Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (37 page)

First, however, there were four more
Medeas
to be sung in London and a concert at the Holland Festival. There were thousands of people to welcome her at Amsterdam airport when she arrived there on the Sunday evening before the performance. Deeply moved by the reception, she drove with Peter Diamand, the festival’s director, to the Amstel Hotel where she was staying, and where, after her triumphant concert on July 11, a reception held in her honor lasted until morning. “We must talk, the two of us, without Titta,” she told Peter Diamand at the reception. The following day they drove to Keukenhof near Leiden where they had lunch among the tulips. Walking in the lush park afterward, she asked Peter not to send her fee to the Callas-Meneghini joint account:

“Keep the money until you hear from me. There will be many changes in my life in the next few months. All my instincts tell me so. You’ll hear many things. . . . Please stay my friend.”

“Maria,
che melodramma
!” protested Peter Diamand.

“No, not melodrama, Peter—drama,” she said, but she looked radiant as she was saying it.

She had made up her mind: they were going on the
Christina
. Tina Onassis had called twice: “We so much hope you will come.”

Meneghini had put up a good fight. “I have to be in touch with my mother who is ill,” he said at the end, almost in desperation.

“No problem,” replied Onassis; “there are forty-two radio telephones on the
Christina
.”

It was Meneghini’s last card, and he had lost. He could not swim, he hardly spoke English, barely spoke French and was constantly seasick, but the decision had been made. In record time, Biki prepared for Maria a magnificent cruising wardrobe: twenty dresses, pants suits, negligees, bathing suits.

On July 22, they flew to Monte Carlo. They were met by Ari, Tina and Ari’s sister, Artemis. The next day the other guests arrived: Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, their daughter Diana, their canary Toby, Churchill’s secretary Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, and the head of Fiat, Umberto Agnelli, with his wife. Prince Rainier was there to see them all off on the
Christina
. The only other time Maria had seen Churchill was in Athens during the Civil War, when in a crowd of people she waited outside the British embassy to watch him arrive in his armored car.

By the time the Churchills and the other guests appeared, Maria had already been shown the sea palace that was to be her home for the next three weeks; and the sophisticated
femme du monde
was transformed into a wondering girl. She laughed, she chattered, she asked questions, she enjoyed what she heard and what she saw: lapis lazuli balustrades, solid-gold fixtures in every bathroom, dolls designed by Dior for the children, an El Greco in Onassis’ study, a jeweled Buddha, the oldest known to exist in the West, a swimming pool decorated with an enlarged reproduction of a mosaic from the Palace of Knossos, marble bathrooms and ornate dressing rooms for the guest suites. . . . Tina had once said that for Ari the
Christina
“was not a fantastic plaything but a real passion. He is almost like a housewife fussing over it, constantly looking to see that everything is being done well, constantly looking for things to correct and improve.” It had a crew of sixty, and the staff included waiters, valets, seamstresses, masseurs and two chefs—one exclusively for French cuisine, the other for Greek. Both menus were available and the guests could choose.

Maria mostly ordered raw meat and green salads, and then, as was her lifelong habit, picked what she wanted from everybody else’s plates. The feeling that she had entered a fairy-tale world began to overwhelm her. She had brought with her a score of Bellini’s
La Straniera
. She did not touch it.

The first few days were difficult. Meneghini was grumpier and gloomier than she had ever known him. He was maddeningly lethargic and seemed unable to take an interest in anything except endlessly cataloguing what he saw as the other guests’ slights toward him. Maria found his worries, his complaints and his judgments of everyone and especially their host, exasperating. Onassis was only nine years his junior, but Meneghini seemed determined to behave like an ailing grandfather. Maria was divided between the marital proprieties and her instinctive longing to be close to Onassis.

