Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (61 page)

The year 1976 had brought few excitements, few surprises, but before it was out, the di Stefano chapter was finally closed. “The relation I had is definitely finished,” she wrote to her godfather in October. “All I have to do is ask for my few belongings in his home at San Remo—but I don’t even want to do that. So I leave things as they are.” Before Christmas she wrote again as if to convince him—or was it to convince herself? “ . . . Also the other thing that bothered you (P.) is no longer in my life. Thank God. . . . Are you going on a holiday for Xmas? I’m staying here. I’m comfortable at home.” Comfortable she was, but there were days when even her favorite room, her bright bathroom, darkened. The tiger lilies growing around the bathtub twisted into a sinister little jungle, and the white curtains in the window overlooking the street made ominous shadows. She was adrift, waiting for the lightning to strike. “I am over fifty,” she said to Vasso, “I am free, I have all the money I want to enjoy myself. And what do I do? I work.” She did go on working, without joy, without aim, simply to fill the gnawing emptiness.

And yet there were moments, sometimes when she was practicing, sometimes when she was listening to her old recordings, or even when she was playing with her little dogs, teaching them to sing, when she would vibrate again with the joy of music. It happened when Leonard Bernstein brought Sylvia Sass to Georges Mandel. Bernstein and the young Hungarian soprano, whom critics had been hailing as the new Callas, had come just for an hour and had kept the hired chauffeur-driven car waiting outside. Ferruccio, the perfect butler, showed them in. At first Maria was on her best Callas behavior. “So you are the new Maria Callas,” were her opening words, heavy with irony. She put Sylvia in the Blue Room while she sat in the drawing room imperiously issuing orders. “Sing this, that, the other.” Finally, in the middle of Violetta’s first aria, she even started talking to Bernstein while Sylvia was singing, and then sang the aria herself, instructing Sylvia to repeat it exactly. That was too much for Sylvia, who finally asserted herself. “I admire you tremendously,” she said; “for me you are almost a goddess, but I am not a copy of Callas and I never will be. In a few days I’m singing
Traviata
in Hamburg and it would be better for my confidence and my voice if I went.” It was what Maria needed to drop the facade of the aloof legend. She was instantly transformed into a young woman fired by another young woman’s enthusiasm for her art—and all the love that was inside her, bursting for an outlet, apart from Djedda and Pixie, she poured on Sylvia. They stayed together for four hours, long after Bernstein had left in a taxi for his rehearsal, and until the chauffeur waiting outside had broken the spell by coming up to announce that he had to leave for another job. This time Maria dispensed with Ferruccio, took Sylvia to the door and waited, waving to her, until she had disappeared. “I won’t forget the strength and the tenderness in her eyes as she was looking at me from the door,” remembers Sylvia Sass. “What she gave me that evening will be with me for my whole life. Even now, when I am singing or thinking about my singing, something she said, a sentence, a few words, come back to me. I somehow knew looking at her standing at the door that I would never see her again.”

Montserrat Caballé, one of the leading contenders for Maria’s vacant throne, had also called when she was having difficulties with
Norma
. “I have trouble with the trio that ends the first act,” she confessed.

“I can’t do this at the end of a telephone,” Maria snapped.

Caballé went to Paris to see her, but Maria’s role was not really that of the oracle. She was a performer, not a teacher; and in any case the magic that was hers was not transferable.

There was one last attempt at a comeback. Charles Vanne, a friend who was running the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, offered her the theater to practice in to get the feel of singing on a stage again. One day, a reporter from
France Dimanche
sneaked in while she was singing, took some photographs and wrote a devastating article about the collapse of her voice. Her inner resolve that had been mastered with such difficulty was blown away. She was in agony. Once again, for the last time, she sued. And once again she won—this time, after her death.

She was shriveled, shrunken, isolated. Yet even in her isolation the world was very much with her. And even though she had stopped searching through the dead past looking for meaning, the past was still with her, still haunting her with the ghosts of its bitter resentments and its tortured guilts. “I have nothing,” she told John Tooley at the beginning of 1977, soon after her fifty-third birthday. “What am I going to do?” After the
France Dimanche
article, the dream of a real comeback had dissolved; but even dissolved, the dream continued to sustain her. “Why isn’t anyone writing an opera about Mary Magdalene?” she would ask. She had suddenly become fascinated by her and started reading and rereading the passage in the Bible in which she washes Christ’s feet. But nobody was writing an opera about Mary Magdalene.

