Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (50 page)

This time Maria found it impossible to exercise her newfound yet already much-tried patience. The lid flew off and out poured anger and bitternesss and a deep sense of injustice. Why?
Why?
And, more to the point, why in public—especially when he knew just how important dignity and keeping up appearances were to her? Perhaps
because
he knew how important they were. Whenever Maria exploded, and it was happening more and more, Onassis watched as though watching the temper tantrums of a child, but he was by no means unaffected himself. He may have been torturing her but he did not want to lose her. The extent to which
she
did not want to lose
him
was soon to be made patently and in a sense tragically clear.

Ever since she had realized her dreams of success and achievement, and even before she met Onassis, Maria had one overwhelming desire: to have a child. Now, at the age of forty-three, she found herself pregnant. It seemed a miracle. “I’m thirty-six,” she had said at the beginning of her relationship with Onassis, “and I want to live—I want a child, but I don’t even know if I’m capable of giving birth to another being.” As the years went on, Maria had tried to convince herself that perhaps she did not want a child all that much after all. It took the discovery that she was pregnant to make her see just how much she did want it, and just how much this had been a source of half-conscious but ever-present regret. All her instincts, everything in her that longed for life, wanted a child. Onassis did not. It was painful enough to have the man she adored reject instead of celebrate the child of their love, but he went further: he warned her that if she went ahead and kept the child it would be the end of their relationship. She was pitched into a torrent of doubt, fear, confusion. Her decision betrayed everything real and life-giving in her for the sake of a relationship that was increasingly tenuous and unreal. The aborted baby, at the moment when she longed for a new source of energy and meaning, was her life’s greatest might-have-been.
Poppea, Werther, Carmen
onstage, the
Verdi Requiem
, film versions of
Tosca
and
Traviata
with Zeffirelli and Karajan—these and other career opportunities were inconsequential to Maria compared with the lost child, the one who might have prevented her gradual descent into self-destructive inertia.

“One day when she was thirty-four,” recalled Meneghini, “Maria confessed to me that, above everything, she wanted a child. She went on saying that again and again. But I told her that having a child would have put her career in jeopardy for at least a year. In fact a child would have destroyed the great diva that she had become.” So one of the two men in her life refused her a child because of her legend, and the other for the sake of a relationship that was about to end. Her choosing to give in to Onassis’ will was the turning point. Her second great dream was slowly souring into nightmare. From then on their quarrels were only temporarily mended: they never really ceased. Maria’s longing to be needed by Aristo was further from fulfillment than ever. Welcome everywhere, she felt indispensable nowhere.

The pleasures of being welcome and applauded everywhere were always available. On May 31, when she arrived for the first night of the Met’s visiting production of
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
in Paris, she was applauded as though she had just sung a marvelous Rosina herself. She acknowledged it with the style and aplomb that by now were second nature to her. The first time the audience had burst into spontaneous applause at the mere sight of her in the auditorium was a few days after her spectacular
Norma
in Chicago: “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” remembered Maria. “I must have seemed stupid, but I didn’t know what it was all about. I was delayed getting there, and when I heard the clapping I thought the maestro must be entering the orchestra pit. When I realized they were applauding me I didn’t know what to do.” Now she certainly knew what to do. In the American ambassador’s box, drinking champagne at intermission with Madame Pompidou and Jean-Louis Barrault, she looked poised, smiling, confident. Onstage or in crowds this basically shy, uncomfortable woman glowed like a radiant goddess.

Maria felt at home in Paris and, for some time now, she had wanted to buy an apartment and create her own home exactly as she wanted it. She wanted it to be “their” home, but she had to accept that for the time being it was going to be hers alone. The second floor of 36 Avenue Georges Mandel, overlooking what was to become
her
chestnut tree on the corner of the avenue, was designed and decorated not for Maria but for La Callas, by La Callas herself and Georges Grandpierre, the interior decorator who idolized her and identified with the grand style that she believed was proper for her. It was less a home than a tomb for a legend, in which Maria had turned the bedroom, and even more the bathroom, into a nest for herself. “I always had the feeling,” said the Greek director Michael Cacoyannis, “that Maria was living in someone else’s perfectly well-run house.”

