Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (51 page)

It was the most telling vignette of the case: the three around the lunch table; Maria with that closed, hurt look of a powerless child that Onassis so often brought out in her; Onassis, slightly shamefaced at not only having denied Maria the domestic idyll she had been dreaming of, but having even begrudged her the gift of the shares he had promised her; and Vergottis offering her his kingdom, or at least an option on it.

Onassis was in an expansive mood throughout the trial. The boy hero was going to show the world just how strong, brilliant and witty he was. When it was suggested by Peter Bristow that the money was a loan from Maria for the purchase of the ship, he replied dismissively that this was “a myth of Aesop.” “Why do we need Madame Callas’s money? Maybe Mr. Vergottis does, but I don’t.” And when it was suggested that it was he who had turned Maria against Vergottis, the wit was at the ready: “Madame Callas is not a vehicle for me to drive. She has her own brakes and her own brains.”

The case took ten days, but as Mr. Justice Roskill said in his summing-up, “The final determination depends upon a simple question of personal credibility. . . . There is no escape—one would wish there were . . . from the fact that, by one side or the other, perjury has been committed.” His verdict was that the perjury had been committed by Vergottis. He was ordered to transfer twenty-five shares in the company to Maria and pay all their legal costs, which had come to about £25,000. The case, the judge had said in his summing-up, “had many of the elements of Sophoclean tragedy”; and once the dust had settled over the verbal pyrotechnics and the fascination of watching the rich and the famous scratching each other’s eyes out in public, these tragic elements could be clearly seen. Here was a seventy-eight-year-old sick man, with his doctor beside him throughout the trial, convinced that he was the victim of a conspiracy by two of the most important people in his life; here was a sixty-one-year-old man betraying in public both the woman who was, hard though he fought the realization, the great love of his life, and the man whom he had once called “my closest friend”; and here was Maria, who longed more than anything for something real in her life, being drawn inexorably into the shadows of a performance even more artificial and implausible than the plot of some of the crudest and most garish operas she had sung in. For ten days, three people whose lives had once been woven intimately together had, themselves torn, been tearing at one another in public.

The final irony was still to come. Vergottis appealed and won the appeal, at the end of which a new trial was ordered. Onassis and Maria instantly appealed against this decision to the final court of appeal—the House of Lords. It was on October 31, 1968, eleven days after Jackie Kennedy had become Mrs. Onassis, that the law lords decided against Vergottis. Maria and Onassis had won a joint victory at a time when Onassis was honeymooning with Jackie on Skorpios and Maria was deep in her anguish in Paris.

But that was still eighteen months away. Meanwhile Maria could hardly wait to get to Skorpios and abandon herself to the sea she adored. She was trying to convince herself that having some time with Aristo on the island she felt was their home would breathe new life into their relationship. In fact that summer of 1967, their last summer together, turned out to be the saddest and most tense summer of an increasingly unhappy entanglement. Onassis had finally agreed to cooperate with Willi Frischauer on his biography. At first he had tried to bribe Frischauer by offering him $50,000
not
to write it. When Frischauer refused—“I am too old,” he told him, “to accept money for not writing”—Onassis rather philosophically decided to cooperate: “If I have to be raped,” he explained, “I might as well lie back and enjoy it.” Frischauer was invited to Skorpios, and very soon Onassis was enjoying the rape so much that he had hardly any time left for Maria. He was always late for meals, always absorbed in some aspect or other of his life, and often behaving as though Maria did not exist. Frischauer remembers her fussing and worrying “like an irritated suburban housewife.” She was that, but she was also a woman who sensed that she was losing the man she loved and the center of her life.

She returned to Paris full of apprehension, and her fears had plenty to feed on. Ari was spending less and less time with her, and one day she heard that Helen and George, Onassis’ servants at his Avenue Foch apartment, had recently been ordered not to leave their quarters throughout an entire evening while he was entertaining a mystery guest; he would serve the food himself. Maria had always known that Onassis had never stopped having affairs on the side. She had accepted that, as she had so much else, as part of what Greek women were brought up to expect. But why all this sudden secrecy? She followed Maggie van Zuylen’s advice; she carried on as if nothing was happening and asked no questions. And in some ways life went on as if nothing
was
happening. He went on calling her every day from wherever he was, and Maria, as always, would put everything aside to welcome him back. Lord Harewood remembers one evening, when they were talking at her home, suggesting that they go out to dinner: “Oh, no, I can’t,” she replied unhesitatingly. “He is coming on the morning flight from New York, and I must go to bed early and be fresh for when he arrives.”

