Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (52 page)

In Cuernavaca, Mary Mead took a house, and they were joined by John Coveney, director of classical artists and repertory for Angel Records. It was also in Cuernavaca that Maria agreed, for the first time since this traumatic trip had begun, to go to a dinner party given by friends in the area. As the time for the dinner approached, she realized she could not face it. Mary Mead was not going to give in: “The rest of us are going. Where would you like your dinner served—at the pool, your bedroom or the dining room?” When it came to that, Maria, unable to face staying alone, decided reluctantly to go. Mary Mead remembers what a revelation, in the state she was in, this Cuernavacan dinner turned out to be. “She had lost all her self-respect and she was truly amazed to discover that people still loved her, still cared for her and admired her.”

But it took very little to tumble her back into a state of self-conscious insecurity, and it was very hard to stop being reminded of what she most wanted to forget. An August issue of
Newsweek
carried a picture of Teddy and Jackie “en route to Greece” for the cruise on the
Christina
. In the middle of August, Doris Lilly, the
New York Post’s
gossip columnist, announced on the
Merv Griffin Show
that Jackie Kennedy would marry Aristotle Onassis. She was hissed and booed by the studio audience for disseminating misinformation that still smacked of sacrilege to the American public.

Early in September, Maria arrived in Dallas with two cracked ribs: she had slipped in her bathroom in Cuernavaca and fallen on the tiled floor. Suddenly the physical pain became a welcome distraction from the emotional agony. John Ardoin, who was music critic of the
Dallas Morning News
and a great friend of Lawrence Kelly’s, started calling her Maria Click because of the sound made by her broken ribs. He remembers her giggling like a schoolgirl the first day he collected her from the doctor’s. “I had to get a doctor,” she said, still laughing, “who collects all my records. Poor man, he blushed when he asked me to take off my blouse, and he seemed afraid to touch me!”

One afternoon, at John Ardoin’s house, after they had taped an interview for a local radio station, Maria turned very quiet; suddenly tears welled up in her eyes. As she began sobbing, and John Ardoin took her in his arms, she cried out: “How could anyone be so cruel?” After a few moments, she pulled away and went to the bathroom to compose herself. “Put another tape on,” she said when she came back. “These will be notes for you.” The pain she was carrying had somehow to be exorcised before she could face Paris and what remained of her world. It was as if the shock of the breakup with Onassis had opened the sluices of all the bitterness and resentment that had been accumulating for years. She longed to make sense of it all, to understand and to be understood. When she decided, that afternoon in Dallas, to talk to John Ardoin, the man who six years later would write the most comprehensive and most deeply understanding study of her singing, she knew that his respect and love for her were such that she could trust him completely. “I know you will never misquote me, John,” she said. “You understand me too well.” Nor did he betray her trust; the most intimate and painful details of their conversations he never published at all.
^*

These tapes are the most extraordinary document we have of Maria talking about herself. In the last years of her life she would spend hours speaking into a tape recorder, but most of the time it was La Callas speaking in all her dignity and stature. In her conversations with John Ardoin, we can feel the legend creeping in every now and then, but most of the time it is Maria pouring her heart out in an English that had clearly suffered from nine years of speaking Greek with Ari. What we hear is a disjointed stream of consciousness welling up from a level deeper and more truthful than any from which she had yet spoken.

Not once in this flood of memories does she refer to Onassis by name. He is “them” or “they” or “he” or an abstract presence hovering over everything she says: “If for nine years you have been living a hidden life, and a humiliating life, it gets you, and you’re not cured in two months. . . . When serious, strong people promise or guarantee relative happiness, then they have to live up to that. It’s too easy to say, ‘Well, you know . . . I mean . . . we did our best to be happy!’ ‘Well, thank you very much . . . for nine years.’ ‘Well, ain’t that sweet?’ as they say vulgarly. Where does it leave me? At least a friendship? Not even that. The way things have gone I can’t be friends. How can he be my friend? Humiliating me that way. It’s so easy to say, ‘No resentment.’ Sure, Christianity says, I’ve read it in books, ‘You must forgive, you must have no resentment.’ I don’t have resentment, but I have hurt.”

