Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (45 page)

After the Scala
Medea
, Maria, heartbroken and weary, withdrew to the
Christina
. Ari was her great passion but at moments like that he was more: he was her savior from the slavery to the voice, to reviewers and to the public’s reactions. At the same time Aristo, more than anyone else before or after, could, with a word or even a look, tumble her into a state of self-conscious insecurity. He intensely disliked seeing her with glasses and several times and in the presence of others had told her that they made her look plain. And Maria, who never managed to wear her contact lenses without discomfort, carried her glasses in her hand: putting them on to orient herself and quickly taking them off again. So most of the time the world around her was hidden in a menacing mist—half-seen people and things that, as a result, took on a sinister vagueness. Beauties are traditionally measured by the havoc they cause but Maria never considered herself beautiful. She never liked her body; she was always self-conscious about her legs and she was only really confident about her long, expressive hands. “She is not very beautiful,” Biki said, “but she has that indefinable something that you find in certain animals like the hare, the eagle, the racehorse.”

The indefinable quality was something that Maria recognized and sought in others. “It makes you feel like quicksilver, vibrant, alive,” she said once. “To me it’s a sign of energy and youth, call it what you will. Animals are like that, too—dogs look at you and try to see what is in your mind before you say it. I like to be with quick people, quick thinking, quick talking.” That quickness, that aliveness, was one of the things she most loved about Ari, even though it included the restlessness that she so much wished was not there. It is quite remarkable how little Maria tried to change him. He, on the other hand, could not resist trying to make her different. Having so far failed to persuade her to do a film, he took it on himself to change the way she dressed. His own clothes always suggested that he had several other things on his mind while dressing. Later on they would give rise to one of Jackie’s most constant jibes: “Look at him,” she would say. “He must have four hundred suits. But he wears the same
gray
one in New York, the same
blue
one in Paris and the same
brown
in London.”

Yet his tastes in women’s clothes were very definite and he would often telephone Maria at Biki’s during her fittings to make sure that his instructions were being followed. He loved her in black, and at that time Maria ordered one black dress after another, even though her own favorite colors were red and turquoise. And always plenty of shawls. “Not even the best fashion models,” remembers Biki, “could wear shawls as Maria could. Like the ancient Greeks, she had a long torso and short legs, the exact opposite of a model’s figure. But, what do you want, she wore clothes like no one else.” Onassis also made her change the way she did her hair. He sent her to Alexandre in Paris, who disposed of her long mane and created for her instead a short hairstyle—jollier, younger and more sophisticated. Maria was enjoying the transformation. Her readiness to change the outward appearance was part of her readiness to throw the old Callas away in search of a new identity.

On November 4, 1962, Maria broke her five-month-long silence to take part in a performance televised from the stage of Covent Garden. In her short Alexandre hairstyle, she looked young and radiant. She sang “
Tu che le vanità
” from
Don Carlo
, followed by the Habanera and the Seguidilla from
Carmen
. During the Habanera her heavy diamond bracelet suddenly fell from her wrist. Without for a second stepping out of role, she went on singing and, with her unique sense of dramatic timing, she stooped at an appropriate moment on the stage, picked up the bracelet, put it back on and continued. A potentially embarrassing moment had become part of the performance.

Once again she fell silent—this time for six months. The year closed with a letter from the Welfare Department in New York informing Maria that her mother had applied for public assistance and that, in accordance with the law, she was “responsible for her support to the extent of her ability to contribute.” The letter found Maria in a particularly bitter mood. Through her book, her appearance in a nightclub and her attempted suicide, Evangelia had succeeded in finally making the breach with her daughter irreparable. Yet at that lowest point in their relationship, the daughter was obliged to begin supporting the mother. Afraid that the papers would find out about her mother being on welfare, Maria wrote urgently to her godfather, giving him complete authority to reach a settlement. At the end of January she received a letter from him with the details of the agreement he had reached:

