Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (59 page)

In the autumn of 1974, she left with di Stefano for the Far East and the last leg of their tour. They gave nine concerts: in Seoul in South Korea, and in Fukuoka, Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima and Sapporo in Japan. And so it came about that, on November 11, 1974, Sapporo, a city with a population of just over a million, near the head of Ishikari Bay in northern Japan, was the last place on earth to hear Maria Callas sing live onstage. At the beginning of the tour Maria’s hernia recurred, causing internal bleeding and terrible pain. She returned to Paris in a state of total collapse. For the first few days, even her memory seemed to have gone. Her doctor called in a neurologist to see her; through his pills and recommended rest cure she began to gain some peace and strength, and her memory started to come back.

Maria was still in Japan when, in October 1974, Tina was found dead in the Hôtel de Chanaleilles in Paris. Onassis was so shaken that he could not even bear to attend his ex-wife’s funeral. As for Christina, she instantly demanded an autopsy to find out the cause of her mother’s death, and even when it was confirmed that Tina had died from an edema of the lung, she remained full of suspicion, bitterness and outrage at Niarchos. Christina, who had herself skirted death a few weeks earlier with an overdose of sleeping pills, needed desperately to make some sense, however irrational, of all the tragic, sudden deaths: first her aunt, then her brother, now her mother. She became convinced that if her father had not married Jackie the deaths would somehow have been averted. For Christina, Jackie was the ill omen that had spread disaster in their family, and she started openly bemoaning the fact that she herself had helped drive her father away from Maria.

While Maria’s career faded out in the unlikely surroundings of the Ishikari Bay, Onassis began on the final lap of his own life. Since Alexander’s death he had been having trouble keeping his eyes open for long and talking without slurring his words. At first he put it down to physical and emotional exhaustion and refused to find out more about it; but it was only a question of time before he had to enter a New York hospital. His condition was diagnosed as myasthenia gravis, a defect in the body’s chemistry which makes impossible the routine transmission of impulses through a faulty connection of nerves and muscles. He could only keep his eyes open by taping the drooping eyelids to his eyebrows, and he had to have a regular series of painful injections, which was the only way to minimize the effects. The disease was incurable, though the doctors assured him it was not fatal. The body had turned against itself, and Onassis turned viciously against the woman whom he now irrationally considered the source of all his accumulating woes. He saw his marriage to Jackie as the moment when his sun had begun to set: marrying her was his life’s supreme act of betrayal. The first faulty connection had not been between his nerves and his muscles, but between his heart and his actions. His heart had pointed him toward love, toward Maria; his actions had taken him toward more of all the things he already had—more fame, more power, more glory. Committing himself to Maria would have been a step toward reality, but he had clung to images.

“He had climbed to the top of the tree,” said Constantine Gratsos, “and there was nothing there.” He was obsessed with the notion that once he had reached the top of the tree he would find fulfillment. So he had to convince himself that he must have missed something, perhaps a still higher branch, perhaps marrying the world’s most famous woman. When he discovered that this had been one more empty acquisition, he turned against his wife as if it was she who had forced the illusion on him. It was in this mood of dejection and bitterness that he had received the thunderbolt of Alexander’s death. “I don’t think he ever knew what he wanted,” said Gratsos. “The difference was that in his last years he knew he would never get it.” He began to feel that somehow it was Jackie who had cheated him of that mysterious “it” that he could not even put a name to, and, by no means altogether consciously, he began to take revenge on her. His first concern was to reduce to the legal minimum, and if possible less, Jackie’s share in his estate. Having done this in his last will and testament and fearing that she might challenge it, he added a codicil: “I command my executors and the rest of my heirs that they deny her such a right through all legal means, costs and expenses charged on my inheritance.”