The Grand Salon with the Steinway, the Louis Quinze furniture, the jonquil-yellow lacquered commode and the grand Renaissance paintings; the Salon Rouge with all the chinoiserie—a pair of dogs, an elephant, a pagoda; the Venetian multicolored door separating the Grand Salon from the Rouge; the rare silk carpet in
petit point
; paintings by Bassano, Sebastiano del Piombo and Fragonard; a Regency inlaid rosewood and violet-wood commode; the Louis Seize dining room—all formed part of a grand, impersonal set for Callas’ last performance. Except that there was no indication of what the person living on that set was doing or even what his or her interests were. All evidence that Maria was an opera singer—from a portrait of Malibran to all sorts of memorabilia from La Scala—was collected in the Blue Room and in the studio where Maria worked right to the end, even when there was no specific project to work on. An obsessive order pervaded the whole apartment. Clothes, gloves and handbags were documented as meticulously as her recordings, with a list giving the date each item had been bought, and where, when and in whose company it had been worn.

In the bedroom she put the suite Meneghini gave her soon after they married, dominated by the eighteenth-century Italian double bed with its flower-painted and carved headpiece and an embroidered bedspread to match. But it was in the bathroom that Maria lived. It looked as though it had been produced by Zeffirelli in an extravagant mood; it was huge, in white and pink marble, with mirrors everywhere, covered in rugs and with thick, white curtains for the windows overlooking the street. There was a settee and a large armchair, both covered in orange velvet, with a telephone and a record player next to them. It was the most fully alive room at Georges Mandel. Maria spent hours in her bath with its golden tap and hanging plants, surrounded by flowers. She would talk on the telephone, make plans, play records or, wearing one of her favorite multicolored caftans and reclining on her settee, receive friends. Her bathroom brought out the Oriental courtesan in her, or perhaps it was the Oriental courtesan who had created the bathroom.

Heading the supporting cast at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel was Bruna. Two years older than Maria, brown-haired and always impeccably neat, she had been with her since before the Meneghini marriage broke up. There was something solemn about Bruna; she emanated a sense of having found in her work for Maria not just a job but also her destiny. She was Maria’s maid, sister, mother, confidante, but at the same time she had an exquisite sense of her part in the play. Whenever there was anyone present, Bruna was almost deferential to her: “
Oui, Madame . . .” “Que désirez-vous Madame?
 . . .” When they were alone, they were friends talking away in Italian, often sitting at the oak table in the kitchen. Bruna was the outlet for Maria’s immediate feelings and a source of earthy advice even on things she knew nothing about. It was to Bruna that Maria showed the script of
Medea
before she decided to go ahead with the film. And when she had a hernia operation shortly after she had moved to Georges Mandel, it was Bruna who was at the hospital day and night. “She didn’t even want the nurse to touch me because she was ashamed,” said Maria later. “Imagine that creatures like that should still exist! . . . Ashamed to humiliate me to a nurse, cleaning me in private instead.” Bruna deeply loved Maria, but she also loved and idealized the legend—and legends are not to be cleaned by a mere nurse in the hospital.

With every year that passed, Bruna’s most important job was to act as Maria’s screen (“
Non, Madame n’est pas ici . . .” “Non, Madame dort encore
 . . .”), canceling at the last minute invitations that Maria had accepted, protecting her, making her growing isolation in the middle of Paris not only possible but extremely effective. Consuelo, the cook, worked intermittently for Maria, and Ferruccio, the butler, was the other permanent member of the supporting cast. He looked as though he had stepped out of an Italian operetta, the perfect butler in uniform and white gloves with which he served dinner even if it was just Maria and a friend. Muffle the scream . . . the show must go on. . . .