I wrote to your Mother and to Mr. Copeland of the Welfare Department to meet me in my office on Monday, January 28th. I found Mr. Copeland to be a gentleman and a reasonable man and in front of him I told your Mother that if I ever hear that she makes a television or night-club appearance or anything that draws publicity I will stop her allowance the same day. Your Mother reassured me that no such thing will happen and Mr. Copeland agreed that my request is extremely reasonable. Because your Mother’s rent is $130.00 a month I gave her a check for $200.00 and promised her that every 25th to 28th of each month I will send her a check for $200.00. Of course I realize that with such a rent it is not enough, but if she can abstain from publicity for six months to a year I told her, and I am quite sure you will agree, you will increase her allowance. . . . Maria, your Mother left the office in good spirits and I hope she will keep her promise.

But Evangelia found it very difficult to abstain from publicity. When Maria read an interview her mother had given to the Italian magazine
Gente
, she exploded in a letter to her godfather: “You have got to help me put
some
sense into her head and make her realize her position and shut her lovely mouth. Anyway that’s like cancer. I’ll never get rid of her and the consequences.” The letter was permeated by her fears and doubts: “I have a wonderful friendship with the person you know,” she wrote, as so often in her letters referring to Onassis in the abstract rather than by name, “but I think I have gone through too much and started working too early in life not to feel tired and with no enthusiasm left for anything.”

The year 1963 had begun with mingled hope and doubt and, whenever her relationship with Ari showed signs of flagging, her doubts reawakened. Would she be able to keep him? Was she doing the right thing? Was she good enough? Maria, who wanted the perfect relationship as much as she had wanted the perfect performance, constantly blamed herself whenever real life with Aristo did not match the dream: if only she had planned things differently, surely there would have been no conflicts. At the beginning of their relationship she had found it much easier to relax and accept life as it unfolded, but now, three years later, she began to feel that, because it was only through effort that she had achieved everything she wanted, it was only through effort that she would keep Onassis. However, this meant being and behaving as she thought Aristo wanted her to, instead of as she felt. It was as if she was moving toward an enchanted land that receded as she approached, and, as time passed, her longing for their future together made it much more difficult for her to enjoy their present.

With no professional engagements to distract her, her life had merged with Aristo’s: dinners at Maxim’s, the races, other people’s first nights, waiting for the dawn at Régine’s, a medley of new clothes, new people, new sensations. Prince and Princess Radziwill—Stash and Lee—were among the new people. They had come into Ari’s life shortly after his divorce, and they were becoming an integral part of it. If Maria’s life story were ever turned into opera, the first appearance of Lee Radziwill would be signaled by a hint of prophetic uneasiness in the music. It was Lee who, later in 1963, brought Onassis and her sister Jackie together. For the moment the Radziwills were simply a glamorous addition to the circle.

At the end of the year, Maria would be forty, and she was driven to impose some order on what was for her a sprawling life given meaning by the fact that Aristo was at its center. Order meant marriage and children, and she knew that at her age, having children was not something she could indefinitely postpone. She wanted to find peace in a domestic idyll; he could only find peace in excitement. “After you reach a certain point,” Onassis had said, “money becomes unimportant. What matters is success. The sensible thing would be for me to stop, but I can’t. I have to keep aiming higher and higher—just for the thrill.”

Onassis aimed higher and higher, acquiring glamorous new friends like Lee Radziwill as easily as he acquired new companies. Maria had started working on her voice again, preparing for a recording of French arias at the beginning of May and for a concert tour of Europe that started in Berlin on May 17 and ended in Copenhagen on June 9. Maria played it safe for these concerts both in her programming and in her singing, which at times sounded tentative and almost lifeless, though the old genius inevitably broke through here and there. “I must find my joy in my music again,” Maria had said, but it turned out to be a nearly impossible undertaking—from now on there would be only glimpses of the old joy through the fears and anxiety. Afraid to compete with her own earlier self, she was just as afraid to stop. “If I don’t have my work, what do I do from morning to night? . . . I have no children, I haven’t got a family . . . what do I do if I don’t have my career? I can’t just sit and play cards or gossip—I’m not the type.”