Every word she spoke, every pause, is in fact steeped in both hurt
and
resentment. She felt that he had robbed her not only of her respectability, but, much more important, of her dream of a family that would bring meaning to her life: “ . . . After nine years, not a child, not a family, not a friend! That’s very little you know. And you say, ‘God, why? Why should these things happen?’ Also, because I figure in my own stupid logic that if people have been privileged to reach great positions they should realize that their obligation is to be happy, somehow or other. . . . It takes very little to make me happy, but then when you’re slapped down, it’s not very pleasant, don’t you think? Tomorrow you have a girl and you love her, and today she says she’ll love you forever, and then tomorrow she treats you all of a sudden very badly. That’s a big slap in the face. Now if that goes on every day up and down, you’ll be a nervous wreck. Am I right? Would you still hope? . . . I would rather hope for the worst and have the best. Frankly, for nine years I thought I would have, and I found out. . . . How can a man be so dishonest? So, I don’t know, so crazy. Poor man . . .”

All this outpouring came before the shock of the public announcement of Ari’s wedding, which was still thirty-four days away. “I don’t like to lose. Who does? Frankly I’m terrified of going home. It’s like the beginning of a performance . . .” She had hoped that Onassis would have led her closer to reality. Now that he had gone, she felt she had no option but to return to the performance—in life no less than onstage, and however terrifying the prospect of both. From Dallas, she made an announcement: “Next season, I shall sing again at the Dallas Opera. Lawrence Kelly and Nicola Rescigno have been my friends for a very long time. It was with them that I made my debut in America. And it is with them that I would like to return to the stage.” She did not believe it; it was part of the performance. “Anything to survive, my dear,” she told John Ardoin. “At my stage of the game, anything to survive.” The announcement was part of the survival game: no date given, no opera, no cast, no director. More of an incantation than a statement of fact: next year, please God, make it possible that I may sing again, for there is nothing else left. “Don’t have any illusions, John. Happiness is not of my world.”

From Dallas, with Mary Mead and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Lainie, she flew to New York. Maria found in Lainie a much-needed outlet for her love and her attention, giving her advice on how to diet, how to discipline herself in her life and, above all, how never to give herself over completely to anyone. But Maria’s despair, which even the fourteen-year-old had sensed, was a more powerful deterrent than any advice, especially as, while they were in New York, Onassis arrived and was everywhere reported escorting Mrs. Kennedy about town. “I can’t bear watching her pain,” Lainie said to her mother. “I hope I never,
never
care so much about anyone.”

Renata Tebaldi was opening at the time in
Adriana Lecouvreur
at the Met. Maria decided to go to the first night and, backstage afterward, the two rivals fell into each other’s arms. Maria had tears in her eyes. It was as if something had driven her to seek some confirmation that there was still harmony and reconciliation underneath all the bitterness and the hurt. And she found it backstage at the Met.

Back in Paris, she wrote to John Ardoin:

Dear John

Thank you so much for being such a warm affectionate friend—you really don’t know what strength you give me—may God pay you all back for such love & respect towards me.

I came back quite exhausted—too many emotions, I suppose—I am so fragile under this so called control.

I do so want to be worthy of you all, & of course, myself.

It is still a long life to live and I must be worthy of so much bestowed upon me.

And she signed it “Yours affectionately, Maria Click.”

On October 17, 1968, at three thirty in the afternoon, Nancy Tuckerman, Jackie’s secretary, made an announcement to the press: “Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss has asked me to tell you that her daughter, Mrs. John F. Kennedy, is planning to marry Aristotle Onassis some time next week. No place or date has been set for the moment.”

Maria was in Paris.

Three days later on October 20, at five thirty in the afternoon in the tiny chapel of Panayitsa (the Little Virgin) on Skorpios, where Maria loved to sit alone in the hot afternoons, a bearded Greek Orthodox archimandrite, in gold brocade vestments, stepped forward to conduct a traditional Greek Orthodox wedding: “The servant of God Aristotle is betrothed to the servant of God Jacqueline, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .” Artemis, the bridegroom’s sister, placed on the heads of the couple delicate wreaths with lemon blossom linked with a white ribbon, and changed them over three times while the priest was chanting. Gold wedding bands were placed on their fingers and also passed between them three times. Alexander and Christina looked on grimly. Caroline and John-John watched dazzled. Patrol boats, reinforced by cruisers and helicopters from the Greek navy, circled the island to keep reporters from getting closer than a thousand yards.