By the time the
Christina
had reached Piraeus, the Greek gods seemed to have decided whose side they were on. The sea became rough, the weather stormy, Meneghini and most of the other guests took to their rooms, leaving Maria and Onassis alone in the deserted games room gazing at the roaring fire in the lapis lazuli fireplace and talking until the early hours of the morning. Something remarkable was happening to Maria: for the first time in her life she stopped being the sole object of her own absorbed attention. The self-absorption, it is true, had been for the glory of her art, but this did not change the fact that it had excluded all others; the attention she had given her husband was no more than an expression of her gratitude that he, too, had recognized that the world revolved around her and her art, and seemed well satisfied that this should be so. Now, suddenly, Maria had been displaced from the center of her world. She was deeply, passionately, in love. For a few days she went on fighting the feeling, resisting the realization, attributing the glow of happiness when she was near Ari to their common origins, his charm, his fascination for her; but it was only a matter of time—and a short time at that—before she surrendered.

As for Ari, he behaved as though he had thought of nothing in the past month except Maria. And in a sense that was true, except that Ari, as she was to discover, was capable of being monomaniacally obsessive about more than one thing at a time. He was in raptures over
Medea
, even though his dislike of opera was well-documented, and he was full of enthusiasm and ideas about Maria’s future, even though his ignorance of opera was at least as great as his dislike of it. He spent hours talking with her about the possibility of a Monte Carlo Opera Company built for her and around her. He did, after all, own a controlling interest in virtually all the major business activities in Monte Carlo.

In the long hours they spent together, they spoke mostly Greek to each other. They talked much of the future but they talked even more of the past. And mainly
his
past. Maria could not hear enough. He talked of Smyrna, on the coast of Turkey, where he was born seventeen years before her; he described the Greek quarters where he lived; he talked of his father Socrates and his uncle Homer, prosperous merchants of cotton, raisins, tobacco, figs and anything else the Anatolian interior produced. He talked of his mother Penelope, who had died of a kidney operation when he was six; of his father’s remarriage to her sister, of his grandmother Gethsemane whom he adored; of his time as a choirboy dressed in gold-braided cassock and surplice (“I still have a fine singing voice,” he teased her laughingly); of the time he pinched the attractive English teacher’s bottom and was suspended for several days as a result; of his first love and his first “mistress” when he was thirteen. He talked of the Turkish attack on Smyrna in which tens of thousands of Greeks perished, of his father’s arrest and the horror that followed, of his decision to emigrate to Argentina, and the crossing crammed with hundreds of immigrants packed together, of his arrival in Buenos Aires on September 21, 1923. He was sixteen and had sixty dollars in his pocket. When Maria was born, almost three months later, he was working for a Buenos Aires telephone company. The pay was not very good, he told her, but there were plenty of pretty telephone operators.

He would always talk to Maria about the women in his life in a way that made her feel flattered to be the culmination of such a long and varied list of conquests. In his search for the steady partner, which had already begun at the age of sixteen, he used to grade his dates meticulously in ten different categories ranging from receptivity and dress to love of the sea and love of parents. Before he was twenty-four, he was Greek vice-consul general in Argentina. He had not yet found the perfect mate, but not very long after that he found the perfect ships with which to begin his unique shipping career—two Canadian vessels, belonging to a company that had suffered huge losses during the Depression.

He loved talking to her of his struggles more than his victories, and he loved hearing of her own struggles. As he was to say later, “I have always had a great admiration for Madame Callas. More than her artistic talent, even more than her success as a great singer, what always impressed me was the story of her early struggles as a poor girl in her teens when she sailed through unusually rough and merciless waters.” The long, hard roads they had traveled, separate but parallel, until they became what the popular papers never tired of describing as “the world’s two most celebrated Greeks,” had finally come together in a love for each other that at times seemed almost predestined. Each liked the fact that the other was also a fighter, and a winner, with whatever cards life had dealt them. Aristo—as his family called him in Smyrna and as Maria loved to call him herself—always played down the prosperity and standing of his family before the Smyrna disaster, so that nothing would be allowed to detract from the romantic picture of the man who had started with nothing.