It was not enough. He decided to divorce her but only after he had made it as humiliating as possible for her. He hired a private detective to follow her with the specific brief of producing evidence of adultery. Then he invited Jack Anderson, the celebrated Washington columnist, to lunch. He began with deliberately controlled complaints about her on the lines of: “What does she do with all those clothes? All I ever see her wearing is blue jeans.” The hard facts were to follow later at Onassis’ office after he himself had discreetly withdrawn, and his aides took Anderson on a thorough sight-seeing tour of all the piles of ledgers, memos and letters documenting Jackie’s frenzied extravagance.

At the same time, telling Jackie nothing, Onassis asked Roy Cohn, who in the fifties had been one of McCarthy’s investigators, to represent him in divorce proceedings. By then he had moved out of Jackie’s apartment and was staying in his suite at the Pierre. He had considered divorcing her as early as 1972, but now any remaining doubt had evaporated, and all that was left was the driving desire to hit her as hard as possible. While Onassis was drawing up a master plan of all the steps to be taken before the announcement of divorce proceedings, Maria was singing in Japan. In the dim picture of lost happiness by which Onassis was haunted, Maria was the only clearly defined figure. She had not been strong enough to pull him out before the current began to draw him down, but in some part of himself he knew that she could have been. As for Maria, being interviewed a few months earlier during her American tour by Barbara Walters, she described Onassis in public, for the first time in fifteen years, as “the great love of my life.” Was there still time?

Sick and broken though Onassis was, the life in him said yes. But it was a very faint yes from a very exhausted man, and the events that followed submerged it. In December 1974, his aides finally revealed to him the disastrous state of Olympic Airways; they had not dared tell him before that the airline was no longer capable of generating enough money to keep its planes in the air. Olympic Airways may not have been a very big part of the Onassis empire, but emotionally, being his main link with Greece, it was the most important. He stepped in and, in a parody of his former business style, through all-night meetings and endless, compulsive wrestling with the Greek government, he tried to save the crown of his business kingdom. His moves were all mistimed and miscalculated—the panic moves of a desperate man. He lost every round of the negotiations, and on January 15, 1975, he had no option but to sign the document handing Olympic Airways over to the Greek government. “Emotionally and for his sense of grandeur,” said Professor Georgakis, who had been Olympic’s managing director, “it was the final blow. For once he was not begged to remain.”

A few weeks later he collapsed in Athens. The French liver specialist, Dr. Caroli, advised flying him to Paris for an immediate gallbladder operation; the American heart specialist, Dr. Rosenfeld, recommended flying him to New York for intensive treatment to strengthen him before any operation was contemplated. Onassis chose Paris. The one thing he made sure he took with him for what turned out to be his last journey was the red cashmere blanket Maria had bought him from Hermès for his birthday earlier in the year. He had the operation on February 10; he never recovered complete consciousness. For the next five weeks in Room 217 of the Eisenhower Wing of the American Hospital, he was kept alive by a respirator and fed intravenously. In the room next door, the mother of Vasso Devetzi was being treated for cancer. Vasso was there every day, talking to the same nurses, seeing who was going in and out of Room 217, always getting the latest news of his progress and reporting to Maria. It was the kind of coincidence that convinced Maria that there are no coincidences.

Maria felt as though she was tied to the same machine that was keeping Aristo alive. Vasso was coming back with the news: they have replaced all his blood; Jackie came to the hospital today for half an hour; they have given him a massive infusion of antibiotics; Christina has not left his bedside all night; he has been put in an oxygen tent.

Maria could not bear it any longer. She felt that he was as much part of her as her own breath, and yet she had no right to be at his side. And the doctor had said that he could survive in his present condition for weeks, even months. She decided to leave Paris, to leave Europe. She rented a house in Palm Beach and at one o’clock on Monday, March 10, together with Bruna, Ferruccio and Consuelo, she flew out of Paris. On Saturday, at 12 Golf View Road, Palm Beach, she received the last report from the American Hospital. Aristo was dead.

14

W
HILE
J
ACKIE WAS FLYING BACK
to Paris; while in the hospital chapel Archbishop Meletos was praying over the body lying on an open bier with a Greek Orthodox icon on its chest; while the
Christina
’s flag was lowered to half-mast; while the funeral party was landing on Skorpios; while Jackie, Christina, his three sisters, Teddy Kennedy, John and Caroline were kissing the icon placed on the coffin lid; while the coffin was being lowered into the concrete vault—Maria was lying semiconscious in her rented home in Palm Beach.