At the beginning of November, as Ari and Maria were coming out of Régine’s in Paris at two o’clock in the morning, they were approached by a reporter from
Oggi
magazine and asked the question they had been asked at least a thousand times in the last eight years: “Is it true that you are about to get married?” “You are late. We are already married. We married fifteen days ago,” came back Onassis, adding as an afterthought, “It was a wonderful thing.” The reporter instantly filed his story mentioning as confirmation that they seemed unusually “gay and lighthearted.” Some gremlin inside Onassis made him play this joke on the press just as the decision as to whom he actually wanted to marry was formulating in his mind.

Maria soon had the solution to the mystery of the guest at dinner in Avenue Foch. Ari and Jackie Kennedy had been seen dining together in New York: at El Morocco; at 21; at Dionysos; at Mykonos, together with Christina, Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev. By the beginning of 1968, Onassis had begun to be mentioned—though more in jest than in earnest—as a runner in the race for Jackie’s hand, along with such well-qualified favorites as the former British ambassador to Washington, Lord Harlech, or the glamorous Roswell Gilpatric, former deputy secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration.

For a while Maria carried on with her policy of making no scenes. But a battle was raging inside her—anger, fear, jealousy, pain—and it could not be contained for long. The explosion took place when Ari came back from New York with the announcement that Jackie would be coming on the
Christina
for a short cruise in the Caribbean. Maria had by then learned that he had not merely kept in touch with Jackie since that cruise in 1963, which she knew anyway, but that he had been having long, regular telephone conversations with her from all over the world. She remembered the time she and Ari were in New York and he had called Jackie at her Fifth Avenue apartment. “Come over for a drink,” she had said. “I’d love to, and I have Maria with me.” “In that case, sorry, perhaps another time.” Then, Jackie’s reaction was merely mysterious; now, it took on sinister overtones. What were her intentions? Maria said some very bitter things, giving vent to all the feelings she had been holding back, but by the end she felt emptied rather than unburdened. There was no next step; there was no ultimatum she could issue; there was no future she could see except as part of his life. She had given her power over to him, and all she could now do was watch and wait.

And to watch him was to watch a man tipsy with the smell of fame and drunk at the prospect of more of it. If philotimia—the word that in ancient Greece came to mean an excessive thirst for prestige—had been a disease, then at this point in his life Onassis would have been described as a terminal case. He was a driven man and there was one goal: Jackie. Jackie needed security and loved luxury, but, much more important, she had a zest for life that had been stifled by the mantle of near-sainthood that the American press had thrown over her. There is an incident that sums up just how powerful that instinct was in her. The day of her husband’s funeral happened also to be her son’s third birthday. Everyone had assumed that John-John’s birthday party would be postponed. Jackie would not hear of it. For her it was a glorious coincidence that a day of grief and mourning could be crowned with a celebration of life, with noisemakers, paper hats, ice cream and toy trucks.

In May, Jackie boarded the
Christina
for the Caribbean cruise; Maria stayed behind. The watching game was turning deadly serious, and the pain, killing. She knew that Jackie had been given the Ithaca suite, the suite reserved for special guests, the suite that was Churchill’s, the suite she herself had stayed in. She knew, because she had lived it so many times, the routine on the
Christina
, the times for lunch and dinner, the ritual of cocktails on the deck at sunset; she knew the maids who would look after Jackie, the waiters who would wait on Jackie, the chef who would cook for Jackie. Johnny Meyer, Onassis’ friend and publicity man, telegraphed him: “Aren’t you lonely without Maria and me?” Far from being lonely, he seemed elated. Jackie’s pet name for him was Telis (short for Aristotelis, the Greek form of his name), and “Telis,” singing and swimming with the former First Lady, was relishing the new depths of their intimacy.

