say, you have a great Lucia,” she told David Webster in his office at Covent Garden. “Don’t ever ask me to sing Lucia again. You have your own great British Lucia now and you should be proud of her.” Confronted with real talent, the artist in Maria always recognized and acknowledged it. Zeffirelli remembers bringing her a record of
The Golden Age at the Metropolitan
; she giggled outrageously when she heard Tetrazzini and Galli-Curci, but when Rosa Ponselle began to sing, she fell silent and listened absorbed.

Before London and
Medea
there was Venice and another ball—this time given by the Contessa Castelbarco. Ari and Tina Onassis were once again among the guests. Within a few minutes Ari had invited the Meneghini-Callases aboard the
Christina
.

“We can’t,” said Maria; “I am singing
Medea
at Covent Garden.”

“We’ll be there,” Ari replied promptly, to the amazement of Tina, who knew that he detested opera.

And that did not just mean going to the performance and then congratulating Maria backstage. Onassis organized a grand party and invited thirty-seven of the guests to join them first for the opera. “Mr. and Mrs. Aristotle Onassis request the pleasure . . .” read the invitations. In Covent Garden’s Crush Bar before curtain up, visibly excited, Onassis poured champagne and proudly distributed tickets to his friends as though
Medea
had been his very own creation. A few minutes before the overture began, he escorted Lady Churchill to her seat and took his own next to Tina. It was the first time he would see Maria in an entire opera.

Nobody can really know what went on in his mind in the darkened opera house as, sitting next to his wife, he watched the woman who was to replace, and far surpass, her in his heart. What is certain is that later that night at the party he gave for her at the Dorchester, only one person existed for him: Maria. It was as if he was there not so much to grant as to divine her every wish. The fashionable crowd included Randolph Churchill, Margot Fonteyn and Cecil Beaton, and the Dorchester ballroom had been decorated entirely in pink and filled with pink roses. Neither Maria nor Meneghini was unaccustomed to luxury, but even they had never encountered such prodigious hospitality. It was a party on a scale far grander than all the other parties, dinners and balls that had been given for her. It was the abundance, the energy, the vigor, almost the grandeur that this short, thickset, froglike man radiated that was communicated to everyone around him, from the hotel manager to the most junior waiter. On the night of June 18, Maria was the focus of all this energy. What would she like to hear? A tango? The band leader is summoned, 50 pounds put in his hand and a command issued: play nothing but tangos. And all night, Onassis, aroused by the smell of impending conquest, exceeded even himself. It was after three o’clock when Maria left the Dorchester, and in the foyer she was prophetically photographed in a triple embrace with Onassis and her husband on either side. The invitation to cruise on the
Christina
had been repeated several times in the course of the night, and Maria had promised him an answer soon.