Work had become a necessary substitute for children and a family. Still, Maria, with Ari at her side, had no difficulty in doing nothing for the whole of the summer except cruising on the
Christina
and seeing more of Greece. More of Greece included the rocky island of Skorpios, shaped like the scorpion that gives it its name, and covered with magnificent olive trees. Onassis fell instantly in love with it. “You can even see Ithaca from it,” he said to Maria. His dream was that one day, through some kind of miracle, and despite its 58,000 people, he could buy Ithaca and become its modern Ulysses. When he saw Skorpios, ten miles to the north, he decided to abandon the chimera of owning Ithaca and buy instead the island nearest to it. He decided to buy it on the spot and to turn it into his paradise kingdom covered in olive groves, cypresses and bougainvillea, with a copy of the Cretan Palace of Knossos at the top of the hill.

Maria was on the
Christina
when she heard that Meneghini’s attempt to change the terms of the separation order, and put the entire blame on her, had failed. But this was by no means the last Maria would hear of Meneghini. From the Hôtel Hermitage in Monte Carlo, where she now stayed when not on board the
Christina
, she wrote to Dr. Lantzounis:

My husband is still pestering me after having robbed me of more than half my money—by putting
everything
in his name since we were married. Therefore
created
and took advantage of scandal to keep me in court and keep therefore my money. Italy is not America and I was a fool to marry him in Italy and more of a fool to trust him.

Very soon after the decision of the Milan court, Meneghini announced to the press that Onassis had left Maria for Princess Radziwill, adding, “I always knew their friendship would have a sad ending for Maria.” He was perhaps the only one to draw this conclusion with such certainty, but there were plenty of others speculating about Onassis’ friendship with Lee Radziwill. In the
Washington Post
, the influential columnist Drew Pearson asked, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?” Even Robert Kennedy, with his brother’s reelection campaign around the corner, got worried. “Just tell Lee to cool it, will you?” he told Jackie.

On August 8, Lee broke off her holiday on the
Christina
to fly to her sister’s bedside in the hospital. Jackie had just given birth prematurely to her third child, a son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who died in less than two days with his father by his side. After the baby’s funeral, Lee flew back to Athens, and over dinner described to Ari and Maria just how weak and desolate Jackie was. Onassis instantly offered to put the
Christina
at her disposal. Lee, no less instantly, phoned her sister to pass on the invitation: “Tell Jack that Stash and I will chaperone you,” she said. “Oh, Jackie, it would be such fun. You can’t imagine how terrific Ari’s yacht is, and he says we can go anywhere you want. It will do you so much good to get away for a while.” Jackie eagerly agreed. The president was much less enthusiastic, and so was Maria. Jack Kennedy could justify his lack of enthusiasm by reminding Jackie that during the Eisenhower administration Onassis had faced criminal charges of conspiring to defraud the American government by not paying taxes on surplus American ships. The president could point out the possible political embarrassment such a cruise might cause. It was much harder for Maria to explain her own anxiety to herself, based as it was on nothing more solid than her intuitive conviction that the cruise would open a Pandora’s box that she would never be able to close.

Without entirely knowing why, she railed bitterly against Ari. He was selfish, indifferent to her wishes, not bothering even to find out what they were. She sulked, she nagged, she implored and finally she gave notice: she was not going on the Jackie cruise. In that case, said Ari, I’m not going either. He had all along intended to offer not to be present on the cruise so as to minimize the chances of political embarrassment for the president. It was a pretty safe diplomatic offer; he knew perfectly well that Jackie and Lee would never accept it. “I could not accept his generous hospitality and then not let him come along,” explained Jackie. “It would have been too cruel. I just couldn’t have done that.” Nor did she.