In her private hell, Maria lived the cruise with them. It was at this time that she began to find it impossible to sleep without pills. And it was at this time that she longed more than anything for sleep to stop the torture of her mind. Nor was the torture the creation of a wild imagination. At the end of the cruise, back in New York, Jackie called Bobby Kennedy, the Kennedy closest to her, and told him that she was seriously considering marrying Onassis. At the time, he was in the middle of his campaign for the presidential nomination, and he pleaded with her to do nothing until the campaign was over. Days later, on June 6, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was dead, shot by a mad gunman in Los Angeles, and Ari was on his way there to be near Jackie.

With the campaign tragically over, there were only two reasons left for continuing with the secrecy: Jackie wanted to consult Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who had married her to Jack Kennedy, over the Vatican’s attitude to her marrying a divorced man, and Onassis wanted to ease the shock for Maria. Privately he had made his decision, and Jackie had made hers. Maria had become, together with the Vatican, one of the things that had to be tied up. But whether out of cowardice, fear of what she might do or an unconscious and very deep desire not to lose her, Onassis told Maria nothing. He went on seeing her at the same time as huge bouquets of flowers were greeting his bride-to-be every morning wherever she was with just four letters on the card: TJWL.

After Robert Kennedy’s funeral, Onassis and his daughter spent a weekend with Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, at her summer home, Hammersmith Farm, in Newport. He returned to Paris and Maria; he went back, this time to Hyannis Port to spend time “preparing” John-John and Caroline—swimming with them, going for long walks with them, telling them that although he would never replace their father, their mother needed someone to take care of her. He returned to Maria; he went back to Hyannis Port, this time to meet the family matriarch. Rose Kennedy found him “pleasant, interesting, and, to use a word of Greek origin, charismatic.” While at Hyannis Port, Ari invited Teddy Kennedy, now the effective head of the family, for a week’s cruise in August “to talk things over.” “As I did not expect a dowry,” Onassis said later, “there was nothing to worry about.” He returned to Maria who was by then on the
Christina
with Lawrence Kelly, who had flown in from Dallas to be with her. She had been the
Christina
’s hostess for the last nine years and nobody had told her, in so many words, that things had changed.

“Maria, now I want you to go back to Paris, and wait for me there.”

“Go to Paris in August? Are you mad?”

“You have to go.”

“August in Paris? Why? What do you mean?”

“I’m having company and you can’t be aboard.”

“Who? And why can’t I be aboard?”

She knew the answer to both questions, but she asked them as though, in the gap between asking the questions and receiving the answers, some miracle might happen. No miracle happened, and all that was left was fighting, swearing and finally her desperate announcement:

“Then, I’m leaving you.”

“I’ll see you in September after the cruise.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m leaving you. You’re never going to see me again—ever.”

With Lawrence Kelly, she left the
Christina
—never to return. From Paris she called Mary Mead. She was almost hysterical. “Don’t leave Dallas,” she said. “I can’t explain now, but Larry and I are coming over.” Mary Mead protested at the thought of summer in Dallas, and in the end, with Lawrence Kelly still at her side, Maria flew to New York and from there to Kansas City, where they stayed at the home of Kelly’s best friend, David Stickelbar. All she knew was that she could not bear to stay in Europe; when she arrived in America, she realized that she could not bear to stay anywhere. There was nowhere she wanted to be and nothing she wanted to do. From Kansas City to Santa Fe, where the two wanderers were joined by Mary Mead and John Ardoin; from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where Maria was robbed at the Bel Air Hotel; from Los Angeles to San Francisco, to Cuernavaca, to Dallas and back to New York, staying mostly in hotels, watching Westerns on televison and talking, talking, talking. She talked about the Nazi occupation and walking miles to the mountain market for food, about bullets whistling by her in the streets, about hunger and misery and fear, and then she talked about Aristo, memories of rejection and humiliation flashing through her consciousness without sequence or reason. With her two identities—the opera star and Aristo’s woman—both in fragments, she went from hotel to hotel, having nothing and no one to go home to. Time and space had been abolished. All she knew, all she could identify with, was her pain. It seemed as though she would talk it out, let go of it; but no, she talked around it in circles, clinging to it, almost hoarding it—as if when the pain and the self-pity and the bitterness went, there would be nothing left at all.