His death had struck her an almost mortal blow. To exist in a world that did not contain him seemed pointless. The past had vanished and, in her deep suffering, there was no future. Through the interminable days that followed, her only real action was reaching for one of the many bottles on her bedside table for more tranquilizers, more sleeping pills, more forgetfulness.

But in time the numbness began to fade, and the spirit to stir. She began to get up and wander about the house, watching television, swimming, lying in the sun. Her godfather went to stay with her; so did her friend John Coveney. “One morning at breakfast,” Coveney remembered, “a parcel arrived full of letters and telegrams forwarded to Maria from Georges Mandel. She started opening them and passing them on to me. They were all letters and telegrams of condolence. At one moment she stopped: ‘All of a sudden I am a widow,’ she said.” One of the letters brought her news of Visconti’s death. After a massive stroke three years earlier and a year in a wheelchair, Luchino had died two days after Aristo, on March 17.

Late in April, Maria returned to Paris. “What else?” she kept asking the few people who called or came to see her. “What else?” She knew that there was, there had to be, something else, but she did not dare look. She sat solitary for hours, wondering how it had all happened. “I have too much pride,” she had said once, “to ask for pity.” Time moved on sluggishly while Maria, from the old photographs and the old recordings, the years of headlong gallop and the beginnings of old age, sought to reassemble a self. She began thinking a lot about buying the house in Palm Beach. Having another base, away from Georges Mandel, in the sun and a few thousand miles from Paris might give her the chance of a fresh start, a break with the past and all its memories. Twice she decided to buy it, and twice she changed her mind. Any big decision, and sometimes smaller ones, seemed very hard to make.

She had promised at the end of her tour in Japan to return there with di Stefano to sing
Tosca
. Without any longer knowing why, as if something in her had been set in motion years ago and would not stop, she began practicing again. “I’m working hard,” she wrote to Leo at the end of June, “because this year I either have to be
much
better or nothing.” A month later she wrote again. “I have come to a big decision. I’m stopping singing. I’m fed up with the whole business! . . . After my last tour I came back so sick that I’m terrified now that the months are coming to that date. My nerves can’t stand the strain any more.” Her return to Japan was canceled, and di Stefano persuaded Montserrat Caballé to take Maria’s place in
Tosca
. “I’m still with Pippo,” she had written to Leo in June; “I cannot find anyone else better. Richer maybe, but poorer in feelings, and all that goes against the grain. I only wish we had fallen in love when he was famous—and had a fabulous voice—because he has many human qualities.” The death of his daughter at this time brought them temporarily closer together. She had been young, beautiful and intelligent; and Maria, who had watched with concern and admiration her fight to survive and had drawn strength from her will to live, had grown to love her.

While di Stefano was singing in Japan, Maria went to Ibiza to spend part of the summer with Evelynne Archer, the sister of Anastasia Gratsos. By the time she got back to Paris, she knew that her relationship with Pippo could not last much longer. At the end of August, in a touchingly honest letter to her godfather, she explained how she felt:

As for P. I still care for him but of course not as I did—but how does one say it to him. After the death of his daughter he lives for this love of ours. I am hoping that destiny will take care of things so as the hurt and shock will not be hard on him. He is not the type to fall in love with another woman. I would hope for that but I doubt.
   Maybe I might meet someone and that would be the ideal solution. This way I would not care whether he gets hurt or not. (Terrible of me, isn’t it?)

Leo wrote, answering her letter point by point. He carefully annotated every single letter from Maria and even underlined the key sentences, responding with detailed practical advice, like the most loving and caring lonely hearts columnist. “The only thing to do is to get busy,” he wrote back on this occasion. “You must go out more. Don’t be interested in the age of people. Look at the older generation. There are plenty of people who would love to invite you. . . . You are free and you should accept such invitations.”