She had somehow to flee the anguish in her heart—if not any longer into work, at least into talking about work. John Tooley suggested
Cavalleria Rusticana
with Placido Domingo; then he suggested a new major production of
Tosca
. Together with Zeffirelli, they discussed first
L’Incoronazione di Poppea
, then
The Merry Widow
. Maria balked at the idea of an operetta. “Too undignified,” she would say. “Let’s do
Traviata
,” “Let’s do
Traviata
with Giulini.” And she went on saying it until a few months before she died: “Let’s do
Traviata
, Franco.”

“If she had accepted some compromises in the first act,” said Zeffirelli a year after her death, “she could have been singing it yesterday.” Perhaps she could, but the will to launch into a new adventure, a new trial, was not there. It would be rekindled every now and then, flicker uncertainly and then die, until the next time when someone would manage to ignite the fire for a while. In between, curling up in front of the television to watch someone else’s adventure in the Wild West was so much more inviting. She was drowning in a pool of lethargy and memory, but the instinct to expand and grow was so intense in her that when she stifled it, it began to choke her.

On February 21, 1977, she wrote to Leo. It was the shortest letter she had ever written to him, as if even this had now become an effort; it was also the last. She complained about her low blood pressure: “It makes me feel low and without desire for anything—but in a week I’ll be back to normal.” But she never was. The decline was now inexorable.

In the spring of 1977, she asked Vasso to prepare a will, leaving everything to Bruna and Ferruccio. She never signed it.

In July, Alan Sievewright went to see her again about doing a special discussion evening with her at Covent Garden on her roles, her life and her career. “Everything they want to know about me is there in the music,” she said. “ . . . Callas is dead.” She was stroking the little white poodle on her lap: “She is getting very old, you know. I always replace them when they die. I’ve always thought we should do the same with human beings, but I’ve discovered we can’t.”

Her last pilgrimage was to Skorpios; she spent hours kneeling in front of Aristo’s tomb, praying.

Back in Paris, in the hushed luxury of Georges Mandel, Maria was suffocating, too despairing and too resigned even to cry for help. Most of the time there was a faraway look in her eyes, as though there was nobody behind them, but a part of her continued with the old routine: walking Pixie and Djedda, watching television, practicing the Verdi
Requiem
with Vasso, reading Robert Massie’s
Nicholas and Alexandra
, sometimes going to the hairdresser, sometimes having a friend in for supper, sometimes going to the movies, sometimes laughing or arguing or gossiping. But the old Maria had been dead for some time and, on September 16, 1977, the part of her that had gone on existing gave up. She awoke late, Bruna recalled. She had breakfast in bed, then got up and took a few faltering steps toward the bathroom. There was a piercing pain in her left side, then the sound of a fall. She was put back to bed and made to drink some strong coffee. They phoned her doctor; he was out. They rang the American Hospital; the number was engaged. Finally they rang Ferruccio’s doctor, who started out immediately for Georges Mandel. She was dead before he arrived.

Epilogue

E
VANGELIA WAS GOING OUT FOR
the evening. Waiting for her friends to collect her, in a red dress and a string of pearls, she was half watching television and half listening for the buzzer to ring when the news was flashed on the screen: Maria Callas is dead.

Driving from Yorkshire to London, Edith Gorlinsky stopped at a mailbox on a country lane to mail the card she had written to Maria. Back in her car, she switched the radio on just as the newscaster was announcing that earlier that day Maria Callas had died in Paris of a heart attack.

The immigration official at Paris airport looked closely at Peter Diamand’s passport: “So you are the artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival. Did you know Maria Callas?”

“Yes. Why?”

“She is dead,” he replied with that special eagerness of someone who is first with the news.