He ordered the captain to stop the
Christina
at Smyrna, ostensibly to show his guests the place where he was born, but in fact to bring to life for Maria the past he had been telling her about. At the beginning of August, the
Christina
anchored at Istanbul, still referred to by the Orthodox Greeks as Constantinople, their Church’s most sacred place. The following morning the patriarch received Onassis and his guests. When they knelt to receive his blessing, Ari and Maria were side by side. He called them “the world’s greatest singer and the greatest seaman of the modern world, the new Ulysses”; he thanked them for the honors they had brought to Greece; he blessed them. For Maria, this was the moment of complete surrender. She was deeply moved, as if the Byzantine ritual, the solemnity of the old patriarch, the special blessing for the two of them—as if all these corresponded to the drama being played inside her. More; it was as if the patriarch’s blessing was a blessing of their union, a formal permission to Maria to acknowledge the emotions that had been awakened in her and give them their proper name. “But she is already married,” Meneghini was heard whispering bitterly. He could sense Maria’s emotion, and although nothing had yet been said, some part of him knew that Maria already thought of herself as another man’s wife. “It was an outburst of nationalism,” he would insist later, the bitterness still very much alive. “It left Maria with the physical mark of exultation. She was no longer the same. How could I defend myself against the new Ulysses?”

Aristo was her first experience of loving and being loved—the world and everything in it glowed under a different light. Meneghini was right. Maria
was
no longer the same. Aristo had brought love, frivolity, passion and tenderness to the life of a dedicated nun who had begun to lose the taste for her vocation. He had broken that single-minded and in many ways glorious obsession with her work that had excluded so much, and he had opened the way for a host of feelings never before experienced and impressions never before sensed. For the first time she was not dominated by the constant tug of engagements, commitments and looming first nights. She could wake up in the morning without a sense of apprehension, soak up the sun during the day and Ari’s stories during the night as though there were no conflicts and no troubles. Ari came alive at night, especially after midnight. He loved to tell the stories of Greek myths, as others tell fairy tales to children, or to conjure up all the sea monsters he had heard sailors talk about. He could summon up the spirit of the places he had been, the force of the elements, the strangeness that lurked in the sea around them.

Maria was swept along by his headlong impetuosity as by a hurricane, and that day in Istanbul the last resistance crumbled. The same night there was a party for the guests of the
Christina
at the Istanbul Hilton, as there had been parties wherever they had stopped. Meneghini remained on board, feeling too weak and tired to attend. Maria returned in the early hours of the morning to find her husband waiting up for her. There was a moment—but only a moment—of hesitation. How do you tell a husband to whom you owe so much, who has proved so invaluable in the past, who has devoted himself so completely to you, that you are leaving him? In Maria’s mind, there was only one way: “I love Ari.”

“I felt I was going to burst into tears,” Meneghini recalled later; “at my age too. . . . It was as if a fire was devouring them both.” He did not cry, but the rest of the cruise was a long supplication. The supplication was punctuated by arguments that lasted well into the night, shouting matches at the end of which he would subside into whining passivity. The tension had infected all the other guests, except for Sir Winston who in his lofty detachment seemed impervious to what was going on. Yet the others could not shake off the feeling that, as he dozed after lunch on the deck of the
Christina
with his hat over his eyes, Churchill was absorbing all the panics and dramas, and smiling benignly. The engines were always slowed down when Churchill was having his afternoon siesta, and the cruising speed was adjusted to ensure the least vibration in his suite. But for the first time since he had met Onassis, his host was not constantly hovering over him. The honor of his presence had been overshadowed by the emotional explosions on board. As for the beautiful Tina, she remained a neutral hostess presiding over the conventions which were being grimly observed among the confessions, quarrels, vows and recriminations.

Finally, a long week after she had anchored in Istanbul, the
Christina
sailed into Venice. The crew, who had silently observed the entire proceedings, had placed bets as to who would leave with whom. Maria and Meneghini left first, aboard one of Onassis’ private planes. They landed in Milan and went straight to Sirmione. On Maria’s wrist there was a bracelet engraved with the initials TMWL (To Maria With Love). It is true that Onassis had given a TTWL bracelet to Tina and was a few years later to give a TJWL bracelet to Jackie Kennedy, but for the moment Maria wore her own with joy and pride, not least in front of her husband.