On April 17, 1967, while the creation of Georges Mandel was under way, another show was about to begin in London. Maria, dressed defiantly in a scarlet dress and white turban and accompanied by Onassis, arrived at the law courts. They took their places side by side in the well of the court. A few minutes later the usher made the traditional announcement that warned those present that the judge was about to take his place on the bench: “Be upstanding in court.” Mr. Justice Roskill entered, bowed to the court, the lawyers returning the bow, and Sir Milner Holland, counsel for Maria and Onassis, rose and began with words no less traditional: “May it please your Lordship, I appear for the plaintiffs, Mr. Aristotle Socrates Onassis and Madame Maria Kalogeropoulos, and my learned friend Mr. Peter Bristow appears for the defendant Mr. Panaghis Vergottis.” (Maria was claiming under her real name, but was referred to throughout the case as Madame Callas.) The case that was to occupy the front pages of the newspapers for the next week was about to begin.

Maria’s broad smile as she arrived in court was betrayed by the condition of her legs, which, almost as much as her voice, were a barometer of her emotional state. They were swollen, the veins protruding, and as the trial became more emotionally wrenching with each day that passed, the swelling and the discomfort increased.

“We are here,” Maria said at one point during her questioning by Vergottis’ counsel, “because of twenty-five shares for which I have paid, and not because of my relations with another man.” In fact the case became a painful retrospective of her eight years with Aristo, and in the cold, formal atmosphere of an English court, their answers, and especially Onassis’, seemed at times to be addressed to each other. It was as if they had unconsciously staged this whole performance not because of twenty-five shares, which as Onassis himself had said were hardly of any consequence in themselves, but to clarify, a little over a year before they parted, what was really happening in their relationship. And Peter Bristow obliged them by asking questions which seemed of little relevance to the case in front of the judge but of great relevance to the case at the back of Maria’s and Aristo’s minds.

Maria had hardly expected Onassis to use an English court as a platform from which to profess his undying love for her. But his answers, in their mixture of defiance, mendacity, hardheadedness and cruelty, clearly went far beyond a simple desire to shield his private life.

Meanwhile, Maria was desperately clinging to a legal technicality to protect in public the fiction that if only they
could
be married, they would be: “You told us,” asked Peter Bristow in his cross-examination of her, “that you are still married to your husband who is in Italy?” “Under the Italian law I am very much still married to him,” was Maria’s reply, at which point Peter Bristow reminded her—as if she could have forgotten—that Mr. Onassis had said in his evidence that there was no problem about their marrying if they had wanted to. There was real desperation in Maria’s attempt to uphold the illusion without contradicting Onassis, especially in view of her own public statement when she had taken on Greek nationality a year before that her marriage had in effect never existed. “I may answer that immediately. If I go to America and have a divorce I can marry anyone. In Italy it would not be valid. Everywhere else it would be valid.” But Bristow, by this stage counsel for Truth rather than for Vergottis, was not going to allow her to escape. “Do you regard yourself now as a single woman?”—a question which theoretically was open to only two possible answers: yes or no. There was a long pause: “In Italy, no. Elsewhere, yes.”

The question had referred to a state of mind. Maria had sidestepped it by repeating a statement of fact. We are left to wonder what would have happened if she had suddenly succumbed to one of her uncontrollable impulses and had blurted out the truth: “No, I do not regard myself as a single woman. Indeed, for nearly eight years I have regarded myself as married to the man sitting beside me in the well of the court today, who not long ago informed you that he feels no obligation whatsoever toward me except that of mere friendship.” Would Onassis have dismissed her answer as a pleasantry, as he had done all those years ago when Maria had announced that they were getting married? What is certain is that the truth, whether spoken or only felt, remained unchanged. Maria did not give vent to her bitterness, but at one point Vergottis did so on her behalf. He talked about how Onassis asked him to transfer twenty-four of his shares to his nephew, but said nothing about what he wanted to do with the other twenty-six. Then he recalled how Maria had telephoned him in February 1965 complaining that Ari had promised
her
fifty shares. “She said she had been with him for seven years or whatever it was then. She was furious about the whole thing.” The next day the three of them had lunch together. “With a sly look,” Vergottis went on, “he turned around and said: ‘I have given her twenty-six shares. Why don’t you give her another twenty-five?’ I could see she was upset. I patted her back and said, ‘I’ll give you an option or the whole ship or anything in the world.’ ”