“It’s not possible,” snapped Peter Diamand. He rang Peter de Jong, the head of EMI in France; he was not there. He went on ringing one friend of Maria’s after another to reassure himself that it was not possible, that she was not dead. No one was in. He waited until three o’clock in the morning and then went to the Arc de Triomphe, where he knew he could get the first edition of the morning newspapers. He did not have to look far. There it was on the front page:
La prima donna du siècle: La cantatrice Maria Callas est morte hier à
13
h
30
par suite d’un accident cardiaque
.

In Athens, Vasso Devetzi was preparing for her concert that night at Herodes Atticus, when Bruna called her from Paris:
“Madame est morte.”
A few hours later, with faltering voice, she broke the news to the Athenian public from the stage of the ancient theater.

Victoria de Los Angeles was rung by the French Press Agency at her home in Barcelona. It was a very bad connection and for the first couple of minutes she could not understand what they wanted. Finally she heard, “What is your reaction to the death of Maria Callas?” All the French journalist could hear at the other end was uncontrollable sobbing.

John Ardoin was in San Francisco to hear Renata Scotto in
Adriana Lecouvreur
. He was having lunch with the pianist Ivan Davis and some other friends, when one of them who had been idly looking at a newspaper suddenly stopped and pointed out to John a small, last-minute item on the front page: “Maria Callas is dead at 53.” “That was all I read. I pushed away from the table, and got up to leave the restaurant. I had no idea where I was going or why. All I knew was that I had to get out. I only realized what I was doing after Ivan, who had also known Maria, stopped me and brought me back to the table.”

Laid out on her bed in a gray gown with a cross and a rose resting on her bosom, her eyes serenely closed, her lips slightly parted and her long auburn hair framing her white face, she looked beautiful and seemed to be at peace. “Her hair was so rich, so full of life,” remembers Peter Andry, who together with a few other friends visited Georges Mandel on the day of the funeral. “I shuddered at the thought that in a few hours it would all be ashes. I felt a strong urge to touch her, to cut a lock to preserve it forever. . . . I wish I had.”

Long before the funeral service was due to begin at four thirty in the afternoon of September 20, there was a large crowd outside the Greek Orthodox church on Rue Georges Bizet. By four thirty there was expectant silence outside and chaos inside. Her sister, Peter Andry, Vasso Devetzi, John Coveney, Peter de Jong, Sander and Edith Gorlinsky, Franco Rossellini, Bruna, Ferruccio and Consuelo, made up the official party, but it was the photographers and the television crews who seemed to be in charge: pushing and shoving to get better pictures of the congregation, rearranging the flowers to get a better view of the ribbons on the wreaths (from the president of the French Republic, from the president of Greece, from Covent Garden, from La Scala. . . .), adding to the buzz, the charge, the anticipation. Suddenly the priests started chanting; for the first few minutes, it was not at all clear whether they were trying their voices or whether the service had already begun. The buzz, which had continued through the chanting, became even more excited when Princess Grace and her daughter arrived late, and the voices of the priests had to do battle with the clicking of the cameras and the noise of the television crews. It was as if everybody was expecting something to happen: for Onassis to be resurrected, her mother to descend on the altar and launch into a speech, Maria herself to rise from her coffin and demand another rehearsal before the service could proceed. The ceremony had started almost unnoticed amid the buzz and it ended in the same vague and haphazard manner. Even the coffin was pushed from the center of the church in the frantic attempt to get a better shot of Princess Grace leaving.

At the same time in Rome, in the little Greek Orthodox church off Via Veneto, a Mass was being said for Maria. The congregation of fourteen included Nadia Stancioff who had organized it, Giulietta Simionato, Piero Tosi and a man in an old gray raincoat whom nobody knew but who had been crying throughout the service, his grief deeply etched in each line of his face.

Back at Rue Georges Bizet, the air was full of flowers and tension as the coffin was carried out. When it appeared at the door of the church, the hundreds of people outside, many of them with eyes moist or tears streaming down their faces, broke into sudden applause and cries of “Bravo Callas,” “Bravo Maria.” It was the last spontaneous, heartfelt good-bye, the first deeply moving moment of this absurdly impersonal afternoon.