It was raining heavily as, a few hours later, around the wedding table on the
Christina
, Janet Auchincloss stood up and, dabbing her eyes, looked straight at her son-in-law: “I know that my daughter is going to find peace and happiness with you.”

In Paris, Maria was arriving smiling at the film premiere of Feydeau’s
A Flea in Her Ear
. She was still smiling when in the early hours of the morning she left Les Ambassadeurs where she had spent the night celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Maxim’s. It was one of the most convincing, one of the greatest performances of her career. Only someone who had looked closely into her huge dark eyes could have seen the anguish that had dimmed their light.

^*
It was not until a year after her death that he made the full transcript available for this biography.

13

“I
F
I
COULD HAVE A MEDICINE
that could give me strength, mental and physical, especially physical . . . I’d be pleased with one year, one good year coming back to what I was. It’s the beginning . . . that’s what I’m terrified of, the beginning.”

Since that last performance on the night of the wedding, Maria had existed in a mist, a dream, an intoxication, living and reliving the past in her mind—as though she could not only postpone but in some way avoid beginning again. The wheels of her mind would not slow down and only with sleeping pills and tranquilizers would they stop. At the deepest point of her despair, she found herself repeating, at first only half consciously and then with all her heart, “God, give me what you want, but, above all, give me the strength to bear what you send me and to survive it.”

As soon as he read about the wedding, Francesco Chiarini, an old friend of Meneghini’s who had remained Maria’s trusted friend, phoned her from Brussels where he was on business. Maria asked him to come and see her in Paris. They talked of the past, of common friends, of what he was doing now, but there was something withdrawn, almost absent about her. Finally, she said: “You know, Francesco, you are a funny man. You’ve read what has happened to me, and yet you come and see me and not once do you mention it. Look at these.” She got up and fetched him a thick pile of letters and telegrams of condolence from other friends, including Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, and Visconti. From that point on, they talked of nothing else. Or rather he listened while she poured out some of the anger and the pain.

Ten days after the wedding, she wrote to John Ardoin in her own idiosyncratic English, again without once referring to Onassis by name.

 . . . So many things have happened and sincerely I am reacting externally very well, I presume. But I am under severe pressure and am desperately trying to keep controlled. Of course I consider all this a liberation. But how little faith one is left with. One moment I am full of confidence and the next very little. I fight the last because it is not christian and noble and my feelings are essentially pure and all that goes with it.
   But, John, what a lonesome life I see for myself. No work I can do will be what I was used to and no man is to my expectations or standards—and that does not mean financial situation. Is it so much to ask of people to be loyal, honest, faithful and passionate? (always in the happy medium of course?)
   I am quite discouraged of being only sure of myself and
no one
else past, present & future. Am I such a strange creature? And why?
   Forgive this strange letter but I am in a strange moment.

When she looked ahead the only lifeboats she could see were work, new roles, new projects: a film of Puccini’s life that Visconti wanted to make; Menotti’s
The Consul
; Tennessee Williams’
Boom!
, turned into a film by Joseph Losey. She thought a lot about this last one but, in the end, playing the part of a star living among her diamonds and her memories on her Mediterranean island and being visited there by the Angel of Death seemed too close to the whirlpool she was trying to escape. Elizabeth Taylor took the part, and Maria went on discussing other options. One of them, a new production of
Traviata
, directed by Visconti, got beyond the discussion stage. They went as far as signing a contract with the Paris Opera, but very soon the prospect of a major new operatic production became too daunting. Too proud to cancel the contract, she demanded twenty to thirty days of rehearsals for the orchestra and chorus—a demand which she well knew the administration of L’Opéra would never meet. Making impossible and varying demands had increasingly become Maria’s way of saying no.